{"id":188,"date":"2009-10-18T16:53:01","date_gmt":"2009-10-18T15:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/?p=188"},"modified":"2009-10-18T16:53:35","modified_gmt":"2009-10-18T15:53:35","slug":"russian-history-under-threat-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/2009\/10\/18\/russian-history-under-threat-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian history under threat, again"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was planning to write about something entirely different today, but the arrest of Mikhail Suprun<\/a>, a historian from Arkhangelsk who is researching Germans sent to the \u00a0Gulag in the Stalin era, is worrying news which deserves comment. This is the most recent in a series of attacks on academic freedom and integrity relating to the study of the Soviet era, following last year’s\u00a0raid on the St Petersburg offices of Memorial, which I mentioned in a previous post, the establishment by Medvedev of a commission to prevent the so-called ‘falsification of history’ (here it is<\/a> — sadly, most the interesting bits haven’t been translated), and the related closure of a major Russian history website<\/a>, hrono.info<\/a> (now fortunately back up and running).<\/p>\n

We’ve got so used to the control of the media that when we read that that Russia’s last independent TV channels are being taken under state control<\/a>, the only surprise is that they had lasted so long. The media is one thing, but scholarship is another, and this sort of political interference represents a return to the practices of the past, which is particularly alarming because it’s trying to suppress the memory and retelling of those very events.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0this light, even the odd apparently liberalizing step, such as in the recent news<\/a> that Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago<\/em> is going to be taught as part of the Russian high school curriculum, looks so contrary to the general trend that one has to be suspicious; I wonder how<\/em> it will be taught, and whether this is actually a move to control and neutralize its influence, a return to something akin to Stalinist reading circles, perhaps? The irony would certainly be in the Stalinist spirit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was planning to write about something entirely different today, but the arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a historian from Arkhangelsk who is researching Germans sent to the \u00a0Gulag in the Stalin era, is worrying news which deserves comment. This is the most recent in a series of attacks on academic freedom and integrity relating to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[529,530,14],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russian-politics","tag-gulag","tag-russia","tag-solzhenitsyn"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-32","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}