It is hard to get a firm handle on the latest development in the Kremlin’s “history wars” — its militant campaign to censor all but the most positive assessments of the Stalin period. The arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a history professor in Arkhangel’sk, for collecting personal data on German POWs and Soviet Germans in the Gulags of the Arctic North is unprecedented and, on the face of it, so extreme and absurd that there may be something more to it than meets the eye. But it is an alarming development. For two reasons. (more…)
Index on Censorship’s associate editor Rohan Jayasekera has just come back from Gori, Georgia — birthplace of Josef Stalin. He didn’t buy the t-shirt though.
Index on Censorship contributor Orlando Figes discussed the bizarre defamation case brought by Stalin’s grandson on behalf of the dictator on the BBC’s Today programme this morning.
Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov has won a defamation case against human rights group Memorial and its head, Oleg Orlov. But the trial has given the organisation a chance to address the injustices in the region. Tanya Lokshina reports (more…)
