In addition to the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is waging a war against history

Vladimir Putin's military objectives, whether based on an attempt to restore imperial greatness or traditional Russian territorial paranoia, have led to the human tragedy unfolding before the eyes of the world in Ukraine.

The president's desire to reclaim what he considers lost Russian territory has also spread to the realm of history with, recently, the most absurd and anhistoric statements about Ukraine and its statehood.

Although Putin's historical revisionism has focused especially on issues related to World War II and the supposed historical justification of “reunification” with Ukraine, it has also had an effect on another aspect of Russian history that has received less attention: the study of repression Stalinist in the Soviet Union.

Last December, the Supreme Court of Russia liquidated the NGO Memorial, founded in the late 1980s and dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims of the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's regime of terror who were imprisoned in the Gulag camps in the 1930s.

The Supreme Court justified its decision on the basis of the 2012 law on “foreign agents”, which sought to penalize any Russian organization that received financial aid from abroad.

The Gulag in the archives

Throughout its evolution, the NGO Memorial has become both an archive on the Gulag and a major human rights organization. The dissolution of this organization, which holds the largest archive in the world on Stalinist repression and the Gulag, is just one of the flagrant examples of Putin's revisionism.

The closure of Memorial was accompanied by a wave of arrests of dissenting voices in Russia, and this at a time when Russia was gathering its troops for the invasion of Ukraine.

Putin's war against the history of his country has been brewing for many years.

Shortly after Vladimir Putin took power in 1999 - and long before the rest of the world had any idea where his regime was headed - the FSB (Russia's main intelligence service and successor to the KGB) visited at least four central archives in Moscow, scaring staff and sending the message that the “golden age” of the open archives was coming to an end in Russia.

Although the archives were not closed, some documents were reclassified and it became more difficult for foreign researchers to collaborate with Russian colleagues on archival projects. The FSB archive, as well as the highly secret “presidential archive” of the Kremlin, remained essentially off-limits, and completely closed to foreigners.

When foreign historians were welcome

In the 1990s, no one could have foreseen this offensive against history. On the contrary, the 90s were a period when archives were opened and Russian and foreign historians worked together for the first time.

I have been researching Russia's political and social history for more than 30 years, including the violence of the Stalinist era. I remember those heady days when I worked at the Russian Economic Archive and ended up drinking tea all day while one historian after another came to see me.

Soon after, a group of historians specializing in the Soviet peasantry, all of them quite old and prominent, took me under their wing, inviting me to participate in an international collaborative project dedicated to the research, declassification and publication of documents from 1927 to 1939 on the Soviet camp. This group even had access to the FSB archives, which proved to be a rich source of information.

Together we published six volumes of documents. We documented the repression of the Soviet peasantry and discovered a major peasant rebellion against the Soviet state during agricultural collectivization, Stalin's initiative to control agriculture and peasants.

We also discovered important documents about the famine of 1932-33 - known as Holodomar - that killed millions of people in Ukraine and other Soviet regions. And we found others who helped revise the historical understanding of Stalin's Great Terror of the late 1930s.

For my Russian colleagues, this project was of considerable importance.

Most members of the group had been born and raised in peasant villages, had fought on the front lines during World War II, and had begun writing history and publishing documents during the relatively liberal years of the Khrushchev era, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.

V.P. Danilov, the most prominent of the group, was silenced when Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev in 1964, and hoped to end up in jail.

When I met Danilov in the 1990s, he told me about the urgency he felt to publish archival material, arguing that “anything could happen” in the coming years. Since an authoritarian government could come back and silence historians, he said, our goal was to put these documents in the public domain.

At the time, I only partly believed him. In fact, Danilov's warnings were foreboding, and they remain current.

Increasingly difficult access

As I continued to work on archives in the 2000s, access became increasingly difficult.

In 2007, I returned to the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk, where I had already worked twice in the 2000s. I was denied access to the city archives, even though, under the law, I should have been allowed to work in its state archives. I was told that I needed a security certificate from the FSB, which surprised me at the time. My colleagues in Moscow were also surprised and suggested that the head of the archive might have wanted a bribe, something that I would never have offered him on principle.

I thought my job had become impossible, and that was until the 2014 revolution, which ended the pro-Russian government of Ukraine. Afterwards, I went to the Ukrainian archives. I was working on the authors of the Great Terror and, together with a German colleague, I decided to try my hand at the SBU (formerly KGB) archives in Kiev.

The Ukrainian archives, unlike their Russian counterparts, generously opened their doors to foreign researchers. Based on my research in the archives, I published Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine.

I followed Danilov's advice and, with the help of a large team of Ukrainian and Russian historians, published five volumes of documents on those responsible in the Soviet Union for the death and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine and other Soviet regions under Stalin's rule.

Documents in the public domain

I am no longer so optimistic about the course of history and its impact on the former Soviet archives. Like the previous volumes on the Soviet campaigns, the documents unearthed by our investigation are now in the public domain, safe from Putin's imperial claims in Ukraine.

Fortunately, many Ukrainian archival institutions have begun to digitize their resources sensibly, although it is not yet clear how much of their material has been safely copied.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Putin recently ordered the destruction of the SBU buildings, where his archives are located, in Kiev. The liquidation of the archive would be a terrible loss for historians of Ukraine and the former Soviet Union.

History was always used as a weapon in the Soviet Union, as a means of controlling discourse and denying the reality of the past. Putin is now trying to control speech through war and internal repression.

Article originally published by The Conversation- By Lynne Viola, Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

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