Having posted at the time about the raid on the offices of the human rights group Memorial in St Petersburg by masked men from the investigative committee of the Russian general prosecutor's office, and having recently finished The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, I was interested to read author Orlando Figes' article in yesterday's Guardian, about the decision not to publish the book in Russia - a decision, he felt, with political overtones:
The history in my book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, is inconvenient to the current regime in Russia.
It draws on several hundred family archives and thousands of interviews with survivors of the Stalinist regime which I conducted with Memorial, a human rights and historical research centre which has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize.
On 4 December a group of masked men from the investigative committee of the Russian general prosecutor's office forced their way into the St Petersburg offices of Memorial. After a search the men confiscated hard drives containing the entire archive of Memorial in St Petersburg: databases with biographical information on victims of repression; details about burial sites in the St Petersburg area; family archives; sound recordings and transcripts of interviews.
All the materials I collected with Memorial in St Petersburg (about one third of the sources used in The Whisperers) were also confiscated. The raid was part of a broader ideological struggle over the control of history publications and teaching in Russia that may have influenced the decision of Atticus to cancel my contract.
The Kremlin has been actively for the rehabilitation of Stalin. Its aim is not to deny Stalin's crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country's "glorious Soviet past". It wants Russians to take pride in their Soviet past and not to be burdened with a paralysing sense of guilt about the repressions of the Stalin period.
At a conference in June 2007, Vladimir Putin called on Russia's schoolteachers to portray the Stalin period in a more positive light. It was Stalin who made Soviet Union great, who won the war against Hitler, and his "mistakes" were no worse than the crimes of western states, he said. Textbooks dwelling on the Great Terror and the Gulag have been censored; historians attacked as "anti-patriotic" for highlighting Stalin's crimes. The administration has its own textbook, The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: A Teacher's Handbook. According to one of its authors, Pavel Danilin, its aim is to present Russian history "not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instil pride in one's country. This is precisely how teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud".
Danilin is a close associate of Gleb Pavlovsky, a presidential adviser and the editor of the Russian Journal, which aims to create an intellectual base for Putin's pseudo-democracy.
A special issue on the "politics of memory" was published to coincide with the raid on Memorial. It contained two articles viciously attacking Memorial for playing into the hands foreign historians accused of setting out to blacken Soviet history by focusing on Stalin's crimes.
The Whisperers has been translated into 22 languages, including all the European languages of the former Soviet Union – except Russian, it now seems.
All very reasonable, you might think, but at CiF today there's a piece by Russian academic Irina Filatova, describing Figes' "conspiracy theory" as "embarrassing. Non-publication of his book is nothing to do with politics apparently – and hey, we all know that stuff about Stalin anyway – all to do with commercial realities in the current economic climate.
Figes himself has commented:
I don't think I suggested that there was a "conspiracy" – merely that there are political circumstances that may have affected the decision of Atticus to cancel publication of my book.
The article does not mention the recent police raid on Memorial in St Petersburg and the confiscation of its entire archive, including many of the materials I collected with Memorial for The Whisperers.
Nor does it mention the recent attacks on Memorial by Russkii Zhurnal, which is closely allied to the presidential administration.
I have no doubt that the decision by Atticus was at least partly commercial – times are very hard for publishers in Russia, as they are elsewhere.
However, I should emphasize that there were in fact no translation costs for Atticus, because the translation is being paid for by a grant from a charitable organization in Russia which believes that Russians may learn something from the book.
You have to wonder quite why The Guardian felt that Filatova's piece was worthy of publication, considering how eager they are to censor views they disagree with. Maybe they're worried about being accused of Russophobia.
Mick Hartley 
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