From Luke Harding of the Guardian, the latest regrettable attacks on history and the politics of memory in Russia.
A group of British academics including the historian Orlando Figes and the poet and translator Robert Chandler have spoken out after authorities in Russia closed down a website dealing with the country's controversial Soviet past.
On 19 June the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg shut down the site www.hrono.info. The website had been Russia's largest online history resource, widely used by scholars in Russia and elsewhere as a unique source of biographical and historical material.
Officials said they closed the site because it published extracts from Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf. Today, however, its founder, Vyacheslav Rumyantsev, said the closure had nothing to do with Hitler, adding that the text was widely available elsewhere and was only summarised on the site.
Rumyantsev said the authorities may have pulled the plug after an article was posted on 16 June criticising St Petersburg's pro-Kremlin governor, Valentina Matviyenko. The article attacked Matviyenko's decision to cut an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
Since Mein Kampf has to remain as an example of what we should never do again, it shouldn't simply be 'forbidden'. After all, not all uses of a text involve propaganda -- some are merely didactic. Since this wasn't the case with respect to this website, which is a respected source of historical materials, this clearly was a politically action -- something probably meant to keep historians within officially acceptable limits. A pity, and yet another example of how Russia is going off the wrong track as far as history -- a scientific interpretation of the past -- goes. Why, oh why did Russia have to politicize its past?...