Revisionist History - A Practice Revived?

Over the last ninety years the Russian Federal State, with its subservient propaganda apparatus, has continuously ‘changed’ the history of that country and of the world as a whole, to make real facts and their interpretation serve internal political purposes

Guest Chairman: Either Mr. JOHN ROBERTS or MR. MARTIN DEWHIRST

Over the last ninety years the Russian Federal State, with its subservient propaganda apparatus, has continuously ‘changed’ the history of that country and of the world as a whole, to make real facts and their interpretation serve internal political purposes, thereby distorting the perceptions of several generations. The short lived freedom to access archive documents and to publish objective research during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years has been superseded by the rewriting of history under Putin – ideological dogmatism, on the pretext of fostering Russian patriotism and pride in Russia’s past. The revelations and decisions of Khrushchev at the 20th and 21st Congresses of the CPSU are seen as a slander on the glorious Soviet past. There has been a complete rethinking of the attitudes to Stalin, to the collectivisation of agriculture, to genocide within the Soviet population, to World War II, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, to the occupation of the Baltic States, to the Yalta Agreement etc. A sinister situation – the sanitisation of Stalin!

Dr. Arkady Vaksberg, a hero of our time, is a writer, world famous journalist, historian and Doctor of Law. He spent 20 years at the Moscow Bar for the defence in many trials in Soviet cities. From 1973 he became the renowned columnist for Literaturnaya Gazeta – the paper’s circulation soared to 7.5 million, due to his ‘Courtroom Sketches’. Pushing the limits of what was possible under press censorship he exposed incidences of corruption, abuses of power, suppressions of human rights, and interference with judicial independence. It was he who coined the phrase ‘law by telephone’, a term which has entered the Russian political vocabulary. He is the author of plays, film scripts, and over forty books, including “The Prosecutor and his Prey – The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky”, “The Soviet Mafia”, “Stalin against the Jews”, “The Murder of Maxim Gorky”. Some of these, like his latest book Le Laboratoire des Poisons (Paris 2008), revealing individual events of political terror in Soviet and post Soviet Russia, could be published only outside Russia. Arkady Vaksberg now resides in France.

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