Window on Eurasia

Mironov Calls Editor an ‘Enemy’ of Russia for Article on WWII

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 26, 2006 – In indication of the sensitivity of World War II for many Russians and the tendency of some to react harsly to any divergence
from the official line, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov
denounced an editor for publishing a story about a quasi-autonomous
Russian republic at the time of German occupation.

On Friday, Mironov told a session of the upper house of the Russian
parliament that Petr Kotov, the editor of “Parlamentskaya gazeta,”
was an “enemy” of Russia and should be fired for an article he
allowed to be published in that government newspaper
[http://www.newsru.com/23jun2006/mironov.html].

The article in question, “The Lokotskaya Alternative” by Sergey
Veryovkin and published on Thursday, described how a group of Russians
in Bryansk oblast set up their own republic at the time of the German
invasion of the Soviet Union and were largely able to run their own
affairs during the war
[http://www.pnp.ru/archive/19490147.html].

In his sympathetic essay, Veryovkin described how this group of
Russians was able, in his words, to live “in a humane fashion” without
Stalinist oppression and its “cannibalistic experiments” and also
how the pro-Soviet partisans both oppressed the local population and
subsequently misrepresented what they had done there.

The Lokotka Republic, which united people in eight regions of Bryansk
and Kursk oblasts, cooperated with anti-Soviet Russian forces working
under German command, and some of its citizens continued to resist
Moscow’s reconquest of the area for many years after the war itself
came to an end.

As President Vladimir Putin has worked to make World War II a central
unifying theme of the Russian people, anyone who suggests that the
Soviet effort in that war was anything but noble has drawn the fire
from patriotic Russians and anyone said to have resisted Moscow at that time
has been denounced in the harshest terms.

Not surprisingly, such criticisms are often cast in highly emotional
language especially when they appear close to anniversaries like
Victory Day or the date of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Despite that, a few Russian writers have tried to discuss the
complexities of that time, one in which many were caught between two
totalitarian systems.

In the last few months, for example, several Russian analysts have
reported on the fact that more than a million Soviet citizens fought on
the side of the Germans against Stalin and have considered the various
reasons – fear, personal calculations, and their experiences of the
1930s, to name but three – that caused them to do so.

But the Veryovkin article and Kotov’s decision to publish it raise
two larger issues, both of which help to explain Mironov’s anger and the
reason that a large number of Russians and especially those close to
the Kremlin are likely to be particularly incensed.

On the one hand, Veryovkin casts his language in terms of a discussion
of how Russians might have been able to live if they had somehow
escaped Stalin’s rule, and he pointedly argues that in the Lokotka Republic
he examined they lived better, even though they were under German
occupation.

Such an argument and the implicit suggestion that the supporters of
this republic and not the pro-Soviet partisans and troops occupied the moral
high ground – Veryovkin highlights the brutality of the partisans
against innocent civilians – represent positions that threaten
efforts the war to shore up the country’s legitimacy.

And on the other hand, Veryovkin’s article appeared in a government
newspaper, and consequently Kotov’s decision to publish it is
somewhat more problematic than would be the case if the piece had appeared in a media outlet not owned by the state itself.

As Newsru.com reported on Friday, various media watchdogs argued that
Veryovkin and Kotov had broken no laws and had acted within the terms
of freedom of the press. But most of them acknowledged that the government
had at least some rights to determine what its outlets published.

Consequently, this controversy between politicians and an editor and
writer is not quite as simple and clear-cut as are many media cases in
the Russian Federation. And it is probably more important to view it as
a barometer of feelings about the war today than as a measure of the
Russian government’s increasingly tight control of the media.