All leaders love to interfere with the pursuits of discipline of history: they assume that by doing so they can define the cause of their nations' past. However, the more sophisticated among them have long since understood that historical battles are better left to professionals, if one were to avoid a future hush judgment. Not so in Russia, where President Dmitry Medvedev has just signed a decree creating a commission tasked to counter attempts "to falsify" history to Russia's detriment.
To those who consider only the immediate context, this might seem an innocent or even a noble move, for it comes as a response to the attempts to reinterpret the results of the second world war and to counter neofascist tendencies both in the Baltic states and Russia. What could be fairer than defending Russia's image as the vanquisher of fascism? Better still if this could be done with a whole lot of new archival documents at hand (one of the proclaimed goals of the commission is declassification of the so far closed archives pertaining to the second world war). Yet many in Russia, historians, political commentators and journalists alike, are not happy.
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