By Janusz Bugajski from Wall Street Journal Europe, June 11

As European democracies celebrate the 20th anniversary of their liberation from communism and the Soviets, Moscow seeks to restore its dominance over former satellites. Rewriting Russian history is part of this plan. The Putinist notion of a progressive Soviet system in the past is designed to provide justification for Russia’s current assertiveness in the region.

Take Moscow’s annual May 9 parade, which celebrates the “victory over fascism” on the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender to the Allies. The entire exercise is based on a monumental national delusion fostered by the Kremlin. Although Russia was one of the victorious powers at the end of World War II, Moscow continues to disguise the historic record that the Soviet Union itself helped launch the war in close alliance with Nazi Germany. Through the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, Stalin schemed with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe.

Russia has recently intensified its revisionist campaign, claiming that it voluntarily gave up communism and the Soviet Bloc and that the Cold War ended in a draw with the West. Russia’s state propagandists maintain that the USSR never occupied its neighboring states after World War II, but rather liberated them from tyranny.

- – -

Western countries, including the former Soviet satellites, can take steps to expose Russia’s historical revisionism by sponsoring international conferences and symposia, by opening up all pertinent state archives to scholars, by educating the younger generation about communist crimes, and simply by talking openly about the Soviet era.

As Russia glosses over its dark past and flexes its muscles, the fear is that those who rewrite history may also be determined to repeat it.

Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Lev Gudkov, Igor Klyamkin, Georgy Satarov and Lilia Shevtsova writes in the Tuesday, June 9 edition of The Washington Post:

As intellectuals and liberal Russians, we have read with great interest many recommendations American experts have compiled for President Obama regarding the U.S.-Russian relationship. While there are several constructive ideas, many of these reports reflect a serious misunderstanding of the situation in Russia and the course it is following.

We object, for example, to the basic proposition of calling for a return to realpolitik because some believe that the worsening of Russian-American relations was mainly caused by Washington’s insistence on “tying policies to values.” The result, some American “realists” argue, is that the United States needs to build a new relationship with Russia based on “common interests and common threats.” Yet in blaming the Bush administration for trying to “teach” Russia about democracy, these realists appear to accept the official Russian position. In our view, America has ignored the problems of democracy and civil society in Russia, but even turning a blind eye did not prevent the breakdown in the U.S.-Russian relationship — and now Obama is essentially being asked to treat Russia as though it is incapable of democratic transformation.

While there is anti-democratic sentiment here, such feelings are not ubiquitous. In fact, nearly two-thirds of Russians would like to see the establishment of democracy and the rule of law, according to a 2008 Levada Center poll. The ruling elite oppose the development of democratic institutions, but the key is that members of the elite are more than ready to integrate into the Western world on an individually beneficial basis; they will do everything in their power to “protect” the rest of Russian society from the perils of such integration.

(From the New York Times, by Nicholas Kulish)

It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.

“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedywas killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never, ever have thought that this could be true.”

Read the full article here.

There’s a new activist group on social networking web site Facebook dedicated to promoting resistance to the Nordstream Baltic Sea gas pipeline project. The fast-growing community’s members include luminaries such as former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar, Swedish writer Johan Norberg, American historian Dr. Alan Charles Kors and many others.

Join the group here.

For over a decade the proliferation of so-called “Gas Trading” companies in Europe has destabilized the EU energy market and possibly criminalized it as well. The appearance of such companies as RosUkrEnergo, the Centrex group of companies, Gazprom Germania, YugoRosGas, Eural Trans Gas, Overgas, and others, all linked in some fashion to Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom, have not added any value to gas transactions in the EU. Furthermore, these companies have been linked to numerous scandals and conflict of interest cases involving high-level officials in the EU.


In January 2009 one such company, RosUkrEnergo, played an instrumental role in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that led to a gas blockade of Europe, causing considerable human suffering and financial damage to the economies of those countries most affected. It is highly likely that had this company not been inserted into the Russian-Ukrainian gas supply-transit chain, the “Gas War” of January 2009 would not have taken place.

In the new report “Gazprom’s European Web”, Jamestown analyst Roman Kupchinsky traces the unspoken connections between Russian gas giant Gazprom and various European companies.

The report is available from the Jamestown Foundation here.