FOREWORDxxix
closures about Soviet involvement in the Arab–Israeli conflict, as a corollary of
Russia’s domestic backslide toward authoritarian rule and its reversion to a pugna-
cious bipolar foreign-policy orientation. The change was soon felt in the area of
archive opening. As one expert put it, “the collapse of the Soviet Union ... after a
breath of fresh air in the mid-1990s, left Russian records firmly shut to public scru-
t i n y.”^53 What had not been opened before is not going to be opened, and a lot that
had been opened has been locked anew.^54 Putin ensured the enforcement of this
clampdown when in 2016 he assumed direct formal control of all state archives.^55
Even the controlled process of publishing bilateral collections of diplomatic papers
has come to a halt.^56 By 2008, it could again be stated that “the history of combat
operations in Eg ypt from 1956 till 1975, when the USSR assisted a friendly nation
... is to this day full of blank spots and many things still ‘cannot be declassified.’”^57
What is worse, Russia has gradually been gripped again by fear of incautious talk
and writing, after dozens of politicians, activists, journalists and others who dared to
flout the approved line met sticky ends. Veterans, academics and other sources who
once communicated with us freely now decline to be interviewed without permission
“from higher up,” which they assume will not be granted.
Furthermore, the official line itself has changed radically. The element of Russian
national pride has been greatly reinforced, but the earlier dissociation from the Soviet
past has given way to identification with it. Not only is Russia perceived as the linear
heir of the USSR; there is nostalgia for the latter’s redoubtable superpower status,
truculent resentment at its loss, and determined aspiration to regain it. Putin has
repeatedly demonstrated this tendency in the Middle Eastern arena, most recently in
the Syrian crisis, with almost the same assertiveness as toward the former Soviet
fiefdoms of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Any exposure of lies, aggression
or crimes in the Soviet past has become an insult to, if not subversion of, Russia’s
resurgence—and is punished accordingly.
The formalization of this process began in May 2005, when the State Duma
adopted a declaration condemning “attempts to falsify history.”^58 In early 2009, the
minister for emergencies, Sergey Shoigu (since promoted to defense minister), pro-
posed a law against such “distortion.”^59 In May of that year, Dmitry Medvedev, who
had temporarily taken Putin’s place as titular president, appointed a state commission
to combat “distortion of history to the detriment of Russian interests.”^60 In February
2012, the commission was disbanded, but in May 2014, Putin—now reinstated as
president—signed its main project into law: a statute imposing up to five years in
prison and a stiff fine, with heavier penalties if the falsification is backed up with
“fabricated” evidence and/or spread through the mass media.
The law was passed in the context of the Russian–Ukrainian crisis, which was cast
by Moscow as a renewed fight against Nazism. Like the preceding initiatives, it was
painted mainly as being aimed against negative presentation of the USSR’s role in the