Keeping history clean as a profession
The Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
History is power. Whoever is in charge of the key to the archives, without which no history can be written, decides who has access to this power. In Russia, the Ministry of Defence is one of the keepers of the Grail of the history of the Great Patriotic War. There is a law on access to archives, but this is a matter of indifference to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence. The behaviour of the archive’s employees towards historians verges on sabotage, sabotage of attempts to find out what really happened during the years 1941-45. It therefore comes as no surprise that 60 years after the end of the war, myths about it continue to flourish and there is little historians can do about this.
(Osteuropa 4-6/2005, pp. 407–418)