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This is a guest post by Orlando Figes
It is hard to get a firm handle on the latest development in the Kremlin’s “history wars” — its militant campaign to censor all but the most positive assessments of the Stalin period. The arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a history professor in Arkhangel’sk, for collecting personal data on German POWs and Soviet Germans in the Gulags of the Arctic North is unprecedented and, on the face of it, so extreme and absurd that there may be something more to it than meets the eye. But it is an alarming development. For two reasons.
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Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, the grandson of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, has lost a libel case against newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Dzhugashvili alleged that an article describing his late grandfather as a “bloodthirsty cannibal” defamed Stalin’s “honour and dignity”.
Read more here
Index on Censorship’s associate editor Rohan Jayasekera has just come back from Gori, Georgia — birthplace of Josef Stalin. He didn’t buy the t-shirt though.
Index on Censorship contributor Orlando Figes discussed the bizarre defamation case brought by Stalin’s grandson on behalf of the dictator on the BBC’s Today programme this morning.
You can listen to Orlando here