From Luke Harding of the Guardian, the latest regrettable attacks on history and the politics of memory in Russia.

A group of British academics including the historian Orlando Figes and the poet and translator Robert Chandler have spoken out after authorities in Russia closed down a website dealing with the country’s controversial Soviet past.

On 19 June the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg shut down the
site www.hrono.info. The website had been Russia’s largest online
history resource, widely used by scholars in Russia and elsewhere as a
unique source of biographical and historical material.

Officials said they closed the site because it published extracts
from Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. Today, however, its founder,
Vyacheslav Rumyantsev, said the closure had nothing to do with Hitler,
adding that the text was widely available elsewhere and was only
summarised on the site.

Rumyantsev said the authorities may have pulled the plug after an
article was posted on 16 June criticising St Petersburg’s pro-Kremlin
governor, Valentina Matviyenko. The article attacked Matviyenko’s
decision to cut an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of
Leningrad.

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