Word: sovietizing
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...Shoigu's call for the new law came after Russian television channel NTV broadcast a documentary about the Battles of Rzhev, a series of offensives launched by Soviet forces against the Germans between January 1942 and March 1943. The documentary raised popular anger, especially among WWII veterans, after it exposed the number of Soviet soldiers killed, which was much higher than most Russians believed - around a million compared to around 500,000 on the Nazi side - and presented a negative interpretation of Soviet tactics by, for example, showing how shocked German soldiers who had fought in the battles were...
...that the law banning denial of the Holocaust is designed to protect the memory of the Jews and other ethnic groups killed by Nazi forces and their supporters. Russia's new bill, however, would stop anyone reexamining a history fraught with half-truths and lies propagated by the Soviet government, then carried into the present on the backs of unrevised text books and a general aversion to looking too closely the country's past. (See pictures of Hitler's rise to power...
...punish and silence new - and possibly more accurate - interpretations of the country's history and solidify the government's control of the past. But the real aim of the law may be to provide the Kremlin with another rhetorical tool with which to attack governments of former Soviet Republics and Eastern Bloc countries that have increasingly moved towards the West. The most recent example - which is still making waves in Russia - was the 2007 row in Estonia over the moving of the statue of a Red Army soldier from a central Tallinn square to a nearby war cemetery, a decision...
...When Russia's law "Against the Rehabilitation of Nazism" is passed, "the presidents of some countries who denied [the Soviet victory] would not be able to travel with impunity in our country. And the mayors of some cities, before demolishing sites, would think before they act," said Shoigu, according to RIA Novosti...
...According to a poll of 1,600 Russians released on Wednesday by the Center for the Study of Public Opinion, 60% of Russians say they agree that denying the Soviets won World War II should be criminalized, while 77% believe the Soviet Union liberated Eastern Europe. On Saturday, thousands of troops, with over 100 tanks, troop carriers and mobile ballistic missile batteries, will parade through Red Square and the center of Moscow as more than 70 aircraft and helicopters fly overhead. But as Russians celebrate their victory over the Nazis, they may also be celebrating the defeat of freedom...