RUSSIAN president Dmitry Medvedev has formed a commission to protect Moscow's version of Second World War history from "falsifications", amid growing concern over attempts to downplay or criticise the country's war record.
A presidential decree posted on the Kremlin's website said "the commission will engage in the compilation and analysis of information on the falsification of historical facts and events, directed at lowering the international prestige of the Russian
Federation".
It comes days after the president warned against anybody questioning Russian history and its wartime sacrifice – millions of Soviet civilians and soldiers died in years of bloody fighting and German occupation .
"We will not allow anybody to cast doubt on the achievement of our nation," he said. "We should not close our eyes to the terrible truth of war. History teaches you nothing, only punishes you for ignorance of its lessons."
The new commission, which will be headed by Sergei Naryshkin, the president's chief of staff, and made up of 28 government officials, will also "counter efforts of historical falsifications against the interests of Russia".
That welding of an official interpretation of history to Russian national interests serves as an indication of Moscow's determination to quell what Mr Medvedev described on his internet blog as "more and more harsh, depraved and aggressive" attempts to rewrite history.
In particular, Russia has been angered by the growing confidence of former Soviet republics and satellite states in challenging or rejecting Moscow's version of the war, which paints it very much in terms of good versus evil, and of defence and liberation.
The three Baltic states, which were invaded and annexed by Stalin in 1940, have sparked Russian ire by regarding the Red Army as occupiers rather than liberators after its soldiers drove German forces out in the latter years of the war.
Latvians who served in the infamous SS still parade together, and earlier this year the tiny Baltic state said it would bill Russia for £130 billion in compensation for damages caused by the "occupation". In 2007, Estonia caused outrage in Russia after it decided to relocate a contentious Soviet war memorial – a move described at the time by Sergie Lavorv, Russia's foreign minister, as "blasphemous".
Russia was further angered last month when posters praising a Ukrainian SS division appeared in the western Ukrainian town of Lviv, while Kiev's government is pushing for recognition of the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgents Army, which, after fighting German forces, maintained armed resistance to Soviet control up to the mid-1950s.
However, such steps could soon risk not only the wrath of the Kremlin also that of the Russian legal system.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, has started work on legislation aiming to make it a crime to belittle or deny the key role Russian forces played in defeating Nazi Germany.
The bill envisages a three-year prison sentence for anybody who "rehabilitates Nazism" by sullying the achievements of Soviet forces.
Commenting on the legislation, parliamentary speaker Boris Gryzlov said: "We are seeing what is happening in some of the ex-Soviet states. You cannot stay indifferent when politicians and parties try to justify Nazism."
Liberal Kremlin critics said, however, that Mr Medvedev's commission amounted to an effort to airbrush Soviet history. Author Yulia Latynina said it played into the hands of "mastodons in epaulets" – ultraconservatives among Russia's historians and politicians.
"The whole idea was copied from Orwell's 1984 and from the famous phrase about Russia as a country with an unpredictable past," she said. "This commission will finally turn Medvedev into a laughing stock."
