Accusations of falsifying history in the Kremlin media this week

At the beginning of November, the Russian media blamed the Baltic nations of rewriting history. The accusations that have been repeatedly stated over the last six months were launched this time on November 1 at a discussion club held at the Kant Baltic Federal University, lead by the publication RuBaltic where the accusation of rewriting history was a key issue. That same evening, the Russian Defence Ministry owned television station Zvezda had a broadcast on this topic where they expanded it on a special chat edition of „Special Article“ whose episode title was „Nazi executioners – New Baltic Heroes“

The group discussion lasted for more than an hour and forecast the future of propaganda where in between opinions from „experts“ on Baltic nations, lengthy videos and pictures gave a warped history lesson.

The report, with the help of „experts“ and video clips accused the Baltic nations of denying economic development during the years of being part of the Soviet Union and failure of recognizing that the victory over Germany during World War II avoided a catastrophe. The show criticized the ungrateful Baltic nations of trying to convey a negative tone to the entire valuable heritage given during the Soviet era and are actually trying to claim a compensation sum of 30 billion Euros from Russia for those years.

The imagery on the telecast showed the path of the Nazis linking together the crimes of WWII and NATO’s attempt this summer to make heroes of Nazis in a film produced by NATO. The film talked about the Forest Brothers who allegedly murdered compatriots and Jews. Several video commentaries with Russian Jews were introduced to give weight to this claim.

Participants in the discussion are all well known in Russia for their opposition to the Baltic States. Aleksandr Gaponenko, director of the Institute for European Studies in Latvia and Josif Koren, leader of the „Nazi free Latvia“ community participated in the program on behalf of Latvia. The representative for Estonia was Dmitri Linter. In addition, Igor Shishin, deputy director of the CIS nations Institute, Federation councillor Anatoli Shirov and journalist Mihkail Shahnazarov were included in the conversation.

The television channel where such a biased hourly propaganda campaign took place belongs to the Russian Ministry of Defence. The channel, that calls itself patriotic, is one of the most powerful anti-Western media outlets in Russia and has shown itself with numerous false news items. For example, they have produced a story about the nine nuns who were raped by refugees in a Milan convent as well as Nazi zombies who fight with the Ukrainian army in Donbass.

However, on November 6, the debate in the discussion club reached RuBaltic and included propaganda presentations that were overlapping with the ones on television. The accusations against the Baltic States about rewriting history have begun to appear with more frequency.

This is expressed by Russia often as an attempt to gain sympathy of the Soviet occupation and support from Western allies as well as increasing their negative attitude towards the Kremlin. The myth of „the golden Soviet era“ has been disproved by Gatis Krumins who proved by analysis that in the years 1946-1991, larger sums of money moved from Latvia to Russia and not the other way round.

Photo: screen shot from the show on Zvezda television