deals honestly with the people, and a country that

Freedom House deals honestly with the people, and a country that lives at peace with its neighbors. The Ukraine factor The falsification of history that began during the early years of Putin's leadership has been intensified in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea in 2014. To convince the Russian people that waging a form of low-intensity warfare against a neighbor was justified, Putin has stepped up efforts to depict the West as antagonistic to Russian interests, launched a campaign to label those responsible for Ukraine's Maidan uprising as fascists, driven home the idea that ethnic Russians living outside the Russian Federation were under relentless persecution, and identified Russian critics of aggression against Ukraine as a treasonous fifth column. A recurring theme of post-Crimea propaganda is the notion that Russia faces the same threats from the West today as it did during the Cold War. To make this point, Russian television aired a documentary meant to justify one of the more shameful events of the Soviet period, the 1968 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. The invasion was undertaken to crush the reformist Prague Spring movement, whose leaders were moving increasingly in the direction of jettisoning state socialism, embracing democratic reforms, and seeking a kind of neutral geopolitical status much like that enjoyed at the time by Austria. The documentary used archival footage to build a concocted case that the invasion was necessary to thwart a NATO-inspired coup in Prague.'° The clear purpose of the film was to portray NATO as a permanent threat to Russian inter- ests, as much in 2014 as in 1968." Another television documentary focused on the sei- zure of Crimea, a year after the event. As Lucian Kim has noted, the program is something of a celebration of the tactics of dictatorship. The filmmakers offer no conflicting opinions and present American leaders as puppet masters. Among other claims, the docu- mentary asserts that Washington gave the Maidan forces information about Ukrainian security methods that American officials had obtained during bilateral exchange programs with the Kyiv government. !% To further bolster the case for the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian propaganda machinery devoted great energy to demonstrating the fascist nature of the Maidan, relying heavily on invocations of Soviet history. The Ukrainian protesters and activists who helped drive out corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych, and the European-oriented politicians who replaced him, were repeatedly labeled as present-day followers of Stepan Bandera, a controversial nationalist leader who fought the Soviets and at times cooperated with the Nazis in a doomed campaign for an independent Ukraine during World War II. Russian media presented Bandera and his followers as unambiguous allies of the Nazis, and highlighted their wartime atrocities. Russian media also featured a number of documenta- ries that emphasized Russian, as opposed to Soviet, resistance to Hitler. The objective was to equate contemporary Ukrainians who favored full sovereignty and independence from Russian influence with Nazi collaborators and pogromists. This served not only to explain Moscow's response, but also to deter any emulation of the Maidan protests in Russia itself. The assault on academic freedom Since the occupation of Crimea and invasion of east- ern Ukraine, it has become increasingly dangerous to express dissenting views on Russian foreign policy in Russias schools and universities. Putin mace the point quite clearly in a speech before the parliament in March 2014, when he referred to a “fifth column” and a “disparate bunch of national traitors” sowing discord within Russia."® In the ensuing months, anyone criticizing Russian pol- icy risked the label of foreign agent, which in Russian usage is tantamount to being called a spy. Around this time a new website called Predatel (traitor) began listing alleged traitors, specifically those who had criticized Russia's annexation of Crimea or supported sanctions against Russian officials. The site encour- aged Russians to send in the names of other traitors. Meanwhile, a number of educators fell afoul of the new policies on the teaching of history. In March 2014, Andrey Zubov, who held a position at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, was fired for “an im- moral act"—namely an article he published in the news- paper Vedomosti that criticized the seizure of Crimea and compared it to Hitler's annexation of Austria. “We must not behave the way the Germans once behaved, based on the promises of Goebbels and Hitler,” he wrote. The university's explanation claimed that Zubov's writings “contradict Russias foreign policy and inflict careless, irresponsible criticism on the actions of the state."”’ In a similar incident, senior sociologist Aleksan- dr Konkov was let go by Sakhalin State University after declaring that Russia had seized Crimea opportunisti- cally because Ukraine was weak, not because Crimeans themselves had clamored for the takeover.!® www.freedomhouse.org 31 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019265