09.04.2009
Eurasian Secret Services Daily Review AIA
Russian FSB bent on rewriting history of Estonia, Tallin newspaper maintains
Russian historian Alexander Dyukov, nicknamed the Dragon by his friends, arrived in Tallinn on the 60th anniversary of Stalinist deportations, Eesti Ekspress reports. Dyukov is one of the key players in Russia’s information war against Estonia, according to the paper.
In Tallinn, he presented his book, The Myth About Genocide: Soviet Reprisals in Estonia (1940-1953). The Estonian translation of the book has been published by the former operative of the intelligence directorate of the KGB of Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic Vladimir Illyashevich who distributed the book free of charge to vistors of the presentation.
Since 2007, the young, 30 years old researcher has written and published five books, more than 50 articles and in addition has participated in many historical publications and drawing up of collections of documents. Eesti Ekspress names it a fact of surprising working capacity.
Dyukov is authorized to freely work in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Military Archive, the Archive of the President of20the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Modern History, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, the Central Archive of the FSB of the Russian Federation and the Central Archive the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, also in the Archive of Belarus KGB. He has free access to the archives which are unavailable to majority of Russian historians, not even speaking about Estonian ones.
His books have been always corresponding to current political discussion and their coverage in Russian mass media is simply massed, Eesti Ekspress marks. He has been contributing to such
"hot" topics as reprisals of the Soviet authorities in the Baltic countries and in Western Ukraine. In his works Dyukov justifies deportations and other Communist crimes, the paper points out. Already the title of the book, The Myth About Genocide…, has been showing the accent he emphasizes in the publication.
Dyukov does not consider researches of Estonian historians even worth of serious analysis as they are always written on evidence and memoirs of the deported persons and to rumors and under influence of nationalist propaganda, as he puts it.
The Estonian paper assumes that judging in particular from the easy access to the FSB and KGB archives given to Dyukov, he in fact may appear an employee of the FSB and a provocateur in the information war. Eesti Espress even consider that a collective body of hardworking Russian historians-archivists may have been hidden under the name of this public figure.
It seems that there are bases for similar suspicions, the paper notes. Earlier this year, a photographer and a historian of Russian origin, Sergei Melnikoff, living in Florida, US, directly declared that Dyukov was a staff employee of the Russian FSB’s ‘P’ department under the nickname of "FLAG". It means a banner in a literally translation, or a flag-officer, and in the information war, Dyukov is really a flag-officer, according to Eesti Ekspress. In his retort, Dyukov tried to deride Melnikoff’s claims in his blog.
Application of methods of information and propaganda wars in the field of history research is nothing new even in Estonia, the paper adds. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet KGB and its Estonian branch published series of books and articles in which they branded every politically active Estonian living abroad and calling for freedom of their motherland as Nazi war criminal or at least as their sympathizer. or less active Estonians living abroad, Eesti Express concludes.
