MOSCOW, February 12. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia has to think over amendments to its legislation to protect its stance on historical events, head of the international affairs committee at the State Duma lower house of parliament Alexei Pushkov said in the context of Latvia’s pending amendments imposing criminal responsibility for denying the Soviet and Nazi occupation.
The Baltic state mentioned in its new bill the Nazi occupation “just to make this law less shocking,” he said. “In fact, its arrows, of course, are targeted against our country.”
“Now we see many attempts to play down and distort our country’s role in defeating the Third Reich,” Pushkov said. “A recent scandalous poll by CNN that dared to make mocking attacks on the Brest Hero-Fortress in Belarus, an immoral query about the need of Leningrad’s surrender and no less immoral comparisons of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin - all these statements from abroad are migrating to Russian, to be more accurate, to anti-Russian media.”
“In the conditions when we are facing such a battle for history and when member-states of the European Union are adopting laws attributing certain position on history, possibly, we have to think over adoption of the legislation that will protect our history and our point of view on historical events. There are not a few of those in foreign countries and, unfortunately, inside Russia who want to distort them,” the parliamentarian said.
Pushkov expressed confidence that “adoption of Latvia’s laws that formally place our country and Nazi Germany on the same shelf, or in other words the laws that justify the Nazism will not change history.” “However, this can change minds of those who do not take trouble of learning the history. We should not allow this to happen,” he said.
Earlier on Wednesday leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia Vladimir Zhirinovsky called provocative the actions of the Latvian parliament, “where the legal commission approved amendments to the Criminal Code envisaging three-year punishment for justification of the Soviet occupation.”
“This is disgusting, we saved them and the whole Europe from fascism,” Zhirinovsky said. “We will demand that our ambassador should be recalled for consultations and measures to be taken to prevent adoption of the law in the parliament. Three more readings of the bill and the president’s signature are ahead, but we need to react.”