Kremlin blocks Mein Kampf, spins the Soviet history in the process

Here is how I see the future of the Russian Internet: sites that offer a controversial take on history would be shut down on some legal excuse, while those that offer space for debate will be infiltrated by paid conservative commentators, who would do their best to convince everyone that Stalin was a good guy, if not by the quality of their argument, then, at least, by their quantity. 

What other way to read the news that follows? From The Guardian:

A group of British academics including the historian Orlando Figes and the poet and translator Robert Chandler have spoken out after authorities in Russia closed down a website dealing with the country’s controversial Soviet past.

On 19 June the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg shut down the site www.hrono.info. The website had been Russia’s largest online history resource, widely used by scholars in Russia and elsewhere as a unique source of biographical and historical material.

Officials said they closed the site because it published extracts from Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. Today, however, its founder, Vyacheslav Rumyantsev, said the closure had nothing to do with Hitler, adding that the text was widely available elsewhere and was only summarised on the site.

Rumyantsev said the authorities may have pulled the plug after an article was posted on 16 June criticising St Petersburg’s pro-Kremlin governor, Valentina Matviyenko. The article attacked Matviyenko’s decision to cut an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

A group of British academics including the historian Orlando Figes and the poet and translator Robert Chandler have spoken out after authorities in Russia closed down a website dealing with the country’s controversial Soviet past.

On 19 June the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg shut down the site www.hrono.info. The website had been Russia’s largest online history resource, widely used by scholars in Russia and elsewhere as a unique source of biographical and historical material.

Officials said they closed the site because it published extracts from Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. Today, however, its founder, Vyacheslav Rumyantsev, said the closure had nothing to do with Hitler, adding that the text was widely available elsewhere and was only summarised on the site.

Rumyantsev said the authorities may have pulled the plug after an article was posted on 16 June criticising St Petersburg’s pro-Kremlin governor, Valentina Matviyenko. The article attacked Matviyenko’s decision to cut an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

…In December, police in St Petersburg raided the human rights organisation Memorial, removing much of the material used by Figes in The Whisperers, his acclaimed book on family life under Stalin. It included interviews with gulag victims, photos and personal testimonies. Figes’s Russian publisher later scrapped plans to publish the book in Russian.

Today Figes said in an email the Kremlin had become "very active on the internet" on history, claiming that it even hired bloggers to pose as members of the public, their task being to disseminate a Kremlin-approved version of the past and to "rubbish historians like myself".

The Moscow Times has more: 

Nevertheless, the closure of one web site bears the hallmarks of selective justice. If you type “Mein Kampf” in Russian into search engine Yandex.ru, the system automatically suggests “download” as the most popular result. Dozens of web sites offer downloads of “Mein Kampf.” One called XXII-vek.info offers the option of ordering a paper version described as “samizdat.” Another web site, Knigadarom, lists the book and says that 1,984 people have downloaded it.