Just an excellent interview with the director of the State Archive of the Russian Federation—definitely give it a read.
It’s about the falsification of history and exposing it. Here, the fight against historical falsification has turned into a fight to defend the supposed truthfulness of Soviet textbooks, even though what we really need is a genuine struggle against falsification and propagandistic fabrications.
Here, by the way, is the document:
This was just 5 days before the war.
And the most important part of the interview, it seems to me, is here:
Ribbons and all that, every other car on the street driving around with “To Berlin” on it, patriotic concerts, and declarations that foreigners want to rewrite history. And against that backdrop, there are two million soldiers whose fate remains unknown. Tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—are still unburied.
I was told about a farmer in Leningrad Oblast who found a large number of soldiers’ remains in his field and ran around like a man possessed from the military commissariat to the local administration and back again, asking for help arranging a burial—but he never managed to interest anyone.
Now that would be an excellent nationwide project. The right one, and a noble one. With ribbons, Young Pioneers (the Soviet youth organization), television programs, accounts of heroic deeds, and honor guards. To find and bury all the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet term for the Eastern Front of World War II). No amount of money would be too much to spend on that.