Agreeing on history

TALLINN - The new Russian ambassador to Estonia, Juri Merzlyakov, proposed at a press conference on Nov. 10 to form a joint Estonian-Russian history committee to discuss the different approaches of the states to historical events, reports news agency LETA. “We consider it necessary to channel the public discussion on that subject from the interstate relations sphere to a purely academic path,” Merzlyakov said, as reported by Postimees.

“With that aim, we propose to form a bilateral committee of historians that would be similar to the existing Russian-Lithuanian and Russian-Polish committees,” he added.
Such a committee would be able to step-by-step solve disputes in the different approaches that Estonia and Russia have on history. “We propose to look to the future, but leave history to historians,” he said.

Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said that Estonian historians have the freedom to pursue any cooperation they are interested in with their colleagues from other states, including Russia. “The government does not have to organize the work of historians,” Paet said, adding that cooperation between research institutions is under way already.

Riigikogu foreign committee member Marko Mihkelson, however, said that an Estonian-Russian history committee would be a reasonable step and it has been proposed before. Tartu University professor, historian Aadu Must, said that if Russia proposes to pursue more effective cooperation between historians, and reciprocal access to archive materials is enabled in the course of that, Estonian historians would be very much interested.