Public Memory and the Difficulty of Overcoming the Communist Legacy
Public Memory and the Difficulty of Overcoming the Communist Legacy

Poland and Russia in Comparative Perspective

Author(s): Mark Kramer
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, History
Published by: Central European University Press
Keywords: Public memory;totalitarianism;Communism
Summary/Abstract: In a televised ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow on November 2, 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that he had awarded a posthumous Hero of Russia plaque and Gold Star medal to George Koval, an American technician who had been assigned by the U.S. Army during World War II to the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s top-secret program to build a nuclear bomb. Koval, it turned out, was also working at the time as a spy for the Soviet military intelligence service, operating under the codename “Delmar.” He smuggled highly sensitive information about nuclear weapons technology to the Stalinist regime in Moscow. At the Kremlin ceremony honoring Koval, Putin warmly described him as “our comrade” and extolled him for his “immense contribution to the strengthening of our country’s defense capacity.”

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