Huh, I actually am a bit surprised. Not that Putin would ban a type of speech, that's believable, but banning Holocaust denial? He's a populist authoritarian and I've had the impression antisemitism is not that uncommon in Russia and Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe(Muslims excluded).
It's not very surprising once you look into the support that underpins Putin's popularity. I've said on many occasions that he's a porous and incompetent head of government, but he's an excellent head of state.
Once the USSR fell, US propaganda became the dominant global historical perspective on the Cold War period. Like any fallen empire or defeated country, Russia was saddled with disrepute disproportionate to its actual crimes, while those of the US, UK, and France were marginalized.
However, old USSR loyalists are still very prevalent in Putin's Russia and make up a considerable portion of the nationalist crowd that most supports Putin. And one of perhaps the greatest exercises of Cold War propaganda was the reframing of WWII as an American-led victory, when it was really considered a Russian-led victory for decades following the end of the war. In reality, it was some great triumph of the Russian people over an objectively evil ideology that
did kill millions of Jews, that
did scapegoat Jews as well as Marxists, communists, and social democrats, and that
did cause Russia to lose more citizens to military death than the entirety of the Axis powers combined. Winning WWII was and is thus, understandably, an area of Russian pride.
Also, to be sure, Russian Jews were both very supportive of and were integral to (see my namesake for one famous revolutionary Jew) the revolution. However, while official antisemitism was permanently retired and treatment of Jews drastically improved under Lenin, later Stalin's paranoia toward Jewish holders of power and frankly towards Trotsky individually led Stalin to institute his own war on Jewish people. Because this was an exercise of Stalin's personal failures, not the animus of the Russian people per se, it's not a particularly favorable topic. For insights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union
In short, there are a lot of Russian nationalistic reasons to oppose Holocaust denial, and they play into Putin's brand pragmatic pandering. No Russian wants to think that they lost 10 million countrymen fighting a hoax. Hope that helped.
@Limbo Pete
Why not let Holocaust deniers say what they want. They will just confirm what idiots they are, yes? I think that's the point here.
Silencing any political speech seems to cause more problems than it would ever solve, no?
Well, that logic is fine for us, and it's the logic that I like.
However, that "marketplace of ideas" type of approach is an argument for liberalism that is ingrained in US thought. However, Putin has been fairly frank in his commitment to the fact that liberalism is not the only way forward. That could be some left over Soviet sentiment, but more likely it's just that he's drunk on power.
