Tuesday, June 12, 2007

In the news

Latvian historian Heinrihs Strods has been denied Russian visa. He intended to visit Moscow to explore documents in Russian archives and to give a talk at a conference. Strods applied for visa several times, with support letters from the Latvian embassador to Russia and from a history institute of Russian Academy of Sciences and was repeatedly denied visa. This is a second instance when a well-known Latvian historian has been denied Russian visa. The first was Aivars Stranga in 2005.

This is quite outrageous. Apparently, in Putin's Russia, foreign historians are not allowed to do archive research unless Putin's government is sure that they'll interpret archive documents in desired way!

2 comments:

Pēteris Cedriņš said...

Oops, didn't notice that you'd already covered this -- I wove this into my post on 17 June. Nice to see you updating more frequently!

Latvian abroad said...

It's good to have this information on as many weblogs as possible, so that people notice! Not everyone reads both of our weblogs...