TEHRAN -- Russia’s Minster of Culture Vladimir Medinsky has welcomed his Iranian counterpart’s proposal to translate his best-selling series “Myths about Russia” into Persian.
“This will give me a good excuse to visit Iran again for unveiling the translation,” Medinsky said in a press conference after a meeting with Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Hosseini in Tehran on Saturday.
Asked about the contents of his book, Medinsky declined to talk about it and said, “It would take hours if I began to talk about it.”
Medinsky arrived in Tehran on Friday to sign a protocol on organizing a Russian cultural week in Tehran in 2013.
Medinsky’s book was also discussed during a meeting with officials of Tehran’s Book City Institute, who also asked to translate the book into Persian, some Persian news agencies reported on Sunday.
This series “is designed to instill national pride among the population and debunk the idea (allegedly propagated by Western historians) that Russia’s past has many negative features,” Amy Knight, an American historian of the Soviet Union and of Russia, wrote in an article published in the New York Review of Books in May 2012.
“Thus, for example, Medinsky asserts that Ivan the Terrible was actually a humane leader and suggests that the notion that Russia has a strong history of anti-Semitism is a gross exaggeration. He also denies that Soviet troops invaded and occupied the Baltic States and Poland during World War II or that vast numbers of Soviet prisoners of war were sent to labor camps when the war ended.”
Medinsky explained in a 2009 interview:
“Dirty myths are purposely forged as an instrument of political propaganda or psychological warfare against certain countries. And no other nation in history [except Russia] has endured such prolonged demonization…. If we do not squeeze out the poison of dirty myths, they will be passed on, like a baton, to future generations.”
Knight also wrote that some Russian commentators have already dubbed Medinsky the Russian Goebbels.
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