historical scholarship, stated: "They're idiots if they think they can change the discussion of Soviet history internationally, but they can make it hard for Russian historians to teach and publish. It's like we're back to the old days." Professor Steven Blank of the U.S. Army War College found the formation of the commission to be a further regress toward Soviet and Stalinist practices, glorifying Soviet empire and its crimes. The Economist found the commission and the law to be a demand "that other countries abandon complexity and fit their history into the Soviet straitjacket" and notes that although it was hard to explain Stalin's crimes convincingly during Soviet era, the same work for Russian propagandists is even harder. Kremlin responses to critics According to the Kremlin, the History Commission was needed as there were increasingly aggressive attempts to rewrite history to Russia's disadvantage. Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin lawmaker and member of the commission, said the new body would not imprison people or blacklist historians whose analyses it disagrees with. Its priority, he said, was to challenge what he said were distorted interpretations of the Soviet Union's role in World War II. Nezavisimaya Gazeta published the responses of historian Natalya Narochnitskaya, who said "they try to convince us that it was not we who won the Great Patriotic War, that it was Americans." Regarding attempts at equating the Communism imposed on Eastern Europe with Nazism, she claimed that "agrarian peoples: Czechs, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians left us with violins, professors, academicians, cinematographers, whereas Hitler planned for them fates of pig herders and janitors." Dissolution of the Commission A presidential decree issued on 14 February 2012, invalidated all the prior legislation concerning the commission, thus dismantling it. Its former member historian Alexander Chubarian said that the commission had fulfilled its task leaving a certain legacy behind, whereas the State Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky and historian Viktor Pleshkov commented that it had been ineffective and useless. Members Commission Chairman Sergey Naryshkin, Chief of Staff of the Russian president Alu Alkhanov, former president of the Chechen Republic, Deputy Justice Minister of Russia Andrey Artizov, historian, PhD, the head of the Federal Archive Agency Alexander Chubaryan, historian, PhD, the head of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Ivan Demidov, ideologist of United Russia and leader of its youth wing; head of the Department for Humanitarian Policies and Public Relations of the