‘Unpatriotic’ WWII Videogame Pulled Off Shelves in Russia

MOSCOW, August 6 (RIA Novosti) – A real-time strategy computer game based on World War II, inspired by a first-hand eyewitness account of the conflict, has been pulled off the shelves in Russia after complaints it is not patriotic enough, the distributor said.

1C Softclub stopped sales of “Company of Heroes 2” late last month and is “analyzing the situation,” the Russian company said in a statement Monday.

The campaign against the game, developed by Vancouver-based Relic Entertainment, was launched in Russia shortly after its release in late June, with 22,000 signing a petition to ban its sales on Change.org as of Tuesday afternoon.

The game scenario, which pits the Soviet Red Army against Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht, tasks the player on the Soviet side with burning Soviet civilians alive, killing fellow troops with friendly fire and executing Polish partisans, the petition said.

“Such episodes…are illegal because they humiliate our nation’s dignity and create an illusion of racial supremacy of soldiers from the Hitler coalition,” the petition said.

Pro-Kremlin rights activist Georgy Fyodorov, who sits on the Public Chamber, an advisory body on human rights, also asked state prosecutors last week to examine the game, saying on his blog it was produced by US spin doctors bent on “rewriting history” and “might negatively influence the patriotic education of youth.” No follow-up was reported.

Relic Entertainment has not commented on the issue.

“Company of Heroes 2,” a sequel to a bestselling game from 2006, had an 80 percent positive critic rating on review site Metacritic.com at the time of publication of this article.

The developer said previously the game was influenced by works of Vasily Grossman, a Soviet war correspondent who recounted his experiences in the epic novel “Life and Fate” (1959). The book was banned in the Soviet Union, but compared to Leo Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” upon publication during the Perestroika reform period in the late 1980s. It was acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal in 2007 as “one of the great novels of the 20th century.”

Both Soviet and Western historians say the Soviet Army went into battle accompanied by so-called barrier troops from the NKVD, Stalin’s political police, that were deployed behind the front line and tasked with executing soldiers who dared retreat. The NKVD also purged undesirable elements such as collaborators in newly-reoccupied areas that had been under Axis control.

The Russian establishment remains fiercely defensive about preserving the prestige of the wartime Soviet Army’s conduct, which has been the cause of conflict with several states from which criticism of it has emerged.

British military historian Anthony Beevor triggered a wave of outrage among Russian politicians in 2002, when he published his book “Berlin” about the campaign to take the German capital in 1945. Beevor claimed the Red Army carried out millions of rapes of German women as it advanced across the Reich in 1944-45, and even frequently attacked Russian and Polish women.

A Russian lawmaker said in June Russia’s lower house of parliament would consider a bill which would outlaw criticism of the Red Army’s actions during World War II and attempts to “rehabilitate” Nazism.