Yesterday the Russian publishing house Atticus cancelled the publication of an acclaimed book by the Russian scholar Orlando Figes about life under Stalin. The publisher said it was dropping the book for economic reasons, but the historian believes that the decision was the product of political pressure and reflects a desire by the Kremlin to rehabilitate Stalin.

The history in my book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, is inconvenient to the current regime in Russia.

It draws on several hundred family archives and thousands of interviews with survivors of the Stalinist regime which I conducted with Memorial, a human rights and historical research centre which has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

On 4 December a group of masked men from the investigative committee of the Russian general prosecutor's office forced their way into the St Petersburg offices of Memorial. After a search the men confiscated hard drives containing the entire archive of Memorial in St Petersburg: databases with biographical information on victims of repression; details about burial sites in the St Petersburg area; family archives; sound recordings and transcripts of interviews.

All the materials I collected with Memorial in St Petersburg (about one third of the sources used in The Whisperers) were also confiscated. The raid was part of a broader ideological struggle over the control of history publications and teaching in Russia that may have influenced the decision of Atticus to cancel my contract.

The Kremlin has been actively for the rehabilitation of Stalin. Its aim is not to deny Stalin's crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country's "glorious Soviet past". It wants Russians to take pride in their Soviet past and not to be burdened with a paralysing sense of guilt about the repressions of the Stalin period.

At a conference in June 2007, Vladimir Putin called on Russia's schoolteachers to portray the Stalin period in a more positive light. It was Stalin who made Soviet Union great, who won the war against Hitler, and his "mistakes" were no worse than the crimes of western states, he said. Textbooks dwelling on the Great Terror and the Gulag have been censored; historians attacked as "anti-patriotic" for highlighting Stalin's crimes. The administration has its own textbook, The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: A Teacher's Handbook. According to one of its authors, Pavel Danilin, its aim is to present Russian history "not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instil pride in one's country. This is precisely how teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud".

Danilin is a close associate of Gleb Pavlovsky, a presidential adviser and the editor of the Russian Journal, which aims to create an intellectual base for Putin's pseudo-democracy.

A special issue on the "politics of memory" was published to coincide with the raid on Memorial. It contained two articles viciously attacking Memorial for playing into the hands foreign historians accused of setting out to blacken Soviet history by focusing on Stalin's crimes.

The Whisperers has been translated into 22 languages, including all the European languages of the former Soviet Union - except Russian, it now seems.