THE PROBLEMATIC PAGES
by Leon Aron
The New Republic
September 24, 2008
To understand Vladimir Putin, we must understand his view of Russian
history.
In memory of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I.
On June 18, 2007, a national conference of high school historians and
teachers of social sciences was convened in Moscow. The agenda called
for the discussion of "the acute problems in the teaching of modern
Russian history," and for "the development of the state standards
of education." It soon became clear that the real purpose of the
gathering was to present to the delegates–or, more precisely, to
impress upon them–two recently finished "manuals for teachers." One
of them, to be published in a pilot print run of ten thousand, was
called Noveyshaya Istoriya Rossii, 1945-2006 GG: Kniga Dlya Uchitelya,
or The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: A Teacher’s Handbook. It
was the work of a certain A.V. Filippov, and it was designed to
become the standard Russian high school textbook of Russian history,
scheduled to be introduced into classrooms this month.
Unusually heavy artillery was deployed in the textbook’s
support. Speaking at the conference were Andrey Fursenko, the minister
of education and science, and Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin chief
ideologist and first deputy chief of staff. Surkov is the inventor of
the concept of "sovereign democracy," which became the centerpiece
of the Putin regime’s worldview, justifying authoritarianism in
politics, re-centralization in economics, and anti-Western truculence
in foreign policy. (As Russian wits like to say, "sovereign democracy"
and "democracy" are as different as "electric chair" and "chair.")
The project’s origin and the author’s provenance were soon disclosed
by liberal websites, which these days are looking more and more like
a kind of cyber samizdat. The textbook’s editor, Alexandr Filippov,
who is listed as the sole author on the cover, is a deputy director of
the "National Laboratory of Foreign Policy," which, in his own words,
"assists the state organs, including the presidential administration,
in the development and implementation of foreign policy decisions." He
later confirmed the rumor that it was the presidential administration,
along with the ministry of education, that had "invited" him to
assemble the manuscript, making the textbook nothing less than an
expression of Vladimir Putin’s view of Soviet history.
The author of one of the chapters turned out to be Pavel Danilin,
the editorin-chief of the Kremlin.org website and deputy director of
the Effective Politics Foundation, which is headed by the top Kremlin
propagandist Gleb Pavlovsky. Danilin–who is also affiliated with
the "Young Guard of the United Russia," the Komsomol-like helper of
the United Russia "ruling" party–was quoted as saying that "our
goal is to make the first textbook in which Russian history will
look not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as
something to instill pride in one’s country. It is in precisely this
way that teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland
with mud." Addressing on his blog teachers and scholars who might be
less than enthusiastic about such an approach, Danilin, who is thirty
years old and is not known to have ever taught anything, wrote:
You may ooze bile but you will teach the children by those books
that you will be given and in the way that is needed by Russia. And
as to the noble nonsense that you carry in your misshapen goateed
heads, either it will be ventilated out of them or you yourself
will be ventilated out of teaching…. It is impossible to let some
Russophobe shit-stinker (govnyuk), or just any amoral type, teach
Russian history. It is necessary to clear the filth, and if it does
not work, then clear it by force.
The official promotion of the history textbook resumed after
the summer vacation, when the ministry of education and science
scheduled teachers’ conferences in seven Russian regions, at which
the authors and the government functionaries were to be joined by the
"representatives of the president’s administration" and those local
governments. To show how it should be done, a meeting took place last
September at the Academic Educational Association for the Humanities,
with Moscow’s top education functionaries, university presidents,
and directors of research institutes on hand, including the director
of the Institute of General History and the rector of Moscow State
University. Representing the Kremlin was Dzhokhan Pollyeva, secretary
of the Presidential Council for Science, Technologies, and Education,
who called on historians and education administrators to wish the
textbook’s authors a great success, and assured the audience that
there would be sufficient funding for all the seminars and courses
required for the training of teachers to support the curriculum.
In fact, the clearest expression of the Kremlin’s goodwill toward
the textbook came two months earlier, with an invitation to the
conference participants to visit President Putin at his residence
in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside Moscow. In a long introduction to the
discussion that ensued, Putin complained that there was "mishmash"
(kasha) in the heads of teachers of history and social sciences, and
that this dire situation in the teaching of Russian history needed
to be corrected by the introduction of "common standards." (Four days
later, a new law, introduced in the Duma and passed with record speed
in eleven days, authorized the ministry of education and science to
determine which textbooks be "recommended" for school use and to
determine which publishers would print them.) There followed some
instructive exchanges:
A conference participant: In 1990-1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We
adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of all-human values…. It
is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told
[by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy,
and we will judge when and how you have done…. In exchange for
our disarming ideologically we have received this abstract recipe:
you become democrats and capitalists and we will control you.
Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher
and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I
would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of
influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone
from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he
arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.
Participant: In the past two decades, our youth have been subjected
to a torrent of the most diverse information about our historical
past. This information [contains] different conceptual approaches,
interpretations, or value judgments, and even chronologies. In such
circumstances, the teacher is likely to …
Putin (interrupting): Oh, they will write, all right. You see, many
textbooks are written by those who are paid in foreign grants. And
naturally they are dancing the polka ordered by those who pay them. Do
you understand? And unfortunately [such textbooks] find their way to
schools and colleges.
And later, concluding the session, Putin declared:
As to some problematic pages in our history–yes, we’ve had them. But
what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other
[states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes,
we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning
in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had
no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over
thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more
bombs than during the entire World War II, as it was in Vietnam,
for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism,
for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every
state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt–they’d
better think of themselves.
II.
Since a great deal is at stake in the understanding of history
in Russia today, a few things need to be said about the Russian
president’s view of Russia’s past. For Vladimir Putin’s reading of
the Soviet Union’s record represents nothing less than a repeal of
glasnost and its accomplishments in the cause of truth. "Fewer," he
says; and "not as horrible"; and others are "even more" terrible. And
also that there was no terror before 1937. So the old version, the
Soviet version, of the "repressions" perpetrated by the Soviet regime,
according to which they were confined to the slaughter of the party
nobility, the top military commanders, and the intelligentsia during
the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938, has now been officially reinstated.
In 1988, the Marxist historian and Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev
attempted to add up the number of those "repressed" (that is,
arrested) prior to 1937. His estimate was seventeen million to eighteen
million people, of which "no less than" ten million perished. Oleg
Khlevnyuk’s definitive study of the OGPU-NKVD-KGB archives, in The
History of Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, puts the
number of people convicted between 1930 and 1936 at twelve million
(or one-eighth of the adult population of the Soviet Union, based on
the January 1937 census). This is far more than the estimated 8.6
million that were convicted in the Great Terror and its aftermath
in 1937-1940. Medvedev could have added that the first "special
designation" (osobogo naznacheniya) extermination camp was set up on
the Solovki Islands in the White Sea in 1923. One of the methods of
execution there was to tie the doomed victims to a log and push it
down "a long and steep staircase." Half a minute later, witnesses
remembered, a "shapeless bloody mass" reached the foot of the steps.
The defendants in the first show trials in 1928-1930 were not former
party leaders, but the "wreckers" from among mining engineers,
economists, historians, agronomists, and veterinarians. A third of a
million people were arrested in 1930, of whom 20,000 were shot and
100,000 sent to camps, where their chances of surviving a ten-year
sentence were very slim. (When we were college students together
in Moscow in the mid-1970s, I heard Khrushchev’s grandson, Lyosha
Adzhubei, tell his grandfather’s story of a German delegation that came
to Russia in the 1930s to learn about the organization of the Gulag.)
And in another deviation from the official Putinist myth, of the five
to seven million arrested in the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938–by
Medvedev’s estimate, at least one million were shot–three to five
million were "ordinary people," not Party members. At Kuropaty,
near Minsk, one of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of Soviet
mass execution sites, people were shot daily from 1937 to 1941. The
exhumation of unmarked (and carefully hidden) mass graves by local
activists in 1987-1988 revealed holes in the skulls made by handgun
bullets shot point-blank into the back of the head. Judging by the
things found around the site– wallets, shopping bags–and by the
clothes and shoes found on the bodies, many appeared not to have
spent any time in prison, which means that they had not been given
any judicial proceeding but were taken to the forest directly from
their homes. Altogether, 510 mass graves were found with an average
of 200 bodies in each: 102,000 people. That is probably more than
all the people in the top layers of the Party.
When they were suddenly allowed to be heard in 1987-1988, the voices of
victims and, occasionally, of their tormentors filled the Soviet media
and meeting halls. Sometimes, according to witnesses’ testimony, the
victims were made to stand on the edge of the ditch, their hands tied
and mouths gagged, while the executioners aimed more powerful rifles at
the sides of the heads of those on either end of the row, attempting
to kill at least two people with one bullet. "They were saving ammo,"
a witness explained, and also "showing their professionalism." Were
they still remembered, they, too, could add precision to Putin’s
"no less-even more" moral calculus.
It is true that there was no "Nazism" in the Soviet Union, and
no Auschwitz. But six weeks in the Kolyma camps, in northeastern
Siberia–with temperatures reaching negative 50º Celsius, and
sixteen-hour workdays of chipping off gold ore with pickaxes or
hauling it in wooden wheelbarrows on four hours of sleep, and 400
grams of bread (for those meeting sadistic daily work quotas that
even two men working together could not always achieve), and the tepid
greasy water passed as soup, and a sliver of salty herring–all this,
Mr. President, turned a healthy adult man into a walking skeleton,
dying of dystrophia, wracked by the bloody diarrhea of pellagra, and
oozing pus and blood from frostbitten fingers and toes. (The great
Russian writer Varlaam Shalamov, who miraculously survived Kolyma,
tells the story in his beautiful and unbearable Kolyma Tales.) Hundreds
of thousands more perished from overwork, disease, starvation,
and accidents at the various "canalization" and "industrialization"
sites of the first Five-Year Plans. To recall Solzhenitsyn’s grim
refrain in The Gulag Archipelago: we did not have the gas chambers,
very true, we did not….
During the "collectivization" of 1929-1932, an estimated one million
peasant households were herded into boxcars, driven for days often
with little food or water (the dead, mostly babies and the elderly,
were thrown off the moving trains), and then unloaded to "special
settlements" (spetsposeleniya) in the frozen tundra, the swamps of
the Russian Northeast, the Urals, or the bare Kazakh steppes. Most
peasants–between six and eight million–died in what may well
have been the greatest demographic catastrophe to hit Europe since
the Middle Ages: the man-made famine of 1932-1933, following the
"requisition" by the state of all grain, including seed. The precise
number of the collectivization’s victims may never be known, with
estimates ranging from the very conservative seven million to eleven
million villagers, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, southern Russia,
and the North Caucasus. (Ten years later Stalin would tell Churchill
that ten million had died.) In 1988, the leading Kazakh writer Olzhas
Suleymenov told a party conference that out of six million of his
compatriots before the collectivization, three million remained. (This
year Ukraine officially commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of
the "Hlodomor," or "death from hunger," designated as genocide. How
long will it be before Kazakhstan does the same?)
For the survivors, there was the edict of August 7, 1932, personally
drafted by Stalin, which meted out "the highest measure of social
defense"–that is, shooting–with the confiscation of all property
or, in "extenuating circumstances," ten years of camp, for "theft
of kolkhoz property." The decree became known as "the law on five
ears of wheat," because its most conspicuous victims were starving
peasant children and their mothers, who ate or tucked into their
pockets a few grains while collecting wheat or rye left on kolkhoz
fields after reaping. (Grain found in mouse burrows was to be counted
kolkhoz property as well.) To make sure that peasant children (and
those of the "enemies of the people") did not get away with anything,
another decree in 1932 lowered the legal age of defendants to twelve
years. The children were to be tried as adults and to be "subject to
the entire range of sentencing." When the comrades in the provinces
asked for clarification, the Politburo affirmed that "entire range"
included execution.
And–right you are, Mr. President–no bombs were dropped in 1939-1941
on western Ukraine, western Belorussia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina,
Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania, which were all deeded to the Soviet
Union in 1939 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or in 1944-1945,
when they were re-conquered, or "liberated." Instead there was a
"knock on the door" at two in the morning, to recall the title of a
fine novella about the arrests and deportations in formerly Romanian
Bessarabia. The total number of people arrested and deported (again,
an estimate) was at least two million in 1939-1940 and two to three
million in 1944-1945. How many were executed or died in camps? Two
hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? Half a million?
There were also no bombings of the Volga German Republic in 1941,
nor of Chechnya, Ingushetia, or the Tatar villages in the Crimea in
1944. Like the "kulaks" ten years before, all these victims were
arrested and deported–again, as with the "kulaks," to the last
pregnant woman and suckling baby–and dumped in the wilderness. The
total of the "re-settled" is estimated at three million, of which as
many as a million may have died in the first few years of exposure,
starvation, and disease. Of the entire Chechen nation of 489,000,
an estimated 200,000 perished.
Scoring points in his obsessive and never-ending debate with
the United States was not the sole goal of Putin’s declaration
at Novo-Ogaryovo. His remarks were also designed to establish
guidelines for the new Russian historiography embodied in the
textbook. The first axiom appears to be this: although there were
"mistakes" and "dark spots," what mattered was the survival and
strengthening of the state–by whatever means necessary. And, by that
standard, the Soviet Union was a glittering success, and the costs
were justified–especially, as we have already seen, since the main
victims of Stalinism were the elite, not the ordinary people. The
second axiom of modern Russian history according to Putin is that
the Soviet Union was a "besieged fortress," forever under threat
of attack by the West, and that the machinations of the West were
responsible not only for Soviet foreign policy but also for a great
deal of domestic misfortune. Finally, and most importantly, the
overarching aim of this and all future historical narratives is the
"normalization" of the monstrosity of Soviet totalitarianism, the
manufacture of justifications and excuses for its crimes.
While pages and pages of The Modern History of Russia overflow with
official statistics attesting to the dazzling achievements of Soviet
economy–the production of mineral fertilizers grew six-fold; of
electricity, five-fold; of steel, double–or with positively loving
recitations of the quality and quantity of Soviet military hardware,
the Gulag is mentioned by name once. And this sole mention is by way of
cautioning the reader against the "exaggeration" of its "contribution"
to the economy: after all, there were only 2.6 million prisoners
(in 1950), compared with 40.4 million in the country’s workforce
outside the barbed wire.
Among the many eyewitness accounts inserted into the textbook’s
narrative under the rubric "How It Was" (Kak eto bylo), there is not a
single one from the flood of memoirs published in the late 1980s about
the hell of the camps or "investigative prisons," where "testimony"
was beaten out of the arrested; not a single quotation from Kolyma
Tales, or Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or
The Department of the Useless Things by Yuri Dombrovsky (another
splendid Russian writer who miraculously survived three stints,
amounting to a quarter of a century, in the Gulag), or from the
brilliantly imagined prison and camp chapters in the greatest Russian
novel of the twentieth century, Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. The
"Doctors’ Plot" of 1953 merits a paragraph–but not the next step,
which only Stalin’s death thwarted: the planned public hangings of
traitorous Jews on Red Square and a countrywide pogrom to be followed
by the exile of more than two million Soviet Jews to the Far East.
And, speaking of pogroms, the textbook has this to say about
inter-ethnic relations under Brezhnev: "The degree of consolidation
of Soviet nationalities and their yearning for mutual closeness were
especially pronounced in comparison with other multi-ethnic states. In
the USA, for instance, Ku Klux Klan-like organizations were operating
almost openly [and] every now and then bloody mass confrontations
occurred on racial or national grounds." This, about a society in which
one’s ethnicity was the defining characteristic of the individual in
his relations with others; in which the Azeri hated the Armenians,
and the Abkhaz hated the Georgians, and the Uzbeks hated the Kirgiz
(and would start killing one another as soon as the totalitarian
controls were relaxed, while others, such as Moldovans, Lithuanians,
Latvians, Estonians, and Georgians, bolted out of the happy union
even before it collapsed); in which ethnic Russian "masses" seem to
despise all other nationalities and commonly use slurs and derogatory
terms for the Ukrainians, the Armenians, the peoples of Central Asia
and the Caucasus. There is also not a word about state antiSemitism
under Brezhnev and anti-Jewish discrimination in employment, travel
abroad, and university admissions; or about the internal passports
in which "nationality" followed name and address; or about Moscow
State University’s admissions policies in the second half of the
1970s, when the applicants had to put down not only the last names of
their parents but also those of their grandparents, so as to help the
university detect the Jews. Those with only one Jewish grandparent,
it was widely believed, had a chance.
III.
The sections on foreign policy in The Modern History of Russia could
have come directly from Soviet textbooks. The origins of the Cold
War are covered in three sentences. The United States was bent on
"world domination." The Soviet Union’s might was in America’s way. A
"serious confrontation ensued." Churchill’s Fulton speech on March
5, 1946, the "Iron Curtain" speech, was a declaration of war, and
the reliable Stalin is cited at length from a Pravda interview to
that effect. Since there is no analysis, no alternative view, and
certainly no refutation of Stalin’s words, the Russian schoolchildren
are supposed to accept what he said at face value:
Pravda: May Mr. Churchill’s speech be considered as damaging the
cause of peace and security?
Stalin: Undoubtedly so. In essence, Mr. Churchill has taken the
position of a warmonger…. It must be noted that in this regard
Mr. Churchill and his friends are remarkably like Hitler and his
friends…. Undoubtedly that Mr. Churchill’s viewpoint is a viewpoint
of war, a call for a war with the USSR.
Nor did the planning of war against the Soviet Union stop at
"concepts." Russian high schoolers will learn from this textbook
that already in May 1945 Churchill was reviewing a war plan against
the Soviet Union, and by November 1945 the targets for the nuclear
attack on the Soviet Union had been selected. (Why, then–one hopes a
bright Russian girl or boy will ask–was the Soviet Union not bombed
by the bloodthirsty warmongers, given that it would not explode its
own nuclear charge until four years later? )
The text does not dwell on what might have made its "former allies"
suspicious of Moscow’s intentions in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe
and thus shaped what became known as the "Cold War mentality": the
arrest and trial (on charges of "sabotaging the Red Army") of the
sixteen leaders of the Polish anti-Nazi underground, loyal to the
London-based government-in-exile, after they were promised immunity
and presented themselves to the Soviet headquarters; the squeezing out
of non-communists from the governments of Eastern Europe; the rigged
election in Poland, in direct contravention of the Soviet Union’s
pledge in Yalta that there would be a free election there in which
all "anti-Nazi and democratic forces could participate"; the later
installation of murderous totalitarian satrapies in Eastern Europe, and
the arrests of hundreds of thousands of "members of the bourgeoisie,"
the intelligentsia, and local political notables (firstly of the
non-communist left), and the show trials and the executions, after
horrible torture, of local communist leaders such as Traicho Kostov in
Bulgaria, Laszlo Rajk in Hungary, and Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia.
Instead, Russian students will learn how regimes of "people’s
democracy" were established "with assistance of the Soviet military
administration" in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and
Bulgaria, and how, as a result, "the communists came to power," and
how "overall, the population, which wanted social reforms, supported
the communists’ coming to power." The Sovietization of Eastern Europe
is explained by the need to defend vital and perfectly legitimate
national security interests:
It was impossible to sacrifice the security of the USSR. No Russian
government could have afforded to do so. Stalin could not possibly
agree to U.S.-British demands for the return of the pre-war governments
to Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Yugoslavia. For such a return would have
restored the cordon sanitaire [a stretch of pro-Western, "bourgeois"
"buffer" states along Bolshevik Russia’s western borders] erected
against the USSR in those lands. Stalin wanted to create a broad band
of communist-led states, which was to stretch between the Soviet Union
and Western Europe. The "Polish gate" cost the USSR huge sacrifices,
and the Soviet government could not simply hand over the key to it
to Washington.
>From the beginning, then, the Cold War was a one-sided affair: the West
attacking, the Soviet Union defending itself as best it could. Among
the main lines of this gratuitous assault on Russia was ideological
warfare: "having failed to dislodge the Soviet regime by force,"
The Modern History of Russia explains, the United States "unleashed
an ideological war" whose "main tool" was Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty. (And yet Radio Moscow had broadcast in every language under
the sun for decades before and after the war, not to mention the
thousands of pro-Soviet–and often Soviet-funded–newspapers and
magazines around the world, and the incessant "peace" "congresses,"
"conferences," "movements," and "appeals" of the 1940s and early
1950s.) A few pages later the textbook acknowledges the ruling Soviet
doctrine of the "impossibility of peaceful co-existence between of the
socialist and bourgeois ideology," that is, the permanent ideological
war on the West until the bitter end–without recognizing, of course,
the implications of this admission.
The Cold War–and, by a very short extension, the United States–was to
blame even for the reversal of the very mild "liberalization" allowed
by Stalin during the Great Patriotic War. For, as far as the textbook’s
authors are concerned, it goes without saying that no "democratization
of the domestic regime" could be allowed by Stalin. The "conditions
of hostile encirclement," the reconstruction of the economy, and "the
forging of military capability necessary to resist the U.S. and its
allies" required the "ideological consolidation of the population"
and thus the "strengthening of the state’s ideological control over
society."
And whatever problems the Cold War may have caused along the way,
the Soviet Union–until Gorbachev, of course–marched from victory
to victory in world affairs. Even the withdrawal of nuclear-tipped
missiles from Cuba in 1962 ended in a "defeat" for the United
States. Another victory was won in the Vietnam war, which had been
caused by the "U.S. aggression against North Vietnam" aimed at the
"liquidation of the communist regime in North Vietnam." In its capacity
as "the guarantor of world stability," the Soviet Union had no choice
but to "state its readiness to render North Vietnam the assistance
necessary to repulse the aggression."
The account of the Soviet role in the Arab-Israeli conflict in
The Modern History of Russia has nothing about the Soviet Union’s
massive shipments of armaments and material to Egypt and Syria in
1966-1967; and not a word about the Egyptians’ massing troops in
Sinai, and Syria doing the same on the Golan Heights, in May 1967;
or about the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba by Egypt; or of the Soviet
representative at the United Nations blocking any possibility of the
Security Council’s addressing Israel’s grave concerns (and thus the
resolution of the crisis by peaceful means). Instead, the textbook
repeats the canard of Israel’s imminent attack on Syria–the same
lie that Moscow communicated at the time to Egypt and Syria, thus
pushing Egypt still closer to war.
The Six Day War segment of the story concludes with Israel condemned
as "aggressor" by "Resolution 247 of the Security Council" and,
peace-loving to the core and unwilling to keep company with warmongers
of any kind, the Soviet Union’s breaking diplomatic relations
with the Jewish state. In fact–but how could any Russian high
school student know this?–U.N. Security Council Resolution 247,
adopted in March 1968, re-authorized the U.N. peacekeeping force
in Cyprus. The textbook’s authors must have meant Resolution 237,
of June 14, 1967–except that there was nothing in that resolution
about Israel’s being an "aggressor." And the Yom Kippur War of 1973,
when Soviet-armed Egypt attacked Israel, is not mentioned at all.
The nuclear arms race was also America’s fault. No mention is made
of the Soviet Union’s annual churning out of more tanks than the
rest of the world combined, to add to the tens of thousands that
were already deployed in Eastern Europe. There is nothing about the
deployment of the mobile intermediate missiles SS-20 armed with three
nuclear warheads and targeted at western Europe; and nothing about
the shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007, with 269 passengers
and crew, by the Soviet Air Force on September 1, 1983.
When all is said and done, the "rigorously centralized character
of the political and economic system of government of the Soviet
era"–the word "totalitarian," which became virtually inseparable from
the definition of the Soviet regime during the glasnost revolution
of the late 1980s, and made its way into Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s
speeches, is not used once in the Putinist textbook–is not to be
understood as a product of the deadly ideology of a "utopia in power,"
to recall the marvelous title of an "alternative" Soviet history by two
expatriate Russian scholars in the 1980s. Nor were the "psychological
peculiarities of Stalin’s personality," as the authors coyly phrase it,
among the primary causes. No, the responsibility for the bestial regime
rests with "objective conditions": historical, social, economic. The
Russian national tradition is that of "centralization" in the service
of "modernization," and Stalinism was no different, except that the
constant threat of invasion necessitated that "modernization" be
especially speedy, which had the consequence of making the regime
"tougher." Nothing unusual about that. Stalin was no more "tough
and merciless" than Bismarck, who united the German lands by "iron
and blood." Why, even such allegedly "soft" and "flexible" political
systems as that of the United States–the quotation marks are in the
original–tend to evolve toward "hard forms of political organization"
under threat, as happened after September 11.
As for the "measures of coercion"–the word "terror," like
"totalitarianism," also does not seem to be in the authors’
vocabulary–the "expedited modernization" called for a "corresponding
system of power" and an apparatus capable of the "realization of the
course." Producing such an "apparatus" and making it "effective" were
tasks that may be accomplished "by a variety of means, which included
political repression." The pursuit of the "maximal effectiveness of the
governing apparatus" explained the fact that, "according to Russian
and foreign historians," the "primary victim" of the "repressions"
between 1930 and 1950 was the ruling class.
In the "plus" column of its "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand"
assessment of Stalin, the textbook declares him "the most
successful leader of the USSR," responsible for industrialization,
the "cultural revolution," the world’s best "system of education,"
the "elimination of unemployment," and also for the ultra-effective
"machinery of power." Conversely, Brezhnev’s inability to forge an
equally "effective" elite management–notwithstanding his achieving
nuclear parity with the United States, the feat that forever secures
his place in the pantheon of greatest Russian leaders and the nation’s
undying gratitude–"played a fatal role" in the Soviet Union’s demise.
IV.
There is nothing new, of course, in these distortions of Russian
history, or in the czar acting as historian-in-chief. "Like Providence
in reverse, the Russian government seeks to arrange for the better not
the future, but the past," wrote Alexander Herzen, Russia’s first true
(and still rather lonely) liberal. Count Alexander von Benchendorff,
the first head of the infamous Third Department of His Majesty’s
Chancery–the secret political police, or the Gendarmes, set up by
Nicholas I in 1826–gave this instruction to Russian historians:
"Russia’s past was wonderful, its present is more than superlative,
and when it comes to her future, it is above anything that the
most daring imagination could conjure. This is the point of view
from which Russia’s history must be viewed and written." (Putin has
added a portrait of Nicholas I to the busts and portraits of Peter
the Great, Catherine the Great, and Alexander II in the antechamber
of the president’s office in the Kremlin.)
Stalin began, in 1934, with question marks and exclamation points in
the margins of a high school history textbook, and four years later
produced extensive editorial notes and insertions into the drafts of
the Short Course History of the VKP(b)–the acronym stands for the
Russian equivalent of the All-Union Communist Party (the Bolsheviks)–
which established the guidelines for the writing of Soviet history
for the next fifty years. (Stalin’s notes and interpolations, in small
but perfectly legible round letters in black pen, may soon be viewed
on the site of Yale University’s "Cold War Archives" project, led by
the indefatigable Jonathan Brent.) A comparison between Stalin’s and
Putin’s interventions in Russian historiography seems obvious. The
first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? But there is nothing
farcical about the new round of mendacity in the narrative of Russia’s
past. The stakes are too high.
The important point about Putin’s reactionary revisionism is that this
time the lies are appearing after the rehabilitation of the truth. With
the advent of glasnost–a genuinely moral revolution, and a fearless
society-wide soul-searching, and an outburst of decency and courage,
and an explosion of journalistic and intellectual excellence, which
almost redeemed the previous seven decades of cruelty and lies–an
accurate account of Russia’s history was established as a condition
of Russia’s revival. The previously taught version of the country’s
history was found to be so "monstrously distorted," in Izvestia’s
phrase, that the national high school examination in history, required
for graduation and the diploma, was abolished in 1988. The exam was
restored the following year, but the old textbooks remained invalid
and new ones were being readied for the ninth and tenth grades.
First and foremost, in the great glasnost moment, it was deemed
imperative to create the political and social mechanisms that "would
firmly block any tilt toward [our] self-exterminating past," as the
leading literary magazine Znamya put it in the fall of 1987. Such
mechanisms would not work without moral and cultural reform, which
would consist in unflinching self-reckoning and selfdiscovery. Above
all, the renewal of Russia required a sober and remorseless burning
away (vyzhiganie) of any self-delusion. What we conceal and what
we fear is one and the same, wrote a contributor to perhaps the
finest collection of glasnost essays, Inogo ne dano, or There Is
No Other Way, in 1988. If hiding the truth is a sign of fear, then
the revelation of truth is a sign of the conquest of fear. The road
toward a society in which the free individual flourishes, suggested
a literary historian, lies "only through truth, through really honest
self-learning (samopoznanie) and self-awareness (samosoznanie)." Could
it be that all our misfortunes–including, of course, the horrors of
Stalinism–are "because we have not learned to respect the truth, the
truth of our history?" asked a leading political philosopher. If so,
"we must stop deceiving ourselves…. We can no longer evade truth,
engage in myth-creation. We must trust the truth."
The passionate quest for such a history began with the recovery of
the true dimensions of the devastation wrought by Stalinism. This
national act of acknowledgment and commemoration was thought to be
more than a tribute to the dead. The horrors that Stalinism visited
on Russia had to be recognized in shame and remorse, shuddered and
wailed over, and, most importantly, redeemed by the creation of a
state and a society that would never again allow the country to be
ruled by terror. One must be "horrified to become brave enough" to
condemn and forever break with the past in which most of one’s life
was lived, declared a letter to the flagship of glasnost, the weekly
newspaper Moskovskie novosti, in 1988.
It was not too long ago, then, that what Anatoly Rybakov, the
author of the immensely popular anti-Stalinist saga Deti Arbata,
or The Children of Arbat, called "moral cleansing" was the order
of the day. Confronting Stalinism was a matter of the "spiritual
health of the country," its "spiritual hygiene." The troubadours
of glasnost seemed confident that Russia would emerge from this
merciless self-examination as if from a banya, a sauna: bleary-eyed
and with red marks left by the birch twigs, but–at last!–clean,
light, sober, serious, and ready for hard and honest work. The time
"of societal penitence and moral cleansing is come," declared one
of the Soviet Union’s most beloved film actors, Georgy Zhzhyonov,
himself a former prisoner in Stalin’s camps. "What a wonderful,
capacious word is ‘repentance’!" seconded Russia’s finest eye surgeon,
Svyatoslav Fyodorov, whose innovative techniques returned sight to
thousands of Russians (and whose father, too, perished in Stalin’s
purges). "How fitting it is for our times! To repent, to tell all
without holding anything back in order to begin a better life!"
The full tale of the nightmare had to be recovered and retold not
only as credible and accurate history, but also as a parable to be
read anew by every man and woman, every boy and girl. The memoirs of
survivors, which schoolteachers were instructed to read to students,
were thought by a literary critic at Ogonyok magazine, that other
engine of glasnost, to be the moral equivalent of "inoculations against
cholera, smallpox, or plague." Insofar as Stalinism justified violence
in pursuit of an ideal society, and offered absolution of guilt in
exchange for blind faith, or complicity, or acquiescence, in terror and
lies, de-Stalinization heralded the end of Soviet history’s exclusion
from ethical judgment, the end of an "extra-moral" (vnemoral’noe)
attitude to history, as a young woman instructor in the humanities
put it. De-Stalinization meant a re-moralization of Soviet history
and a return to normal historiography, which, in turn, promised to
return to the Soviet people their country’s true history. And so the
eventual publication of the first honest textbook of Russian history,
a veteran schoolteacher wrote in Izvestia in July 1987, would be an
event of national significance.
As usual in the greatest Russian debates, the classics were deployed
to excellent effect. One of Russia’s finest poets, Fyodor Tyutchev,
was invoked: "For society, as well as for an individual, self-knowledge
is the first condition of any progress." And then the uncannily wise
Chekhov, by way of Trofimov’s soliloquy in Act II of The Cherry
Orchard: "We don’t have a definite attitude toward the past. We
only philosophize, complain of ennui, or drink vodka. But it is so
abundantly clear that to begin living in the present we must first
redeem our past and be done with it, and we can redeem it only by
pain and by an extraordinary and constant labor." And Tolstoy, in a
magnificent essay on the sadistic punishment of soldiers in the reign
of Nicholas I and the moral imperative of remembrance:
We are saying: why remember? Why remember the past? It is no longer
here, is it? Why should we remember it? Why disturb the people? What
do you mean: why remember? If I was gravely ill and I was cured, I
will always remember [the deliverance] with joy. Only then will I not
want to remember, when I am still ill, in the same way or even more
seriously, and I wish to deceive myself…. Why remember that which
has passed? Passed? What has passed? How could it have passed–that
which we not only have not started to eradicate and heal but are even
afraid to call by its name? How could a brutal illness be cured only
by our saying that it is gone? And it is not going away and will not
and cannot go away until we admit that we are ill. In order to cure
an illness one must first admit that one has it.
And now, to turn all this back, to reverse this great movement
of honesty, to dash this splendid hope and retard this amazing
transformation, comes the cynicism and the corruption of the past
eight years–and this wretched war in Georgia, in which, for the first
time, post-Soviet Russia appears determined to resurrect invasion and
occupation as tools of its foreign policy. When Russia’s historians
come to compose their indictment against Putinism, as they surely will,
the charges will prominently include Vladimir Putin’s unforgivable
interruption of his country’s renaissance and the subversion of its
attainment to moral maturity.
Leon Aron, a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at
the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently,
of Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989-2006.
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