Russia redefines history
All countries politicize history. All nations draw on the past to justify decisions taken in the present. All nations tell stories about the past in order to understand their present too. Nevertheless, in Russia, the relationship between the state and the past is unusual, and therefore deserves some extra attention. To put it bluntly, Russia is a country where the recent tradition of falsification and manipulation of history is simply deeper and more profound than anywhere else. After all, Russia’s Soviet elite deliberately and decisively falsified history for a long time, over many years. They retouched photographs to remove discredited comrades, they changed history books to put themselves at places where they had not been, they tormented and manipulated professional historians.
Russia’s current elite is not the Soviet elite, and I don’t believe Russia’s leaders are trying to re-create the Soviet union. However the leading members of this new elite are people who were raised and trained not only in the Soviet union, but inside the culture of the old KGB, where they absorbed the prevailing attitudes and assumption. In the old Soviet KGB, there was simply no such thing as neutral or objective history: History was something to be used, cynically, in the battle for power - and if you don’t use it, then your enemies will.
Until recently, this instrumental attitude towards history was actually not dominant in post-Soviet Russia. In the 1980s, during the era of glasnost, discussion of history was a national obsession. During the economic crisis which followed the Gorbachev period, people were simply too busy to worry about the past: people stopped talking about the Gulag, and about Stalinist repression, simply because they had more urgent things to do.
But in Putin and Medevedev’s Russia, this is no longer the case: nowadays events are present in Russian textbooks, or absent from official culture, because someone has taken a conscious decision that it should be so. Deliberate choices are being made about Russian history for deliberate, immediate, political reasons. Most of all they are being made in order to legitimize the power of the ruling elite. Precisely because there is no genuine democratic process at work in Russia, the current leadership must always have a degree of insecurity about their position, and about their true popularity. The manipulation of history is one of the means by which they would like to convince the public that they are the rightful rulers of Russia. Looking at what has been included, and what has been left out, tells us a great deal about the political goals of contemporary Russia.
The first and most obvious subject missing from contemporary discourse is of course the Gulag, and indeed the entire history of the Stalinist period, during which millions of people were murdered in camps, in massacres and in the course of being deported around the country. In the 1980s, as I’ve said, this topic was a matter of urgent public debate. In the 1990s, when I was working on my book on the Gulag, this period was mostly considered irrelevant, or boring. Now, however, it is slowly taking on the air of a political taboo, and it is once again considered a touchy or dangerous subject.
I don’t want to exaggerate here: Not all Russian archives are closed, and not all Russian historians write about the glorious Soviet space program. Dotted around Russia, it is even possible to find a handful of informal, semi-official, and private monuments to the Gulag and the terror. Nevertheless, from the perspective of Moscow, a city of vast war memorials and huge public structures these local initiatives do seem insufficient. I’d guess that the majority of Russians are not even aware of them.
This lack of memorials reflects something deeper, too. Although there was much talk about doing so at the end of the 1980s, and though there was an aborted “trial” of the communist party in the early 1990s, there have for the most part been no official investigations, government inquiries, or public apologies. Indeed there has still never been a legal acknowledgement of what happened in Stalin’s Russia at all. Thus while victims can be rehabilitated, they can also be refused rehabilitation for no good reason.
There are many reasons for this, but I would pick out two. One is that the current Russian leadership consists, as I say, largely of people who are former KGB officers, and they simply have no interest in focusing on the crimes carried out by their organization. More importantly, though, it seems to me that there is actually now a link made, in some people’s minds, between the discussion of the past that took place in the 1980s, and what Russian remember as the total collapse of the economy in the 1990s. What was the point of talking about all of that, many people have said to me: it got us nowhere.
The regime echoes this sentiment. More than once, newspapers and politicians have formally stated their belief that a discussion of the crimes of the past is a sign of national weakness, one which the current Russian leadership therefore does not encourage. Just to use a personal example, the only mention of my Gulag book that I am aware of, in a mainstream Russian newspaper, was in an article about foreign espionage in Russia . Thus a book on Gulag is not a contribution to popular debate, but a kind of foreign attack on the Russian psyche.
So what kind of history is being officially encouraged? Judging from the recently Russian history textbook, released with great fanfare by Putin himself, it is probably best described as a kind of selective rehabilitation of the Soviet and Stalinist past. Of course there is no public discussion of the gulag, but there is also no great interest in, say, the rapid industrialization which Stalin set in motion, or the collectivization of land. Instead, it is Stalin’s wartime leadership which has been chosen as a subject to celebrate, and in particular the end of the war: the moment of imperial conquest, when Soviet-style communism was imposed on Russia’s western neighbors.
Examples of this trend are numerous. Every year, the May celebrations of the anniversary of victory in 1945 grow more elaborate: This year, they included several thousand Russian soldiers dressed in Soviet uniforms, waving the Soviet flag, and singing Soviet songs. There are new books about the war too, whole shelves of them, a notable feature at Moscow bookstores which once had few history books at all.
So powerful is this interpretation of history, in fact, that it has begun to have political connotations, particularly regarding Russia’s neighbors, and especially Poland and the Baltic states. Part of the problem seems to be that the history of these countries, and in particular the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, does stand in the way of a heroic picture of the war. Vladimir Putin himself went out of this way to describe the invasion of the Baltic states and eastern Poland in 1939 as a decision justified at the time by the correlation of forces or the need for self-defense, and this explanation is repeated in textbooks. A similar problem occurs in any discussion of 1945, which the Russians remember as a moment of victory and liberation, and Russia’s neighbors remember as the beginning of a new occupation. Disputes over this issue last year led to a major diplomatic battle between Russia and Estonia.
But these are perhaps also illustrations of a point I made earlier: Namely, that the Russian leadership uses history to reinforce its own somewhat shaky legitimacy.Why Poland and Estonia, after all? Could it be because they are, of all Russia’s closest neighbors, the most successful? Both have open, capitalist economies, and both have successfully made the transition from communism to open, Western-style democracy. Estonian-style capitalism, with its encouragement for entrepreneurship, or Polish-style democracy, in which political parties take power from one another in unpredictable ways, threatens Putinist-style managed democracy. If this is a regime which is by definition insecure about its long-term support, it has to fear the existence of successful democracy among its neighbors.
Even more importantly, though, is the role that the celebration of the Soviet Union’s imperial zenith is playing in a larger narrative about recent Russian history, namely the history of the 1980s and the 1990s. Famously, Putin once said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, presumably larger than either world war. He, and the Russian media and current Russian president who echo him, also now openly attribute the hardships of the 1990s not to decades of communist neglect and widespread theft, but to deliberate Western meddling, western-style democracy and western-style capitalism. Putinism, within which Medvedev fits naturally, represents, in its own interpretation, a return to the stability and safety of the communist period.
I am not, as I say, arguing here that Stalinism has been revived in Russia: The present government does not need that level of repression in order to stay in power - and indeed might find that too great a use of violence could harm its image and legitimacy both domestically and internationally. It has, however, found a use for the positive memory of Stalin, and we would do well to pay attention, and to ask ourselves why.
Anne Applebaum (born 1964) – American columnist of Washington Post and Slate. She is also a director of Political Studies in Legatum Institute in London, where she realizes projects concerning systemic and economic transformation. Former staff member of Washington Post. Worked also as foreign correspondent and deputy editor-in-chief of Spectator in London, as editor of political department of Evening Standard and columnist for several British newspapers like Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. In 1988-1991 she was a Warsaw correspondent of the Economist.