A History Lesson

History Today has an article by Catherine Merridale, professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary University in London, that looks at Russia and pull of history that is dragging it back into an authoritarian state. Here is a bit from the article:

The fact that many government officials, including Putin himself, began their careers in the Soviet security force, the KGB, is also relevant, for Memorial is the nemesis of every secret police force since the days of Lenin’s Cheka, run by the aristocratic Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinskii. Underlying Memorial’s unpopularity, however, and feeding the current enthusiasm for strong, centrist, managerial rule, is a kind of amnesia, a false memory of Stalinism. The key here was Russia’s failure to deal decisively with the criminal aspects of its Communist decades when there was still a chance. As The Economist’s Arkady Ostrovsky put it in 2008, the publications of the glasnost years seem to have been swallowed without being digested.

The country’s rapid collapse in the 1990s was part of the problem. Another was the accompanying failure of collective nerve. Yeltsin put the Communist Party as an institution on trial, but criminal charges were never brought against the many living interrogators, torturers, embezzlers, bullies and rapists. Russia, unlike South Africa, had no Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The moment when such a thing might have happened – some time in 1992 or 1993 – coincided with a time of deep uncertainty and many argued that self-flagellation was a poor method of crisis management. The deeper truth, however, was that people feared to look so piercingly at themselves. Almost every family had its secret. As a result, the real crooks, many of whom remained in their influential administrative roles, never faced justice. More seriously still, the case against Stalinist methods, Communism’s legacy and even against Stalin personally, remained moot. Such an omission was bound to influence understandings of history and it left the door open for today’s revival of popular chauvinism. When Putin reintroduced the Stalinist national anthem, with all its associations, in 2000, a majority of Russian citizens supported him.

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A decade ago, aspiring Russians wished for nothing more than to be part of the wider European (and American) prosperity, to send their children to English public schools such as Eton or Millfield. The mood (it seemed to call for acres of gold leaf) chimed perfectly with the popular nostalgia for late tsarist elegance. But that hankering for Europe – in cultural terms as much as in diplomatic and trade relations – brought disappointment. Russia’s more assertive international stance since 2004 has encouraged a militant Slavophilism at home and the chunk of history that fosters that is the pre-Petrine age, a time when Russians were still distinctive, still bearded, robed, remote from casual European eyes.

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That same nostalgia plays out in Russian cinemas. Several films released on the eve of the 2008 presidential elections recreated Russia’s past for new audiences. The $12 million epic 1612, released in 2007, showed how an invasion from Poland was heroically repulsed by manly Russian patriots. As history, the story was impossibly flawed – in fact, the Kremlin was in the hands of an invited Polish army at this point and Russia was tearing itself apart in civil war – but the film, with its simple messages of Russian glory and Polish evil, proved popular. It also underscored another, rather different piece of Putinite rebranding. With the fall of Communism, the national holiday on November 7th, which celebrated the Bolshevik Revolution, had become an embarrassment, too popular to abandon but too discredited to enjoy. Since 2005, however, the holiday has been shifted back to November 4th and repackaged as ‘Russian Unity Day’, a celebration of the ‘1612’ version of Moscow’s liberation from the Poles, also, coincidentally, an opportunity for ultra-nationalist demonstrations. On television, meanwhile, another pre-election hit, a film about Byzantium, was praised for describing a state with which Russians could identify, the epitome of benevolent, all-powerful and religious authoritarianism. No irony was intended and the film was presented by Vladimir Putin’s own religious confessor.

School textbooks, which also enjoy close official scrutiny, are now designed to reinforce this assertive mood. The next generation, it seems, will not be obliged to wallow in Memorial’s brand of collective guilt. In 2008, schoolchildren studying the period since 1945 were introduced to a textbook that glossed over Stalin’s crimes, explaining them as a necessary stage in Soviet Russia’s economic growth. While Russian patriotism was celebrated, other kinds of nationalism were written out of the new tale, including that of Second World War-era independence fighters in the Baltic and Ukraine.

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The historical revolution of the late 1980s and 1990s was exhilarating for me as a foreigner, but for many Russians it involved a traumatic reassessment of their lives. As Russia entered the flawed process that was called ‘transition’, there was little time to reflect and much incentive to evade further consideration of the past. Even when Communist power had gone and even as some Gulag camps were turning into tourist destinations, the old Soviet mentality (suspicious but assertive), Soviet language (simplistic and impoverished) and Soviet expectations of the future (boundlessly ambitious) thrived within people’s minds. There was never a decisive turn away from these values and nothing has emerged since that competes with them. Stalin’s ghost still walks, in other words, and, though it is easy to condemn the Kremlin’s new occupants for invoking it in their pursuit of power and wealth, the strategy could work only because a large proportion of Russia’s people was ready to welcome the old villain home with open arms.

It is tragic that the Russians haven't been able to break the chains of their past. I remember getting excited in the 1970s when the dissidents and samizdat literatures began circulating. I remember devouring Andrei Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? and a number of other books by Russian dissidents. The USSR collapsed, but sadly the liberal dreams of the dissidents never flourished.