Forcing people to believe in lies is not new in Russia. Joseph Stalin rewrote reality on an epic scale, bigging up his own importance by excising former rivals from the historical record, airbrushing their faces from photographs. ‘Who controls the past controls the future,’ wrote George Orwell in his novel
Stalin was punctilious in telling Soviet historians what to write about him. He dictated his own entry in the
Putin is the latest Russian autocrat to mould history to suit himself. In February 2013, he ordered Russian historians to come up with guidelines for new school history books that suggested a portrayal of the past – and the present – more in line with his version of autocracy. Part of his motivation was the fear that gripped him following the widescale protests of 2011 and 2012 and the need to shore up his image before the impending presidential election. But it was also a vanity project. The guidelines were to make no criticism of the president, no reference to any protests against him and no mention of the confrontation over his crushing of Yukos. ‘It was a simple political order,’ wrote the independent Russian historian, Vladimir Ryzhkov, ‘to justify the ruling authorities, to explain that they are doing everything right’. The guidelines reaffirmed the myth that Russia needs strong autocratic rule to protect the nation against its foes and credited Putin with providing it. ‘During his first and second presidential terms, Vladimir Putin managed to stabilise the situation in the country and strengthen the “vertical of power”,’ the guidelines conclude, adding that Putin had fostered stability, economic growth and ‘the restoration of Russia’s position in international affairs’.
The man Putin engaged to implement his revision of history was Sergei Naryshkin, a former Kremlin chief of staff and senior representative of the president’s own United Russia party. Like so many of Putin’s enforcers, Naryshkin had been with him at the KGB Academy and would go on to become the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. As the head of the Orwellian-sounding ‘Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests’, Naryshkin was instrumental in moves to whitewash some of the most shameful aspects of Russia’s past, including Soviet cooperation with the Nazis and the treatment of ‘liberated’ peoples after war. Another of Putin’s Siloviki advisers, the FSB director, Alexander Bortnikov, made clear that the rehabilitation of Stalin was official Kremlin policy when he declared that ‘a significant proportion’ of the executions carried in the Stalinist purges were justified, because they were based on ‘objective’ evidence. Leading academics at the Russian Academy of Sciences warned against the dangers of such baseless revisionism; the Kremlin was rewriting history that it considered ‘detrimental to Russia’s interests’ by besmirching the memory of millions of innocent people murdered by a tyrannical regime.
Glorifying the Soviet past and refusing to express regret for the crimes of the Stalin era appeal to many, mostly elderly, Russians, who wish to look back with pride on the years of Soviet rule. By reviving the Soviet anthem, reinstating Soviet-style military parades and reintroducing Soviet tactics against political dissent, he has won the gratitude of those who felt themselves demeaned by the post- perestroika mood of repentance for past crimes; but to do so, he has had to distort the facts.
