The Russia Conundrum полностью

At a televised meeting with history teachers in 2007, Putin issued instructions for how his new version of the past should be taught to the young generation whose beliefs will determine Russia’s future. ‘There is nothing in our history for Russians to be ashamed of,’ he told the audience. ‘No one must be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt upon us.’ The responsibility of teachers was to make students ‘proud of the Motherland’. To help them with their task of creating this alternative history – one which overlooks unfortunate episodes in favour of Russia’s achievements – the presidential administration produced a handbook of instructions. A Modern History of Russia, 1945–2006; A Manual for History Teachers explains that Stalin’s purges of the 1930s were necessary because of the need to prepare for war with Germany, while the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991 was a historical tragedy. ‘The Soviet Union was not a democracy,’ the handbook somewhat understatedly concedes, ‘but it was an example to millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.’ The reigns of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, in which the Soviet vassal states of Eastern Europe and then the Soviet republics were granted independence, are presented as a cause for regret, while Putin himself is lauded for pledging to restore Russia’s ‘greatness’.

A pensioner sheds a tear at Stalin’s tomb in Moscow on the 63rd anniversary of his death

In seeking to deploy the past as validation for his own brand of autocracy, Putin is following in Stalin’s footsteps. Stalin commissioned his 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course in order to enshrine a (fake) version of history, in which he played the central role in the 1917 revolutions, while other Bolsheviks deferred to his leadership. To underline the veracity of the Short Course, Stalin obliged the Soviet historical establishment to declare him a great historian, whose judgements were infallible. Putin, too, has set himself up as a scholar of history. At a press conference in December 2013, he praised two historical figures who embody many of the attributes to which he aspires. ‘What is the difference between Cromwell and Stalin?’ he asked the audience, before demonstrating his historical expertise by answering his own question. ‘I’ll tell you. There is none. Our liberal politicians think these men were both bloody dictators. But Cromwell was actually a smart man who [like Stalin] played a controversial part in history. And his statue is still standing in London. Nobody is tearing it down. We, too, should treat our history with that sort of care.’ The comparison is deeply stretched, and Putin’s historiography is alarmingly selective, but his purpose is clear. By excusing Stalin’s excesses and rescuing his memory, Putin is placing himself in a tradition of strongman autocrats who saved their nation from chaos.

It is not a narrative that chimes with everyone’s view of the past. The human rights group, Memorial, was founded in the Gorbachev years to document the crimes of the Stalin era, honour the victims of political repression, and use education and remembrance to ensure that such abuses never happen again. But to Putin, Memorial was an inconvenience, an unwelcome voice pointing out that historical reality cannot be erased simply to suit the wishes of today’s leadership. Instead of listening to the message, Putin attacked the messenger. In December 2008, Memorial’s St Petersburg offices were raided by the security forces and archives chronicling hundreds of thousands of individual cases of people repressed or murdered under Stalin were confiscated. Memorial’s director, Irina Flinge, said they had been targeted because their work contradicted the ethos of ‘Putinism’, a strident nationalism that draws strength from the autocratic past. ‘The official line now’, Flinge concluded, ‘is that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country. And if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims … Russians are told to be proud of their history, not ashamed, so those investigating and cataloguing the atrocities of the past are no longer welcome.’ In December 2021, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the closure of Memorial for breaching recently promulgated laws on ‘foreign agents’ – a catchall instrument of censorship to which I will return later.