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Last Updated: Sep 7, 2008 - 8:04:52 AM |
"Dear friends! The textbook you are holding in your hands is dedicated
to the history of our Motherland… from the end of the Great Patriotic
War to our days. We will trace the journey of the Soviet Union, from
its greatest historical triumph to its tragic disintegration."
This greeting is addressed to hundreds of thousands of Russian
schoolchildren, who will in September receive a new history textbook
printed by the publishing house Enlightenment and approved by the
ministry of education. "The Soviet Union," the new textbook explains,
"was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people
around the world of the best and fairest society." Furthermore, over
the past 70 years, the USSR, "a gigantic superpower which managed a
social revolution and won the most cruel of wars," effectively put
pressure on western countries to give due regard to human rights. In
the early part of the 21st century, continues the textbook, the west
has been hostile to Russia and pursued a policy of double standards.
Had it not been for Vladimir Putin's involvement, this book would
probably have never seen the light of day. In 2007, Putin, then
Russian president, gathered a group of history teachers to talk about
his vision of the past. "We can't allow anyone to impose a sense of
guilt on us," was his message.
The 1990s were largely ideology-free in Russia. The country was too
weary of grand designs and too preoccupied with economic survival.
When Putin came to power in 2000, he said Russia's national idea was
"to be competitive." But then, as the price of oil climbed and Russia
started to feel important again, the need for ideology became more
urgent. Unable to offer any vision or strategy for the future, the
Kremlin looked, inevitably, to the past.
The textbook covers the period 1945-2006, a suggestive choice: from
Stalin's victory in the "great patriotic war" to the "triumph" of
Putinism. It celebrates all contributors to Russia's greatness, and
denounces those responsible for the loss of empire, regardless of their
politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is seen not as a
watershed from which a new history begins, but as an unfortunate and
tragic diversion that has hindered Russia's progress.
The whole postwar period in Russian history is viewed through the prism
of the cold war "initiated by the United States of America." The
textbook does not deny Stalin's repressions; it justifies them. The
concentration of power in Stalin's hands suited the country; indeed,
conditions of the time "demanded" it. "The domestic politics of the
Soviet Union after the war fulfilled the tasks of mobilisation, which
the government set. In the circumstances of the cold war …
democratisation was not an option for Stalin."
But if Stalin mobilised the country and expanded the Soviet empire so
that it reached parity in power-status with the US, Mikhail Gorbachev
surrendered those hard-won positions. Stupidly, from the textbook's
point of view, Gorbachev considered western partners to be his
political allies. He gave up central and eastern Europe, which meant
Russia lost its security. America and the west instigated revolutions
in Ukraine and in Georgia, which turned the former Soviet territories
into western military bases. These revolutions "set a task for Moscow
to pursue a more ambitious foreign policy in the post-Soviet space,"
the textbook says.
Now we have seen this ambition realised in the recent war against
Georgia. For the first time since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia
has asserted itself militarily in the post-Soviet space and played out
its imperial ambitions with tanks and grenade launchers. Russia's
invasion was intended to send an unequivocal message to other former
Soviet republics: "we can and will stop Nato's eastward advance." In
the first few days of the war, Russia bombed Gori, Stalin's home town.
The cluster bombs it dropped on the city killed between five and 30
people, but the statue of Stalin on the main Stalin Square remained
standing. As Russian tanks rolled past the statue on Putin's orders,
one can even imagine the Soviet dictator winking and waving.
***
It is easy enough to condemn Russia's manipulation of history for
ideological ends, or Putin's restoration of the Soviet anthem in 2000.
But the truth is that a large majority of Russians—77 per cent
according to one poll—welcomed the restoration of the anthem, and at
least half the country view Stalin's role in history as positive. This
connects to another uncomfortable truth: the version of history
portrayed in the new textbook is as much a defeat for Russian
liberalism and liberal intellectuals—the journalists, historians and
artists who were supposed to counter the Soviet ideology—as it is a
triumph for Putin. There was more opposition from Russian liberals to
the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, than there is now to the war in
Georgia.
The destruction of the Soviet Union did not yield a new, liberal
post-Soviet ideology. The defeat of the KGB-led coup in August 1991 by
hundreds of thousands of Russian people, who risked death when they
went to defend the Moscow parliament, did not become a watershed. It
was not celebrated as the birth of a new nation, merely the collapse of
the old.
By contrast, the mythologising of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution began
almost immediately. Two years after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter
Palace, the event was re-enacted as a mass spectacle, directed by
Nikolai Evreinov. The artist Kuz'ma Petrov-Vodkin marked the third
year of the revolution with "1918 in Petrograd," a painting of a red
Madonna breastfeeding a child. The tenth anniversary was celebrated by
Eisenstein's film October.
In terms of imagery, August 1991 offered the perfect opportunity for a
new foundation myth: Boris Yeltsin, tall, striking, with a shock of
white hair, standing on a tank and addressing the crowd, was an image
made for canonisation. But the day when the coup was defeated and
people brought down the statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky has not
even become a national holiday. The tenth anniversary of the 1991 coup
went uncelebrated.
It is true that 1991 was not good news for everyone. Many people had
their savings wiped out. Some never quite believed that the Soviet
system had really gone. Others felt a niggling sense of emptiness and
nostalgia. Over the past decade, this nostalgia has became
all-encompassing.
So why did Russia fail to come to terms with its own history and shape
a new liberal course after 1991? One reason, perhaps, was a fear of
civil war, an anxiety that debate about the Soviet legacy was
potentially explosive and might end in the streets (as in 1993, when
members of the Supreme Soviet mobilised die-hard communists and
nationalists in an armed revolt). Unlike in eastern Europe, the secret
service files were not thrown open for the simple reason that too many
people, including the intelligentsia, had been involved with the KGB.
The secret services were restructured and renamed but never outlawed.
Condemnation of Stalinism was as half-hearted as it had been in 1956,
when Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality.
Unlike Georgia, Ukraine or the Baltic states, Russia did not have
anyone else to blame for Soviet rule. Russia was involved in the
destruction of itself. In 2000, this act of mass suicide was bleakly
and clinically depicted in a theatre adaptation of Andrei Platonov's
1926 novel Chevengur, staged by Lev Dodin, one of Russia's most
talented and thoughtful directors. The builders of the great utopia
were depicted first disposing of their class enemies, sealing their
naked bodies in giant transparent plastic bags. They then sank
themselves into a pool of water, carrying large heavy stones. The
stones resurfaced; the bodies did not. The country which performed
this collective suicide required self-analysis and a dispassionate
study of its history—which never took place.
A vast amount of previously banned literary works and historic
documents were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but they
were swallowed without being digested. "We thought that if
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was published, the world would turn
upside down," Dodin told me recently. "But then an extraordinary thing
happened: it was published and remained unread." The same was true of
Vasily Grossman and Varlam Shalamov. None of these authors became part
of a national canon. Worse still, their writing has not become a
vaccination against the return of the disease they described. When
Solzhenitsyn came back to Russia in 1994, he was treated as a figure of
the past. Some, like the writer and television personality Tatyana
Tolstaya, ridiculed him, others paid tribute to his courage, but few
took him and his thoughts on "How to Rebuild Russia"—the title of an
essay he wrote in 1990—seriously. When he died on 3rd August, few
Russian intellectuals came to pay tribute as his body lay in state.
The most distinguished mourner, ironically, was Putin, who was
attracted to Solzhenitsyn by his outspoken nationalistic views. The
Russian government is promising to rename Moscow's Bolshaya
Kommunisticheskaya [Big Communist] Street as Solzhenitsyn Street—so
co-opting the scourge of Stalinism to the new authoritarian state.
***
What happened culturally in Russia in the 1990s was a kind of
adolescent reaction against an overbearing parent. Irony and swearing
flooded the public realm. But the contemptuous bashing of Soviet
culture added little to the understanding of it. And at the same time
as rejecting Soviet culture, the media and popular art engaged in an
extraordinary exercise of self-deprecation. The slogan of those years
seemed to be: "We are the worst."
It is easy to see how a KGB officer or a pensioner could feel they had
lost out in the early 1990s. But why did intellectuals and artists who
had pressed for perestroika and were supposed to have benefited most
from the collapse of the Soviet Union behave like such losers? One
reason is that they lost the special status which they enjoyed under
the communist regime, but did not have enough talent, integrity or
independence to make use of their new freedom.
The fact is, that the events of 1917 unleashed enormous artistic
energy: suffice to mention the works of Alexander Blok, Vladimir
Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhkhold, Dmitry Shostakovich. Nothing of this
kind took place in Russia after August 1991. Not a single great poem
or novel was produced. And more damagingly, the post-1991 period did
not produce a language adequate to the events that were taking place in
the country. The past 15 years have revealed an enormous linguistic
vacuum. Serious or high language was abused and devalued by the
official Soviet ideology. Words like "truth," "heroism" or "duty" were
falsified beyond recognition—and there has been no rebirth.
Russia's first commercial newspaper, Kommersant, turned sarcasm and
irony into its hallmark. Its headlines usually were (and still are) a
pun on Soviet slogans or citations from popular films or songs. The
shortcomings of this language became apparent towards the end of the
1990s and the early 2000s. Events such as the financial crisis of
1998, the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003 or the terrorist
attack on a school in Beslan in 2004 required a different, serious
language which did not exist.
The day after the bloodbath in Beslan, Izvestia, a leading Russian
daily, gave its entire front page to a picture of a bruised Russian
soldier carrying a bloodstained girl in his arms, with no headline. In
a way it was telling. It was as if the paper wasn't confident that it
could find the right tone with words. The only way to be serious was
to say nothing. (It is also telling that this front page was so
powerful that the editor got sacked by the proprietor, probably after a
nudge from the Kremlin.)
Irony penetrated all areas of Russian culture. Soviet symbols and
slogans became a rich field for post-modernism. Soviet history was
stylised and commercialised, before it was properly assessed and
studied. This began in the mid-1980s and spanned visual arts, theatre
and literature. Some of the most memorable images came from a series
of paintings by Leonid Sokov (one of them is on the cover of this
issue) of Stalin and Marilyn Monroe in amorous poses. It was
entertaining but no more than that.
By the mid-1990s, Russian culture was already starting to flirt with
Soviet culture of the 1930s. One of the highlights of the theatre
season of 1994 was an extraordinary student production of a 1934
comedy, The Wonderful Fusion, by Vladimir Kirshon. Full of energy and
sincerity, it was faithful to the period and expressed the naivety and
excitement of Soviet youth before the second world war. It did not
propagate Soviet ideology, but was saturated with nostalgia for the
sense of purpose associated with Soviet idealism. This was a precursor
for what became a tide of nostalgia on a far greater and more damaging
scale.
In 1996-97, a television presenter, Leonid Parfenov, launched a
programme on Channel One, one of Russia's leading channels, called Old
Songs About Important Things. It revived Soviet songs, playing in a
light-hearted and ironic way to a growing nostalgia for things Soviet.
In part, this "ideology" was a backlash against the self-deprecation of
the early 1990s. But it proved extremely popular. (In a further
irony, when Putin came to power, Parfenov was one of the victims of his
squeeze on the media.)
***
One of Vladimir Putin's first acts as Russian president was the revival
of the Soviet national anthem, replacing Mikhail Glinka's "Patriotic
Song" (which had no words). On New Year's eve in 2000, the country
clinked glasses to the tune written on Stalin's orders in 1944. At the
time, Putin's supporters argued that this was his concession to the
older population, a kind of sweetener for the bitter pill of economic
reforms. There was, in fact, no popular demand for a change of the
anthem. But when it arrived, it stirred dormant feelings in the
population.
The same year as the return of the Soviet anthem in 2000, Channel One
reinstated a Soviet-era jingle for the main nine o'clock news
programme, Vremya. Melodies, like smells, can be highly evocative.
The tune signalled a return to Soviet-era news coverage. In fact, it
was as if the state was sending signals to the country as a
whole—signals of restoration and revanche. And this was no longer some
kind of game or joke. The jokers—like Parfenov—were quickly removed.
The Kremlin and the KGB—now renamed the FSB and recovering much of its
lost power—were deadly serious. To be sure, demand for a serious tone
did exist. But the sad fact is that this demand was met not by the
liberal intelligentsia, but by the ideologues of Putin's regime. As
Russian troops moved into Georgia, Russian television presenters talked
with straight faces and straight voices about the hand of the west
behind Georgia's attack on its separatist region of South Ossetia.
The icons of Soviet ideology are revived not for their connection with
the Bolshevik, communist or revolutionary ideals—far from it—but as
symbols of Russia's imperial greatness. Revolution is firmly out of
fashion in Russia, and communism has been dumped. Lenin's mausoleum
has long ceased to be a national symbol. During a recent military
parade on Red Square, the constructivist pyramid designed by Alexei
Shchusev in 1924 to house Lenin's remains, was covered up modestly with
victory imagery. There was no room for the dead Bolshevik in the
celebration of Russia's resurgence.
But the revival of the Soviet anthem did break a taboo which, for
better or worse, had existed since Khrushchev's 1956 speech—it
re-established Stalin as a great national leader. The dictator's
appeal lay not in his communist background, but in his imperial
legacy. "Stalin's empire—the sphere of influence of the USSR—was
greater than all Eurasian powers of the past, even the empire of
Genghis Khan," the history textbook marvels. Stalin occupies a proud
place in modern Russian history, along with Ivan the Terrible, Peter
the Great and now Putin. Russia is still far from erecting monuments
to Stalin, but the acceptance of him as a positive, or at least complex
historical figure is an established fact. It does not matter that
every family in Russia has relatives or close friends who suffered in
Stalin's terror. The myth is stronger than first-hand knowledge.
One of the most significant Russian novels published under perestroika
was Life and Fate, completed in 1960 by the disillusioned communist and
war correspondent Vasily Grossman. The book dared to consider the
similarities between Stalinism and Nazism. In one scene an SS officer
is talking to his prisoner, an old Bolshevik. "When we look one
another in the face, we're neither of us just looking at a face we
hate—no, we are gazing into a mirror. That's the tragedy of our age.
Do you really not recognise yourselves in us; yourselves and the
strength of your will?… You may think you hate us, but what you really
hate is yourselves in us… Our victory will be your victory… And if
you should conquer, then we shall perish only to live in your victory."
Twenty years after the first publication of Life and Fate, this idea is
anathema to official Russian ideology. The history textbook rejects
the very notion of totalitarianism. "This doctrine, that equates the
Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, was and remains a weapon of
ideological war, not a tool of knowledge. The ideology of Nazi Germany
and the ideology of Soviet Russia had nothing in common."
Russia today is not a totalitarian state, nor is it a socialist one.
But in the absence of an indigenous liberal ideology, an old fashioned
nationalism, in neo-Stalinist costume, has become the most powerful
force in Russian society. It is this force that brought Russian tanks
into Georgia and scares most of Russia's neighbours. In the process of
"restoration," Russia has not returned to the Soviet past—but it has
arrived at a new junction that bodes ill for its neighbours and its
citizens.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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