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  • The Problematic Pages

    THE PROBLEMATIC PAGES
    by Leon Aron

    The New Republic
    September 24, 2008

    To understand Vladimir Putin, we must understand his view of Russian
    history.

    In memory of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

    I.

    On June 18, 2007, a national conference of high school historians and
    teachers of social sciences was convened in Moscow. The agenda called
    for the discussion of "the acute problems in the teaching of modern
    Russian history," and for "the development of the state standards
    of education." It soon became clear that the real purpose of the
    gathering was to present to the delegates--or, more precisely, to
    impress upon them--two recently finished "manuals for teachers." One
    of them, to be published in a pilot print run of ten thousand, was
    called Noveyshaya Istoriya Rossii, 1945-2006 GG: Kniga Dlya Uchitelya,
    or The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: A Teacher's Handbook. It
    was the work of a certain A.V. Filippov, and it was designed to
    become the standard Russian high school textbook of Russian history,
    scheduled to be introduced into classrooms this month.

    Unusually heavy artillery was deployed in the textbook's
    support. Speaking at the conference were Andrey Fursenko, the minister
    of education and science, and Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin chief
    ideologist and first deputy chief of staff. Surkov is the inventor of
    the concept of "sovereign democracy," which became the centerpiece
    of the Putin regime's worldview, justifying authoritarianism in
    politics, re-centralization in economics, and anti-Western truculence
    in foreign policy. (As Russian wits like to say, "sovereign democracy"
    and "democracy" are as different as "electric chair" and "chair.")

    The project's origin and the author's provenance were soon disclosed
    by liberal websites, which these days are looking more and more like
    a kind of cyber samizdat. The textbook's editor, Alexandr Filippov,
    who is listed as the sole author on the cover, is a deputy director of
    the "National Laboratory of Foreign Policy," which, in his own words,
    "assists the state organs, including the presidential administration,
    in the development and implementation of foreign policy decisions." He
    later confirmed the rumor that it was the presidential administration,
    along with the ministry of education, that had "invited" him to
    assemble the manuscript, making the textbook nothing less than an
    expression of Vladimir Putin's view of Soviet history.

    The author of one of the chapters turned out to be Pavel Danilin,
    the editorin-chief of the Kremlin.org website and deputy director of
    the Effective Politics Foundation, which is headed by the top Kremlin
    propagandist Gleb Pavlovsky. Danilin--who is also affiliated with
    the "Young Guard of the United Russia," the Komsomol-like helper of
    the United Russia "ruling" party--was quoted as saying that "our
    goal is to make the first textbook in which Russian history will
    look not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as
    something to instill pride in one's country. It is in precisely this
    way that teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland
    with mud." Addressing on his blog teachers and scholars who might be
    less than enthusiastic about such an approach, Danilin, who is thirty
    years old and is not known to have ever taught anything, wrote:

    You may ooze bile but you will teach the children by those books
    that you will be given and in the way that is needed by Russia. And
    as to the noble nonsense that you carry in your misshapen goateed
    heads, either it will be ventilated out of them or you yourself
    will be ventilated out of teaching.... It is impossible to let some
    Russophobe shit-stinker (govnyuk), or just any amoral type, teach
    Russian history. It is necessary to clear the filth, and if it does
    not work, then clear it by force.

    The official promotion of the history textbook resumed after
    the summer vacation, when the ministry of education and science
    scheduled teachers' conferences in seven Russian regions, at which
    the authors and the government functionaries were to be joined by the
    "representatives of the president's administration" and those local
    governments. To show how it should be done, a meeting took place last
    September at the Academic Educational Association for the Humanities,
    with Moscow's top education functionaries, university presidents,
    and directors of research institutes on hand, including the director
    of the Institute of General History and the rector of Moscow State
    University. Representing the Kremlin was Dzhokhan Pollyeva, secretary
    of the Presidential Council for Science, Technologies, and Education,
    who called on historians and education administrators to wish the
    textbook's authors a great success, and assured the audience that
    there would be sufficient funding for all the seminars and courses
    required for the training of teachers to support the curriculum.

    In fact, the clearest expression of the Kremlin's goodwill toward
    the textbook came two months earlier, with an invitation to the
    conference participants to visit President Putin at his residence
    in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside Moscow. In a long introduction to the
    discussion that ensued, Putin complained that there was "mishmash"
    (kasha) in the heads of teachers of history and social sciences, and
    that this dire situation in the teaching of Russian history needed
    to be corrected by the introduction of "common standards." (Four days
    later, a new law, introduced in the Duma and passed with record speed
    in eleven days, authorized the ministry of education and science to
    determine which textbooks be "recommended" for school use and to
    determine which publishers would print them.) There followed some
    instructive exchanges:

    A conference participant: In 1990-1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We
    adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of all-human values.... It
    is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told
    [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy,
    and we will judge when and how you have done.... In exchange for
    our disarming ideologically we have received this abstract recipe:
    you become democrats and capitalists and we will control you.

    Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher
    and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I
    would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of
    influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone
    from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he
    arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.

    Participant: In the past two decades, our youth have been subjected
    to a torrent of the most diverse information about our historical
    past. This information [contains] different conceptual approaches,
    interpretations, or value judgments, and even chronologies. In such
    circumstances, the teacher is likely to ...

    Putin (interrupting): Oh, they will write, all right. You see, many
    textbooks are written by those who are paid in foreign grants. And
    naturally they are dancing the polka ordered by those who pay them. Do
    you understand? And unfortunately [such textbooks] find their way to
    schools and colleges.

    And later, concluding the session, Putin declared:

    As to some problematic pages in our history--yes, we've had them. But
    what state hasn't? And we've had fewer of such pages than some other
    [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes,
    we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning
    in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had
    no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over
    thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more
    bombs than during the entire World War II, as it was in Vietnam,
    for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism,
    for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every
    state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt--they'd
    better think of themselves.

    II.

    Since a great deal is at stake in the understanding of history
    in Russia today, a few things need to be said about the Russian
    president's view of Russia's past. For Vladimir Putin's reading of
    the Soviet Union's record represents nothing less than a repeal of
    glasnost and its accomplishments in the cause of truth. "Fewer," he
    says; and "not as horrible"; and others are "even more" terrible. And
    also that there was no terror before 1937. So the old version, the
    Soviet version, of the "repressions" perpetrated by the Soviet regime,
    according to which they were confined to the slaughter of the party
    nobility, the top military commanders, and the intelligentsia during
    the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938, has now been officially reinstated.

    In 1988, the Marxist historian and Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev
    attempted to add up the number of those "repressed" (that is,
    arrested) prior to 1937. His estimate was seventeen million to eighteen
    million people, of which "no less than" ten million perished. Oleg
    Khlevnyuk's definitive study of the OGPU-NKVD-KGB archives, in The
    History of Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, puts the
    number of people convicted between 1930 and 1936 at twelve million
    (or one-eighth of the adult population of the Soviet Union, based on
    the January 1937 census). This is far more than the estimated 8.6
    million that were convicted in the Great Terror and its aftermath
    in 1937-1940. Medvedev could have added that the first "special
    designation" (osobogo naznacheniya) extermination camp was set up on
    the Solovki Islands in the White Sea in 1923. One of the methods of
    execution there was to tie the doomed victims to a log and push it
    down "a long and steep staircase." Half a minute later, witnesses
    remembered, a "shapeless bloody mass" reached the foot of the steps.

    The defendants in the first show trials in 1928-1930 were not former
    party leaders, but the "wreckers" from among mining engineers,
    economists, historians, agronomists, and veterinarians. A third of a
    million people were arrested in 1930, of whom 20,000 were shot and
    100,000 sent to camps, where their chances of surviving a ten-year
    sentence were very slim. (When we were college students together
    in Moscow in the mid-1970s, I heard Khrushchev's grandson, Lyosha
    Adzhubei, tell his grandfather's story of a German delegation that came
    to Russia in the 1930s to learn about the organization of the Gulag.)

    And in another deviation from the official Putinist myth, of the five
    to seven million arrested in the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938--by
    Medvedev's estimate, at least one million were shot--three to five
    million were "ordinary people," not Party members. At Kuropaty,
    near Minsk, one of the hundreds and perhaps thousands of Soviet
    mass execution sites, people were shot daily from 1937 to 1941. The
    exhumation of unmarked (and carefully hidden) mass graves by local
    activists in 1987-1988 revealed holes in the skulls made by handgun
    bullets shot point-blank into the back of the head. Judging by the
    things found around the site-- wallets, shopping bags--and by the
    clothes and shoes found on the bodies, many appeared not to have
    spent any time in prison, which means that they had not been given
    any judicial proceeding but were taken to the forest directly from
    their homes. Altogether, 510 mass graves were found with an average
    of 200 bodies in each: 102,000 people. That is probably more than
    all the people in the top layers of the Party.

    When they were suddenly allowed to be heard in 1987-1988, the voices of
    victims and, occasionally, of their tormentors filled the Soviet media
    and meeting halls. Sometimes, according to witnesses' testimony, the
    victims were made to stand on the edge of the ditch, their hands tied
    and mouths gagged, while the executioners aimed more powerful rifles at
    the sides of the heads of those on either end of the row, attempting
    to kill at least two people with one bullet. "They were saving ammo,"
    a witness explained, and also "showing their professionalism." Were
    they still remembered, they, too, could add precision to Putin's
    "no less-even more" moral calculus.

    It is true that there was no "Nazism" in the Soviet Union, and
    no Auschwitz. But six weeks in the Kolyma camps, in northeastern
    Siberia--with temperatures reaching negative 50º Celsius, and
    sixteen-hour workdays of chipping off gold ore with pickaxes or
    hauling it in wooden wheelbarrows on four hours of sleep, and 400
    grams of bread (for those meeting sadistic daily work quotas that
    even two men working together could not always achieve), and the tepid
    greasy water passed as soup, and a sliver of salty herring--all this,
    Mr. President, turned a healthy adult man into a walking skeleton,
    dying of dystrophia, wracked by the bloody diarrhea of pellagra, and
    oozing pus and blood from frostbitten fingers and toes. (The great
    Russian writer Varlaam Shalamov, who miraculously survived Kolyma,
    tells the story in his beautiful and unbearable Kolyma Tales.) Hundreds
    of thousands more perished from overwork, disease, starvation,
    and accidents at the various "canalization" and "industrialization"
    sites of the first Five-Year Plans. To recall Solzhenitsyn's grim
    refrain in The Gulag Archipelago: we did not have the gas chambers,
    very true, we did not....

    During the "collectivization" of 1929-1932, an estimated one million
    peasant households were herded into boxcars, driven for days often
    with little food or water (the dead, mostly babies and the elderly,
    were thrown off the moving trains), and then unloaded to "special
    settlements" (spetsposeleniya) in the frozen tundra, the swamps of
    the Russian Northeast, the Urals, or the bare Kazakh steppes. Most
    peasants--between six and eight million--died in what may well
    have been the greatest demographic catastrophe to hit Europe since
    the Middle Ages: the man-made famine of 1932-1933, following the
    "requisition" by the state of all grain, including seed. The precise
    number of the collectivization's victims may never be known, with
    estimates ranging from the very conservative seven million to eleven
    million villagers, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, southern Russia,
    and the North Caucasus. (Ten years later Stalin would tell Churchill
    that ten million had died.) In 1988, the leading Kazakh writer Olzhas
    Suleymenov told a party conference that out of six million of his
    compatriots before the collectivization, three million remained. (This
    year Ukraine officially commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of
    the "Hlodomor," or "death from hunger," designated as genocide. How
    long will it be before Kazakhstan does the same?)

    For the survivors, there was the edict of August 7, 1932, personally
    drafted by Stalin, which meted out "the highest measure of social
    defense"--that is, shooting--with the confiscation of all property
    or, in "extenuating circumstances," ten years of camp, for "theft
    of kolkhoz property." The decree became known as "the law on five
    ears of wheat," because its most conspicuous victims were starving
    peasant children and their mothers, who ate or tucked into their
    pockets a few grains while collecting wheat or rye left on kolkhoz
    fields after reaping. (Grain found in mouse burrows was to be counted
    kolkhoz property as well.) To make sure that peasant children (and
    those of the "enemies of the people") did not get away with anything,
    another decree in 1932 lowered the legal age of defendants to twelve
    years. The children were to be tried as adults and to be "subject to
    the entire range of sentencing." When the comrades in the provinces
    asked for clarification, the Politburo affirmed that "entire range"
    included execution.

    And--right you are, Mr. President--no bombs were dropped in 1939-1941
    on western Ukraine, western Belorussia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina,
    Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania, which were all deeded to the Soviet
    Union in 1939 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or in 1944-1945,
    when they were re-conquered, or "liberated." Instead there was a
    "knock on the door" at two in the morning, to recall the title of a
    fine novella about the arrests and deportations in formerly Romanian
    Bessarabia. The total number of people arrested and deported (again,
    an estimate) was at least two million in 1939-1940 and two to three
    million in 1944-1945. How many were executed or died in camps? Two
    hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? Half a million?

    There were also no bombings of the Volga German Republic in 1941,
    nor of Chechnya, Ingushetia, or the Tatar villages in the Crimea in
    1944. Like the "kulaks" ten years before, all these victims were
    arrested and deported--again, as with the "kulaks," to the last
    pregnant woman and suckling baby--and dumped in the wilderness. The
    total of the "re-settled" is estimated at three million, of which as
    many as a million may have died in the first few years of exposure,
    starvation, and disease. Of the entire Chechen nation of 489,000,
    an estimated 200,000 perished.

    Scoring points in his obsessive and never-ending debate with
    the United States was not the sole goal of Putin's declaration
    at Novo-Ogaryovo. His remarks were also designed to establish
    guidelines for the new Russian historiography embodied in the
    textbook. The first axiom appears to be this: although there were
    "mistakes" and "dark spots," what mattered was the survival and
    strengthening of the state--by whatever means necessary. And, by that
    standard, the Soviet Union was a glittering success, and the costs
    were justified--especially, as we have already seen, since the main
    victims of Stalinism were the elite, not the ordinary people. The
    second axiom of modern Russian history according to Putin is that
    the Soviet Union was a "besieged fortress," forever under threat
    of attack by the West, and that the machinations of the West were
    responsible not only for Soviet foreign policy but also for a great
    deal of domestic misfortune. Finally, and most importantly, the
    overarching aim of this and all future historical narratives is the
    "normalization" of the monstrosity of Soviet totalitarianism, the
    manufacture of justifications and excuses for its crimes.

    While pages and pages of The Modern History of Russia overflow with
    official statistics attesting to the dazzling achievements of Soviet
    economy--the production of mineral fertilizers grew six-fold; of
    electricity, five-fold; of steel, double--or with positively loving
    recitations of the quality and quantity of Soviet military hardware,
    the Gulag is mentioned by name once. And this sole mention is by way of
    cautioning the reader against the "exaggeration" of its "contribution"
    to the economy: after all, there were only 2.6 million prisoners
    (in 1950), compared with 40.4 million in the country's workforce
    outside the barbed wire.

    Among the many eyewitness accounts inserted into the textbook's
    narrative under the rubric "How It Was" (Kak eto bylo), there is not a
    single one from the flood of memoirs published in the late 1980s about
    the hell of the camps or "investigative prisons," where "testimony"
    was beaten out of the arrested; not a single quotation from Kolyma
    Tales, or Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or
    The Department of the Useless Things by Yuri Dombrovsky (another
    splendid Russian writer who miraculously survived three stints,
    amounting to a quarter of a century, in the Gulag), or from the
    brilliantly imagined prison and camp chapters in the greatest Russian
    novel of the twentieth century, Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. The
    "Doctors' Plot" of 1953 merits a paragraph--but not the next step,
    which only Stalin's death thwarted: the planned public hangings of
    traitorous Jews on Red Square and a countrywide pogrom to be followed
    by the exile of more than two million Soviet Jews to the Far East.

    And, speaking of pogroms, the textbook has this to say about
    inter-ethnic relations under Brezhnev: "The degree of consolidation
    of Soviet nationalities and their yearning for mutual closeness were
    especially pronounced in comparison with other multi-ethnic states. In
    the USA, for instance, Ku Klux Klan-like organizations were operating
    almost openly [and] every now and then bloody mass confrontations
    occurred on racial or national grounds." This, about a society in which
    one's ethnicity was the defining characteristic of the individual in
    his relations with others; in which the Azeri hated the Armenians,
    and the Abkhaz hated the Georgians, and the Uzbeks hated the Kirgiz
    (and would start killing one another as soon as the totalitarian
    controls were relaxed, while others, such as Moldovans, Lithuanians,
    Latvians, Estonians, and Georgians, bolted out of the happy union
    even before it collapsed); in which ethnic Russian "masses" seem to
    despise all other nationalities and commonly use slurs and derogatory
    terms for the Ukrainians, the Armenians, the peoples of Central Asia
    and the Caucasus. There is also not a word about state antiSemitism
    under Brezhnev and anti-Jewish discrimination in employment, travel
    abroad, and university admissions; or about the internal passports
    in which "nationality" followed name and address; or about Moscow
    State University's admissions policies in the second half of the
    1970s, when the applicants had to put down not only the last names of
    their parents but also those of their grandparents, so as to help the
    university detect the Jews. Those with only one Jewish grandparent,
    it was widely believed, had a chance.

    III.

    The sections on foreign policy in The Modern History of Russia could
    have come directly from Soviet textbooks. The origins of the Cold
    War are covered in three sentences. The United States was bent on
    "world domination." The Soviet Union's might was in America's way. A
    "serious confrontation ensued." Churchill's Fulton speech on March
    5, 1946, the "Iron Curtain" speech, was a declaration of war, and
    the reliable Stalin is cited at length from a Pravda interview to
    that effect. Since there is no analysis, no alternative view, and
    certainly no refutation of Stalin's words, the Russian schoolchildren
    are supposed to accept what he said at face value:

    Pravda: May Mr. Churchill's speech be considered as damaging the
    cause of peace and security?

    Stalin: Undoubtedly so. In essence, Mr. Churchill has taken the
    position of a warmonger.... It must be noted that in this regard
    Mr. Churchill and his friends are remarkably like Hitler and his
    friends.... Undoubtedly that Mr. Churchill's viewpoint is a viewpoint
    of war, a call for a war with the USSR.

    Nor did the planning of war against the Soviet Union stop at
    "concepts." Russian high schoolers will learn from this textbook
    that already in May 1945 Churchill was reviewing a war plan against
    the Soviet Union, and by November 1945 the targets for the nuclear
    attack on the Soviet Union had been selected. (Why, then--one hopes a
    bright Russian girl or boy will ask--was the Soviet Union not bombed
    by the bloodthirsty warmongers, given that it would not explode its
    own nuclear charge until four years later? )

    The text does not dwell on what might have made its "former allies"
    suspicious of Moscow's intentions in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe
    and thus shaped what became known as the "Cold War mentality": the
    arrest and trial (on charges of "sabotaging the Red Army") of the
    sixteen leaders of the Polish anti-Nazi underground, loyal to the
    London-based government-in-exile, after they were promised immunity
    and presented themselves to the Soviet headquarters; the squeezing out
    of non-communists from the governments of Eastern Europe; the rigged
    election in Poland, in direct contravention of the Soviet Union's
    pledge in Yalta that there would be a free election there in which
    all "anti-Nazi and democratic forces could participate"; the later
    installation of murderous totalitarian satrapies in Eastern Europe, and
    the arrests of hundreds of thousands of "members of the bourgeoisie,"
    the intelligentsia, and local political notables (firstly of the
    non-communist left), and the show trials and the executions, after
    horrible torture, of local communist leaders such as Traicho Kostov in
    Bulgaria, Laszlo Rajk in Hungary, and Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia.

    Instead, Russian students will learn how regimes of "people's
    democracy" were established "with assistance of the Soviet military
    administration" in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and
    Bulgaria, and how, as a result, "the communists came to power," and
    how "overall, the population, which wanted social reforms, supported
    the communists' coming to power." The Sovietization of Eastern Europe
    is explained by the need to defend vital and perfectly legitimate
    national security interests:

    It was impossible to sacrifice the security of the USSR. No Russian
    government could have afforded to do so. Stalin could not possibly
    agree to U.S.-British demands for the return of the pre-war governments
    to Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Yugoslavia. For such a return would have
    restored the cordon sanitaire [a stretch of pro-Western, "bourgeois"
    "buffer" states along Bolshevik Russia's western borders] erected
    against the USSR in those lands. Stalin wanted to create a broad band
    of communist-led states, which was to stretch between the Soviet Union
    and Western Europe. The "Polish gate" cost the USSR huge sacrifices,
    and the Soviet government could not simply hand over the key to it
    to Washington.

    >From the beginning, then, the Cold War was a one-sided affair: the West
    attacking, the Soviet Union defending itself as best it could. Among
    the main lines of this gratuitous assault on Russia was ideological
    warfare: "having failed to dislodge the Soviet regime by force,"
    The Modern History of Russia explains, the United States "unleashed
    an ideological war" whose "main tool" was Radio Free Europe/Radio
    Liberty. (And yet Radio Moscow had broadcast in every language under
    the sun for decades before and after the war, not to mention the
    thousands of pro-Soviet--and often Soviet-funded--newspapers and
    magazines around the world, and the incessant "peace" "congresses,"
    "conferences," "movements," and "appeals" of the 1940s and early
    1950s.) A few pages later the textbook acknowledges the ruling Soviet
    doctrine of the "impossibility of peaceful co-existence between of the
    socialist and bourgeois ideology," that is, the permanent ideological
    war on the West until the bitter end--without recognizing, of course,
    the implications of this admission.

    The Cold War--and, by a very short extension, the United States--was to
    blame even for the reversal of the very mild "liberalization" allowed
    by Stalin during the Great Patriotic War. For, as far as the textbook's
    authors are concerned, it goes without saying that no "democratization
    of the domestic regime" could be allowed by Stalin. The "conditions
    of hostile encirclement," the reconstruction of the economy, and "the
    forging of military capability necessary to resist the U.S. and its
    allies" required the "ideological consolidation of the population"
    and thus the "strengthening of the state's ideological control over
    society."

    And whatever problems the Cold War may have caused along the way,
    the Soviet Union--until Gorbachev, of course--marched from victory
    to victory in world affairs. Even the withdrawal of nuclear-tipped
    missiles from Cuba in 1962 ended in a "defeat" for the United
    States. Another victory was won in the Vietnam war, which had been
    caused by the "U.S. aggression against North Vietnam" aimed at the
    "liquidation of the communist regime in North Vietnam." In its capacity
    as "the guarantor of world stability," the Soviet Union had no choice
    but to "state its readiness to render North Vietnam the assistance
    necessary to repulse the aggression."

    The account of the Soviet role in the Arab-Israeli conflict in
    The Modern History of Russia has nothing about the Soviet Union's
    massive shipments of armaments and material to Egypt and Syria in
    1966-1967; and not a word about the Egyptians' massing troops in
    Sinai, and Syria doing the same on the Golan Heights, in May 1967;
    or about the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba by Egypt; or of the Soviet
    representative at the United Nations blocking any possibility of the
    Security Council's addressing Israel's grave concerns (and thus the
    resolution of the crisis by peaceful means). Instead, the textbook
    repeats the canard of Israel's imminent attack on Syria--the same
    lie that Moscow communicated at the time to Egypt and Syria, thus
    pushing Egypt still closer to war.

    The Six Day War segment of the story concludes with Israel condemned
    as "aggressor" by "Resolution 247 of the Security Council" and,
    peace-loving to the core and unwilling to keep company with warmongers
    of any kind, the Soviet Union's breaking diplomatic relations
    with the Jewish state. In fact--but how could any Russian high
    school student know this?--U.N. Security Council Resolution 247,
    adopted in March 1968, re-authorized the U.N. peacekeeping force
    in Cyprus. The textbook's authors must have meant Resolution 237,
    of June 14, 1967--except that there was nothing in that resolution
    about Israel's being an "aggressor." And the Yom Kippur War of 1973,
    when Soviet-armed Egypt attacked Israel, is not mentioned at all.

    The nuclear arms race was also America's fault. No mention is made
    of the Soviet Union's annual churning out of more tanks than the
    rest of the world combined, to add to the tens of thousands that
    were already deployed in Eastern Europe. There is nothing about the
    deployment of the mobile intermediate missiles SS-20 armed with three
    nuclear warheads and targeted at western Europe; and nothing about
    the shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007, with 269 passengers
    and crew, by the Soviet Air Force on September 1, 1983.

    When all is said and done, the "rigorously centralized character
    of the political and economic system of government of the Soviet
    era"--the word "totalitarian," which became virtually inseparable from
    the definition of the Soviet regime during the glasnost revolution
    of the late 1980s, and made its way into Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's
    speeches, is not used once in the Putinist textbook--is not to be
    understood as a product of the deadly ideology of a "utopia in power,"
    to recall the marvelous title of an "alternative" Soviet history by two
    expatriate Russian scholars in the 1980s. Nor were the "psychological
    peculiarities of Stalin's personality," as the authors coyly phrase it,
    among the primary causes. No, the responsibility for the bestial regime
    rests with "objective conditions": historical, social, economic. The
    Russian national tradition is that of "centralization" in the service
    of "modernization," and Stalinism was no different, except that the
    constant threat of invasion necessitated that "modernization" be
    especially speedy, which had the consequence of making the regime
    "tougher." Nothing unusual about that. Stalin was no more "tough
    and merciless" than Bismarck, who united the German lands by "iron
    and blood." Why, even such allegedly "soft" and "flexible" political
    systems as that of the United States--the quotation marks are in the
    original--tend to evolve toward "hard forms of political organization"
    under threat, as happened after September 11.

    As for the "measures of coercion"--the word "terror," like
    "totalitarianism," also does not seem to be in the authors'
    vocabulary--the "expedited modernization" called for a "corresponding
    system of power" and an apparatus capable of the "realization of the
    course." Producing such an "apparatus" and making it "effective" were
    tasks that may be accomplished "by a variety of means, which included
    political repression." The pursuit of the "maximal effectiveness of the
    governing apparatus" explained the fact that, "according to Russian
    and foreign historians," the "primary victim" of the "repressions"
    between 1930 and 1950 was the ruling class.

    In the "plus" column of its "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand"
    assessment of Stalin, the textbook declares him "the most
    successful leader of the USSR," responsible for industrialization,
    the "cultural revolution," the world's best "system of education,"
    the "elimination of unemployment," and also for the ultra-effective
    "machinery of power." Conversely, Brezhnev's inability to forge an
    equally "effective" elite management--notwithstanding his achieving
    nuclear parity with the United States, the feat that forever secures
    his place in the pantheon of greatest Russian leaders and the nation's
    undying gratitude--"played a fatal role" in the Soviet Union's demise.

    IV.

    There is nothing new, of course, in these distortions of Russian
    history, or in the czar acting as historian-in-chief. "Like Providence
    in reverse, the Russian government seeks to arrange for the better not
    the future, but the past," wrote Alexander Herzen, Russia's first true
    (and still rather lonely) liberal. Count Alexander von Benchendorff,
    the first head of the infamous Third Department of His Majesty's
    Chancery--the secret political police, or the Gendarmes, set up by
    Nicholas I in 1826--gave this instruction to Russian historians:
    "Russia's past was wonderful, its present is more than superlative,
    and when it comes to her future, it is above anything that the
    most daring imagination could conjure. This is the point of view
    from which Russia's history must be viewed and written." (Putin has
    added a portrait of Nicholas I to the busts and portraits of Peter
    the Great, Catherine the Great, and Alexander II in the antechamber
    of the president's office in the Kremlin.)

    Stalin began, in 1934, with question marks and exclamation points in
    the margins of a high school history textbook, and four years later
    produced extensive editorial notes and insertions into the drafts of
    the Short Course History of the VKP(b)--the acronym stands for the
    Russian equivalent of the All-Union Communist Party (the Bolsheviks)--
    which established the guidelines for the writing of Soviet history
    for the next fifty years. (Stalin's notes and interpolations, in small
    but perfectly legible round letters in black pen, may soon be viewed
    on the site of Yale University's "Cold War Archives" project, led by
    the indefatigable Jonathan Brent.) A comparison between Stalin's and
    Putin's interventions in Russian historiography seems obvious. The
    first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? But there is nothing
    farcical about the new round of mendacity in the narrative of Russia's
    past. The stakes are too high.

    The important point about Putin's reactionary revisionism is that this
    time the lies are appearing after the rehabilitation of the truth. With
    the advent of glasnost--a genuinely moral revolution, and a fearless
    society-wide soul-searching, and an outburst of decency and courage,
    and an explosion of journalistic and intellectual excellence, which
    almost redeemed the previous seven decades of cruelty and lies--an
    accurate account of Russia's history was established as a condition
    of Russia's revival. The previously taught version of the country's
    history was found to be so "monstrously distorted," in Izvestia's
    phrase, that the national high school examination in history, required
    for graduation and the diploma, was abolished in 1988. The exam was
    restored the following year, but the old textbooks remained invalid
    and new ones were being readied for the ninth and tenth grades.

    First and foremost, in the great glasnost moment, it was deemed
    imperative to create the political and social mechanisms that "would
    firmly block any tilt toward [our] self-exterminating past," as the
    leading literary magazine Znamya put it in the fall of 1987. Such
    mechanisms would not work without moral and cultural reform, which
    would consist in unflinching self-reckoning and selfdiscovery. Above
    all, the renewal of Russia required a sober and remorseless burning
    away (vyzhiganie) of any self-delusion. What we conceal and what
    we fear is one and the same, wrote a contributor to perhaps the
    finest collection of glasnost essays, Inogo ne dano, or There Is
    No Other Way, in 1988. If hiding the truth is a sign of fear, then
    the revelation of truth is a sign of the conquest of fear. The road
    toward a society in which the free individual flourishes, suggested
    a literary historian, lies "only through truth, through really honest
    self-learning (samopoznanie) and self-awareness (samosoznanie)." Could
    it be that all our misfortunes--including, of course, the horrors of
    Stalinism--are "because we have not learned to respect the truth, the
    truth of our history?" asked a leading political philosopher. If so,
    "we must stop deceiving ourselves.... We can no longer evade truth,
    engage in myth-creation. We must trust the truth."

    The passionate quest for such a history began with the recovery of
    the true dimensions of the devastation wrought by Stalinism. This
    national act of acknowledgment and commemoration was thought to be
    more than a tribute to the dead. The horrors that Stalinism visited
    on Russia had to be recognized in shame and remorse, shuddered and
    wailed over, and, most importantly, redeemed by the creation of a
    state and a society that would never again allow the country to be
    ruled by terror. One must be "horrified to become brave enough" to
    condemn and forever break with the past in which most of one's life
    was lived, declared a letter to the flagship of glasnost, the weekly
    newspaper Moskovskie novosti, in 1988.

    It was not too long ago, then, that what Anatoly Rybakov, the
    author of the immensely popular anti-Stalinist saga Deti Arbata,
    or The Children of Arbat, called "moral cleansing" was the order
    of the day. Confronting Stalinism was a matter of the "spiritual
    health of the country," its "spiritual hygiene." The troubadours
    of glasnost seemed confident that Russia would emerge from this
    merciless self-examination as if from a banya, a sauna: bleary-eyed
    and with red marks left by the birch twigs, but--at last!--clean,
    light, sober, serious, and ready for hard and honest work. The time
    "of societal penitence and moral cleansing is come," declared one
    of the Soviet Union's most beloved film actors, Georgy Zhzhyonov,
    himself a former prisoner in Stalin's camps. "What a wonderful,
    capacious word is 'repentance'!" seconded Russia's finest eye surgeon,
    Svyatoslav Fyodorov, whose innovative techniques returned sight to
    thousands of Russians (and whose father, too, perished in Stalin's
    purges). "How fitting it is for our times! To repent, to tell all
    without holding anything back in order to begin a better life!"

    The full tale of the nightmare had to be recovered and retold not
    only as credible and accurate history, but also as a parable to be
    read anew by every man and woman, every boy and girl. The memoirs of
    survivors, which schoolteachers were instructed to read to students,
    were thought by a literary critic at Ogonyok magazine, that other
    engine of glasnost, to be the moral equivalent of "inoculations against
    cholera, smallpox, or plague." Insofar as Stalinism justified violence
    in pursuit of an ideal society, and offered absolution of guilt in
    exchange for blind faith, or complicity, or acquiescence, in terror and
    lies, de-Stalinization heralded the end of Soviet history's exclusion
    from ethical judgment, the end of an "extra-moral" (vnemoral'noe)
    attitude to history, as a young woman instructor in the humanities
    put it. De-Stalinization meant a re-moralization of Soviet history
    and a return to normal historiography, which, in turn, promised to
    return to the Soviet people their country's true history. And so the
    eventual publication of the first honest textbook of Russian history,
    a veteran schoolteacher wrote in Izvestia in July 1987, would be an
    event of national significance.

    As usual in the greatest Russian debates, the classics were deployed
    to excellent effect. One of Russia's finest poets, Fyodor Tyutchev,
    was invoked: "For society, as well as for an individual, self-knowledge
    is the first condition of any progress." And then the uncannily wise
    Chekhov, by way of Trofimov's soliloquy in Act II of The Cherry
    Orchard: "We don't have a definite attitude toward the past. We
    only philosophize, complain of ennui, or drink vodka. But it is so
    abundantly clear that to begin living in the present we must first
    redeem our past and be done with it, and we can redeem it only by
    pain and by an extraordinary and constant labor." And Tolstoy, in a
    magnificent essay on the sadistic punishment of soldiers in the reign
    of Nicholas I and the moral imperative of remembrance:

    We are saying: why remember? Why remember the past? It is no longer
    here, is it? Why should we remember it? Why disturb the people? What
    do you mean: why remember? If I was gravely ill and I was cured, I
    will always remember [the deliverance] with joy. Only then will I not
    want to remember, when I am still ill, in the same way or even more
    seriously, and I wish to deceive myself.... Why remember that which
    has passed? Passed? What has passed? How could it have passed--that
    which we not only have not started to eradicate and heal but are even
    afraid to call by its name? How could a brutal illness be cured only
    by our saying that it is gone? And it is not going away and will not
    and cannot go away until we admit that we are ill. In order to cure
    an illness one must first admit that one has it.

    And now, to turn all this back, to reverse this great movement
    of honesty, to dash this splendid hope and retard this amazing
    transformation, comes the cynicism and the corruption of the past
    eight years--and this wretched war in Georgia, in which, for the first
    time, post-Soviet Russia appears determined to resurrect invasion and
    occupation as tools of its foreign policy. When Russia's historians
    come to compose their indictment against Putinism, as they surely will,
    the charges will prominently include Vladimir Putin's unforgivable
    interruption of his country's renaissance and the subversion of its
    attainment to moral maturity.

    Leon Aron, a resident scholar and director of Russian studies at
    the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently,
    of Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2006.

    --Boundary_(ID_7JDX6nJ7V1FrLVhXqsWuWw) --
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