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Russian History Rewritten, Again

13.08.2010

by Vladimir Kara-Murza

Russia is famously a country with an unpredictable past. With a brief exception of the 1990s, regimes of the day freely rewrote the historical narrative for their own expediency. A famous Soviet-era joke advised that the latest edition of the encyclopedia had a regrettable misprint: instead of “distinguished statesman, hero of socialist labor” the paragraph should read “enemy of the people, convicted foreign spy.”

Under ex-KGB apparatchiks who seized control of the Russian government a decade ago, the discussion of Soviet crimes became unfashionable. The new leaders declared the USSR’s dissolution “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” reinstated the Stalinist national anthem, approved a school textbook referring to Stalin’s mass purges as “adequate to the task of modernization” and suggested decorating Moscow with posters of Stalin for the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II.

The latest attempt at rewriting history came with a new textbook, History of Russia 1917–2009, coauthored by Moscow University professors Alexander Barsenkov and Alexander Vdovin. The Educational Methodical Association, which is comprised of faculty deans from across the country, has officially recommended the book for use in universities. Intended to rear a new generation of Russian history teachers, the book refers to the 1917 Bolshevik coup as “the great revolution” (p. 11) and calls Stalin a “great hero” in terms of nation-building (13). His policy of forced collectivization that condemned millions of peasants and their families to the Gulag is justified as necessary for the future victory over Nazism (283). So, indeed, is the Great Terror: the textbook quotes (without challenging) Molotov’s assertion that “we owe it to 1937 that we had no fifth column during the [second world] war” (253). According to Professors Barsenkov and Vdovin, “the gigantic diversity of opinions” about Stalin prevents a definitive conclusion about his role in history, although “attempts to judge his role merely negatively,” according to them, “are not succeeding” (391).

The authors appear to be preoccupied with the “Jewish question.” Several passages in the textbook, according to Russian historian and sociologist Anatoly Golubovsky, merit investigation under the racial incitement provisions of the Russian criminal code. The authors lament the “evident disproportion” of Jews in cultural and scientific professions (299) and meticulously count percentages of Jewish members of the Academy of Sciences, the Writers’ Union, and the universities (424). The deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 is explained by a secret plan to establish a Jewish republic on the peninsula (349), while NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria is said to have “allegedly” had “Jewish origins” (388).

Turning to more recent events, the authors assert that Soviet tanks sent to disperse pro-independence demonstrators in Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius in 1989–91 were fighting “extremists” (649); the three young Muscovites crushed to death by armored vehicles during the KGB-led coup attempt in August 1991 are referred to as “peaceful” citizens and “defenders” of the Moscow White House (seat of the pro-democracy forces). Both “peaceful” and “defenders” are placed in quotation marks (649), and while it is not immediately obvious what the quotation marks are supposed to mean (the young men were not armed, and they did defend the White House), they are clearly intended as an insult.

In the best-case scenario, university officials who approved this book have simply not read it, relying on the authors’ academic credentials. In the worst case, this is a deliberate attempt to poison the minds of yet another generation of Russian students with a neo-Soviet interpretation of history.

Moscow had to abandon its plan to decorate the city with Stalin posters after it hit a wall of determined public opposition. The Russian academic community has already begun organizing against the offensive textbook. The latest attempt at rewriting history may yet be defeated.

Source

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/

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