Stalin Revered, Putin Immortalized?

14Nov07

The Economist reports that Mr. Putin is rewriting Russia’s history, but it isn’t really news. Talk of re-glorifying Stalin and painting him in a new light so as to soften Russia’s violent history appeared in American press about two years ago. Well now Putin is peddling a new textbook written for Russia’s history teachers. Personally, I’d love to get my hand on this piece of propoganda.

“’Russian history did contain some problematic pages,” Mr. Putin told the teachers.’” – Economist. Making this statement is kind of like saying that dead people aren’t very alive: understatement.

Here’s the point that worries me: “The manual does not deny Stalin’s repressions; nor is it silent about the suppression of protest movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It does something more dangerous, justifying Stalin’s dictatorship as a necessary evil in response to a cold war started by America against the Soviet Union. “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’s government.” The concentration of power in Stalin’s hands suited the country; indeed, the conditions of the time “demanded” it. ” I mean, who’s to say they didn’t? I guess though, the important word here is “justifying” - you just can’t. It’d be like justifying the Holocaust.

What I really wonder is how Russians see their history. I can’t use myself as a control because I’ve been exposed to the American view of Russia’s history and I can’t say that I’m unbiased. I can’t get much information out of my mom about what it was like living in Russia either, only the phrase “red tape.” She has some memories about her childhood but they’re mostly all pleasant and personal. Sure, she used to watch political films at the theatre when she was my age, but they were all about the politics of other countries: much more glamorous. The stories are more about how my mom snuck into theatres with her wild friends anyway, rather than the politics of her time. So either my mom was oblivious to any political climate in Russia, or she wasn’t bothered enough by it to really pay attention. When I told her about this rebirth of Stalin as a leader that “did what he had to do” in place of the paranoid killer that he’s been viewed as since his death, she didn’t seem too shocked…but she didn’t seem too complacent or enthusiastic about it either - she didn’t really care one way or the other, actually. She’s a poor control anyway, since her sense of being Russian has only declined these seventeen years we’ve lived in America. That’s not to say she’s a very proud American, and I’m sure she still harbors some fantasies about escaping to Europe, but she doesn’t want people to know she’s Russian. Maybe it’s the vodka jokes?

Either way, I’d love to see this new Russian history “manual”.