Vladimir Kara-Murza: Russian History Rewritten, Again
[Vladimir Kara-Murza JR. is the Washington bureau chief of RTVi television network. He was previously a correspondent for the newspapers Novye Izvestia and Kommersant and editor in chief of the Russian Investment Review.]
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...
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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...