The scramble to expose Soviet lies was never likely to last long. Since
it was part of the collective impatience with economic stagnation and
corrupt, failing government, the public craving for facts was satisfied,
or largely so, when the Soviet regime fell. At that point, too, there
were more urgent pressures in most people's lives, for the economy
collapsed soon after the end of Gorbachev's presidency and for much of
the early 1990s Russians contended with physical hunger, cold,
uncertainty and the very real danger of civil war. An underlying anxiety
of another kind was gnawing away, too, for the crumbling of the Soviet
Union and the accompanying loss of empire and ideological purpose struck
many Russians like a personal blow. The past became a difficult place:
confusing, even tinged with shame.


http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33607&amid=30288428

Catherine Merridale: Haunted by Stalin. History Today, Vol.59 (9)

In this first article of a short series looking at changing attitudes to
history in the former Communist states, Catherine Merridale examines
competing versions of Russia's troubled past in the light of present
politics.

The rebirth of history in Russia began at least two years before the
European turning point of 1989. It was Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of
glasnost, or openness, launched in 1986, that encouraged the tentative
debates, discussions that were sponsored initially by the Kremlin
itself. As a graduate student in Moscow University's Faculty of History
in 1986 I watched the process unfolding and I followed its gathering
momentum during the next three years. The debates were unforgettable and
culminated in a crisis so profound that school and university
examinations in history had to be cancelled. Textbooks, teachers and
curricula faced ignominy; the old questions were irrelevant. It was as
if the past had come to life after more than 70 years, breaking through
the tissue of political illusion to reclaim its place at the centre of
Russia's national imagination.

The last Soviet leader and architect of glasnost Mikhail Gorbachev is
accompanied by his wife Raisa during a visit to Communist Prague in
1987First came the so-called 'revelations'. One after another, Lenin's
revolutionary comrades were rescued from historical obscurity. Even to
pronounce their names had once been a dangerous mistake, but now their
achievements were praised and the stories of their imprisonment, torture
and judicial murder were narrated in graphic, fully documented detail.
More shocking still, however, was the unravelling of official truths,
the questioning, over the next two or three years, of Stalin's economic
policies, Lenin's Civil War tactics and, finally, the justification for
the 1917 October Revolution itself. With that last step, the entire
Soviet Marxist experiment was discredited. It was no coincidence that
the Soviet regime's final reckoning should have arrived at just this
point but, however dramatic the news stories from Moscow, history
usually enjoyed an equal billing, not least because it was predictable.
The names of the long dead, of Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky and,
later, Tsar Nicholas II continued to merit front-page coverage
throughout Gorbachev's premiership. As Eastern Europe's people gathered
to defeat dictatorship, their cousins in Soviet Russia were preparing,
with a similar courage, to confront the possibility that their 70-year
march to Communism had been a sham.

Twenty years on, the region as a whole has changed, not just in terms of
politics but also physically. Russia's major cities look brighter,
brasher, their drab geography transformed by the glare of capitalism.
Moscow's once-bleak and still windswept heart is now a maze of dazzling
malls where shoppers jostle for Swiss watches, diamonds and designer
furs. It would be easy to conclude - though it would be a mistake to do
so -- that Moscow's middle class is too busy in the present to bother
about the past. The public hunger for historical facts, for revelations
and confessions, has certainly evaporated, while the number of
university students enrolling on history courses has dropped, a striking
change to set beside the queues for business studies, economics,
marketing and law.
 
Yet though the appeal of serious historical research has declined,
resurgent Russia's national identity relies almost entirely on a reading
of the past, a tale of progress and triumph whose shaping owes a lot to
direct government intervention. Liberal commentators in and outside
Russia have begun to talk of a return to the bad old ways.
 
The scramble to expose Soviet lies was never likely to last long. Since
it was part of the collective impatience with economic stagnation and
corrupt, failing government, the public craving for facts was satisfied,
or largely so, when the Soviet regime fell. At that point, too, there
were more urgent pressures in most people's lives, for the economy
collapsed soon after the end of Gorbachev's presidency and for much of
the early 1990s Russians contended with physical hunger, cold,
uncertainty and the very real danger of civil war. An underlying anxiety
of another kind was gnawing away, too, for the crumbling of the Soviet
Union and the accompanying loss of empire and ideological purpose struck
many Russians like a personal blow. The past became a difficult place:
confusing, even tinged with shame.
 
While popular history faded, however, more formal scholarship enjoyed a
brilliant, if impoverished, decade. Where Gorbachev had led, Boris
Yeltsin followed. Research and teaching flourished, and in the 1990s the
newly constituted Russian Federation introduced some of the world's most
generous laws on archival access. Older scholars, used to more
repressive rules, sometimes had trouble with the new freedom, but the
best of them, and many of their eager students, embarked on an ambitious
programme of research and writing, producing work that offered fresh
interpretations as well as newly-rediscovered facts. Many of these young
Turks are mature scholars now. It is largely thanks to them that so many
old paradigms, including the totalitarian model of Soviet politics, have
disappeared from the research agenda. New thinking, especially about
Stalinism and Soviet society, has become established in the
international academic mainstream.
 
All this was happening at a time of stress and recrimination, however.
The investigative historians were too easily seen as cannibals, the kind
who feast upon the people's suffering body. It did not help that the
most conspicuous audience for their material was not the embattled
Russian people but foreign scholars, many of whom were also enjoying the
archival bonanza. There were always domestic audiences for writing -
nationalistic writing, that is - on the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic
War (and smart new editions of documents, memoirs and popular war
histories continue to crowd the shelves of bookshops) but, at a time
when Russia faced a crisis of self-confidence, the appetite for books
that explored the dismal aspects of its past diminished. Paradoxically,
the 1990s were also the best years for Memorial, the research and
campaigning organisation dedicated to the public understanding, support
and commemoration of Communism's victims, but popular enthusiasm for
such initiatives was fickle. As Russians struggled to recover their
collective purpose, a nostalgia for the certainties of Stalin's time
resurfaced. For some, the steady flow of soul-searching and criticism
began to smell of treachery.
 
Memorial continues to make progress in its mission to explore and
commemorate the Stalinist past. Through its branches in many Russian
cities, it has collected a formidable archive of oral testimony,
personal letters and photographs. Its researchers have also documented
(and sometimes literally unearthed) important sites, including former
Gulag camps and mass burial grounds. Its commemorative mission has
produced scores of memorials, some simple stones, some monuments, many
associated with the specially-constructed Orthodox chapels where
dwindling bands of survivors and their families gather to remember and
pray. Memorial also continues to support living victims, providing the
material help that many have needed in the fast-changing and
inflationary world they now inhabit.
 
Russian Orthodox priests carry icons before an image of Peter the Great
during the tricentenary celebrations of St Petersburg the westward
facing city he foundedThe scale of Memorial's activity, however, fades
to a glimmer when compared with the resources and public effort devoted
to the memory of Stalin's war. There was always a surreal tension
between the victims of repression and the veterans of war (as if both
were not, in different ways, equally subject to the brutality of
Stalinist politics), but for some years now, and certainly since the
60th anniversary of Soviet victory in May 2005, the war has occupied the
limelight. This is no accident; the Patriotic War serves as Russia's
national shibboleth, the proof of its collective strength and virtue in
the modern age. In the ten years since Vladimir Putin came to power,
commemoration has grown ever more elaborate. First there were the
coloured flags that people fixed to cars (these seemed to materialise in
response to America's post-9/11 sea of stars and stripes), then came the
television coverage, the public ceremonial, the solemn mood. The 50th
anniversary of the Soviet victory, in 1995, passed with little public
show. By 2005, a clutch of new 'traditions' had appeared and at the
centre of them all, on every television screen, loomed the face of Putin
himself. A state that had made a poor job of its only war (in Chechnya),
and whose leader had never tramped through battlefield mud, borrowed its
martial glory by inventing a new kind of past.

Memorial, meanwhile, was reporting increasing harassment. The St
Petersburg branch was raided in December 2008 and electronic data from
its archive seized. Although the raid was later condemned, it seemed as
if that taint of treachery had stuck. Part of the explanation for this,
and also for the bleak spectacle of Stalin's unofficial rehabilitation,
lies with the current government, with its desire to build a statist,
patriotic politics, a new authoritarianism. The fact that many
government officials, including Putin himself, began their careers in
the Soviet security force, the KGB, is also relevant, for Memorial is
the nemesis of every secret police force since the days of Lenin's
Cheka, run by the aristocratic Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinskii. Underlying
Memorial's unpopularity, however, and feeding the current enthusiasm for
strong, centrist, managerial rule, is a kind of amnesia, a false memory
of Stalinism. The key here was Russia's failure to deal decisively with
the criminal aspects of its Communist decades when there was still a
chance. As The Economist's Arkady Ostrovsky put it in 2008, the
publications of the glasnost years seem to have been swallowed without
being digested.

The country's rapid collapse in the 1990s was part of the problem.
Another was the accompanying failure of collective nerve. Yeltsin put
the Communist Party as an institution on trial, but criminal charges
were never brought against the many living interrogators, torturers,
embezzlers, bullies and rapists. Russia, unlike South Africa, had no
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The moment when such a thing might
have happened - some time in 1992 or 1993 - coincided with a time of
deep uncertainty and many argued that self-flagellation was a poor
method of crisis management. The deeper truth, however, was that people
feared to look so piercingly at themselves. Almost every family had its
secret. As a result, the real crooks, many of whom remained in their
influential administrative roles, never faced justice. More seriously
still, the case against Stalinist methods, Communism's legacy and even
against Stalin personally, remained moot. Such an omission was bound to
influence understandings of history and it left the door open for
today's revival of popular chauvinism. When Putin reintroduced the
Stalinist national anthem, with all its associations, in 2000, a
majority of Russian citizens supported him.

That interaction between Russia's people and its increasingly
manipulative government is the key to understanding how history has
changed in the past decade. It is the Kremlin's view that Russia needs a
coherent story and that the tale should not only encourage romantic
patriotism but that it should, in the process, justify the kind of
centralised government that Putin and his aides desire. In return, a
significant portion of Russia's people seem drawn to escapism and epic;
swashbuckling, after all, is much more fun than repentance. At first,
the war took the lion's share of the nation's commemorative energy but,
in a major break with the Soviet era, Russia no longer concentrates its
focus entirely on the years since 1917. The fall of Communism led to a
major reconsideration of the alternative and hagiographic accounts of
Nicholas II's reign soon followed. In 1998 the bones of the last tsar
were reburied in the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul in St Petersburg.
The act lent much-needed splendour to Yeltsin's ailing presidency, but
it also seemed to meet a public need. Russians had missed the sense of
mission that Soviet power gave. Now they could dream of empire and of
greatness once again.
 
There is a problem with imperial Russia, however, and it turns out to be
that era's European mode. A decade ago, aspiring Russians wished for
nothing more than to be part of the wider European (and American)
prosperity, to send their children to English public schools such as
Eton or Millfield. The mood (it seemed to call for acres of gold leaf)
chimed perfectly with the popular nostalgia for late tsarist elegance.
But that hankering for Europe - in cultural terms as much as in
diplomatic and trade relations - brought disappointment. Russia's more
assertive international stance since 2004 has encouraged a militant
Slavophilism at home and the chunk of history that fosters that is the
pre-Petrine age, a time when Russians were still distinctive, still
bearded, robed, remote from casual European eyes. On a recent visit to
the Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition of Russian court costume, The
Magnificence of the Tsars, I heard a Russian friend lamenting that the
costumes were 'all European, not Russian at all'. She meant, of course,
that there was nothing Muscovite on show. The uniforms and robes all
dated, at the earliest, from the 18th century. Ironically, the outfit
she preferred was Nicholas II's fancy dress for the so-called 'Muscovite
ball' of 1903, an occasion when the entire court, giving way to a
nostalgia not unlike today's, donned versions of the suffocating robes
(but not, presumably, in the women's case, the veils) that nobles used
to wear in the age of the first Romanov tsars.

Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra in pre-Petrine dress for the
Muscovite Ball of 1902That same nostalgia plays out in Russian cinemas.
Several films released on the eve of the 2008 presidential elections
recreated Russia's past for new audiences. The $12 million epic 1612,
released in 2007, showed how an invasion from Poland was heroically
repulsed by manly Russian patriots. As history, the story was impossibly
flawed - in fact, the Kremlin was in the hands of an invited Polish army
at this point and Russia was tearing itself apart in civil war - but the
film, with its simple messages of Russian glory and Polish evil, proved
popular. It also underscored another, rather different piece of Putinite
rebranding. With the fall of Communism, the national holiday on November
7th, which celebrated the Bolshevik Revolution, had become an
embarrassment, too popular to abandon but too discredited to enjoy.
Since 2005, however, the holiday has been shifted back to November 4th
and repackaged as 'Russian Unity Day', a celebration of the '1612'
version of Moscow's liberation from the Poles, also, coincidentally, an
opportunity for ultra-nationalist demonstrations. On television,
meanwhile, another pre-election hit, a film about Byzantium, was praised
for describing a state with which Russians could identify, the epitome
of benevolent, all-powerful and religious authoritarianism. No irony was
intended and the film was presented by Vladimir Putin's own religious
confessor.

School textbooks, which also enjoy close official scrutiny, are now
designed to reinforce this assertive mood. The next generation, it
seems, will not be obliged to wallow in Memorial's brand of collective
guilt. In 2008, schoolchildren studying the period since 1945 were
introduced to a textbook that glossed over Stalin's crimes, explaining
them as a necessary stage in Soviet Russia's economic growth. While
Russian patriotism was celebrated, other kinds of nationalism were
written out of the new tale, including that of Second World War-era
independence fighters in the Baltic and Ukraine.
 
Heroes and horseback chases are part of the new popular history, magical
unicorns (they feature prominently in 1612) and mythic spirituality is
another. What is missing, generally, is reputable historical research.
The easiest way to test the market is to visit a large bookshop, perhaps
the celebrated one on Moscow's Tverskaya Street. Here, 20 years ago, the
history section was a curious mix of dull but well-produced official
tomes and new but cheaply made research-based books, some little more
than pamphlets, featuring secrets from the state archives. The
publication quality of these 'new' histories gradually improved (the
prices went up, too) and by the early 1990s they had been joined by
translations of English-language classics such as Robert Conquest's The
Great Terror and Robert Tucker's multi-volume biography of Stalin.
Today, by contrast, the shelves bear little new research and precious
few translations. History occupies a very large space in the store and
the section is always packed with readers (and, sometimes, potential
buyers), but they are being offered very different fare. The books are
smarter, hardbacked and expensively illustrated, but the overwhelming
majority of them are reprints of 19th-century classics such as Nikolai
Karamzin's great patriotic history of Russia. As books, they are
beautiful, but as history they collectively affirm that Russia's destiny
is special and unique.
 
These are the kinds of change that liberals deplore and it is easy, when
tracing developments over two decades, to adopt a pessimistic tone. It
would be a mistake, however, to talk about a return to the past. Russia
is not simply regressing to its Soviet self, nor can it do. For one
thing, the intellectual energy of the 1980s has not entirely dissipated.
Indeed, a better-taught and more sophisticated generation of historians
continues to work, albeit under financial constraints, and a glance at
any Russian website will show the results. The agenda may have changed
(and this is not necessarily unhealthy), but there is plenty of new
work. The study of ethnic nationalism is a growing field, for instance,
as is research into late tsarism. Muscovite Russia, too, has benefited
from the wider interest and scholars are exploring neglected sources
with a new sensitivity, especially on matters of religious belief and
mentalities. Beyond the academic institutes, local initiatives, some
sponsored by Memorial, yield essays and research projects by students
and schoolchildren; their history is still alive. My own experience of
teaching Russian teenagers confirms this view. While some are bored by
20th-century history (starved of the truth, it can seem rather grey),
their curiosity about the past is as vigorous as ever.
 
Technology has brought more irreversible change. It seems amazing now,
but the debates of the 1980s were held without benefit of blogs or
mobile telephones. Since then, Russians have taken to the Internet with
enthusiasm and they use it with a bilingual skill that puts most
foreigners to shame. Even those who read only Russian can find numerous
sites for history, some delivering source material (including the texts
of classic books) and others presenting new research. Sources can also
be located using search engines designed for Cyrillic script. To be
sure, there are sites for every kind of taste, including homes for
Stalinists, monarchists and people who think that unicorns still canter
over Russian soil, but pluralism, within bounds, ought to be welcomed
after seven decades of state censorship. Cultural exchanges and debates
are not confined to the virtual world, either. Russians are among
Europe's most dedicated travellers. They do not live in ignorant
seclusion and what is true for tourists also holds good for scholarship.
In the 1960s, Harvard University's Richard Pipes held a major conference
on the Russian Revolution without inviting a single Soviet academic. To
do so now, with Russians among the foremost scholars in this field,
would be unthinkable and the debate is very much two-way.

The promoters of Russia's popular films and glibber textbooks might also
argue, in answer to the criticisms levelled here, that the taste for
costume drama, cinematic warfare and epic heroes is not a Russian
monopoly. International audiences certainly enjoyed another 2007
blockbuster, Sergei Bodrov's Mongol. The point is, however, that the
market is not the only driving force behind the more blatant historical
confections, let alone the new textbooks. History is deliberately being
used once again in a society whose sense of nationhood and entire
discourse about politics has long been more deeply historical than is
usually the case. As the US scholar James Billington once put it: 'The
highest good in Muscovy was not knowledge but memory.' In a society
where argument and democratic give and take have little purchase, the
authority of precedent, of control over the past (and, by implication,
over the direction of the future) plays a crucial part in conferring
political legitimacy.
 
Lenin and his successors knew this, of course, and history was one of
the academic disciplines that the Soviet government directed most
closely. Its publicists also staged festivals and built monuments to
promulgate their version of it, commemorating Communist martyrs even as
they tore down reminders of tsarist ones. The Soviet brand of history
was potent and persuasive; even its critics confess to nostalgia for the
red flags and the music. No intellectual reassessment and certainly no
post-Soviet election has evoked collective gaiety on such a scale. But,
even as Putin and Medvedev nurture a new sacerdotal nationalism, they
are playing to the same gallery and using similar tools.

The historical revolution of the late 1980s and 1990s was exhilarating
for me as a foreigner, but for many Russians it involved a traumatic
reassessment of their lives. As Russia entered the flawed process that
was called 'transition', there was little time to reflect and much
incentive to evade further consideration of the past. Even when
Communist power had gone and even as some Gulag camps were turning into
tourist destinations, the old Soviet mentality (suspicious but
assertive), Soviet language (simplistic and impoverished) and Soviet
expectations of the future (boundlessly ambitious) thrived within
people's minds. There was never a decisive turn away from these values
and nothing has emerged since that competes with them. Stalin's ghost
still walks, in other words, and, though it is easy to condemn the
Kremlin's new occupants for invoking it in their pursuit of power and
wealth, the strategy could work only because a large proportion of
Russia's people was ready to welcome the old villain home with open
arms.

Catherine Merridale is professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary
University in London