Abstract
In an article published in the journal European History Quarterly in 1992, marking the 75th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the eminent Russian historian, Vladimir Buldakov, appraising the uncertain, fluctuating state of historiography in the former Soviet Union, engagingly wrote: ‘The [current] writing of Russian history, long accustomed to the role of handmaiden of the state, now appears as a prostitute walking the streets of political pluralism’. According to the authors of the two books here under review, Clio, the Muse of History, has been forced to abandon her brief period of enjoyable promiscuity and revert to her accustomed position of subservience to the powerful, single organ of a centralized, authoritarian government.
In order properly to understand Pearce and Weiss-Wendt’s analyses of the manipulation of Russia’s past under the regime of Vladimir Putin, it is useful to remind readers of the various ways in which – for want of a better example – the 1917 revolutions in Russia have been treated by differing schools of thought. In 1990, a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the British historian, Edward Acton, in a book entitled Rethinking the Russian Revolution, identified a number of different interpretations of Russian history through the prism of the Revolution, all of which were influenced, if not dominated, by strictly political motives to the benefit or detriment of the ruling power in Russia, viz. – Marxist-Leninist (read, Stalinist); Western liberal (very much influenced by virulently right-wing, anti-Soviet Russian émigré writers); Western ‘revisionist’ (reinterpreting the Revolution ‘from below’); and what Acton describes as ‘libertarian’, which sees the Revolution not as a result of political machinations, but as a genuinely spontaneous, elemental, popular expression of the people’s will. After the political demise of the USSR, the short period of intellectual freedom and relaxation of the stranglehold of ideological conformity described by Buldakov, Putin’s government gradually began to reassert its authority over the writing and teaching of history in the interests once more of the consolidation and glorification of Russian state power. How this process developed is the subject of our two authors’ recent works, to which we now turn.
To take Weiss-Wendt’s volume first. As Research Professor at the Norwegian Centre for Holocaust and Minority Studies and author of books on the phenomena of genocide and holocaust denial, he is well qualified to investigate the reconstruction of history in Putin’s Russia. He prefers to use the single word ‘historymaking’, rather than ‘history writing’ in this context, as the process of recreating Russia’s past involves not just the literary efforts of professional historians, but such things as re-arranging national holidays commemorating this or that historical event, ignoring others, erecting or demolishing memorial statues and monuments, exalting or vilifying the role of various historical figures, the setting up of official institutions to police (the word is deliberately chosen) the observation of the correct historical line. Just one particular example illustrates the point: until recently, the most important date in the national calendar – along with May Day – was the anniversary of ‘The Great October Proletarian Socialist Revolution’. The latter has now been almost entirely marginalized, celebrated by only a few die-hard Old Communists, and replaced by ‘Victory Day’ on the May 9, marking with extravagant military ceremony the USSR’s (i.e. Russia’s) triumphant role in the ‘Second Great Patriotic War’, 1941–45 (the First was that against Napoleon). Given the previously almost sacrosanct nature of ‘Great October’, it is rather as if the Vatican abandoned the celebration of Easter, replacing it with a holiday celebrating the mediaeval Crusades (though of course the fable of the Resurrection is pure myth, rather than verifiable historical fact). Similarly, renowned instances of mass rebellion or insurrection against the state in Russia’s Imperial past – e.g. Pugachev’s huge peasant and Cossack revolt during the reign of Catherine the Great, the Decembrist uprising of 1825, even the Bolsheviks – were also downplayed. Instead, what is now emphasized is the continuing traditional link of the patriotic Russian people – the narod – to the leadership of the great Russian state, whether it be ancient Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or post-Soviet Russia.
The nineteenth-century imperial ideology of ‘Official Nationalism’, introduced during the reign of the tyrant Tsar Nicolas I and comprising the three dogmata of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationalism’, have seemingly been replaced by the Putinesque formula of ‘Nationalism, Patriotism and Statism’. To this can be added ‘Militarism’ and the conservative loyalism of the Orthodox Church, ever an obsequious toady, with a brief hiatus under Stalin, of the state authorities.
Ironically, the concept of the ‘falsification of history’ had its origins in Russian attacks on writers, journalists, media outlets and other agencies who were promulgating Russophobia in the West by disseminating reinterpretations of history deliberately aimed at denigrating Russia’s glorious past, including – horror horrorum – the questioning of Russia’s heroic role in the Second World War and the defeat of Nazi Germany. In order to counteract this tendency, Putin began to use government agencies to enforce their own remaking of Russian history by revising academic curricula, publishing approved (censored?) new textbooks, and even attempting to criminalize activities or even opinions which were deemed to deviate from the official, ‘patriotic’ version. Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin banned the use of the word ‘war’ with reference to his ‘special military operation’ there. Despite all the evidence of shelling, bombing, missile launches, thousands of military and civilian deaths, devastation of land and buildings and the other concomitants of modern warfare, the use of the term ‘war’ is not only taboo in this context, but also a criminal offence punishable by up to thirteen years imprisonment. As a result, historical disagreement and the use of objective nomenclature have become tantamount to high treason. One is here reminded of Stalin’s banning of the word ‘famine’ to describe the almost genocidal starving to death of around four million Ukrainian peasants during the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s.
Another weapon increasingly deployed is the controlled closing or releasing of historical archives – the very stuff of true historical research – based on the subject matter of the documents requested and/or the identity of the would-be researcher, the successful applicants often being military- or FSB-related personnel, thereby ensuring the political reliability of the ‘historymakers’. Penalties were imposed for archival misuse, either on the researcher or the archivist who approved access. Ultimately: ‘In April 2016 Putin announced that the Federal Archival Agency would henceforth be directly responsible to the president’ (p. 25). Putin was now virtually ‘Archive Tsar’.
In his new role, he was avidly assisted by sycophantic acolytes and hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, such as Olga Vasilieva, Minister of Education (2016-20) and author of two doctoral dissertations on the role of the Church during ‘The Great Patriotic War’. In these she demonstrated the close relationship between Church and state in the defeat of Nazi Germany. She is also an associate of Bishop Tikhon of Pskov, one of Putin’s close advisers, who was responsible for aiding and abetting Vasilieva in widely extending religious education in schools, believing, as she does, that ‘the study of theology [. . . ] a scientific discipline [. . . ] strengthens moral foundations’ (p. 65). Bishop Tikhon (who is tipped as the next Patriarch and regards the reactionary Alexander III as his favourite Russian Tsar!), is also the driving force behind the organization and construction of a nation-wide network of patriotic exhibitions and theme parks collectively called ‘Russia. My History’. A travesty of Russia’s genuine past, these lavish installations seek – with jaw-dropping popular success – to inculcate a cult of the glories of the country’s magnificent evolution – military, territorial, political, cultural, and religious – perniciously marginalizing or ignoring any negative features and instilling a frenzy of popular patriotic fervour in unquestioning exaltation of the collaborative achievements of the Russian people, the Russian Church, and the Russian state. One original supporter, now critic, of this grotesque enterprise, Pavel Kuzenkov, described it as ‘a striking example of history used in lieu of political propaganda’ (p. 66). Or, as the author succinctly puts it, under the regime of Vladimir Putin: ‘History is politics in Russia’ (p. 255).
In his book, based on his 2018 doctoral thesis, James Pearce demonstrates how this situation is utilized as the basis of the teaching of history throughout the Russian education system from kindergarten to high school. It is worth remembering that everyone in Russia under the age of 22 has grown up in the Putin era, and therefore have no knowledge of the history of their own country other than that taught to them by the peddlers of the ‘Authorized Version’. This version may not exactly be written down in stone, but it is certainly etched indelibly into their own consciousness. There is simply no textbook or forum from which it is possible to mount a critical challenge to the official orthodoxy – which would in any case be likely to be illegal.
Unfortunately, or unavoidably, there is – given the books’ respective titles – a good deal of subject matter and evidential overlap. The same emphases, arguments and examples are present in both volumes, and both come to inevitably similar conclusions. They are: that under Putin, reasserting control over Russia’s past is seen as an essential weapon in the struggle to create a patriotic-minded, right-thinking, quintessentially Russophile, nationalistic and culturally homogeneous society. One of the distinguishing features of Pearce’s book is his analysis – based on personal interviews and questionnaires – of the way in which both qualified, experienced teachers and young trainee teachers of history view their role, their tasks, and their objectives in tutoring a new generation of Russian citizens who will, after all, shape their country’s future. These people will, in the very nature of things, outlive Putin and Putinism, and who can foresee what new contours may then emerge on the landscape of Russian historiography or ‘historymaking’? As the Leningrad (now St Petersburg!) writer, Tatyana Tolstaya, has put it: ‘Russia is a country whose past is impossible to predict’.