Russia is rewriting the history

I was also surprised when he denied the occurrence of the atrocities that are documented historically in the era of Joseph Stalin in particular, such as the genocide, the “forced-labor camps”, the mass displacement, and the mock trials. 

The Russian official said that most Russians now believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a big mistake, and that they disdain Mikhail Gorbachev because he was responsible for it. 

I realized later that rewriting the history of Russia is part of a new policy announced by President Putin this year, and it is expected that the new history will be ready and included in the education textbooks starting from the year 2014. The government has asked the “Historical Society” on February 2013 to review the history books that are taught in schools.
The Society is headed by “Sergei Naryshkin”, Speaker of the House, one of the leaders of the “United Russia” Ruling Party, and he is a strong ally of Putin. 

Rewriting the history is an art probably invented by the Soviets; re-writing the history of the previous period was a habit during different periods of the Soviet rule aimed at ending the influence of their leaders. Stalin in particular was specialist in this, and he used it as a weapon in the face of his opponents and as a mean to direct people the way he wants. He was known for his keenness to omit any positive signal that characterize his opponents in the history books, and to remove their images them from the official pictures, after getting rid of them on the ground. 

Perhaps you saw a comic image of those means in George Orwell’s two famous books “Animal Farm” and “1984”; those means continued in various forms until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many thought that this period has gone and would never return. However, it now seems to be returning back, starting from the attempt to depict that period in a new positive way contrary to the perception that was prevailing in the reigns of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, reaching to reviving the National Soviet Peace by President Yeltsin, after canceling it for a period of time, holding major military parades again, and awarding “medals for combat action” that used to be given during the Soviets yet again. 

Some elderly people were happy because Putin took those proceedings, and he has said once that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “The greatest geopolitical catastrophe that happened in the twentieth century”, and this belief was repeated by the Russian official as well. 

However, what worries more is reviving the Soviet tradition represented in the “cult of personality”, and the violent suppression of any difference of opinion. The representatives of nationalist minorities in the south of Russia, such as Chechnya, refer to the similarities between the style that is adopted by Russia now and Stalin’s methods in dealing with the minorities, where murder, the collective displacement, the total destruction of cities and villages were committed. 

It seems that rewriting the history or reviewing it is returning back as well. The policy that was adopted on February requires preparing the history books that “reconcile the different views about the past of Russia”, and requires from the historians to set “benchmarks” for those books that provide a “standard formula to look at the difficult periods in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union”. 

The Russian Historical Society prepared those standards and submitted them to the president for approval. If they were approved, they will be the basis for the history education textbooks used in all parts of Russia. 

Yet, a number of independent historians, inside Russia and abroad, are criticizing the new standards as being developed by historians that are loyal to the president, and as being similar in some ways to the standards of the Soviet Union, for they might lead to deleting or amending any details or events that will not be approved by the current government, and they do not include any positive details related to the opponents. 

For example, “Vladimir Razakov”, a Russian historian and a former member of parliament, was quoted as saying: “The political instructions to justify what the ruling power does were clear and they showed that everything done by it is right”. 

Others fear that the project might aim at reviving the old idea that says that “Russia needs strong rulers that govern solely, perhaps to justify the continuation of Putin’s rule. However, others point to the fact that Putin came to power in 2000, and remained until now, as a president and a prime minister, and has been elected for a third term on May 2012 that ends in 2018, and he shows no intention to retire after that. 

The Russian government refuses those charges, and denied any attempt to rewrite history according to political agendas. A spokesman for Kremlin said that Russia “Stands constantly against any attempts to falsify history”. 

You might notice that the last phrase has many meanings, for it could be seen as a reference to the attempts of the independent historians, who try to document the history of Soviet Russia, and the period before and after that, and to publish the facts that the Russian citizens began to get familiar with for the first time in the recent period. 

Yet, what raises the question is the fact that the Historical Society has identified in its report twenty “difficult subjects” to be submitted to President Putin for decision, including discussing the period of Stalin’s rule and the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, and topics related to the period of Putin’s rule. The Executive Secretary of the Society, “Andrei Petrov” said: “We have identified the difficult topics that must be addressed by mentioning the different points of views on them, otherwise we would be accused of lying to our children”, but would Kremlin accept this? 

As we remember, Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia after the Soviet Union, tried to reveal some facts about that period, but the average citizen did not begin to know the full truth but only recently. The reactions were different between those who deny the facts, and those who recognized them and are trying to live with the mistakes, just as being proud of the accomplishments that have been achieved during the Soviet Union. 

Perhaps the goal of the new attempt to rewrite history is to end the period of searching for the truth regarding what happened during the Soviet rule, what happened before that during the Russian Empire, and what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and to assign a date that includes only the positive events. In addition to its political objectives that will nearly improve the image of President Putin, the extreme nationalists will also feel like rewriting history, those who are still living the past and feel sorry for it to justify their narrow view of the future.