BPJ 03-2015 Handout Trudolyubov

The Use and Abuse of History

BERLIN POLICYJOURNAL

July/August 2015

Berlin Policy Journal – The new foreign aff airs App available at:

by maxim trudolyubov

The peculiar ways President Vladimir Putin’s regime understands Russia’s past are feeding the

current conflict with the West.

Berlin Policy Journal . July/August 2015

F igures from the past – from medieval Slavic princes to the 19th century czars to Lenin and Stalin – are a constant

presence in Russia’s daily news cycle. And even though many of those figures are literally set in stone, political interpretations of their legacies are in flux: just recently, Moscow’s municipal authorities agreed to hold a referendum proposed by the Communist party on restoring the statue of “Iron Felix” to its former site in front of the Federal Security Service (FSB) building in central Moscow. “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish-born Bolshevik, was the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police and precursor to the KGB and the modern-day FSB. In August 1991, after the failure of the Communist hard-liner coup, the Moscow City Council’s decision to get rid of the dreaded secret police chief’s statue enjoyed broad emotional support. (It was harder to agree on numerous bronze and granite Lenins; hundreds still stand on their pedestals throughout Russia.) Toppling the Dzerzhinsky statue was post-Soviet Russia’s first symbolic act; its restoration today would be no less symbolic.

There is cold-eyed political calculation behind the Dzerzhinsky referendum. This piece of “political technology”, as Russian campaign managers call their craft, is intended to divide the communists from other officially registered political parties, thus preventing a hypothetical center-left coalition from forming. That is how the Kremlin thinks. But images take on new meanings, and though Dzerzhinsky was once seen as a symbol of state-perpetrated crimes against humanity, these days many Russians – though obviously not all – see him as a symbol of a newly recreated, state-supported “order”. In 24 years, it is the first time that a suggestion to undo a part of the symbolic break with the Soviet past has gone as far as a referendum. But not only that: Dzerzhinksy’s statue has a serious contender. Moscow city officials are currently deciding where to put a colossal statue of Saint Vladimir, the prince who christianized early Kievan Rus’


in the late 10th century. The square in front of the FSB buildings is a potential “home” for Saint Vladimir. That of course, is a dilemma for city officials. They have to choose between a Saint and the founder of the Cheka, knowing full well that Putin is fond of both.

In today’s Russia, the past is not just debated and manipulated – it is weaponized. As the conflict with Ukraine was gaining momentum and clashes between police and protesters on the Maidan intensified, the state-controlled media began labeling Ukraine’s pro-Western activists banderovtsy (“banderovites”). Using the image of Stepan Bandera – who was seen as a nationalist hero in Western Ukraine and as a Nazi collaborator in the rest of the Soviet Union – was designed to deepen divisions between Ukraine’s West and East, as well as between the broader Ukrainian and Russian societies.

As part of the same political calculations, the new Ukrainian government became a “fascist junta” on Russian television. Of course, the far right was present in Ukrainian politics – although the Right Sector party won only 1.8 percent of the vote in the 2014 parliamentary election – and some volunteer battalions did display Nazi symbolism, to the dismay of Europeans sympathetic to Ukraine. But the subject has been blown out of all proportion by Russian media: “Right Sector” was the second most mentioned party during the first half of 2014. According to Russian media, a media-generated, NATO-supported, banderovite dictatorship was lurking at Russia’s threshold as early as March 2014. The land grab in Crimea and subsequent conflict in Southeastern Ukraine were framed as a new Great Patriotic War (as World War II is often called in Russia) against newly revived Nazi forces.

Reconstructing a Patriotic War This armchair war on fascism proved a resounding domestic


success. The World War II memories that have been the most important tool of social cohesion or decades in the otherwise atomized post-Soviet societies have been used to “electrify” the Russian society and divide it from its closest neighbor. The majority of the population accepted the new rules, and began to enjoy daily updates on the “just war”. Many started to identify with Russia, the major player, the world’s only dissident, forgetting that only two or three years ago they were protesting the Kremlin’s domestic policies. Dramatized international stories in which the good guys from Moscow fought the bad guys from Washington over pretty much everything, from the fate of Ukraine to world soccer, eclipsed domestic issues in news programs and talk shows. Forget about bleak economic prospects: being big internationally felt good. According to the Levada Center, an independent pollster, Vladimir Putin’s approval rating recently reached an unprecedented 89 percent.

Reconstructing an archetypal patriotic war in people’s minds and “weaponizing” history proved an amazingly effective policy for the Kremlin. It also proved deadly for those who lived it, leading to very real loss of life, freedom, and property throughout Ukraine. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, about 6,500 have died and 16,000 have been wounded in Ukraine since April 2014. More than 1.3 million people are internally displaced, making Ukraine home to the ninth-largest internally displaced population in the world. Some 890,000 have fled to neighboring countries. Southeastern Ukraine has become a full-blown humanitarian crisis.

What do Russians think about all this? They don’t even connect to it. My countrymen, historically friendly to Ukraine, became hostile: 59 percent of Russians describe their feelings towards Kiev as “bad” or “very bad” in May 2015. In early 2014, just before the annexation of Crimea, only 26 percent of


Russians felt that way about their neighbor. Hostility towards the West, especially the European Union and the United States, has grown markedly. According to Levada, in May 2015, 71 percent of polled Russians thought poorly of the EU, compared to just 30 percent at the beginning of 2014.

Improving on StalinIt would be unfair to say that the Kremlin simply uses history to manipulate the masses. Vladimir Putin, who likes to stress that history was his favorite subject in school, does seem to be fond of Russian past. He is more than happy to speak about the ways history should be taught in schools and to volunteer commentary on critical junctures in our nation’s past.

Putin clearly dislikes the inclination to mark entire periods in Russia’s past as tragic or criminal in Western approaches to history. Stalinism is a case in point: “[t]he Stalinist era is impossible to evaluate as a whole,” Putin said in a live broadcast in 2009, as reported by Izvestia. “It’s obvious that between 1924 and 1953 the country lead by Stalin experienced drastic change. It turned from an agrarian into an industrial power. Peasantry did not survive, one has to admit … but the industrialization did take place.”

Industrialization good, mass murder bad: this, apparently, is the lesson. “It’s time to stop taking note only of the bad things in our history and berating ourselves more than even our opponents would do,” he declared at the annual gathering of international Russia experts known as the Valdai Discussion Club in 2013. “We must be proud of our history.” This is clearly not a Russian version of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the painful process through which Germany has been trying to come to terms with the Nazi era and the Holocaust. This is something completely different.


Putin does recognize that most of his predecessors on the Russian throne made mistakes and committed crimes, and he is keen to understand and correct those wrongs. But what does he recognize as wrong? Putin sees Russian history from a very particular angle: from the vantage point of his working desk in the Kremlin. The crimes he worries about are crimes against the state, against continuity of power and regime security, not crimes against humanity. “The greatest criminals in our history were those weaklings who threw power away – Czar Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev – who allowed power to be picked up by the hysterics and the madmen,” Ben Judah reported Putin to have told his inner circle. According to that source, Judah reports, “the president vowed never to do the same.”1

To avoid becoming a new Nicholas II or Gorbachev is an attempt to avoid the mistakes of the past, or rather not to repeat the missteps of past leaders – a highly practical and pragmatic stance. It includes some measures that might seem marginal to Western eyes and an aversion to policies that proved dangerous for the powerful: Nicholas II banned the sale of high-proof beverages during the mobilization campaign in 1914, and then extended the measure for the entire war period. Gorbachev introduced policies limiting the production and sale of alcohol in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Both policies drained public coffers; vodka has always been an important source of government revenue, and one might infer that limiting its sale contributed to the demise of both the Russian and the Soviet empires. Although Putin despises excessive drinking himself, he will not repeat the mistake of initiating a broad campaign against the Russian drinking culture: at the height of the ruble

1 Ben Judah, “Behind the Scenes in Putin‘s Court: The Private Habits of a Lat-ter-Day Dictator,” Newsweek, August 1, 2014.


devaluation late last year, Putin made sure that vodka prices stayed reasonably low.2

One can see a further desire to learn from the mistakes of past Russian leaders in the way Putin handles opposition. “Correcting” Stalinist excesses, the regime is making every effort to keep the number of its victims to a minimum. At the same time, authorities are trying to avoid creating heroes: they punish undesirables not for their politics, but for trumped-up baser crimes such as theft and fraud. This is the case with Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption activist and rising politician who was charged and convicted of fraud. Navalny was spared prison, a “technique” aimed at preventing him from scoring additional political points; Navalny’s younger brother, however, was charged in the same case and sentenced to three and a half years.

Dealing with the intelligentsia is yet another field where today’s Kremlin tries to take some lessons from the past. The government’s control over the spread of facts and commentary is lax by czarist and Soviet standards. Artists, writers, film directors, and the chattering classes in general are free to read and say what they want – within broad but strictly defined limits. More importantly, intellectuals who are unhappy with the political or economic situation in Russia are allowed and almost encouraged to move abroad, thereby releasing tension from the system.

The Soviet war on religion was recognized as a mistake rather early during Russia’s transition. Both Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin treated the Russian Orthodox Church and a number of other chosen confessions kindly. But today’s Kremlin has taken the relationship with a patriotic Church to a level where the separation of church and state is disappearing.

2 “Putin orders vodka price cap as Russia’s economic crisis escalates,” REUTERS, December 24, 2014.


Nikita Khrushchev obviously made many mistakes from the Kremlin’s point of view. The annexation of Crimea – which Khrushchev transferred to Ukraine in 1954 – is not Putin’s only step to correct them. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union came into direct confrontation with the West during the Berlin and Cuban missiles crises; both instances risked open nuclear war, and in both cases the major powers had to retreat from previously held positions. Putin seems to have decided to avoid taking any stance from which he might later be forced to backtrack, as Khrushchev did during the Cuban standoff. By this logic Putin is unlikely to back down over Ukraine.

Under the Dome Putin’s ideal leader seems to be an improvement on Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and, of course, Stalin: a smarter, more pragmatic, and rational version. Once again, this is a view from the Kremlin’s vantage point: it is centered on Russia, with all other nations on the periphery.

This vision is deceptively simple and deeply confusing at the same time. Does it mean that the Stalinist system was generally okay, and just needed some tidying up and better housekeeping? Does this vision recognize that the world has changed over the past century? What part of Stalin’s legacy was fine and what wasn’t? Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said that Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong; Putin does not provide an exact ratio. “Industrialization good, mass murder bad” is too broad, and, if one remembers the actual history, the former was achieved with a great deal of the latter.

Still, seen in that light, some of Putin’s views become more understandable, albeit not necessarily more acceptable. Putin’s attempt to provide the German Chancellor Angela Merkel with an alternative view of the 1939’s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany may have sounded


embarrassing, but it was typical Putin. He was disarmingly frank and revealing, when he called the pact an understandable attempt at avoiding the war following celebrations of the allied victory in World War II. Divvying up Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, and Poland into spheres of influence was, in his view, an acceptable part of Stalin’s legacy – that is what Putin essentially told anyone willing to listen.

But there was, I believe, another aspect to that message: Germany should not be too uptight about certain aspects of its past. Putin’s philosophy of history suggests that he cannot accept that Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung was taken up voluntarily – it must have been imposed by the Americans. It is highly likely that Putin thinks that he is being friendly and generous when he suggests that not all Nazi policies were completely wrong. Some were, some were not – just like with Stalin: take industrialization, add useful geopolitics, and subtract mass murder.

The Kremlin has made marked progress towards its goal of building a society under a “dome”, a territory whose historical narrative is sealed off from those of neighbors – a society where the public discussion is centered only on Russia and its heroic role in the world. Fundamentally, this is because Soviet history has been as traumatic to many Russians as it has been to the Estonians and Poles and Czechs. But Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic could place most of the blame with Russia, separating themselves from the past by the sheer act of leaving the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. Russia, the former center of the empire and a country where the elites grew largely out of the political and security apparatus of the Soviet Union, couldn’t walk out on itself. Russian society still keeps its past tragedies under its pillow. Half of the time it is mythologizing its own heroic past; half of the time it uses unresolved memories as a


weapon against its neighbors, even the very neighbors striving to dissociate themselves from Russia.

“When a mass consciousness is dealing with a historical tragedy it needs to assign the roles of the Good and the Evil, and then it needs to identify with one of those forces,” said Arseny Roginsky, chair of the International Memorial, an NGO devoted to historical memory and human rights in Russia. “It’s always easier to identify with the Good, seeing yourself as an innocent victim or, even better, as a heroic fighter against Evil. One can even identify with the Evil, as the Germans did, in order to dissociate oneself from it saying ‘yes, it was us but we are no longer like this and we will never be’.”

Russian society, never known for exceptional openness to the outside world, cocooned even tighter since 2014. Russia has become a confused place, overwhelmed by its past. And yet, Russian society is still looking for a clear way to deal with its past. That is, why it prefers the passive-aggressive role of a couch potato watching TV, identifying with the good guys beating the bad guys. •

BPJ 03-2015 Handout Trudolyubov

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