Not that long ago it was reported that the leadership of the Communist Party in St. Petersburg intended to sue the Rossiya television channel, as well as the producers of the colorized version of Seventeen Moments of Spring. According to Sergey Milinkovich, chairman of the organization’s central committee, “the lawsuit will point out the rights of TV viewers whose rights will have been violated by having to watch a corrupted version of the original black and white.”
It is well known that the Communists of St. Petersburg are famous for their extravagant initiatives. At one time, they suggested bestowing the title of Hero of Russia on Lenin and canonizing Stalin. As for their most recent step, it would be possible to ignore if it weren’t for two “buts.” First, this is a reason for legal proceedings. The creators of the colorized version did not simply impinge upon a Russian classic, but on the official, once canonical (and, by the way, black and white) history of the Great Patriotic War. Second, in their lawsuit, the Communists in St. Petersburg demonstrated once again that history in our country is first of all a substitute for politics, or, as we can take from Marx, “a continuation of politics by other means.”
One can certainly argue that this is how it has always been everywhere. History as a science does not exist; there is only “a set of myths and dogmas” to be used by the existing regime. This view is not without reason. We may remember, for example, how copies were broken at one time because of the famous “Normanist theory,” as well as about how a purely academic debate often turned into a debate about “Great Russian national pride.” In fact, it would be more correct to speak of the coexistence of a popular (or “pop”) history for the masses and serious academic research. This is the case in most Western countries. The popular French history periodicals, for example, still write about Napoleon’s victory at Borodino. (By the way, soccer fans’ slang in France contains the word “Berezin,” which means the defeat of one’s favorite team). Serious historical research on this issue, however, may be much less unambiguous.
In short, history has been and remains a “politicized” discipline regardless of the country, state of affairs in the country, the country’s economic order or the social structure. But turning history into “Ersatz politics” is generally a phenomenon for “times of change.”
In the Soviet Union the substitution of politics with history clearly manifested itself in the years of Perestroika. Indeed, things could not have turned out differently. The need for change was obvious to everyone. At the same time, however, there was no such thing as public life or politics. Therefore, discussions about the future, about the nature of change and about the methods of its realization took on the character of disputes concerning the past: about the choice over the country’s development in the twenties and thirties, the mistakes that had been allowed, the alternatives that had existed, the Khruschev Thaw, etc. In the ensuing years a lot of attention was paid to discussions (quite naturally) of the Second World War, which, according to the “progressive” historians and journalists of the time, was treated with extreme bias and tendentiousness in the official historiography. This is partly correct, by the way, but another issue is whether these historians and journalists could have rid themselves of their own biases.
The abolition of censorship and the fall of the Iron Curtain gave a powerful impulse to historical discussion that began during Perestroika, including discussions about the war. It is no coincidence that for the first time there was talk about the Soviet Union’s “pyrrhic victory” in the Second World War. The emergence of these discussions at precisely this time is quite understandable. The broad masses of Soviet citizens, not just members of the bureaucratic elite and other “privileged” persons, were eventually were able to travel freely to the West and to see the differences in quality of life between “them” (including those in West Germany) and “us.” The question – “What exactly did the war bring to the winners and the losers?” – seemed quite normal to a lot of people, not to just historians and journalists. It is interesting to note that such talk is alive and well today during the crisis, although it is limited mostly to the internet and the blogosphere in particular.
At the same time, the historical literature of that time was marked by an exaggeration of the importance of Western aid to the Soviet Union (Lend-Lease) and the general role of the United States and Britain during the Second World War. This can also be explained by the state of mind or, more precisely, the fermentation of minds that existed. It is well known that there were very heated debates about how to “arrange Russia.” Other models that were as attractive as the Western socioeconomic model simply did not exist. An extreme manifestation of such “Westernism” were several calls by “ultraliberal” journalists to not observe the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War but instead to mark the end of the Second World War. Indeed, in terms of how the other powers saw things, the victory of the Soviet Union was nothing more than a victory of “one totalitarian regime over another.” Moreover, the Great Patriotic War was treated as a “battle between two tyrannies,” with the Soviet Union not the victim of aggression but an aggressor just like Germany. Viktor Suvorov, whose well-known works were published in the early nineties, fits well into this camp.
Indeed, Icebreaker and the subsequent opuses by the English writer are far from the only thing that “sailed” to us from abroad after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In the early nineties, many йmigrй organizations began operating in our country. None of them was able to occupy a firm position in Russia’s political space, which meant that most of their activities were limited to the historical and journalistic “arena.” As a result, a number of foreign doctrines appeared and took root on Russian soil, including the well-known concept of the “third force,” which includes Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Movement and which was supposedly equally hostile to both Hitler and Stalin. One of the important reasons for the rehabilitation of General Vlasov and his allies was the failure of йmigrй organizations and ideologically similar domestic political groups, especially monarchists and other “national patriots,” to bring forth attractive and important political leaders.
Similarly, the very concept of the “third force” in its different variations has proven popular because of the inability of these organizations’ leaders to develop a new ideology adequate for the times. In other words, both йmigrйs and homegrown “national patriots” have tried to create their own image of the future while looking to the past. With regard to representatives of foreign countries the explanation is easy: for many of them the ideal model of a future Russia is the country that they were forced to either flee or fight. But for our patriots (and some of our liberals) similar appeals to the past have showed and continue to show evidence of their political inadequacy.
It is clear that much of what we have discussed above applies not only to Russia, but also, with local variations, to the former republics of the Soviet Union. Former Nazi collaborators there declared themselves to be fighters against Soviet and communist oppression, occupation, etc. Cooperation with the Germans itself is presented as a struggle for independence. All of this is well known, however, and repeating it makes no sense.
Finally, one cannot help but mention another aspect of the revisionism surrounding the Second World War and the creation of heroes out of former antiheroes. The many attempts to rewrite history are nothing but a desire to rid it of notorious blind spots. Attempts were made to rehabilitate Vlasov, as well as his associates Krasnov, Shkuro and their ilk – not so much as military and political figures but as historical figures, the subjects of stories that need to take their “legitimate” places. The same applies to prisoners of war, those who suffered the blockade, defectors, and all others who had previously been “erased from memory.” Another point is that the results of such attempts were often due to the fact that the initial tasks were not properly set and were often “overlapping,” which, incidentally, often characterized the historical (and not only) writing of the time. On its own, the need to eliminate the blind spots from our national history is, of course, doubted by no one.
Right now there is no need to analyze the academic viability of various revisionist concepts for reasons including the fact that it has already been done by professional historians who study the Great Patriotic War. There is no need to monitor all the stages in the development of revisionism as such. Most often it is simply a case of new arrangements being made for “old songs,” many of which were written by Goebbels’ propagandists. Meanwhile, after the “boom” in the early nineties, there followed a natural decline of interest in Russian history, which has only begun to reverse in recent years. Many of today’s pressing problems, such as those related to social policy, are often viewed in an historical context. A powerful impetus to discussion about our recent past has been the well-known initiative put forth by Sergey Shoigu, which calls for the adoption of a law that criminalizes denial of the Soviet Union’s victory in the Great Patriotic War. Not only is the need for such a law discussed but what exactly will be protected is also discussed, not to mention whether such protection is justified in terms of historical accuracy and from a moral point of view.
Certainly we can and should protect our history – not only from the revisionists of all stripes, many of whom are unprincipled as academics, but also from politicians, both domestic and foreign, who, for the sake of short-term tactical goals, or simply out of self-promotion, interpret recent history in a manner favorable to themselves. The leading role in this case should not belong to the state apparatus, which has, by definition, a limited arsenal of tools available, primarily in the form of prohibitions and restrictions. Rather, it should belong to all our society, which has yet to develop an immunity to either the “creative” revisionists, many of whom, we should repeat, have little worth as historians, or to the various interpretations of past propaganda. And then the politicians will have lost the desire to use our history for the purposes of “Ersatz politics.”
