BERLIN POLICY

JOURNAL
July/August 2015

The Use and Abuse

of History
by maxim trudolyubov

The peculiar ways President Vladimir Putins

regime understands Russias past are feeding the
current conflict with the West.

Berlin Policy Journal The new foreign aairs App available at:

igures from the past from medieval Slavic princes to the

19th century czars to Lenin and Stalin are a constant

presence in Russias 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, Moscows 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 Councils decision to get rid of the dreaded secret
police chiefs 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 Russias 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: Dzerzhinksys 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

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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 todays 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 Ukraines 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 Ukraines 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 Russias 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

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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 worlds only dissident,
forgetting that only two or three years ago they were protesting
the Kremlins 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 Putins
approval rating recently reached an unprecedented 89percent.
Reconstructing an archetypal patriotic war in peoples
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 dont 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

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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 Stalin
It 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 nations past.
Putin clearly dislikes the inclination to mark entire periods
in Russias 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. Its 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. Its 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 Vergangenheitsbewltigung, 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.

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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 Putins Court: The Private Habits of a Latter-Day Dictator, Newsweek, August 1, 2014.

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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 trumpedup 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; Navalnys 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
todays Kremlin tries to take some lessons from the past. The
governments 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 Russias transition. Both Gorbachev and Boris
Yeltsin treated the Russian Orthodox Church and a number of
other chosen confessions kindly. But todays 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 Russias economic crisis escalates, REUTERS,
December 24, 2014.

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Nikita Khrushchev obviously made many mistakes from the

Kremlins point of view. The annexation of Crimea which
Khrushchev transferred to Ukraine in 1954 is not Putins
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

Putins 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 Kremlins 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 Stalins legacy was fine and what
wasnt? 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 Putins views become more
understandable, albeit not necessarily more acceptable. Putins
attempt to provide the German Chancellor Angela Merkel with
an alternative view of the 1939s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
between theSoviet Union andNazi Germany may have sounded

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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 ofthe allied
victory inWorld War II. Divvying up Finland, Estonia, Lithuania,
Latvia, Romania, and Poland into spheres of influence was,
in his view, an acceptable part of Stalins 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. Putins philosophy of history suggests that he cannot
accept that Germanys Vergangenheitsbewltigung 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, couldnt
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

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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. Its 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.

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