Rewriting history: why is it so important for the Kremlin?

A revanchist agenda, driven by the desire to rectify perceived historical wrongs, lies at the heart of Russia’s foreign policy and provides the rationale for its war in Ukraine. But what Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have forgotten is that rewriting history to serve the interests of those in power tends to invite dissent and often backfires.

Russia’s new history textbooks for tenth and eleventh graders are prime examples. Authored by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky and Anatoly Torkunov, rector of the once-renowned Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the textbooks reflect Russia’s «new approach» to history, emphasizing the need to reclaim the country’s lost «historical territories« and praising the «special military operation» in Ukraine.

But Russia’s turn toward revanchism predates February 2022. State propaganda has long portrayed Russia not as a colonial power but rather as a «unique civilization« that must maintain its singular essence and whose demise could trigger global chaos.

To be sure, Russian culture has frequently indulged in grandiose imaginings, and the collapse of the Soviet Union has intensified Russians’ longing for less chaotic, more dignified narratives, giving rise to a cottage industry of alternate histories. Under Putin, however, these embellished narratives have taken center stage.

Mathematician and conspiracy theorist Anatoly Fomenko’s so-called «new chronology,» for example, claims that major events that occurred during the ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian empires actually occurred during the Middle Ages and revolved around Russia. Fomenko’s claims about a vast conspiracy to falsify global history fill his books, which were prominently displayed in Russian bookstores during the early 2000s.

As Putin and his security-service allies (siloviki) consolidated power, fantastical narratives of imperial grandeur, replete with time-traveling historical figures restoring Russia’s honor, burst into the mainstream. These tales, many of which originated during the tumultuous 1990s, often depict democracy as a Western plot designed to destabilize Russia. Authors like German Romanov have cast eighteenth-century czar Peter III – famously overthrown by his wife, Catherine the Great – as a time traveler who returns to the past, thwarts Catherine’s rebellion, and transforms Russia into a new Byzantium. Other popular narratives involve Stalin traveling to the future to prevent the USSR’s dissolution.

In Russia, culture often serves as a political barometer. Amid the prolonged deadlock in Ukraine, narratives have become more important than facts. But literary fiction and TV propaganda can do only so much. Thus, the new history textbooks aim to indoctrinate the country’s 17-year-olds into believing that Russia had to invade Ukraine to fight Nazis and defend itself from an encroaching West. But the Kremlin’s promotion of this narrative has failed to heed a crucial lesson from the Soviet era.

When I was growing up in Leonid Brezhnev’s Moscow, textbooks were constantly rewritten to reflect the ever-changing political climate. Under my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s brutal legacy – particularly the wrongful deaths and incarceration of millions of people – was heavily scrutinized. During the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s, my grandmother Nina painstakingly removed the images of friends, now branded «enemies of the state,» from family photographs. When Khrushchev was ousted by Brezhnev in 1964, he too was scrubbed from official histories.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness) exposed these historical distortions, but Putin has revived the practice. Much as in Stalin’s era, the gravest offense in Russia today seems to be perceiving reality as it is, rather than adhering to the Kremlin’s approved narrative.

Last November, as Ukraine successfully reclaimed the city of Kherson from Russia – just months after the Kremlin declared, «Russia is here forever» – Vasily Bolshakov from Ryazan joked about the Russian forces’ retreat on social media. He was subsequently fined and now faces up to three years in prison. In Putin’s Russia, openly acknowledging reality is tantamount to «discrediting the Russian armed forces, reducing their effectiveness, and aiding the forces opposing the interests of the Russian Federation and its citizens.»

In his efforts to justify the war, Putin has set the Kremlin propaganda machine to full throttle. In the revised history textbooks, Russia’s use of force is portrayed as a necessary response to national-security threats. Such narratives frame Russia as a perpetual victim of Western hostility, shifting blame away from the Kremlin to external adversaries. The subtext is clear: regardless of one’s opinion of Putin, he is protecting Russia, much like Stalin did during World War II.

In fact, Putin’s regime is now in a more precarious position than the Soviet Union was in its final days. While an unwavering official commitment to communism animated the USSR for more than seven decades, contemporary Russia’s belief system is a hodgepodge of conflicting «values»: Christianity amid a war cult, Stalinism coexisting with contempt for Lenin (who sought to accommodate Ukrainian identity), and anti-Western sentiments alongside conspicuous consumerism. From the outset, Putin has encouraged this postmodern pastiche, reviving the Stalin-era national anthem, flying Soviet army flags, and comparing himself to Peter the Great.

Medinsky and Torkunov’s textbooks embody this incoherence. In addition to literary heavyweights like Mikhail Sholokhov, they incorporate works critiquing Soviet injustices, such as Yuri Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment, and, astonishingly, even poignant novels about contemporary Russia, such as Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. In Soviet times, I would have interpreted this as a clandestine attempt to undermine the Kremlin by subtly introducing oppositional perspectives. Today, I see it as a testament to the regime’s blatant cynicism and delusional hubris.

Trifonov’s novel, for example, is about high-level party apparatchiks suddenly sent to the Gulag – the very people my grandmother was cutting out of her photographs. How does such a story align with the official claim that Russia has waged only defensive wars and never persecuted individuals based on religion, ideology, or ethnicity?

It doesn’t. And Russia’s students, unable to dissect these contradictions in class, will likely discuss them at home, just as their parents and grandparents did.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023. www.project-syndicate.org

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