This year, one of the main themes of the Valdai Club was the reconciliation of views on Russian history of the twentieth century, or rather, its terrible period between the revolution in 1917 and the death of Stalin in 1953. It should push the liberals of the Russian establishment, who support President Dmitry Medvedev, to revive Russian reforms and implement a clear break with the Soviet past.
The memory of the crimes of Stalinism was a natural addition to our water journey along part of the White Sea Canal, built under Stalin in the 1930s. political prisoners at the cost of terrible human sacrifices and suffering, cold, hunger and mass executions. These and many other atrocities committed by Stalin and Lenin are only a very limited part of the officially recognized level noted or mentioned today in Russia, although most of the victims are Russians.
This is a subject that non-Russians have a limited moral right to discuss, except for those whose compatriots were victims of massive repression (for example, the Stalinist massacre of Polish prisoners at Katyn). But even so, they should be extremely careful, while emphasizing that this was a crime of communism and not of the Russian nation-state; and that the victims of the Russians were innumerable. But the absence in Russian society of mentioning or considering the problem refers not only to Stalinism, even if the huge number of Stalinist crimes makes it the most serious problem in modern Russian history. The society hardly mentions the 2 million Russians who died in the First World War, although nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past is very common, for example, in modern Russian cinema.
Even for many highly anti-communist Russians whose families suffered under Stalin, it is difficult to unequivocally assess the communist past. Among other things, two reasons came to my mind during the second half of my stay, which included a visit to the city of Yaroslavl, where the Russian government organized an international annual forum that they hoped would become a Russian version of Davos. Looking out the window of my train, I caught sight of a ridiculous white statue standing alone on the edge of the forest. I realized that the statue was a monument to a soldier. Behind it were a row of gray tombstones - the graves of Soviet soldiers who died in World War II, mostly those who died in a military hospital as German advance was halted west of Yaroslavl in November 1941, before a Soviet counterattack pushed the line the following month front. The regime that organized the resistance, repulsed the Germans and saved Russia from destruction was, of course, communist and headed by Stalin. Liberating this great victory, which saved Russia and Europe from Nazism, from the terrible domestic and international crimes of Stalinism, is, to put it mildly, not an easy task.
Another reason is almost four decades of much softer Soviet rule that followed Stalin's death, during which two generations grew up, created families, raised children, and which gave both gray, limited opposition to Brezhnev's rule, and the reformist periods of Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and the final the collapse of the system by the communist rebel Yeltsin; and, of course, the rise to power of former intelligence officer Vladimir Putin.
In other words, all this is unlike the clear and sudden breakdown of Germany with Nazism caused by its defeat and conquest in 1945. The history of Russia has created a situation where in Yaroslavl, favorite restored monasteries, cathedrals and palaces of the imperial era, often destroyed or damaged under Stalin and Lenin, stand on streets named Sovetskaya and Andropova (the latter was born in the Yaroslavl region).
Thus, the danger for Russian liberals is that when they condemn the crimes committed under Lenin and Stalin, they can easily turn out to be people (or be them in reality), condemning the entire Soviet period, for which many people of the older generation feel nostalgia, and not so much for imperial reasons, but because he personified a safe life; or just purely humanly - it was the country of their childhood and youth. In turn, this can inspire liberals to do what they are all inclined to do, namely, to openly express elitist contempt for ordinary Russians and for Russia as a country. It's not for me to talk about the validity or unreasonableness of this. It must be obvious - and at the beginning of the summer I pointed this out to the Russian liberals at a conference in Sweden - to say this in public about your fellow citizens means one thing: you will never be elected either in Russia or in the United States.
Naturally, this approach does not resonate in conservative or “static” circles. He continues to follow the catastrophic model of the nineteenth and early twentieth century ties between the liberal intelligentsia and the state, contributing directly to the catastrophe of 1917 and to the destruction of both of them by the revolution: essentially two moral absolutisms that catastrophically did not hear each other. The absence of liberals who think in terms of the imperial state seriously impoverishes this state and contributes to its mistakes of obscurantism, reaction, unnecessary repression and sheer stupidity; but once again it must be admitted that liberal rhetoric rightly forces the state to consider them irresponsible, unpatriotic and unworthy to be in the public service.
A Russian historian speaking in Valdai demonstrated with a concrete example what this liberal rhetoric is and showed that, despite their assurances, many Russian liberal intellectuals are far enough from their Western equivalent and have a strong tendency towards their own spiritual absolutism. This historian is the publisher of a highly regarded collection of revisionist essays on 20th century Russian history; but his speech in Valdai caused great pain among the Western professional historians present.
It consisted of an appeal to Russian history up to the Middle Ages and the identification of a number of decisive mistakes, pulled out of the historical context and presented with the absence of important facts that complement them. On the one hand, this is not a historical project, although it claims to be so. On the other - it is designed, in essence, to turn into trash most of Russian history - which again, in no way can make fellow citizens listen to it.
As far as the Russian government is concerned, what is most encouraging about its recent approach to history is the complete and open admission of the murder by the Soviet secret police on Stalin's orders of Polish prisoners at Katyn. This led to a radical improvement in relations with Poland. This became possible in part because both the Polish and Russian governments realized that thousands of Russians and other Soviet victims of the Soviet secret police were buried in the same forest. In other words, it was a joint condemnation of Stalinism, not a Polish condemnation of Russia.
It seems clear that in condemning communist crimes, Medvedev will want to go faster and further than Putin. At the meeting, Prime Minister Putin answered the question: "Why is Lenin still in the Mausoleum on Red Square?" snapped up aggressively, asking his British colleague: "Why is there still a monument to Cromwell at the Parliament in London?" One of my British colleagues reacted to this with utter irritation. I must say that, being half Irish and remembering Cromwell's crimes against Ireland (which today would no doubt be classified as genocide), I saw a significant amount of truth in this statement, but still Cromwell ruled Britain 350 years ago, and not 90.
On the one hand, Putin's response reflected an understandable but still counterproductive Russian tendency to snap at uncomfortable questions instead of asking them. In this respect, Medvedev (whatever his qualifications) is a much better diplomat. However, Putin cannot be denied in common sense, hearing him “when the time comes, the Russian people will decide what to do with it. History is something that cannot be rushed. The difference between Medvedev and Putin on these issues can also be explained by the simple fact that Medvedev is 13 years younger.
In Yaroslavl, Medvedev talked about the huge changes that have occurred in Russia since the end of the era of communism, and noted his enormous difficulties in explaining to his 15-year-old son (born in 1995, four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union) life under communism: “There are queues for everything, nothing in shops, there is nothing to watch on TV except endless speeches of the party leaders."
In the end, the approach of Russian teenagers - and, accordingly, future adults - to their history may be similar to that of most Western teenagers. On the one hand, the past is regrettable, knowledge of history can vaccinate against dangerous mistakes and even crimes in the future. On the other hand, however, as a professor, I have no illusions about the ability of most teenagers - Russian, American, British or Martian - to study history too closely or anything else.
