Soon we will be led to believe that in 1941-1945, Stalin, together with Hitler, fought against the West.
A cynical but basically true adage says that high school has two main subjects - history and basic military training. The second teaches how to shoot, and the first teaches at whom.
It is history, or rather, the underlying "myths" and "stereotypes" that determine the self-consciousness of the people. Moreover, it decisively constitutes this people not as a vague "cultural community", but as a whole, conscious of its interests and capable of protecting them in the tougher global competition.
That is why attempts to falsify history are more dangerous than espionage and sabotage: they destroy not military secrets, not economic infrastructure, but what these secrets and infrastructure exist for - national identity, without which there is no people, and the country turns into a "trophy space" waiting for his enslavement.
Our strategic competitors in developed countries understand this very well, and it is in this understanding that the main reason for the constant pressure on our history (and therefore on our ideas about ourselves) to which we are exposed lies.
The most striking example is the sensational OSCE resolution, consistently placing Stalinism and Nazism on the same level and, in fact, equating them to each other.
For the victims of the Russian education system, let me remind you that, despite the indisputable crimes of Stalinism, he did not commit genocide on a national basis. Even the resettlement of peoples was carried out in better conditions - in particular, in previously prepared settlements, in better conditions than those that existed in the regions destroyed by the war. The regime did not wage wars of conquest: even the war with Finland began after the Finns refused to exchange territories, in order to move the border away from Leningrad on the eve of a great war, and entered the territory of Poland only after the Polish army and statehood itself ceased to exist there.
The treaty with Hitler, after which Stalin jumped for joy, shouting "I deceived Hitler!"
Do not forget that the total number of victims of Stalinism, as studies show based on archival data, and not personal tantrums, are overestimated at times, and sometimes dozens of times.
It is interesting that professional accusers of Stalin, as a rule, mysteriously forget about his main, real guilt. This guilt lies in the fact that the inoculation of fear and violence, which he instilled in our society, discouraged an entire people and, in particular, its elite, the ability to initiate, which undermined its vitality and led, ultimately, to the destruction of Soviet civilization. Roughly speaking, "the system he created gave birth to Gorbachev."
The next stage of brainwashing in Russian society after equating Stalinism and Nazism will be the explanation that since Stalin and Hitler agreed with each other in 1939, they fought together in 1939-1945 against "all civilized humanity" and together suffered defeat from the united forces of the United States, Great Britain and France. However, the Germans repented of their crimes, while the Russians, for some reason, did not. And therefore, Russians must repent, repent and repent, pay indemnities and reparations, similar to the German ones, and most importantly, forget forever about the right to any national interests of their own.
Yes, today it looks wild. But no more savage than a generation ago was equating Stalinism - for all its crimes - with Nazism.
Back in 2001, the author of these lines had to hear statements at international conferences that Russia has always played an extremely negative role in the history of Europe. When one of the authors of these statements (by the way, a German) was reminded of the victory over fascism, he calmly declared even then that the role of the Soviet Union in this matter "should not be exaggerated."
An equally important, albeit unknown to the Russian public, element of the West's position is UNESCO's fundamental refusal to recognize the blockade of Leningrad as an event of world-wide historical significance. The explanations of international officials are touchingly simple: they already have big problems with the Poles because of the Auschwitz located in Poland (the functioning of which is recognized as such a fact) and with the Germans - in general, in the history of World War II, and to aggravate relations also due to The blockade of Leningrad is simply not interesting to them.
The Russian bureaucracy is silent in agreement.
Meanwhile, connivance on this issue may well lead to the fact that our children will be forced to teach that the blockade of Leningrad was a crime of the Stalinist regime, and the valiant German and Finnish troops, as best they could, provided humanitarian assistance to the victims of communist terror!
It seems ridiculous and ridiculous only at first glance. I talked with fully formed, 30-year-old adults who already have children, who sincerely do not believe that the Soviet Union was the most reading country in the world. Simply because reading is good, but "what good can be in a scoop and under the communists"?
The most interesting thing is that, in spite of separate screeching and “commissions for combating historical falsifications”, which can easily turn into “commissions for falsifications,” the ruling bureaucracy as a whole supports and stimulates oblivion of the history of our country.
For a very simple reason: no matter how ineffective our state was in the past, no matter what crimes its representatives committed, it has always - both under the tsar and under the communists - been a normal state striving for the public good.
Yes, this "public good" itself was sometimes understood in a surprisingly perverse way, but there were attempts to achieve it.
The statehood created in Russia, as far as can be judged, fundamentally rejects the very idea of "public good", replacing it with the idea of personal enrichment of officials.
Therefore, the effectiveness of the modern Russian state from the point of view of society cannot be compared with the effectiveness of the most vile and ridiculous regimes of our past.
And so that no one has not only a desire, but even an opportunity to make such a comparison, it is necessary to make people forget their past.
To turn Russia into a country of mankurts.
And in this main, principled approach, the interests of the ruling kleptocracy, as far as one can see, completely coincide with the interests of our external strategic competitors.
