Who controls the past controls the future. . .
Today’s Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor included a story on Putin’s push to rewrite Russian history. Putin’s recently presented his argument in a speech to a group of humanities teachers and professors attending a conference in Moscow.
Putin’s argument is based around what I like to call his rhetorical “sovereign” framing of issues. He utilizes the term sovereign to combat and belittle what he sees as “western” meddling into Russian affairs. For example, Putin and his coterie have coined the term “sovereign democracy” to simultaneously distinguish his form of “democracy” he is attempting to implement as natively Russian while backhandedly labeling his pro-democracy opponents and those international groups and organizations working to protect dastardly universal values like human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy as violating the sovereignty of Russia. These sovereign term has also entered the Russian lexicon in issues relating to economics, and now history.
Putin argues that the current history curriculum in Russia was developed with funding from “western grants” and reflect Russian intellectuals dancing a polka that others have paid for and writing history books which belittle and foist guilt upon the Russian people for the past actions of the Soviet Union. He announced that in order to fix this bias, the Kremlin would begin to provide funding to academics to develop new Russian authored history books. President Putin also used the speech as an opportunity to minimize the horrors of Stalin and the NKVD (predecessor of KGB) and argued that Russia’s “black pages” are not as bad as some other countries, mainly the United States.
In a creepy sounding show of support, a representative of the Russian teachers announced that he would begin working with his colleagues to develop a “national-patriotic ideology” to assist teachers in the “civic-patriotic education.” I hope that the actual Russian terms translate poorly and have some deeper, less odious connotation but I doubt it. As perhaps a preview to the content of a”national-patriotic ideology” approved history, the representative argued that the Soviet Union did not lose the cold war, but rather unilaterally disarmed. Brilliant.
So Russia gets new Kremlin-financed and approved history books, who cares? This article caught my eye because of an interesting fact I learned in a class last year on Transitional Justice and Rule of Law. Interestingly, more than a decade after the bloody genocide in Rwanda, it is illegal to teach Rwandan history in Rwandan schools. The development of education curriculum and a historical narrative is very important, especially in postconflict societies. However, the process of doing such can be agonizing and potentially destabilizing, but doing so can play a crucial role in acknowledging past turmoil, debunking myths, and facilitating a reconciliation within a society. Besides Rwanda, Cambodia, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Balkans provide some interesting case studies on the subject. (Sidenote: The US Institute of Peace held a meeting last year addressing these issues, and luckily USIP has posted an audio file and some reports from that event. I highly recommend checking them out, as these issues are important and often overlooked.)
Putin’s move is interesting because one would be hard pressed to say that Russia is a postconflict society. More important, Putin’s move to soften the historical image of the Soviet Regime and the carnage and suffering it brought to the Russian people and their neighbors could serve to weaken the general memory of life under authoritarian rule. While the teaching of history can be conducive to resolving conflicts within a society, history can also be used to develop a broad societal idea of victim hood, to minimize past atrocities, to accentuate myths of other’s wrongdoings, and to manipulate large groups of society by playing on these feelings. Judging by terms like “national-patriotic ideology” and Putin’s rhetoric, this further convinces me of Putin’s work to develop a broader authoritarian movement based “legitimacy” by stoking xenophobia and anti-western sentiments.
Every country has black pages and of course the US and the West does as well. What is important though is that we have a system of government that fosters and allows debate. When people in democratic states may and have filled the streets to oppose the actions of their government and have outlets to express views contrary to the state-approved line, but the last few years have showed us that in Putin’s Russia whenever his opponents gather more than five people they are prevented from traveling, arrested, harassed by police or other “civil society” groups, beat, or killed.
While I could end with trite line about the fate of those who fail to learn history’s lessons, I think the second part of George Orwell’s is far more fitting for Putin’s plan:
Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.
