Russia’s new pantheon and pandemonium
Early this year the Sochi Olympics offered the international community a new version of Russian history. I wrote an article [“The Olympics and... new imperialism”] that was published by The Day on February 11. On that occasion the Kremlin ideologues came up with what I’d describe as a barbarian kind of self-consciousness, something that had nothing to do with history. Each historic event in their interpretation looked as though it were happening here and now. The best example is their attitude to the Second World War. Russian politicians are still reliving the [Great Patriotic War] myth.
Nothing had changed before Putin addressed the young historians in November, except that the rest of the world had changed, and so myths had to be updated.
In fact, the Soviet regime practiced the same attitude, with the official attitude to history changing pro rata the evolvement of totalitarianism. First, history as a science was discarded, then cleaned up, so that in 1934 history faculties were reinstated and people were encouraged to study [the Kremlin version of] history. By 1938 they had prepared the final version known as the “History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course,” with an official interpretation of the most important events. It also laid down the philosophic foundations of the Soviet system.
History kept being rewritten as the Soviet political system evolved, including the Caucasian War and the role of Imam Shamil, let alone the events in Europe, especially in Central Europe. Putin, therefore, followed a well-trodden path, except for the Russian president’s corrections made in the mythologem. The journal Korea writes that “Comrade Kim (whether number one, two or three) is personally supervising the growing of a new rice variety… The morrow belongs to me.” The younger generation has been given all the necessary directives. There is a definite “pedocratic,” Red Guards touch to the whole thing. Needless to say that the time-tested cadre is involved, although the young Korean leader appears to be placing more trust in the young blood. He is right because the cadre that remembers the restructuring period with its historical insights is not reliable.
Should one analyze everything Putin had to say on the occasion? Definitely! Those who are interested should read a verbatim account [in Russian] (kremlin.ru) rather than quotes found in various printed media. However, one shouldn’t get carried away looking for Putin’s slips because the man is known to have made too many of them. Let me try to sum up the main points.
To begin with [according to Putin], Crimea has belonged to Russia since the times of Chersonesus. Looks like they will have to revise the history of the Russian ethnos, considering that once they came up with the idiotic notion of Russians originating from Etruscans, and that today this notion doesn’t sound idiotic.
There was nothing wrong with Poland’s partition on the part of the Third Reich and its Soviet ally that unleashed World War Two. Now this is something new. Previously the Molotov[-Ribbentrop] Pact was officially justified, with fleeting references to the seizures of foreign territories. Now they have to be asserted as standard practice rather than whitewashed, in light of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and further acts of aggression against the Ukrainian state.
Putin’s paranoid solo and the servile choir of young historians were heard loud and clear. I believe the main thing for him has been and will always be political power, keeping it, enhancing it, using it the way he sees fit. That was why he enlarged on such themes as unity, centralization, and above all the continuity of political power – because he does not intend to hand it over to anyone; because he wants to assert his absolute right to use it, the way one uses private property, with no questions asked. Jus utendi et abutendi, the right to use and abuse.
I don’t feel like analyzing his verbiage any further. His main point is clear: Russians are the oldest people on earth, so they have the right to seize foreign territories, and that [absolute] power is an end in itself and its source. Russians have a monopoly on studies of their history (subject to specification at a later date). The way to hammer all this into the heads of the masses is another matter. The previous [Soviet] propaganda machine is nowhere to be seen.
In fact, they don’t need it. In its place they have the enthusiasm of all those young people who met with Putin to listen to his lengthy presentation. They seemed to know what they needed, ranging from porno to what was good for Mother-Russia – and they made statements that sounded academic. They would have the entire Russian education system at their disposal, along with the formidable potential of mass culture.
Mass culture is important if one wants to figure out the difference between the present and Soviet times when the Communist Party’s [geriatric] elite issued ideological formulas and interpretations. The masses were different, especially before the mass purges and Great Terror. Later, it was necessary to clear their heads of the “hangovers.” Now everything is the other way around. One ought to study Putin’s speeches not to figure out the existing sophisticated propaganda machine, but to figure out what the masses have on their minds. And I mean the big crowd, not the man in the street, because each man is an individual, come to think of it. The masses want to see their history that way, no options allowed.
There is no Marxism or Nazism, no master race theory or class struggle doctrine – even though his [Putin’s] discourse on Chersonesus, now Sevastopol which is innately Russian, smacks of farther-reaching ambitions. Political power remains on top of his agenda, so I will allow myself to discuss the prospects of such new myths, namely Russia’s new pantheon and pandemonium.
It is becoming increasingly clear that we [of the older generation] owe our 60-year-old carefully edited and restricted liberties to one man by the name of Nikita Khrushchev, and to one event, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Only once during Soviet history a single politician did something that was absolutely incompatible with what he had done before that event and would do [until his forced retirement]. That was the only time the Soviet system openly malfunctioned, after admitting that it was not faultless, after allowing itself to reflect on itself, its leader, and values that were incompatible with that system.
Russia’s current political elite hates Khrushchev’s guts. This hatred constantly manifests itself, even though Khrushchev was a genuine Russian imperialist. He ruthlessly punished dissidents and curtailed the freedoms of creativity and expression. He ordered assassinations abroad. He also achieved parity [with the West] and launched the first man into space. He consolidated elites and society while unleashing a formidable [pro-communist] expansion in the Third World. He built a new attractive Soviet image overseas.
And yet the Russian ruling elite will never forgive him the 20th CPSU Congress because afterward none of the Soviet rulers could have the amount of power needed to do battle [for the triumph of communism across the world]. Hard as they’re trying to eulogize and idolize Putin, the Soviet system’s malfunction sixty years back reduces all such efforts almost to nil. To paraphrase Sharikov [character of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog], nothing has been natural after Khrushchev and the 20th CPSU Congress.
Russia’s new pantheon will start with political leaders who, during their lifetime, allowed not a trace of democracy or transparency: Lenin and Stalin. Khrushchev will have a place of honor in Russia’s new pandemonium, even though during his lifetime he was a devout Russian imperialist who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower and ordered the assassination of Stepan Bandera.
I’m sure that this pandemonium will also accommodate, even if in the back row, characters like General Andrey Vlasov, Bronislav Kaminski, “Harbin fascist” Radzaevsky, Sergei Efron, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Yet the worst is still to come. We will witness the birth of new disgusting myths not only in mass consciousness, but also in science, among the intelligentsia. Proof of this is the existing [Kremlin-created] maxim of Crimea being an innate part of Russia, their current attitude to Ukraine, Poland, and the rest of the civilized world. They won’t have to replace the previous CPSU propaganda cliches, revise the “History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course,” resolutions passed by the CPSU Central Committee, or upgrade any ideology campaigns. The Kremlin elite will only have to spread the existing mass culture and consciousness stereotypes, leaving the intelligentsia the only pitiful alternative of pretending to think and act like the masses, keeping a very low profile.
Dmitry Shusharin is a Moscow-based historian and political journalist
