27 June 2010
History and Lies
By Gwynne Dyer
The Georgians took down the last statue of Stalin last week. There used to be thousands of such statues all across the old Soviet Union, but the Communists themselves tore almost all of them down after the great dictator and mass murderer died in 1953. They left the one in Gori, in northern Georgia, because that’s where he was born and the locals were still proud of him.
Even after Georgia got its independence in 1991, the six-metre (20-foot-high) statue of Stalin continued to stand in Gori. But now, just when you might think that the Georgians would be starting to approve of Stalin – after all, he was responsible for the deaths of more Russians than any other Georgian, or indeed anybody else – they go and tear his statue down.
They’re planning to replace it with a monument to “victims of the Russian aggression” in the 2008 war, so the history they’re peddling in Gori will still be based on lies. (It was Georgia that started the war with
Russia in 2008.) But the bigger lies will be told in Russia, and they will be told mainly about Stalin.
Two weeks ago, a group of politicians and academics met in Moscow’s main library to discuss how to make Russians proud of their history. The answer? Get an upbeat history book into the schools. “(The book) should not be a dreary look at or apology for what was done,” explained Prof. Leonid Polyakov of the Higher School of Economics.
The politicians were from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, and they wanted the academics to come up with a single history textbook for use in all Russian schools. It should downplay the crimes and
failures of seventy-four years of Communist rule – the purges, the mass deportations, the famines, the gulags – and concentrate on the glorious epic of the Soviet victory in the Second World War. Which means they must rehabilitate Stalin.
Rewriting the history books is not a Russian monopoly. The Texas Board of Education recently caused a great furore by deciding that its history textbooks should show that the founding fathers of the United States, and the authors of its constitution, intended America to be a Christian nation, not a country committed to the separation of church and state. Even that is an easier job than making Stalin look good, but it can be done.
Start with the proposition that the Soviet Union played a key role in defeating Hitler (true), and that the war was a heroic victory against great odds (false). This is the first place where you wind up having to
give Stalin some credit, because he was definitely the man in command throughout the war.
Then, to justify the terrible cost of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war, and to slide past the purges and famines of the 1930s, you have to argue that those horrors were what allowed the miracle of high-speed industrialisation that laid the groundwork for a Soviet victory in the war. Once again, Comrade Stalin gets the credit, for the industrialisation happened on his watch.
It’s all lies and distortion. The Soviet Union’s population was twice that of Nazi Germany, and its industrial power and technology were not significantly inferior. If Stalin had not murdered most of the Red Army’s senior officers in the purges of the late 30s, and if he had not stupidly let himself be surprised by the German invasion, the war would not have lasted so long and killed so many Russians.
As for the alleged miracle of rapid industrialisation, it was only needed because most existing Russianindustry was destroyed by the revolution and the civil war: industrial output in 1922 was only 13% of thatin 1914. If there had been no revolution and no Stalin, and Russia had just started growing again after the First World War at the same rate as other capitalist countries, it would have been far too strong by 1941 for Hitler to dream of attacking it.
Russia’s history in the 20th century was an unmitigated and unnecessary disaster: the first half tragic and very bloody, the second half merely impoverished and oppressive. Even today, Russia has not
regained the rank among the developed countries that it held a century ago. What can one do with such a history but deny and rewrite it?
One can tell the truth. Germany’s 20th-century history was also terrible, and Germans had to bear a burden of historical guilt for harming others far heavier than anything Russians should feel for the crimes of their own imperial past. If today’s Germans can see their past with clear eyes and still feel pride in their present and hope for their future, why can’t the Russians?
It’s not a lost cause. There have been some encouraging instances recently of Russians facing up to the less proud bits of their history, like Prime Minister Putin’s attendance at the ceremony commemorating the Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners in Katyn forest in 1940, and President Dmitry Medvedev’s condemnation of Stalin for “mass crimes against his own people.”
But the omens are not good. If the Georgians no longer need that statue of Stalin, maybe there’s a market for it in Russia.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 13. (“Re-writing…done”; and “It’s not…people”)
13 April 2010
Opportunity at Katyn
By Gwynne Dyer
First, a tragedy that almost sinks beneath the weight of a huge historical coincidence. A plane carrying the political and military elite of today’s Polish society crashes, killing everybody aboard, while bringing them to Katyn forest to commemorate the murder of a previous generation of the same elite by Stalin’s secret police in 1940.
Then the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, whose early career was spent in a later, tamer version of that same secret police force, does something remarkable. He tells one of the main Russian TV channels to show Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s 2007 film “Katyn” in prime time. It’s more than an apology. It’s a national act of penance.
And after that, the speculation starts about whether this tragedy might be the way that the two great Slavic nations, Russians and Poles, are finally reconciled.
Poland’s historic tragedy was to be located between Germany and Russia. Twice the country vanished entirely, partitioned between its more powerful neighbours – and the enduring symbol of the latter partition is the Katyn massacre of 1940.
When Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in 1939, dividing Poland between them, 22,000 Polish officers fell into the hands of the Soviet Union. Some were professional soldiers, but most were reserve officers who in civilian life had been lawyers, doctors, university professors: the country’s intellectual elite. Stalin had them all murdered in 1940, one at a time, by a bullet in the back of the head. That’s what happened in Katyn forest.
Stalin’s aim was to “decapitate” the Polish intelligentsia and make the absorption of eastern Poland into the Soviet Union easier, but Hitler betrayed and attacked his ally in 1941. When the invading German troops reached Katyn, they found the mass graves of the Polish officers and invited international observers to examine the site. That was when the Great Lie was launched.
Moscow insisted that it was the Germans, not the Russians, who had massacred the Polish officers. The US and British governments backed the Soviet story (though they suspected it was a lie), because Stalin was now their ally in the war against Hitler. Only after 1945 did they question it.
In the Soviet Union and Communist-ruled Poland, The Lie was the only permitted version of the story until 1989. Only in 1990 did Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, finally admit that the murders were done by the Soviet secret police, but the Russian public never really had their noses rubbed in the truth.
Whereas for Poles, Katyn is the central symbol of how the country was attacked by its neighbours and then betrayed by its allies. Since it was Russians who committed the actual crime, and Russian Communists who still kept Poland in semi-colonial subjection until 1989, Russians were seen as the worst enemy of all.
So the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre this month was a fraught event. Prime Minister Putin invited his Polish equivalent, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, to attend a memorial ceremony there, but President Lech Kaczynski was not invited. Tusk would settle for a vague expression of regret, whereas Kaczynski was an old-fashioned nationalist who wanted the Russians to apologise on their knees.
Tusk came, and Putin duly expressed his sorrow for the “victims of Stalinist terror,” but he didn’t even mention the word “Poles”. Great states never really apologise, you know. Kaczynski, enraged, basically invited himself to another ceremony three days later, and brought half of Poland’s political, military and journalistic elite with him.
Putin realised that something more was required, and showed up at Katyn again to meet him. When the news came through that Kaczynski’s plane had crashed, he looked utterly stricken. Finally, the grim reality of the place and the occasion got through to him.
Now the apology was real and specific. Now Wajda’s harrowing film on Katyn, previously only seen on a specialty channel, got a prime-time broadcast on Russian TV. Now Russians finally get why the Poles don’t trust them – and most of them have responded with regret, not denial.
The wave of sympathy in Russia for Poles past and present is genuine, and they can even feel it (with some astonishment) in Poland. These moments are rare, and they don’t last long. If you want to make the future different from the past, you have to act fast.
The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has announced that he is going to Poland for President Kaczynski’s funeral. Before he goes, he should look at one photograph.
It was taken in 1984 on the First World War battlefield of Verdun, where a quarter-million French and German soldiers died in 1916. By 1984 France and Germany were in the European Union and NATO together, but after three wars in a hundred years they were still not really friends.
Then President Francois Mitterand of France and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany went there to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the First World War. Looking out over the killing fields torn up by forty million artillery shells, they did the only thing they could. They held hands – and Franco-German relations were changed for good.
If Medvedev can find a way to do something as simple but as powerful as that, he could turn the page and start a new chapter in Russian-Polish history. Right now, people are ready for that.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 8, 9 and 14. (“In the Soviet…enemy of all”; and “The wave…fast”)
12 June 2000
The Wicked Poles
By Gwynne Dyer
In the old Soviet Union, the future was always certain; only the past was liable to change without notice. The signal that it had changed was often the publication of a pseudo-scholarly article that denounced the “Falsifications” of the existing version of history.
Here we go again. Last week Colonel Sergei Kovalev, the director of the scientific research department at the Institute of Military History, published an article on the website of the Russian Ministry of Defence entitled “Fictions and Falsifications in Evaluating the USSR’s Role On the Eve of the Second World War.” He says it was the Poles who started the war in 1939, not the Nazis.
The British and the French were to blame too, because earlier in 1939 they guaranteed Poland’s independence if it stood up to Hitler’s demands. That gave the Poles “delusions of grandeur,” unfortunately, and misled them into rebuffing Germany’s “very modest” requests.
Germany only made two demands to Warsaw in 1939. One was the return of Danzig, a German-speaking city that had been separated from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War. The other was a German road and rail corridor across the strip of territory (the “Polish Corridor”) that gave the Poles access to the Baltic Sea, but separated eastern Germany from the rest of the country.
Kovalev is right about one thing: Hitler’s demands were reasonable enough. By 1939 almost everybody agreed that the Versailles treaty had been wrong to blame the First World War on Germany, and that the five million Germans whose lands had been handed out to neighbouring countries under that treaty had been treated unfairly. But most historians also think that Hitler’s demands were just an opening bid.
The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was determined on world conquest from the start, and that if Poland had accepted his terms in 1939 it would just have faced further demands not much later. But the conventional historians may be wrong, for Hitler also offered Poland a secret alliance against the Soviet Union when he made his demands.
Poland’s military rulers rejected the whole package, trusting in the Anglo-French guarantee to protect them. From the day that the guarantee was issued in March, 1939, they refused even to discuss it with the Germans. That may have been a mistake, for when war came in September Britain and France were unable to help them militarily, and Poland was overrun in a month.
But this hardly explains why Kovalev blames Poland for causing the war, and why the Russian Ministry of Defence put his article on its website. The reason for that, most likely, lies with their need to rewrite the history of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
That was the secret agreement of August, 1939 in which Germany and the Soviet Union carved up eastern Europe between them. The Russians got eastern Poland, all of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and parts of Romania. The Finns fought back and managed to save most of their country, but all the rest succumbed.
This deal has always been hard for the Russians to defend, especially since the Nazis attacked them two years later anyway. They usually say they were just trying to win time, but Stalin clearly fooled himself into believing that he had a real deal with the Nazis. He was recovering almost all the lands that had won their freedom from the Russian empire after the First World War (and he wasn’t interested in the opinions of the residents).
The Soviet secret police killed or deported hundreds of thousands of “politically unreliable” people in the newly conquered territories.
(Twenty thousand Polish officers who had surrendered to the Russians were murdered in Katyn forest to decapitate any resistance movement.) So it’s not surprising that some people in the Baltic states welcomed German troops as liberators in 1941, and that very few people anywhere in Eastern Europe saw Red Army troops as liberators when they came back in 1944.
This has always infuriated the Russians, who see the Red Army as heroes and liberators. Col. Kovalev’s article blaming the Poles for the war was bound to appeal to Russian patriots just as much as it would appal Poles, Estonians, and all the other Eastern Europeans who had to live for decades under the Soviet yoke.
The Polish ambassador in Moscow protested and Kovalev’s article has now been removed from the Ministry of Defence’s website, but the broader trend in Russia is clearly to rewrite history in ways that rehabilitate the Soviet past. Indeed, last month Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the creation of the Commission to Counteract the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russian Interests.
That sounds slightly less weird in Russian, but not much. And there’s now legislation before the Duma (parliament) that would outlaw any portrayal of the Red Army as invaders EVEN ON THE TERRITORY OF FORMER SOVIET REPUBLICS. Of course, Moscow could not enforce that legislation without invading (sorry, liberating) them again, so it has little practical effect, but it is indicative of the mood in the country.
Russia isn’t planning to invade anybody, but it is feeling spectacularly touchy and grumpy at the moment. So far Medvedev (and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin) are managing to ride the tiger, but if they fall off they could be eaten up in a flash.______________________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 6. (“Kovalev…demands”)
24 April 2007
The Man Who Failed Russia
By Gwynne Dyer
He was always a heavy drinker, but until his health problems got bad in the mid-1990s he could usually hold his liquor. The real problem was that he was a man of action who didn’t have an idea in his head. A lot of people kept trying to put ideas in there, but they just fell out the other side. So he freed Russia (and a lot of other countries) from Communism, but he didn’t give it much else to work with instead.
Boris Yeltsin, who died at 76 on Monday, was brought to Moscow in 1985 to clean up the corruption in the capital by the man he eventually removed from power, the Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. But the times were right for ambitious men to aim a lot higher, and Yeltsin was nothing if not ambitious, so by 1988 he had quit his position on the Communist Party’s ruling body, the Politburo. He ran for the all-Moscow seat against the official Communist candidate in the first free election in Soviet history, and won in a landslide.
I first met Yeltsin soon after that in the basement cafeteria of the Supreme Soviet, just inside the Kremlin walls, which was the easiest place for foreign journalists to find and interview deputies to this new-fangled beast, the Congress of People’s Deputies. It was one of the stars of the nascent Russian democratic movement, Galina Strarovoitova, who introduced us, and the contrast between the two of them was quite stunning.
Starovoitova (who was murdered some years ago in a contract killing) was a genuine democratic hero, an intellectual who dedicated her life to the ideal of a free society. Yeltsin was a charming bruiser who ran mostly on instinct and was all too aware of his considerable charisma. Yet he was in practice the leader of her little band of democrats, the Inter-Regional Deputies Group.
The IRDG flourished for less than a year, and it had less than a tenth of the deputies to the Congress, most of whom were still Communist Party hacks. Its leaders, including famous dissident figures like scientist Andrei Sakharov and historian Yuri Afanasiev, were using their unprecedented access to the media to spread democratic ideas to the furthest corners of a country where such notions had been condemned and suppressed for seventy years, but they knew those ideas alone would not produce a democratic majority in any Soviet election in the near future.
Yeltsin, on the other hand, could win the election, but he had no ideas at all. So they made him their leader, and during that year you rarely saw him without some leading light of the IRDG at his side, earnestly trying to fill this empty vessel with democratic ideals. Everybody meant well, I think, but the transplant didn’t take, and by 1990 Yeltsin had moved on.
In the following two years he did two things that should have earned him the gratitude of both Russia and the whole world. Standing on a tank outside the White House in Moscow in August, 1991, he turned back the hardline Communist coup attempt that almost reversed the flow of history. And he did it practically single-handedly, by the force of his own personality.
The coup was amazingly incompetent, but it could have succeeded nevertheless, in which case we would still be dealing with a ramshackle Communist-ruled Soviet Union, sinking ever deeper into poverty and corruption and fighting insurgencies all around its perimeter: Upper Volta with rockets, indeed. What we have is much better than that.
Yeltsin’s other great accomplishment, at the end of 1991, was to wind up the Soviet Union and set all of its constituent “republics” free. He did it for purely tactical reasons, but it was the last great act of decolonisation, and it spared us a generation of bloody struggles as the old Russian empire gradually fell apart. Despite tyranny in the ‘Stans and war in Chechnya, what we have is much better than that, too. But then Yeltsin should have died or at least retired, because he was a disaster and an embarrassment as the president of Russia.
There was the “shock therapy” prescribed by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs that ended all subsidies overnight, drove inflation to 2,000 percent, and wiped out the life savings of tens of millions of families. There were the corrupt privatisation deals that created the “oligarchs” and the gangster culture. There was the armed assault on parliament in 1993 and the needless, futile, bloody attempt to subjugate Chechnya by force. Russia in the 1990s could have done a lot better than that.
Yeltsin’s retirement on New Year’s Eve, 1999 was of a piece with all that: a cynical deal handing power to the former KGB chief, Vladimir Putin, in return for a guarantee that no legal inquiries would be made after he left office into the wealth accumulated by his family and his political associates during their time in power. There is not much genuine mourning in Russia for Yeltsin today, and you can see why.
But he did get the two big things right, and that counts for a lot. History may take a kinder view of him than Russians do today.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 10 and 11. (“There was…seewhy”)