Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

These initiatives by Russian law-makers fit in with the general tendency towards history in our country. History is simply the servant of the authorities, yet another resource at the disposal of the state, along with grain, furs, oil and a submissive population. As they say: ‘Russia is a country with an unpredictable past.’ Generation after generation, like some primitive magic, people believe in the ritual of rewriting history. So in Stalin’s times, schoolchildren blotted out names in their text books and cut out photos of politicians and military leaders who had been declared enemies of the people. And in the late 1940s geographers carefully obliterated German names in what had been East Prussia and was now joined to the USSR, and Tatar place names in Crimea, from which all Tatars had been exiled. So it is now, when politicians naively believe, like children, that if they declare that Nikita Khrushchev (who was responsible for transferring Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954) was an enemy of the people, and if they rewrite the Supreme Soviet Decree, then Crimea will become ours and the international community will recognize this. Why not, then, call Yeltsin an enemy of the people and rewrite the Belovezha Accords of December 1991 about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in order to re-establish the USSR, for which part of the population and the political elite have such nostalgia?

The fantasy of revisionism knows no bounds. We could look once again at the result of the 1986 World Cup Round of Sixteen match, when the USSR lost 3–4 in extra time to Belgium – I still feel in my heart the pain that this defeat brought. Why don’t we also look again at the results of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5? Or the Crimean War of 1853–6? We could also reassess the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre; and call an international tribunal in which Britain could be charged with putting down the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 in China. The wind of history blows through the heads of the revisionists like the crazy December snowstorm.

…After lunch on 31 December, the Federation Council, working at a great pace, passed the laws on changing the 1954 Decree on the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, the 1989 Decree criticizing the invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1867 Agreement on the sale of Alaska. Warmed up by their very effective work and talking excitedly, the senators pulled on their coats and got out their cigarettes as they hurried to the exits and their cars, which should whisk them home to their heavily laden celebratory tables. But as they came out onto Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, they felt that something in the air had changed. And on the ground, too – there were no cars waiting for them, no bodyguards, no colourful advertisements shining; on the cold, snow-laden street among the two-metre high snowdrifts stood gloomy, unlit houses with strange sloping roofs. The snowstorm had stopped, the frost had deepened, and the moon shone out from under the low dark clouds. In the distance they heard the sound of horses’ hooves and wheezing, and further down the road they saw a patrol on horseback: horsemen in shaggy caps on squat horses were racing along Bolshaya Dmitrovka, sitting up in their saddles with long bows and arrows…

It happened that after visiting Moscow, Santa Claus flew further to the East, to Kazan and Astrakhan, to Kzyl-Orda and Mongolia, to the source of the Onon River, where some other grown-up children, descendants of another great state of the steppe, had asked him to reassess the results of their own geopolitical catastrophe – the collapse of the Mongol Empire of the great Genghis Khan.

With whoops and laughter, the horsemen disappeared in a whirlwind of snow, much to the amazement of the stunned legislators. In their light cashmere overcoats and Italian shoes, and with their silent iPhones in their hands, the senators stood dumbfounded in the frost. Above their heads the twinkling stars of the boundless Eurasian night shone down with indifference.

Every year at the beginning of March, Russia experiences a traditional folk amusement, as crazy as it is destructive: the burning of dry grass. Never mind the warnings of the authorities or the appeals of the ecologists, the grass-burning season is open. The coastal region is ablaze, soon the South of Russia will start to burn, then the flames will spread towards the Central Region, destroying tens of thousands of hectares of meadows and forests, whole villages and estates, even taking people’s lives.

Also at the start of March, we give ourselves over to another national amusement, just as pointless and merciless: discussions about the role of Stalin in Russian history. What’s more, the further we get away from the day of his death (5 March 1953) the louder grow the arguments, with explosions of emotion and people foaming at the mouth. Rather like the burning of the grass, arguments about Stalin are yet another variation of our peculiar Russian masochism, when people take pride in humiliation: it would be difficult to find a nation on this earth more ready to dance on the ashes of their own homeland.

This argument is absurd, endless and completely useless. It’s absurd because discussing the role of Stalin is rather like arguing over whether it is worth washing one’s hands before eating or whether you should steal the silver spoons when you’re at someone’s house. There are things one does not talk about in polite society, ethics that are axiomatic; this is not a question of morals, but of hygiene. The fact that we have not experienced de-Stalinization in the way in which Germany has gone through de-Nazification, and that we regularly return to the question of how we should relate to the figure of Stalin, merely bears witness to the archaic, pre-rational and mystical condition of our national consciousness.

The Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadaev, spoke about this in his ‘Philosophical Letters’ of the 1830s, asserting: ‘We stand, as it were, outside of time, the universal education of mankind has not touched us.’ [2] http://www.vehi.net/chaadaev/filpisma.html (Letter 1, para. 8) (in Russian). According to Chaadaev, Russia has no history, no ‘wonderful memories’ like other nations. Russia lives only in the present, its culture is imported and imitative, which is why there is no point of balance in the country. In Russia, Chaadaev writes, what rules is ‘the pointlessness of life, without experience and vision’. And that is precisely why the arguments about Stalin are endless: they take place in a space where there is no historical memory, indeed, with no historical reflexion, just the absurd endlessness of total amnesia.

Finally, arguments about Stalin are absolutely useless, because they are based on a void. Stalin is a simulacrum, a sign without reference, the smoke of a long-extinguished pipe, empty boots standing on a pedestal. And all the different political forces pour their contents into this void: those who support the state talk about Stalin’s modernization (economists have long ago exposed this myth for what it is, showing that Stalin’s economics produced even worse results than would have been the case under the tsar, and much worse than the Japanese in the same period); and they talk also about the Great Victory of 1945 (another myth, this was achieved by the humongous human sacrifice of the Soviet people in order to cover up Stalin’s strategic blunders). The Eurasians talk about Russia’s ‘special path’, which Stalin embodied in the twentieth century. Liberals speak of the Russians’ ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (when hostages begin to identify their interests with the terrorists who are holding them captive). Each group concentrates on its own interests – but they use Stalin as the final argument. And both supporters and opponents end up using the same words, the very same appeal to 1937, the year that was the peak of Stalin’s repressions. ‘Are you an entrepreneur? In 1937 you would have been shot for that’, say one group. ‘You’re stealing from the budget? They shot people for that in ’37’, retorts another. This discussion is not about Russia’s past, it’s about today’s Russia; but the only arguments and language we have are ‘1937’ and mass executions. The country thinks of itself in past categories: we are unable to tear ourselves away from the discourse of Stalinism – it remains our grammar, the language we use to describe everything. A country that is endlessly going round in circles judging Stalin has no future.