Russia is getting increasingly involved in a debate on 19th-century history. Whereas previously it was an effort to combat what Moscow was fond of describing as “falsifications of joint history” in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, over the past several months this debate has for the most part become a domestic Russian affair. The course it has taken makes it increasingly clear that past realities are its formal topic – it is, in fact, a debate on Russia’s present and future.
Last week, Novaya gazeta‘s journalist Aleksandr Podrabinek (formerly a noted dissident) published a sharply worded article on www.ej.ru in response to the renaming of the Antisovetskaya (Anti-Soviet) barbecue house. The thing is that this Moscow’s popular hangout is located on Leningradsky prospekt, across the street from the Sovetskaya Hotel, and has been popularly known as Antisovetskaya for decades. Eventually it became its official name.
A “group of veterans” led by the former Politburo member Dolgikh recently demanded that the local authorities rename it, because its current name is “offensive to the Soviet veterans.” Podrabinek gave vent to his emotions in his article: “It was you Soviet veterans who defended the Soviet regime and were then rewarded by it; now you are scared by the truth, clutching at your Soviet past.”
Then all hell broke loose in Moscow. The Movement against Illegal Immigration (Nazi in spirit) sued Podrabinek for desecrating the “exploits of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War” and the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (Ours) started persecuting the journalist, openly saying they would force him to leave Russia.
At this point one becomes scared by Russia’s future rather than painfully concerned about its past. We saw all this in the 1960s and the 1970s, when those who refused to put up with the Soviet regime and its obscurantism were hunted down and expelled from the Soviet Union. Previously such people were thrown behind bars and executed. One is scared even more so that the young Russians who are lashing out at Podrabinek, picketing the Ukrainian embassy with protests against the truth about the Holodomor, and demanding that Volgograd be renamed as Stalingrad have no idea about what the USSR was really like and how people lived there. Contrary to our recent expectations, Stalinism is not leaving the scene with the pensioners who were thoroughly brainwashed since their youth. It is reborn in the minds of those who spent their youth during the perestroika campaign.
For many young Russians the word “Stalin” sounds cool today; it is associated with grandeur, breakthroughs, and simple answers to complex questions. One shouldn’t condemn such young people in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Likewise, young Parisians brandishing portraits of Mao Zedong fought the police in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worshipped the Cultural Revolution and no one bothered to ponder all those tens of millions who fell prey to the Great Helmsman.
The Russian government that connives at the mounting effort to rehabilitate Stalinism is an altogether different story. Seeking as ideological basis for Russia as a great power and trying to justify the curtailment of civil liberties, along with the government’s unprecedented intervention into the life of society, Russia’s ruling class calmly looks on as Soviet history is receiving increasingly positive evaluations. This class believes that the process will not cross a certain boundary line and that the struggle for the preservation of Bolshevik symbols in Moscow will not transform into full-fledged Bolshevism. After all, the disappearance of the signboard “Antisovetskaya” over the entrance of this barbecue house did not narrow the gap between the personal incomes of 10 percent of the wealthiest Muscovites and 10 percent of Moscow’s poorest residents. (The ratio is 42 to 1, which is bigger than in any megalopolis; even in the US it is 14 to 1.)
Because of the crisis and Moscow’s soaring prices, quite a few of Nashi’s rank-and-file members can no longer afford tuition or decent clothes. The Russian government has stopped playing at “controlled nationalism” and received a neo-Nazi underground whose activists attack not only migrant workers but also police officers, break into stores, and set police precincts on fire. Neo-Stalinists will follow suit.
This October will mark the ninth anniversary of the communist-fascist putsch in Moscow. That time democracy stood its ground, and a clear line was drawn between the notions of Fatherland and the Soviet Union — or so it seemed. In the early 2000s Russian society rejected the “evil 1990s,” their chaos, impotent government, humiliation on the international arena, and overall misery — with such zeal that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s everybody seemed to realize that the Soviet period, despite all its undeniable achievements, was a tragic one in the history of Russia and other peoples of the former USSR. But then this understanding was discarded and replaced by a myth about “Russia rising from is knees.” Now Russia will have to travel the traversed path in order to avoid getting lost in the past and continue moving forward. Hopefully it will. With the elections in Ukraine approaching, Ukrainians should watch this and think. Freedom is never given to anybody as a gift to be kept forever.
