A people's tragedy

His initiative began in schools, where textbooks deemed too negative about the Soviet period were denied approval by the Ministry of Education, effectively removing them from the classroom. In 2007, Putin told a conference of history teachers:

As to some problematic pages in our history, yes, we have had them. But what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as the Americans did in Vietnam. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt …

Putin did not deny Stalin’s crimes. But he argued for the need not to dwell on them, to balance them against his achievements as the builder of the country’s ‘glorious Soviet past’. In a manual for history teachers commissioned by the President and heavily promoted in Russian schools, Stalin was portrayed as an ‘effective manager’ who ‘acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to ensure the country’s modernization’.

Polls suggested that the Russians shared this troubling attitude to the Revolution’s violence. According to a survey conducted in 2007 in three cities (St Petersburg, Kazan and Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk), 71 per cent of the population thought that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB) in 1917, had ‘protected public order and civic life’. Only 7 per cent believed he was a ‘criminal and executioner’. More disturbing was the survey’s finding that while nearly everyone was well informed about the mass repressions under Stalin – with most acknowledging that ‘between 10 and 30 million victims’ had suffered – two-thirds of these respondents still believed that Stalin had been positive for the country. Many thought that, under Stalin, people had been ‘kinder and more compassionate’. Even with knowledge of the millions who were killed, the Russians, it appeared, continued to accept the Bolshevik idea that mass state violence can be justified to meet the Revolution’s goals.

In the autumn of 2011, millions of Russians watched the TV show The Court of Time (Sud vremeni), in which various figures and episodes from Russian history were judged in a mock trial with advocates, witnesses and a jury of the viewers, who reached their verdict by voting on the telephone. The judgements arrived at in this trial by state TV do not hold out much hope for a change in Russian attitudes. Presented with the evidence of Stalin’s war against the peasants and the catastrophic effects of forcible collectivisation, in which millions died of starvation and many more were sent to the Gulag camps or remote penal settlements, 78 per cent of the viewers nonetheless believed that these policies were justified, a ‘terrible necessity’ for Soviet industrialisation. Only 22 per cent considered them a ‘crime’.

Politically the Revolution may be dead, but it has an afterlife in these mentalities, which will continue to dominate the Russian polity for many years.

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