Mosnews.com, April 27, 2005Food for thought.
Russia Returning to Ways of Stalin - Academic
Historian and honorary president of the Russian State University for the Humanities Yuri Afanasiev believes Stalinism is currently being rehabilitated in Russia.
“Attempts to pass an official or semi-official history of Russia have been made. It is the same as history in Stalin’s times falsified, biased, ideologized,” Afanasiev was quoted by Newsru.com as saying at a conference, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of perestroika.
“We are going back to the epoch of Stalin’s dictatorship. Many historical facts are presented in the way he used to interpret them,” the historian went on.
Afanasiev recalled that World War II started for the USSR not with the invasion by Nazi forces of the country’s territory, but with the participation of Soviet armed forces in battles against Hitler’s enemies in Europe. “But you cannot find it in our school textbooks now,” he said. In his opinion the result of the victory over the Nazis was “not liberation, but the subjugation of Europe”.
The historian explained that the “powerful process” of the collapse of Stalinism started during World War II, when Soviet soldiers, sent to Europe, realized what kind of values the rest of the world lived in. But when they came back, their hopes and expectations were ruined. “Tens of thousands of invalids were sent to the northwestern island of Valaam so they did not spoil the ’aesthetic view’ of Soviet cities. They all were buried at the same cemetery, which was later destroyed,” Afanasiev stressed.
He called Stalin’s power “cannibalistic” and concluded that modern Russia “has no democratic institutions, such as a parliament, a court of justice and so on. There are only plaster casts with
the same names.”
Thursday, April 28, 2005
"We are going back to the epoch of Stalin’s dictatorship."
Saw this on the always-worthwhile Johnson's Russia List:
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20 comments:
Big deal. You can find some academic to say anything about anything. Comparing Putin to Stalin is insane.
Who the hell reads JRL anymore anyway?
You are right about being able to find an academic who will say anything. Just like you'll always be able to find 65% of the Russian population who claim to support whoever the current leader is, if you do the polling right.
And I would challenge you to point out where exactly in that article you see Putin being compared to Stalin. Obviously, there is no comparison. Stalin did far worse things than Putin will ever do; after all, Stalin was actually in charge of the country and was either feared or respected by most of the population. Putin, I think, is more and more just ignored.
Who reads JRL? Good question. I can't say I read it every day, but I think that a fair amount of people in the US do; and since it contains so many articles, there's generally something interesting in it every day. Is there a better aggregator of English-language news about Russia now? Do tell...
How else can a header like ""We are going back to the epoch of Stalin’s dictatorship" be interpreted?
I have lived in Moscow 5 years, and the only people I know who are really anti-Putin are 1) uneducated people in their 20s and 2) elderly Zyuganov supporters. I have never met a single supporter of SPS in my life. I used to know Yavlinsky supporters, but now they are pro-Putin and think Yavlinsky is a loser. (Which he is.) Living standards in Russia are rising, even though I know people hate to admit this because they can't bring themselves to say anything nice about Putin, but it is true and that is why they support him.
JRL is useless if you know Russian. If you're a monolingual English-speaker, it's useful if you want to see Russia coverage as filtered through the eyes of David Johnson and Michael McFaul (MF is still at Carnegie, isn't he)? I do not see what the point is in Johnson sending out Washington Post and NYT editorials. They are devoid of intelligence and anyone who wants to can get them through other means. Johnson also has a history of censuring people he doesn't like. What I do is check out Transitions Online, Untimely Thoughts, Moscow News, Moscow Times, RBC, and Eurasia Insight daily in English, and Izvestia and Argumenty i Fakty in Russian, usually the latter since it's more in my reading comprehension level.
Better to just sub to RBC than to JRL if you're just interested in news.
Fair enough.
I agree that the organized "opposition" (SPS, Yabloko) is a failure, and that they failed on their own merits, when they still had a more or less level media playing field. The problem is that now the playing field is no longer level for new entrants into the political marketplace of ideas.
I know Russian and read lots of Russian online and print news media (as many as I have time for), but I don't think JRL is "useless." It aggregates things and even if you know Russian as well as I do (I've lived in Moscow for 3 1/2 years this time and spent 3 years as a foreign service brat in Leningrad in the 1980's, going to a school where I was the only foreigner), it's still quicker to read things in English. Of course there is a filter on JRL, but as long as you read it with that in mind I don't think it's any worse than the editorial slant imposed by any publication.
Your list of sources is good, and I'll check out Eurasia Insight daily (never heard of it before, I must confess), but not everyone has time to systematically visit so many websites. JRL helps the lazy or time-deprived ones among us, I guess. If you do read Russian media, do you ever check out Novye Izvestiia?
Well, yeah, "useless" was hyperbole. (I have a grudge against JRL for personal reasons.) I have come across some good material on there, esp. in the Schofield's (sp?) supplement that comes out occasionally, and it was through JRL that I discovered a variety of sources. It is a good service, but not as valuable, I think, now that more and more news sources are becoming available.
Actually Yavlinsky is a figure I respect as a person, if not as a politician. What annoys me about the Western ranting about the "tame Duma" is that the Duma is tame because none of the parties have anything to offer ordinary people. SPS is seen as the party of the oligarchs, and Yavlinsky is seen by and large, I think, as having his head in the clouds. The CPRF discredited itself. That leaves United Russia, Rodina, and the LDPR. Given those three, I would vote for UR. (Way back in the day, I had hopes Glazyev would transform the CPRF into a Western European-style Social Democratic Party, maybe take the non-loony part of the CPRF and merge it with Yabloko, but that didn't happen.)
Let's face it -- the only party in Russia that has ever had a mass base was the CPRF. Russia's parties are the parties of personalities -- UR is the party of Putin, SPS of Cubais, Rodina of Rogozin, the LDPR of Zhirinovsky, Yabloko of Yavlinsky. You can't build a democratic polity out of a party system based on personal charisma.
No, I don't read NI, or not regularly. Maybe I should.
Nice blog, by the way.
Hi, SpinningOne, s nastupayushem prazdnikom!
Anonyomus was me.
Well, I can't comment on your experience -- only my own -- and in what I think of as "the representative group," which is educated, middle-class people in their 30s and 40s, people I know tend to support Putin. These are the people whose views I tend to trust since they were adults throughout the whole perestroika-postperestroika period and tend to see the larger picture. Most of them view Putin has desperately trying to handle the mess left by Yeltsin. (This is also Gorbachev's view, though he's become less ardently pro-Putin since the monetization of benefits, according to the interviews I've read.) Less-educated people tend to support Rodina, and elderly not-so-educated people tend to support the CPRF. These are overgeneralizations, of course -- I went out on a date recently with a young woman who was a fan of Stalin, and am editing the translation of a book by an extremely well-educated Academician now living in the UK who is a passionate Communist.
Interestingly, the father of a good friend of mine is KGB/FSB, and hugely dislikes Putin because he sees him as too weak and indecisive. He says the FSB's hands are tied.
Khakamada's no longer with SPS, as far as I know?
I was under the impression that Yeltsin was very popular from around 1989-1992, but fell to single-digit approval ratings shortly thereafter, right?
I wrote:
"These are overgeneralizations, of course -- I went out on a date recently with a young woman who was a fan of Stalin, and am editing the translation of a book by an extremely well-educated Academician now living in the UK who is a passionate Communist."
Come to think of it, I work with a lot of scientists, and they tend to support the CPRF to greater or lesser extents. The obvious reason for this is the huge decline in funding for science (and pay for scientists) from 1991 to today. Of course, one of the top CPRF people won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics.
I once met Khakamada very briefly in an airport (a funny story I won't recount here).
My problem with Committee 2008 is what I see as their obsessive anti-Putin focus. How can you run just as "anti-Putin" when most of the country supports him? Such rhetoric will instantly alienate most people. I think a better strategy would be "Putin has done some good things, but we can do something better..." and then describe what that something better is, and how to get there.
I think that you may be idealizing the West. It's not all that wonderful, you know. I think that after the fall of the Soyuz lots of people in Russia traded in their feeling that there is a "svetloe budushchee kommuizma" for the idea that there is a "svetloe napravlenoe razvitiya." My instinct is that it would be best for Russia neither to join West nor East (which nowadays means China), but rather to work out a place between them.
Hello, me again. Thanks for the discussion.
I ran into Khaky in the airport. It was a one-hour stopover in New York on a flight from Moscow to Washington. I asked one of the guards if I could step out of the holding room we were in and he refused. Kind of angered and in nicotene withdrawal, I said something like, "what a barbaric country! You can't smoke in the airport!" I heard a woman start laughing at that, turned around and lo and behold it was Khakamada.
I can't see how any Stalin-type phenomenon could take place. For something like that, you need a powerful ideology that people are willing to kill or be killed for, and Russia can't even come up with a national idea, let alone an ideology. As I've said elsewhere, I think the main threat to Russia right now lies not in centralization, but in its opposite, radical decentralization/disintegration.
As to whether things are worse or better now -- it's pretty hard to assert that Russia's not better off today than it was in the 1990s economically. Public sector wages are higher, pensions and salaries are mostly being paid on time, etc. This isn't a small thing. (Though it would be very wrong, of course, to credit it mostly to Putin -- it's largely high oil prices and the effects of the 1998 devaluation -- but I don't think he should be given _none_ of the credit.)
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about with SPS and most of the liberals: the recent meeting in Moscow decrying Putin as a dictator. If Putin were really a dictator, that meeting would have been held in a dark cellar, not in a conference hall with journalists, and the attendees would be in dungeons or shot. Or the SPS Duma campaign TV ad featuring Khakamada, Chubais and Nemtsov is a private jet playing with their laptops. It was the worst political campaign ever. How is your average Russian, say, truck driver in Omsk ever going to vote for people with that kind of image? It's like holding up a big sign saying "we are for the rich people in the private jets with laptops."
I think Russia needs to find a third, fourth, whatever path simply because Russia is _not_ a Western country or an Eastern country. (Ignoring for the moment that there is really no united "West" or "East" and that all those countries are different.) It's a unique civilization. For one thing, Western countries are all either nation-states or more-or-less culturally homogeneous settler-states like the US or Australia. Russia is not -- Russia is a mulinational post-imperial federation in which probably as many different languages are spoken as in the EU. The country Russia most closely resembles, I think, is India, which is also a multnational federation (which also appoints its governors).
As far as foreign policy goes, Russia has to be oriented toward both West and East just because of geography.
[b]Afanasiev recalled that World War II started for the USSR not with the invasion by Nazi forces of the country’s territory, but with the participation of Soviet armed forces in battles against Hitler’s enemies in Europe. “But you cannot find it in our school textbooks now,” he said.[/b]
I am learning at scool now and I can confirm that we have nothing like that in our textbooks, but can anyone confirm that it's true?
"At 9:52 PM, Danil said…
[b]Afanasiev recalled that World War II started for the USSR not with the invasion by Nazi forces of the country’s territory, but with the participation of Soviet armed forces in battles against Hitler’s enemies in Europe. “But you cannot find it in our school textbooks now,” he said.[/b]
I am learning at scool now and I can confirm that we have nothing like that in our textbooks, but can anyone confirm that it's true?"
I assume they're talking about the Ribbetrov-Molotov pact, when Germany and the USSR divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence? Personally I think this should be viewed as Stain trying to buy tims.
chris: I let myself not to agree with you in your comparison Russia with EU and India. there is no dominating nation/language in India or in EU, no nationality
that forms more than 50% of the population. in Russia russians form 83% of the population; in adding to that, most of non-russians manage Russian and for
many of these non-russians (like me, I'm Tatarian in origin) Russian is their mother-language. thus, unlike India or EU, we have no nationalities competitive
with Russians.
Although, that doesn't mean Russia should not be a federation, it should be it, but not this feudal federation like it is now. For example, the president of
Bashkortostan, where I live, is just some feudal princeling which has been governing this region during last 15 years for the loyality towards Moscow. In
2004 we had latter governor elections here, and during the election campaign local mass media exalted M. Rakhimov and shamelessly defamed his
opponents, they tried to abolish some opponents' registrations for the elections; tons of counterfeit bulletins for Rakhimov were found and many other
unlawful things took place which i don't even want to talk about. in the second round of the elections Mourtaza Rakhimov took 91% of votes (!!!), but i dont
know ANYONE who voted for him. It's obvious that this lawlessness is known and supported by towarisch Putin. I am not sure if you are interested in what I say, though, and sorry for my so-so English.
what the hell with my post
can't fix it (
Hello Danil,
I'm very interested in what you have to say.
Like I wrote somewhere here before, Bashkortostan is one of my examples of places where appointing the governors might be a good idea. I was hoping the recent protests over the gov would result in his being fired -- what happened with that, finally? I haven't seen anything about it in the media.
Yes, you're right, Russia is a lot more dominated by one ethnic group/language than India -- but I still think India's a better comparison to Russia than Germany or the United States. (And India _does_ have a dominant language: English.)
Chris,
Thanks for visiting and starting a real debate. I was up in SPB all weekend and was too tired to post anything when I got back, but I don't really have much new to add to this discussion anyway, except to say that I think you make some fundamentally wrong - and strangely naive, in some cases - assumptions which lead you to incorrect conclusions.
Also, I am interested in your motivations, because I think they help explain your assumptions. It seems that you are interested in stability in Russia, but don't you think it matters at what cost stability (and growth, preferably) is achieved?
Aside from that, I only wanted to respond to some of the specific points you made:
You wrote: "My problem with Committee 2008 is what I see as their obsessive anti-Putin focus. How can you run just as "anti-Putin" when most of the country supports him? Such rhetoric will instantly alienate most people. I think a better strategy would be "Putin has done some good things, but we can do something better..." and then describe what that something better is, and how to get there."
Did you follow the 2004 US presidential campaign? The Democrats' message was almost 100% anti-Bush; I think most observers agreed that they didn't articulate their vision for the country or why people should vote for Kerry, and I think there were more than a few Democrats who thought that Bush was so self-evidently bad that there was no way he could be re-elected. Clearly, this strategy, if it can even be called that, did not work, but it was used by the US opposition party against a popular sitting president, so the basic idea of running in opposition to the status quo is not as outlandish as you suggest.
One problem for Committee 2008 is that they don't know who they are going to be running against or what unexpected turns Putin's succession planning might take, which makes it even more important for them to articulate their vision for Russia's future. This is made difficult by the fact that, unlike the Democratic Party in the US (which is similarly often observed to lack unity and to operate at cross-purposes to itself), the Russian opposition does not have free access to the national media and is effectively unable to solicit meaningful campaign contributions, now that those in the country with money have seen what happens to people (e.g., Khodorkovsky) who support "liberal" causes.
You wrote: "I can't see how any Stalin-type phenomenon could take place. For something like that, you need a powerful ideology that people are willing to kill or be killed for, and Russia can't even come up with a national idea, let alone an ideology."
I agree that those days are not coming back any time soon, but I think you are dead wrong about why. You assume a Soviet (or Putin-era) textbook's view of history. Do you think all of the rank-and-file World War II veterans whose heroism is rightfully being celebrated this week were believers in Stalin or in some "powerful ideology"? Sadly, many of them stormed westward only because they knew they would be shot by their own countrymen if they retreated. The inability of Stalinism to motivate the masses during World War II is why the leader allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to enjoy something of a renaissance during the war years. Religious nationalism and fear of one's own government - is that the kind of "national idea" Russia should be seeking?
In fact, the only thing necessary for a "Stalin-type phenomenon" is the ability to create a universal climate of fear and/or xenophobia. One has to grant that Stalin was a genius, albeit an evil one, in his manipulation of domestic politics - he was able to create a group of elites who owed everything they had to the regime and therefore would indeed be willing to die or kill (as they preferred) for it. This was a key element of Stalin's success, and, while the comparison is tenuous, something that Putin's team also seems to be trying to do. To the extent that they bring more structures under state control, they will have more favors to dole out and more people who owe their livelihood to the regime and will think twice before criticizing it publicly. Fortunately, Russia remains a sufficiently open society to prevent the return of mass fear and paranoia on the level of the late 1930's.
As for Stalin's ability to motivate the masses, he was able to show them that where their parents had been peasants, they had the chance to become factory workers, and their children would have the chance to become engineers. There was real economic progress made in the Soviet Union in the interwar period.
This brings me the next comment of yours with which I'd like to take issue: "As to whether things are worse or better now -- it's pretty hard to assert that Russia's not better off today than it was in the 1990s economically. Public sector wages are higher, pensions and salaries are mostly being paid on time, etc. This isn't a small thing."
I agree that these are important measures of a government's success or failure; however, they should not be the only benchmarks. Again, the USSR in the interwar years did achieve tremendous successes with industrialization, literacy, and rural electrification campaigns, but I don't think anyone would choose to have the other aspects of those years repeated.
You wrote: "Or the SPS Duma campaign TV ad featuring Khakamada, Chubais and Nemtsov is a private jet playing with their laptops. It was the worst political campaign ever."
I could not agree with you more. The first time I saw this ad, I could not believe it was for real; the second time I saw it, I wrote off SPS in my mind for good as being hopelessly out of touch with the electorate. The sad thing is that someone needs to be articulating these liberal ideas, but it's not clear whether there's anyone capable of doing it.
Anyway, thanks again for the discussion.
You seem to have a lot of ideas on the proper direction for Russia - perhaps you should start a blog of your own. Until then, you're welcome to use the comments space here.
P.S. Galya, "sochuvstvuyuschij" would be "sympathetic to" or "a sympathizer" in English. Those terms can be used when talking about someone's attitude toward a political movement.
You write:
"You seem to have a lot of ideas on the proper direction for Russia - perhaps you should start a blog of your own. Until then, you're welcome to use the comments space here."
Thank you very much for your kind offer -- I'll take you up on it. Right now -- I just got home and it's time to sleep. Pora zasnut'. Will send responses tomorrow.
PS I admire your passion.
OK, it's late and I'm sleepy, but I have enough energy to cut and paste. For what it's worth, this is the key paragraph in the recent Ekho Moskvy interview with Gorbachev (I know he's disliked in Russia, but not usually for "liberal" reasons). (OK, I was wrong, I got this via JRL, JRL's useful after all.) I tend to agree with Gorby here, despite all my other criticisms of him:
Gorbachev: During his first term of office the President accomplished what he had to accomplish. He inherited chaos, decline, disintegrating army and other sectors in a dire state. Had President Putin only done what he managed to do during his first term in office, had he stepped down after that, his name would have gone into history. People feel that. People are smarter than we think. This explains why there is support of 60, 70, 80 percent. They hope that now that the situation has stabilized, he will go farther. And I share their hopes.
Chris,
My cynical interpretation is that Gorbachev is "smarter than we think" also. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, he don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - all he has to do is watch Vremia and Vesti to see that in terms of the informational space the country is drifting back to the times of his predecessor (and Putin's fellow KGB alumnus) Yurii Andropov. Gorbachev has a nice, relatively low-profile lifestyle, but in order to maintain it, he has to be allowed to appear in the Russian media every now and then. He has a foundation which needs to stay in the good graces of the tax authorities if it is to survive. Why would he want to jeopardize all of that by criticizing the very thin-skinned Putin administration?
I finally got here, after several days, and will answer in more detail this weekend (because I was out this evening, and alcohol is not conducive to rational debate). But briefly:
COME ON! Are you serious? Gorby disagrees with you -- therefore he must have been bought off, despite the obvious reasons for his respect for Putin, such as Russia's consolidation, which Gorby tried hard to achieve(when "Russia" meant "the USSR") and rising standard of living? Maybe Gorby actually believes what he said -- is that a possibility? Do you have any evidence for your claim? I want hard data of when Gorby was bought off. If you have any, please send it to Zavtra -- I'm sure they will pay a pretty penny indeed.
Chris,
Come back from the Victory Day holiday and post your promised detailed answers!
Regarding your rant about my last comment, I don't think I said Gorbachev was "bought off," just that he is smart enough (and sufficiently successful within the Soviet system) to know that sometimes it's best not to rock the boat. The scary thing about the government is not that they buy people off or provide incentives to be pro-administration (although they have done that in the case of the perks provided to members of Idushchie Vmeste) - of course they did not do that in Gorbachev's case and I did not suggest that - it's that they provide disincentives to speak out against the administration's policies, i.e., I think Mikhail Sergeevich knows that if he has negative opinions about the policies being conducted then he's better off keeping them to himself. I do remember him speaking out about things in the past couple of years, but I think it's clear that certain elements within the government are no longer lenient about those who protest publicly. And of course it is possible that he actually believes what he said.
Come back, Chris, and comment on what's happening in Uzbekistan. It was so chatty here for a few days, and now it seems lonely without all of the comments.
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