Russians talk more often about food prices, welfare and salaries than about history. In this they are no different from most other peoples. But the twentieth century was a troubling period for generations of their families, and every Russian leader seeking public support has to supply an account of the past that enough citizens find plausible and appealing. They need to feel that the Putin team will end the era of traumas and enable them to benefit from the opportunities ahead.
Putin knows that tutoring the public imagination is not something he could do alone. Not least because what he learned about the history of the twentieth century during his time at Leningrad State University came only from compulsory courses in Marxism-Leninism. As a result, once he took office, he sought help from well-informed consultants, even including fierce critics of the Kremlin’s policies such as Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy radio station and a former history teacher. After communism was consigned to the dustbin, the ruling elite looked for lessons it could learn from the annals of tsarism. When the baffled Venediktov asked Putin why he would choose to talk to someone who opposes the official political line, Putin quipped that he was willing to discuss things in private with enemies but drew the line at traitors.1
Another surprising source of advice was the veteran crusading anti-communist and former political prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Putin frequently met with Solzhenitsyn, even awarding him one of the prestigious State Prizes not long before his death in 2007.2
Such encounters enable Putin himself to appear as a man of culture, a man with an inquiring, if not an altogether open, mind. They also allow him to parade his patriotic fervour, for example in 2013 when he mentioned that he agreed with Solzhenitsyn’s call for an increase in the Russian population.3 Putin predictably cribs many of his ideas from conversations and leaves it to his speech writers to find the best quotations from Russia’s intellectuals for use in his oratory. But it is worth noting that he has a distinct preference for sources who are dead and unable to answer back.
Putin and other Kremlin leaders continually pillage history for help with the present. They are nimble marauders, plundering only those items that will serve current political purposes. But like the Vandals who sacked Rome in 455, they find their thinking affected and impregnated by what they discover in their loot.
Their favourite aphorisms are by distinguished Russian authors who affirm the values of leadership, patriotism and the collective will, preferably with a smattering of contempt for the West. As well as Solzhenitsyn, Putin likes to quote the Christian émigré philosophers Ivan Ilin and Nikolai Berdyaev.4 While Solzhenitsyn helped revive Russian literature after decades of battering by Marxism-Leninism, Berdyaev, banned from publication by the Soviets, was a master of Russian philosophical prose. Ilin’s philosophical writings constituted an act of aggression on the language, although his political articles are succinct and punchy, but Berdyaev, who in his long life moved from liberal Marxism to liberal individualism, is useful only in small snatches. Solzhenitsyn helpfully despised Western decadence and called for Russo-Ukrainian unity as well as a firm hand at the levers of Kremlin power. Only Ilin has all the features that Putin is after. Ilin was a lifelong nationalist enemy of Marxism and the USSR. As an émigré in Weimar Germany, he welcomed the rise of Nazism as the antidote to Soviet communism. If Russian leaders are going to applaud his patriotism, they have to observe silence about his enduring support for aspects of European fascism. But Ilin helpfully warned against Western schemes to break up ‘Russia’, and he saw Ukraine as part of the Russian patrimony. He wished for a strong leader at the head of a national dictatorship. It is easy to imagine why, under Putin, he has been endorsed as an intellectual authority. In 2005 Ilin’s remains were repatriated from Germany and reinterred at Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery in a solemn ceremony led by Patriarch Alexi II.5
Putin’s treatment of Ilin reflects the interests and purposes of the ruling group.6 Following the route pioneered by Yeltsin, he laments those periods when the Russian people – or its discontented elements – resorted to violence, which disastrously diverted the country’s course of development. As both an ex-communist and anti-communist, Putin deprecates the entire idea of armed revolution. ‘What we need now,’ he believes, ‘is evolution.’7 He argues that Russia has come nearest to fulfilling its potential when Russians have lived in peace under stable rule.
He has no animus against the Romanov dynasty that governed for over three hundred years. He applauds the tsars who made Russia into a great power and in April 2015 proclaimed, ‘I would remind you [. . .] of the words of Alexander III, our emperor, who said that Russia has only two allies: its army and navy. And in his parting words to his son [the future Nicholas II] he then said that everyone is afraid of our vastness.’8 In November 2016, when unveiling a statue of Alexander III outside Crimea’s old Livadia Palace, Putin quoted tsarist Finance Minister Sergei Witte, who said that the emperor achieved peace at home and abroad ‘not by making concessions but by righteous and unshakeable firmness’. The Crimean statue is the eighth of Alexander III erected while Putin has been in power. Putin also remarked that Tsar Alexander had fostered a spurt of industrial growth and was a kindly sponsor of the arts.9 This cloaked the damage that Alexander III did by harshening the cultural censorship and reversing many of the social reforms of the 1860s. The frieze below the statue base shows the novelist Fëdor Dostoevski and the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. Russian schoolchildren could have told Putin that Dostoevski and Mendeleev produced the bulk of their greatest work before Alexander III came to the throne in 1881.10
Another of Putin’s heroes from the Romanov era is Pëtr Stolypin, who served as Nicholas II’s prime minister from 1906 to 1911. When opening the Federal Assembly in October 2016, Putin remarked: ‘More than a hundred years ago, addressing the State Duma deputies, Pëtr Arkadevich Stolypin said, “We all must unite and agree our efforts, our obligations and rights to support the historic supreme right of Russia: to be strong.”’11
Stolypin was a reforming conservative whose ambition was to restore the status of a great power to Russia and immunize it against the threat of renewed internal insurgency. In December 2013 Putin told the Federal Assembly that local government agencies should emulate the achievements made in Russia before the First World War and paid tribute to the changes introduced by Stolypin to land ownership and to the structure of industry.12 Stolypin is famous for trying to enable the emergence of a class of individual smallholders in the villages, but as events were to show, most peasants were hostile to his agrarian reform – and it is difficult to know what Stolypin did to change the empire’s industrial structure.
But this is hardly the point. When talking about history, Putin and his speech writers have contemporary politics at the front of their minds. Public approval, not objective historical plausibility, is the goal.
It was in this spirit that Putin, in his annual presidential address to the Federal Assembly on 1 December 2016, heralded the centenary of the February and October Revolutions of 1917:
This is our common history and we need to treat it with respect. This is something that the outstanding Russian and Soviet philosopher Alexei Losev wrote about. ‘We know the thorny road our country has travelled,’ he wrote. ‘We know the long and exhausting years of struggle, want and sufferings, but for a son of the Motherland, this is all something of his own kin, something inalienable.’
I am sure that the absolute majority of our people have precisely this attitude towards their Motherland, and we need history’s lessons primarily for reconciliation and for strengthening the social, political and civil consensus that we have managed to achieve today.
It is unacceptable to drag the splits, anger, grudges and bitterness of the past into our life today, and in pursuit of political and other interests to speculate on the tragedies that affected practically every family in Russia, no matter what side of the barricades our forebears were on. Let’s remember that we are a united people, one single people, and we have only one Russia.13
For Putin, the downfall of the Romanov monarchy and the communist seizure of power a few months later were a double blow that led to tragedy at every level of society. In a speech earlier in 2016, Putin had deplored the gruesome murder of the Romanovs in a Yekaterinburg cellar in summer 1918:
Everyone used to denounce the tsarist regime for its repressions. But what did the establishment of Soviet power begin with? Mass repressions. I’m not talking here about the whole scale of them but simply about the most blatant example: the annihilation and shooting of the tsarist family including the children. There could have been some ideological grounds for the liquidation, I suppose, of potential heirs. But why did they kill Dr Botkin? Why kill the servants – people generally of a proletarian background? What for? The reason was to cover up the crime.14
Though Putin exploits historical episodes for political purposes, he is genuinely interested in the fate of the Romanovs. On his state visit to London in June 2003, Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials witnessed his excitement when they presented him with a volume of declassified documents, including several which touched on this episode. Until then he had been a bored and uncommunicative visitor to the British capital.15
For Putin, it is vital that people should remember the many other horrors that followed the October Revolution:
We never used to give this a second thought. All right, they were struggling against people who were fighting Soviet power with arms in their hands, but why kill the priests? In 1918 alone three thousand priests were shot and ten thousand in a ten-year period. In the Don region, people were drowned in their hundreds under the ice of the river. When you think about it, and when new information appears, you start to evaluate many things in a different way.16
Putin has had no good word to say about Lenin and takes notable exception to the constitution that he imposed in 1922:
If you’re a historian, you must know that Stalin at that time formulated the idea of the autonomization of the future Soviet Union. According to this idea, all the other subject parts of the future state had to enter the USSR on the basis of autonomy with entirely broad authority. Lenin criticized Stalin’s position and said it was an untimely and wrong idea.
Putin’s conclusion was damning:
And so he, Lenin, campaigned for the state – the Soviet Union – to be formed on the basis of full equality with the right of secession from the Soviet Union . . . And this was the time bomb under the edifice of our statehood. Quite apart from the fact that they fixed borders and territories for ethnic groups within an essentially multinational state, the borders were also drawn up arbitrarily and nor were they generally decided on a rational basis. For instance, what was the pretext for handing over the Donbas to Ukraine? The idea was to increase the percentage of the proletariat there so as to have greater social support there. Sheer madness, wasn’t it?17
In the Soviet period Lenin was feted as the man who ‘gathered the lands’ back together after the disintegration of empire in 1917. This cuts no ice with Putin, who denounces Lenin’s constitutional settlement as ill-considered, capricious and disastrous.
Under Putin, church and state have demanded respect for the White commanders who fought the Red Army and its communist leadership in the civil war that followed the October Revolution. The remains of General Anton Denikin were brought back to Russia in 2005. Statues were erected to Admiral Alexander Kolchak in St Petersburg and Irkutsk. Films about the White cause were produced and proved popular. Many commentators represented the Whites as valiant fighters and patriots.18
The communist leadership has long since ceased to attract praise. Lev Trotsky was both reviled and neglected in official Soviet accounts, and though he is no longer overlooked by Russian scholars, he continues to be treated severely. Joseph Stalin, as usual, provokes controversy. No decent Russian condones the Great Terror of 1937–8, but not a few public figures contend that his role in industrializing Russia and defending it against the Third Reich was indispensable – this is one of the Communist Party’s remaining tenets of its old Marxist-Leninist credo. History remains a ground of conflict and Putin has trodden it carefully. About one essential matter, Stalin’s mass repressions in the late 1930s, he speaks bluntly:
Stalinism is associated with the cult of the individual and mass violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like this in Russia today and, I hope, never will be again. Our society is simply different now and would never allow it. But this does not mean that we should not have order and discipline. It means that all citizens of the Russian Federation, regardless of their official position, must be equal before the law.19
At the same time, while Putin recognizes the horrors of Stalinism, he firmly denies that it was the worst phenomenon of the twentieth century. The Third Reich deserves greater condemnation:
First of all, of course, it is impossible to put Nazism and Stalinism on the same plane because the Nazis directly, openly and publicly proclaimed one of their policy goals as the extermination of entire ethnic groups – Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. For all the ugly nature of the Stalin regime, for all the repressions and for all the deportations of entire peoples, the Stalin regime never set itself the goal of exterminating peoples, so the attempt to put the two [regimes] on the same footing is absolutely without foundation.20
This gave rise to speculation that Stalin might be about to receive posthumous rehabilitation, which was heightened in 2015 when a tenton statue of him seated alongside Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt was installed outside the Livadia Palace in Yalta, where they had met in February 1945 to discuss the post-war political and territorial settlement in Europe. Sergei Naryshkin, the State Duma chairman at the time, unveiled the monument to the strains of the Russian national anthem. Zurab Tsereteli’s sculpture had been rejected by the Ukrainian government ten years earlier, when Yalta had been governed from Kyiv. After the Crimean annexation, however, the Kremlin wanted to celebrate the Yalta Conference, although there were protests from the Crimean Tatars, whose ancestors Stalin had forcibly deported from the peninsula in May 1945.21
Despite these glimmerings of approval, Putin had no patience with Stalin’s policies in eastern Europe in the late 1940s. The forcible exporting of communism, Putin insisted, was a terrible blunder:
After the Second World War we tried to impose our own development model on many eastern European countries, and we did so by force. This has to be admitted. There is nothing good about this and we have to hearken to this today. Incidentally, this is more or less how the Americans are behaving now as they try to impose their model on practically the entire world, and this too will end in failure.22
Admitting that wrongs were done by Russia while insisting that the Americans are the current worst culprits is a very characteristic approach. Putin also knows that most Russians, aside from rabid neo-Stalinists, are unlikely to object to his conclusions.
He is always circumspect when speaking about Nicholas II. Reverence for the Romanovs is widespread in post-communist Russia, and when in 2017 a film was released about the affair between the future tsar and the ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya, there was immediate protest about the erotic content. Few Russians are more devoted to Nicholas’s memory than Duma deputy Natalya Poklonskaya, who served as Crimea’s Prosecutor-General immediately after the Crimean annexation. She joined others in demanding an inquiry as to whether the film was anti-Russian and anti-religious. This led to a counter-reaction from another film director, Stanislav Govorukhin, who was also a Duma deputy as well as the former chair of its Culture Committee. Faced with this dispute, the Ministry of Culture took the safe road of equivocation. On 15 June 2017 the film’s director, Alexei Uchitel, complained to Putin about how his film was being treated. Putin’s response was that, though he respected Uchitel’s career and his patriotism, Poklonskaya had the right to express her opinion. It is important to Putin that dialogue is at least seen to be encouraged and that he avoids becoming personally embroiled in divisive historical debate.23
His comments about Lenin might once have been jarring to the millions of Russians who were brought up to revere the USSR’s founder. But times have changed and there is little risk of controversy so long as Putin avoids anything as drastic as removing Lenin’s mummified corpse from the Red Square mausoleum.
In 2016 Putin showed his deftness at the opening of an exhibition at the Yeltsin Centre in Ekaterinburg. The curators had annoyed nationalists by failing to describe Lt General Andrei Vlasov as a traitor. Vlasov, captured by the Germans on the Eastern Front in 1942, persuaded himself that he could fight on the German side in pursuit of the liberation of Russia from the grip of Stalinism. Towards the end of the war, he revolted against the Germans. This did not save Vlasov from Stalin’s vengeance and he was hanged in Moscow in August 1945. But what was Putin’s opinion?
There’s nothing special in the fact that a discussion is opening up: this is a normal phenomenon. Some take a favourable stance, some hold more liberal views on the continuing events and on the prospects for development, some are of conservative, traditional views. We have always had our blood-and-soil patriots (pochvenniki) and our Westernizers. Some people regard themselves as blood-and-soil patriots. But at the present time when we are remembering the events of 1917, and when we are about to mark the centenary of the revolutionary events in 2017, we must advance towards reconciliation and rapprochement, and not towards rupture and the stirring up of passions.24
This measured response was designed to secure a calm, reasoned discussion of Russia’s troubled past. He did not succeed, and the nation’s history continues to be fought over. But Putin benefits from appearing to stand outside the fray.
Foreign attitudes to that history irritate Putin enormously. The endless fascination with Joseph Stalin in the Western media causes particular resentment. He notes that ‘dictators’ of other nations seldom attract the same attention. Oliver Cromwell’s bloody career is overlooked and a statue of him stands outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. The body of Napoleon, who rampaged across Europe with his conquering armies, is venerated in Les Invalides in Paris. Yet Stalin is demonized. For Putin, there is no mystery about the reasons. The West’s political establishment wants a stick with which to beat Russia and the Russians, and nothing is handier than the record of the long-dead Soviet dictator.25
When they are not waving a stick, they engage in a game of mockery that is equally aggressive. In 2018 the Ministry of Culture banned Armando Iannucci’s black comedy The Death of Stalin. Culture Minister Vladimir Medinski did not dwell on the film’s elementary mistakes about the names of people and institutions. Offence was taken at the scornful tone adopted for so baleful an episode, and perhaps behind everything was the belief that foreigners should keep their noses out. Medinski has turned himself into the administration’s songbird on historical subjects. A prolific author even after occupying ministerial office in 2012, he sought to wash the Russian and Soviet past clean from denigration. He defended Russians under tsarism against charges of indolence, drunkenness and thievery.26 He did this so vigorously that several professional historians concluded that he did protest too much.27 And his most successful book alleged that foreign authors had wrongly highlighted the rape of German women by Soviet soldiers in 1945.28
Putin has often suggested that the USSR was a complex phenomenon. He has mixed emotions about the people’s experience of communism in the decades after the October Revolution. There were benefits in the centrally planned economy, and he has praised the Soviet Union’s advances in health care, education and the expansion of the military-industrial sector that enabled the victory over the Third Reich.29 He shows respect to surviving veteran communists. He held conversations with Vladimir Kryuchkov, who led the August 1991 coup against Gorbachëv. In 2014 he awarded the Order of Honour to Kryuchkov’s fellow plotter Marshal Dmitri Yazov. In February 2019 he commended the courage and professionalism of the Soviet armed forces in the USSR’s war in Afghanistan.30
But he has never endorsed the communist political system or overlooked the weaknesses of its economic institutions. He is not nostalgic about communism but is bitter about the break-up of the USSR, which in April 2005 he described as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century’. His remark is widely misunderstood. He did not at all regret the passing of Soviet communism but rather the consequences of its disappearance: the mass poverty of the 1990s, the rise of the so-called oligarchs and the dislocation of families separated by the new borders.31 Even so, he was guilty at the very least of hyperbole; for he entirely ignored other events that might be thought to deserve a higher ranking as catastrophic. Among them, surely, would be the onset of the two world wars in 1914 and 1939, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Not to forget Russia’s own October 1917 Revolution.
Putin’s preoccupation with the Soviet Union’s disintegration has a distinctive focus: he hates the fact that millions of citizens of Russian nationality found themselves cut off from Russia in the fourteen other newly independent foreign states – he once went as far as calling this a ‘humanitarian tragedy’, adding:
I would like to repeat my argument that the Russian people became the biggest divided people in the world, and that is absolutely a tragedy. And this isn’t to mention the socio-economic dimension when as a result of the collapse a social system fell apart and an economy crumbled – the previous one had been ineffective but when it fell apart, it led to the impoverishment of millions of people, and that’s also a tragedy for real people and real families.32
In Putin’s eyes, demographic separation and societal dissolution were twin features of the same outcome. This attitude was not something that he dreamed up after he came to power. He believes that although things were bad under communist rule they were much worse after the communists fell from power. He sees the 1990s as the national nadir, when an ‘epidemic of collapse’ took hold in the Russian Federation.33 He been saying as much since the early 1990s, when he was a middle-ranking local politician whom nobody tipped to end up climbing to the peak of Russian power. It would seem to indicate that this is a heartfelt opinion.34
Russia’s relations with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are another sensitive spot. These countries regained their independence with the disintegration of the USSR at the end of 1991. Though they had proclaimed their own freedom, the signing by Yeltsin of accords with the Ukrainian and Belarusian presidents in December was the decisive step. The three presidents simultaneously agreed to the formation of a Commonwealth of Independent States that all fifteen of the USSR’s constituent republics would be invited to join. This projected regional grouping would be looser than anything that Gorbachëv would have found acceptable, which is exactly what Yeltsin wanted. But although the Commonwealth of Independent States was duly formed in 1992, its collective purposes were persistently undermined by its members’ wariness about Russia’s wish to dominate them. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania refused point-blank to join. Similar difficulties affected the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which Russia initiated in the same year to fulfil military and other security needs. The only countries that agreed to join at the outset were Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and all of them were wary of becoming vulnerable to Russian pressure.
Visiting Hamburg in February 1994, Estonia’s President Lennart Meri made a speech denouncing the USSR’s illegal annexation of the Baltic States in 1940 and again in 1944. Meri described how he and his family, along with tens of thousands of Estonians, were deported to Siberia. Putin, who at that time was an official in the St Petersburg mayor’s office and was on a work trip to Germany, happened to be present in the audience. Despite being an obscure Russian official, he rose from his seat and theatrically stormed out of the hall.35 For him, evidently, the Red Army’s wartime operations and Stalin’s geopolitical decisions should be venerated. He had no patience with Baltic leaders who denied that the USSR liberated them after expelling the Third Reich. He was deaf to Meri’s point that Estonia became a captive nation under Soviet rule.
Sometimes, moreover, Putin finds it difficult to distinguish between the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, as when he told the Federal Assembly in March 2018:
After the collapse of the USSR, Russia, which in the Soviet period was called the Soviet Union – or Soviet Russia as it also known abroad – lost 23.8 per cent of its territory if we’re talking of our national frontiers, 48.5 per cent of its population, 41 per cent of gross general product, 39.4 per cent of industrial potential (nearly half of our potential, I would underline), 44.6 per cent of its military potential in connection with the break-up of the USSR armed forces among the former Soviet republics.36
This was a truly slippery comment. Putin contends that it is only foreigners who confused the USSR with the Russian Federation. In fact, he does exactly the same thing himself. Russia suffered no loss of territory when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Not a square yard. The newly independent country emerged with its borders intact and in 2014 used armed force to widen those borders at Ukraine’s expense.
Unlike many fellow Russians, Putin has not blamed Gorbachëv or Yeltsin for the way that the country emerged from communism. He prefers to emphasize the difficulties that they faced. In a Time magazine interview in 2007, the American reporter remarked that Putin was not a ‘president-revolutionary’ like Yeltsin. Far from being irritated, Putin agreed:
I nevertheless consider that he and Gorbachëv anyway did what I surely could not have done. They took the step towards the destruction of a system that the Russian people could no longer endure. I’m not convinced I would have been able to decide on such a step. Gorbachëv took the first step and Yeltsin completed the transition, which I believe was an historic and very important one for Russia and the Russian people. They – and above all Yeltsin, of course – gave Russia its freedom: this is an absolutely unconditional historic achievement of the Yeltsin era.37
Putin too has a mission to change everything for the better, but he wants to do it in his own fashion and bring the cycle of Russia’s traumas to an end once and for all.