Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 7 – The Putin regime
not only has completely restored the Stalinist conception of World War II but
is promoting it in the media and the schools in ways that will make it ever
more difficult for Russians to break out of that ideological straightjacket,
according to Irina Pavlova (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2017/05/blog-post_6.html).
The US-based Russian historian
points to a recent article in Komsomolskaya Pravda as evidence. Entitled “The Americans Prepared Hitler for
War with the USSR but Stalin Outplayed Them,” it was written by Yevgeny
Spitsyn, an expert consultant to the Duma’s security committee and the author
of history textbooks for Russian schools (kp.ru/daily/26670/3695123/).
According to Pavlova, Spitsyn’s
article is “a symbol of present-day Russian historiography of World War II and
a symbol of the return to the Stalinist interpretation” in the most extreme
way. In it, the writer repeats “all the myths about Stalin as the main
peacemaker and supporter of collective security in the 1930s.”
He treats the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact as “a victory of Stalinist diplomacy.” He repeats the Stalinist claim
about “the liberating advance of the Red Army into Poland on September 17,
1939.” And like Stalinist historians earlier, he overstates the size of the
Germany armies which attacked Russia and understates the number of Soviet
soldiers who were taken prisoner.
And Spitsyn does all this in best or
really worst Stalinist style. He dismisses the work of historians in the 1990s
who sought to treat these issues more honestly as “garbage,” for example; and the
textbook author calls suggestions that Stalin played a role in opening the way
to war slanderous.
Indeed, Pavlova
says, his approach is “symbolic” of a larger problem: Russians are celebrating
a victory in the war without being allowed to understand how and why it began, something
that violates all moral principles and “betrays the memory of the millions who
died in this war.”
Nearly a decade ago, Pavlova
continues, she wrote an essay in Grani in which she suggested that the more the
Putin regime tried to conceal the truth about World War II and Stalin’s role in
it, “the more people will be drawn to the truth” and insist on historical
accuracy about their country’s past (graniru.org/War/m.136132.html).
Today, she says, she is “much less
optimistic” about that than she was nine years ago.
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