Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 22 – From the
oldest manuscripts to the latest textbooks, “the entire history of Russia has
been invariably presented as the history
of the state” rather than the history of the people, a situation that has kept
Russians from viewing themselves as a nation apart of the state and thus
retarded national development, according to Yaroslav Butakov.
The Russian historian argues that by
reducing the complex history of Russia to “’a genealogy’” of its leaders,
Russian rulers have advanced their claim over places and peoples which were
never Russian in any national sense and which have little in common with that
nation (rufabula.com/articles/2014/10/21/history-of-the-russian-people).
But at least as significantly, this
approach to the history of Russia has deprived Russians of an understanding of
their origins and development as a nation, Butakov says. “A significant part of
the Russian people has simply been thrown beyond the limits of the official ‘fatherland’
history.”
The Old Believers, the Dukhobors,
the Cossack-Nekrasovites, and so on were simply cast out of the nation because
they were not willing to subordinate themselves
to the state as a result of their religious convictions and thus have been
deprived by Russian historical “’science’” of “the right to be considered as
part of the Russian people.”
Moreover, Butakov continues, as far as
the Pomor region, the Middle Volga, the North Caucasus, the Urals, Siberia and
the Far East are concerned, their history “officially begins from the moment at
which these territories were included within the Russian state, even though
they had proud and rich histories before that time.
Such “an ignoring of their histories is
a typical approach of colonizers.”
Russian historians have largely
neglected and the official version of history has ignored the pre-Russian
periods of the enormous territories over which the Russian state has spread and
even more the fact that “today’s ‘Russians by passport’” are not so much “a
people of a single origin” as “a conglomerate of various ethnoses, unified only
by a single state language.”
The official history has also failed to
investigate how the Russian people lived as opposed to how the Russian state
behaved, Butakov says, and that has meant that Russians do now know as much
about their own nation and its past and present as they need to in order to be
able to construct a genuinely national future.
An adequate history of the Russian
people must include in itself attention to anthropology, ethnography, regional
groups, family patterns, forms of territorial administration, religious faith
and practice, including all the varieties of those things, and many other
topics as well, he says – even though the supporters of the official version
may not like the results.
Historical studies which focus on this “human
dimension” have “already for a long time become the norm for European
historical science,” Butakov says, but they have only just begun in Russia.
Many had hoped that glasnost would allow many questions to be answered, but
that hope has proven an illusion with the imposition of a new official history
on many issues.
“In general,” he concludes, “the real history of the Russian
people and particularly its most recent period has still to be clarified. The
capacity of Russian historical science to formulate these questions, to raise
them, and to require from the state conditions for that to happen are a
barometer of the maturity of this science.”
And
until Russian historians are able to pursue such investigations and communicate
their findings to the entire Russian population through textbooks and other
means, one will not even be able to speak of a genuine “Russian nation, because
there is no nation without an interest to the truth about its history, however
shocking at times this truth turns out to be.”
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