Russians Care Little if Their Image of the Past is True, Only Whether It’s Good, Sokolov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 16 – Historians see as their task determining whether something happened or not and then explaining it. That is, their focus is on whether something is true or false. But ordinary Russians, Nikita Sokolov says, don’t care about that. They care only about whether their image of the past is good or bad, something entirely different.

            That is why, the deputy director of the Yeltsin Foundation says is a major reason why Russians engage in so much mythmaking about the past and hold onto the myths even after these are shown to be false and why fights over history are so intense and bitter (rosbalt.ru/moscow/2019/03/16/1769716.html).

            Sokolov made this observation in leading off a discussion jointly organized by the Yeltsin Foundation and the Gaidar Foundation at Moscow’s Jewish Museum on “Homo Soveticus: Soviet Man at 100.” And he insisted that as a result, “the struggle about historical assessments is not a struggle for the past but for the future.”

            Other speakers elaborated on this theme and showed the ways in which it has pernicious influence on a wide variety of issues. Nikolay Petrov of the Higher School of Economics, for example, pointed out that Russian history is “the history of rulers, and it is to a large extent projected by them.”

            “The powers that be today,” he continues, are such that all tsars by definition must be good. We study history not to learn how people lived. We study only how our heroic country gave back as good as it got and extended its territory.”

            Indeed, Petrov says, in the heads of both ordinary citizens and those in power, “the main elements of our greatness are above all two: nuclear weapons where we rank second in the world behind the US and a gigantic territory.”

            Sokolov for his part notes that the Russian economy has always been extensive rather than intensive, seizing new resources rather than developing those it already has. As a result, the authorities aren’t concerned about developing schools and laws but in destroying them if they get in the way of its unlimited access to resources.

            Petrov adds that the state has not been entirely successful in imposing its vision of history because “the Russian people knows it much better than its television suggests.”  It will be led far in any direction but there are limits, including in the population’s assessment of Stalin, he suggests.

            One place where people get more realistic pictures of the past is in the study of local history. But over the last decade or so, the current Russian government has done what it can to destroy such history, not only because it encourages a diverse view of the Russian past but because it promotes a more honest one, Petrov continues.

            “When an individual views history not as abstract, when he sees his country through his family, his city, or his village, he is less given to accepting myths,” he says. “But we are a country deprived of its roots on its own territory.  Because of the enormous movement of peoples, there is no place we associate with our family.”

            Instead, Russians have the sense that they are accidentally in any one place and may soon be shifted to another, an attitude that undermines an honest approach to the past but that is exactly what the current powers that be in Russia want, Petrov concludes.