Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 12 – It is
emblematic of the state of Russian intellectual life under Vladimir Putin that
the Moscow Institute of Russian History chosen to mark the 150th
anniversary of Lenin’s birth on March 5, the anniversary of Stalin’s death, and
that speakers repeated Soviet-era shibboleths about the Bolshevik leader, Igor
Chubais says.
“It is perfectly clear that official
social science is incapable of breaking with the dead ideological dogmas of the
Soviet past,” the independent historian and commentator says. “Official history
is a dead weight which prevents society from understanding the past and this
means as well does not allow it to draw correct conclusions and plans for the
future.”
Removing Lenin from the mausoleum on
Red Square should happen now before the situation gets worse, and all Russians
of good will must work to drive Leninist ideas and ideas about Lenin out of the
head of Russians rather than allowing these things to fester and metasticize (mk.ru/social/2020/03/12/prishla-pora-vynesti-nevynosimogo-ilicha-iz-mavzoleya.html).
Chubais says he attended the March 5th
meeting because he wanted to hear “first hand” from senior professors what is
new in Russian thinking about Lenin. But “alas, it turned out that the main
speaker presented views which would have sounded in this very same hall five or
35 or even 50 years ago.”
The audience was told as it would
have been told before about “’the great revolutionary,” “the Russian empire as
the condemned weak link” in the world order, and that “Lenin was a patriot, a
humanist and a man of the era of the Enlightenment.” In Russia today, Chubais says, when people
want to turn things upside down, they insist that things must not be turned
that way.
When he had the chance to speak,
Chubais said, he said he agreed with the speaker that no one can write history
without the facts and thus very much regretted that the Lenin collection in the
Russian state archives remains closed, thus prevent a more serious discussion
of his place in the history of Russia.
The independent historian made five
points, each of which calls into question the official Soviet-Russian view of
the Bolshevik leader:
·
Lenin,
as Solzhenitsyn said, “was the murderer of Russia.” In fact, Lenin said as much
himself in State and Revolution. He was thus not “the patriot” the historical
establishment seeks to present him as.
·
Russia was not the weak link in the world of
states. Before 1914, it was booming and projected to be the world leader by
mid-century. World War I posed challenges it could not easily cope with, and
Russians responded with the February revolution that installed the democratic
Provisional Government.
·
What happened in Russia in October 1917 was
not a revolution but a coup. “A revolution is the result of broad social
activity when society seeks the recognition of its rights … a coup is the action
of a narrow group of conspirators.” Remembering
this difference should permit Russians to distinguish conspirators from
revolutionaries, “the Euromaidan from ‘the storming of the Winter Palace,’
which never took place.”
·
October 25 took place because Berlin feared
that Austro-Hungary was about to make a separate peace with Petrograd, and so
Lenin ordered his subordinates to arrest the Provisional Government to prevent
that from happening lest the war end and the Entente win.
·
Lenin was no man of the Enlightenment. He
introduced total censorship, he closed all humanities faculties in Russian
universities, he exiled the intellectual elite of the country and he burned
books.
All this,
Chubasi says, makes it clear that “Lenin was the most horrible catastrophe of our
state during the 12 centuries of Russian history, comparable only with the Mongol
yoke!” He must be carried out of the mausoleum and his ideas and ideas about
him must be driven from our minds.
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