Putin’s Order to Promote Patriotism Repeats Stalin’s ‘Almost Word for Word,’ Kerzhentsev Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 16 – Vladimir Putin’s May 2024 directive to use history lessons in the schools to boost patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life for Russia repeats Stalin’s May 1934 order to do the same thing in the Soviet Union “almost word for word,” according to Boris Kerzhentsev.
    The historian and commentator traces the evolution of Kremlin policy toward history and its use as a propaganda tool in the first decades of Soviet power and then says that the changes Putin has introduced are virtually the same (moscowtimes.ru/2024/11/16/istoriya-v-zakone-kak-gosudarstvo-ispolzuet-proshloe-dlya-podgotovki-pushechnogo-myasa-a147872).
“Like Stalin, Putin’s ‘ideological front’ is rapidly turning into a real military front, on which people fooled by propaganda are dying senselessly. To be sure, foreign agents are not yet mentioned in the text of Putin’s ‘Foundations,’ but this is most likely a matter of time,” Kerzhentsev says.
Indeed, he continues, “some propagandists are already close to, as before, demanding from a high rostrum that ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ be shot ‘like mad dogs,’” as Stalin’s notorious prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky did. And thus one must conclude that despite everything, “for almost a century, nothing has changed in Russia.”
“Using its unlimited resources of violence, control and coercion, the government constantly steals the country's truth about the past, composes its own alternative version of history, and declares it the only true one. And it does so not for the love of writing, but purely for the sake of ensuring the self-preservation of the regime,” Kerzhentsev concludes.