The study of the past has become a risky occupation in Putin’s Russia. In March, 2021, it was reported that an amateur historian in Siberia, who had investigated his great-grandfather’s execution during the dark Stalin-era purges known as the ‘Great Terror’, was facing charges after a complaint by the son of a secret police official.
The historian had found evidence in official archives of 150 people he said had been complicit in the purges in his hometown, including an NKVD official who had signed his great-grandfather’s death sentence. Clearly, the son of the official concerned was keen to ridicule this revelation, describing it as ‘false information’, and had complained to the local police.
The Russian past has become hyper-sensitive and open to manipulation in other ways, too. Russian nationalists appear to be able to increasingly ‘purge’ what they regard as ‘incorrect’ versions of their country’s history. In May, 2020, Russian nationalist activists removed memorial plates commemorating the execution of 6,000 Polish officers by the Stalinist secret police. The plaques in Tver, a city about 110 miles northeast of Moscow, had been installed in the early 1990s by a human rights group on the site of a former Stalin-era secret police HQ. Russian officials seemed uninterested in taking any action over this act of cultural vandalism. There are plenty of other such examples, which suggests that ‘history’ in Russia today has become weaponised in a Russian version of a ‘culture war’ within the nation.
Indeed, recent surveys of public opinion in Russia have found disturbing evidence that Joseph Stalin is now looked upon by a significant minority as a kind of ‘heroic’ figure in the country’s past. Stalin’s crimes and human rights abuses appear to be fading from Russian memory and a new ‘revisionism’ concerning the former Soviet dictator is seemingly evolving.
In Defence of History
It is important for historians to refute this growing pattern of historical distortion, and to remind and educate people about the brutality of Stalin’s time in power. Some of the recent historiography can be helpful here. A good example was a major study published in 2017 of one of the most murderous episodes in Joseph Stalin’s time as dictator of Soviet Russia, entitled Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Allen Lane, 2017). It offered new perspectives on the still relatively under-researched ‘Holodomor’ (the Ukraine word for ‘death by hunger’).
Written by the award-winning historian Anne Applebaum, whose previous books include Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (2003) – a ground-breaking study which won the Pulitzer prize – Red Famine explored (to use Applebaum’s own words) Stalin’s ‘disastrous decision’ to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms, and the huge and negative impact this policy had on the Ukraine in 1932-33, bringing key parts of the countryside to the brink of mass starvation.
It has been estimated that the decision by Stalin and the Communist Party to force general ‘collectivisation’ on the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1934 led to the deaths of at least 5m people across the whole country, and 4m of these were Ukrainians. Moreover, the Communist state sought to cover all this up, preventing foreign journalists reporting on it to the wider world, and altering official census records within the country. In fact, the Communist regime engaged in a blatant attempt to re-write history.
The Value of the Archive
However, despite this manipulative revisionism, according to Applebaum, thousands of archival records remained in existence, while the Ukrainians themselves kept alive their memory of these horrific times over subsequent generations. Moreover, in the aftermath of the 1985 Chernobyl nuclear accident, a new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals began to challenge the authority and legitimacy of the Soviet system, especially given its toxic industrial policies and notorious secrecy. Part of this involved a ‘re-discovery’ of the ‘Holodomor’.
Applebaum’s new study revealed that she first encountered the story of the famine shortly after the Chernobyl events, when the Ukraine’s independence movement was beginning to flourish in the late 1980s and when, as part of the search for a new national identity and a reclamation of Ukraine’s history, a huge national effort was getting underway to collect the memories of famine survivors. Ukraine achieved its sovereignty in 1991, as part of the break-up of the Soviet Union, and this opened up new research possibilities for Western historians to gain access to previously-closed archives and other invaluable primary sources.
What Applebaum’s study also confirmed was the long-standing suspicion held by Western scholars that the famine in the Ukraine was not just a result of the stupidity or naive ideological ambitions of the Communist State’s ‘collectivisation’ programme, but was a tool deliberately used by Stalin to stamp on any signs of Ukrainian nationalism. In other words, as Applebaum put it, the elite leadership of the Communist Party, firmly under the iron grip of Stalin, decided to use the famine in the Ukraine to crush Ukraine’s desire for sovereignty and nip in the bud any future rebellions by Ukrainian peasants, class traitors or ‘counter-revolutionaries’.
The Reality of Stalinism
As well as decimating the peasant class, this ‘war’ on the Ukraine by Stalin was also underpinned by other harsh and deliberately planned measures: every Ukrainian nationalist leader was executed or imprisoned in labour camps, the Ukrainian language was ruthlessly repressed, and many thousands of Ukrainians and their families were deported to other distant parts of the Soviet Union, many of them dying as a consequence.
All in all, Red Famine undoubtedly reinforced Anne Applebaum’s reputation as one of the West’s leading historians of Stalinist crimes and, in particular, introduced the ‘Holodomor’ to a new generation of students and other readers. And, given the recent and worrying revival of interest in Stalin and other ‘strong men’ in Russia and in various parts of the former Eastern Communist Bloc, it is arguably more important than ever to understand the nature of Stalinism, as well as totalitarian authoritarianism more generally, and the reasons why dictators always prefer physical force rather than reason and democracy.
Dr. Steven Woodbridge specialises in the study of extremism and genocide in the 20th century
(All images: WikiMedia Commons)
Note: This is an updated version of a blog published here in September, 2020.
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