Like Hubert Butler I spent some formative years in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. I was there some 50 years after Butler, so the company I kept was different to his. Whereas Butler had befriended the likes of socialist-realist writer Leonid Leonov, one of the founders of the Soviet Writers Union, and had witnessed at first hand the revolutionary fervour of the late 1920s (Mayakovsky had died by his own hand when Butler was there), my own friends all those decades later were more likely to be understated dissident types.
Revolutionary fervour had long since abated by the early 1980s and a resigned cynicism reigned among the self-styled intelligenty in Moscow, Leningrad and those provincial towns which I had the chance to visit. Khrushchev’s “thaw” had frozen over again. Soviet tanks had long since pacified the streets of Budapest and Prague. In Poland General Jaruzelski was now about to do his bit – or so we students were being told – to ensure that no tanks would ever be needed on the streets of Warsaw. As for the Polish students in our hostel, when I asked them – there were more than 400 of them – they preferred to talk about something – anything – else…
Those were the so-called “stagnant” Brezhnev years. “Stagnant” here, as I understood it, was a benign label because it meant that the authorities were less zealous in rooting out anti-Soviet behaviours. The zeal which had marked the Stalin years – with their heady mix of great Russian nationalism and paranoia – had atrophied but had left behind it an atavistic fear of terror, of “the year 1937″ which seemed almost part of the genetic make-up of the people I met. An unspoken subtext seemed to be: could the terror return? It seemed that intergenerational trauma must be real after all.
My Moscow friends avoided the limelight – the cases of Sinyavsky, Daniel, Brodsky, Marchenko and Solzhenitsyn had taught them some important practical lessons about how to handle themselves if ever subject to interrogation – yet they seemed to flourish in their own quiet way. They met, smoked, drank, read, wrote and drew (satirical cartoons) in their modest, sparsely stocked kitchens in Moscow’s khrushchyovki – those identical five-storey apartments built as an alternative to the kommunalki of the 1920s. They spoke sotto voice if the topic ever became sensitive, in case a bugging device was present. They changed carriages frequently when travelling on the metro, so as to shake off KGB “tails” – real or imagined. They passed forbidden literary works or political pamphlets between each other – on Gestetner sheets or microfilm.
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But above all they dared to dream of a time when authentic accounts – “real history” – would replace the Aesopian language and party-speak of official media and publishing circles and become available to everyone. A time when people could, as Solzhenitsyn and Havel wrote, “live in truth”. They knew that such an authentic history existed somewhere. They had read snatches of it in samizdat and tamizdat or heard about it from the so-called “enemy voices” (the shortwave radio broadcasts of Radio Liberty and other forbidden stations from the “rotten West”).
For these Moscow friends of mine their own memory, their personal and family stories, took primacy over any official narrative. One of them – a chemist in a research institute – liked to recall his noble forebears. Before 1917 they had been members of different branches of the Russian Empire’s German and Polish noble stock. For him the Communist period was a waiting room in which he had been detained for longer than he would have liked. At weekends he would retreat to a dacha near Peredelkino and rekindle something of the patrician, wholesome outdoors atmosphere of Turgenev’s Sportsman Sketches or Nobles’ Nest.
The father of another friend managed an animal research laboratory in the closed scientific town of Pushchino, 80 kilometres from Moscow – I needed a special permit to visit. As we younger people sat in the family apartment listening to vinyl recordings of melancholic balladeer Bulat Okudzhava singing about Moscow’s Arbat, we would hear the adults arguing passionately about Stalin’s legacy. I could hear that there was disagreement, and that some of these older people were justifying Stalin’s collectivisation, industrialisation, his pact with Hitler in 1939. “It’s not so simple”, my host was saying. I could not understand why there could be any room for doubt. Had they not read Arkhipelag Gulag? Then I remembered that they probably had not. Would it have made any difference if they had?
I was beginning to see that for some people it was more important to identify with “my people” and to side with the prevailing narrative – whether that be right or wrong – than to dig deeper for some elusive truth. Why argue in favour of a minority position? How could I be right when so many other people seem to think the opposite? I must be missing something … Many years later I noticed that there was an entry about my host from Pushchino in the Russian-language version of Wikipedia. The article said that this man’s father had been declared an enemy of the people in 1932 and that he himself had been sent to the Gulag in 1951, charged with covering up his father’s crimes – but that after Stalin’s death in 1953 the celebrated revolutionary Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, then nearly 90 years old, an associate of Lenin, had interceded for him and that in 1954 the case was dropped. My host’s lifepath had brought him in contact with Communist royalty, it turned out. His own memory – and the experiences of his family – had seemed to provide him with the only history he ever needed.
It was only a few months before that visit to Pushchino that I had arrived in Moscow, by train from East Berlin. The train was to pass through Poznań, Warszawa, Brest, Minsk and Smolensk – could I really be travelling through such places? I had shared a four-berth compartment in our Schlafwagen with an East German student, an East German engineer and his Russian wife – she was from Saratov. The student spent most of the one-and-a-half-day journey explaining why the Berlin Wall was a good thing, why the anti-fascist DDR still needed to defend itself against the fascist BRD and why the capitalist system would ultimately fail. It seemed that he really believed what he was saying.
I had not realised, until I heard him speak, that all the “good Germans” had ended up in the DDR and that the Hitlerites had all been given refuge by the capitalists. The East Berlin worker uprising of 1953, as it turned out, had been a capitalist plot and Walter Ulbricht had been right to crush it. The student was enjoying his studies in Moscow – a wonderful city, wonderful people - and I would enjoy mine too. The engineer and his wife said nothing. They asked me instead about the troubles in Ireland: “It’s Catholics and Protestants, isn’t it – you are always fighting each other? Why?”
I realised that my knowledge of neither German nor Russian was up to this task, for which my school education – in England, as it happens – had left me wholly unprepared. How would I begin to talk about identity … empire … plantation ... settler? How would I explain that each tradition had its own take on what was happening and that religion per se had little to do with anything?
Surely the ambivalence of the terms freedom fighter and terrorist was a feature of all languages, a feature of all conflicts? I was tongue-tied. I could only manage a feeble: “it is complicated”. So my fellow-travellers left the train in Moscow none the wiser – Ireland still seemed to be a place where Catholics and Protestants could not get along with each other… at least in that part of the country which still belonged to the United Kingdom… only this young Irishman said it was complex… whereas in the Soviet Union disputes over religion and identity were a thing of the past, weren’t they?
Scarcely 10 years after that train ride and the Soviet Union was no more. Alternative historical accounts – notably of the period of the “Great Fatherland War” (1941-45) – had started to get published in the Gorbachev years. What better example of this revelation of a hidden past than Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate? This profound and tormented account of the war was written in the 1950s but only published in the Soviet Union in 1988, long after Grossman’s death. So for most Soviet readers here was a fellow citizen, a Ukrainian Jew, addressing them from beyond the grave and telling them for the first time – albeit in novelistic form – about a past which had been long concealed.
Grossman’s novel presents Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s resistance as a struggle between two brutal dictatorships – a totalitarian Nazi Germany and an equally totalitarian Soviet Union – in which all humanity is the victim. Grossman lays bare the servility of Soviet timeservers and names the holocaust as an event of particularly Jewish suffering, which appears to negate the promises of Christianity. Grossman’s was a perspective wholly at variance with official Soviet doctrine at the time when he had written it – a doctrine which had deliberately ignored the destruction of Europe’s Jews as an ethnicity and foregrounded class and ideological affiliations above all else.
For readers of the so-called “fat journals” in the Soviet Union of the late 1980s, voices such as Grossman’s heralded the dawn of openness, intellectual freedom – possibly even the birth of a democratic society with accountable institutions. If awkward truths about Russia could finally be acknowledged – without consigning the whole nation and its culture to the scrapheap – then, or so went the feeling in those formerly “dissident” circles, why stop here?
Grossman’s novel may be said to have assisted at the birth of two competing historical approaches to the period between 1939 and 1945 in the Soviet Union. The revisionist strand, highly critical of Stalin, is perhaps best exemplified by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, whose 2010 book Bloodlands effectively places an “equals” sign between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia and asks us to believe that the one was as bad as the other. Episodes such as the murder of more than 20,000 Poles in Katyn forest in 1940 illustrated the depths of subterfuge and cynicism to which each totalitarian leader would go to blame the other.
This strand highlights the imperialist intent of Stalin in “liberating” yet “occupying” Eastern and Central Europe after Yalta, with the mass rape of German women and girls by occupying Soviet soldiers standing as a symbol of Stalin’s violation of principles of national self-determination. This revisionist strand highlights the incompetence of Stalin in the early stages of the war, his dependence on aid and equipment from the United States and evens questions the inevitability of the huge loss of life incurred during the siege of Leningrad.
The “patriotic” strand, by contrast, effectively seeks to rehabilitate and lionise the roles of Stalin and the “Russian” people (more so even than the “Soviet” people) in defeating Nazism during the Great Fatherland War, against all the odds, and thus effectively saving humanity from fascism. When Russia’s “wild nineteen-nineties”, with their extravagant experimentations in culture, economics and social life, were finally deemed (by the “losers”, of course) to have been a failure, this past-facing narrative of Russia as leader of the anti-Nazi coalition has steadily gained more traction in official Russian cultural discourse.
In a very real sense, to paraphrase contemporary cultural historians Sergei Medvedev and Alexander Etkind, Russia’s past is its future. Although former KGB officer Vladimir Putin was initially appointed to mind the affairs of the Yeltsin family, it became clear that Putin’s ultimate mission was to restore Russia to what his group felt was its rightful place among the nations of the world. Whilst the first decade of Putin’s rule could be dedicated – thanks to dramatic increases in the global prices for Russia’s key exports, oil and gas – to improving the standard of living of Russia’s citizens, the downturn in global financial markets in his second decade required a narrative to drive what was becoming an increasingly gloomy economic outlook from the public consciousness. History has been called upon to provide that narrative.
The direction taken by Russia’s new official history is not surprising given the background of the person chosen by Putin in 2012 as minister of culture to lead that drive, Vladimir Medinsky. Medinsky is a Russian nationalist and traditionalist with a strong hatred of abstract art and Western ideas. As current chair of Russia’s Commission on Historical Education he is responsible for the new school history textbook which seeks to put the terminology of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in the minds and mouths of Russia’s schoolchildren.
But the new direction has required some embarrassing corrections to Russia’s official positions on key historical matters: whereas in 2009 Putin had expressed regret for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, saying that it was part of an unfortunate chain of events, of which Russia could not be proud, by 2014 Putin was saying that – to the contrary – the pact had been the correct decision. This change was accompanied by a growth in attacks on the historical society Memorial, established to preserve the memories of the victims of Stalin’s terror.
New “evidence” has been unearthed recently in an KGB/FSB archive, suggesting that it was the Nazis after all – and not the NKVD – who murdered those thousands of Polish citizens in Katyn forest in 1940. This “evidence” is published in a matter-of-fact style in Russia’s popular press, with no space given to rebuttal or scholarly analysis. In short, nothing any more is what it seems. Many of those Soviet/Russian archives, which had been open in the 1990s – and which were used to great effect for example by Stephen Kotkin in writing the first two volumes of his monumental biography of Stalin – are now closed. Where evidence is suppressed, rumour, speculation and misinformation take centre stage.
Such Russian think-tanks as Fyodor Lukyanov’s Global Affairs openly discuss what they describe as the “memory wars” and how Russia needs to fight them to win. In a memorable panel discussion in December 2019, entitled Historical memory is one more space in which political issues must be decided, Lukyanov and six fellow historians openly brainstorm how Russia should be talking about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in the lead-up to the 75th anniversary of the end of the second World War, so as to minimise the negative effect of the European Parliament’s resolution to designate both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as equally responsible for that war. How to deal with the fact, asks Lukyanov, that “the forces in today’s Europe that we are sympathetic to are the very ones which fought against us back then”?
History in turn was invoked repeatedly by Putin himself to justify Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022: from the “triune people of the Greater Russians, Little Russians and White Russians” to Lenin’s “artificial creation” of Ukraine as a Soviet Republic, to use of the term “denazification”, selective interpretation of the terms Donbas and Novorossiya and glossing over of the diversity of original populations of those regions, to official (tongue-in-cheek) denials of Russian state military involvement in eastern Ukraine since early 2014, the Russian leader has shown the world how historical narrative can be weaponised.
Putin has done us the service of showing us that progress in human knowledge and understanding is not inevitable. We can go backwards as well as forwards. There can be no teleological imperative towards objectivity and the truth, where such political considerations as regime survival (described for public consumption as “the survival of the Russian nation”) are at stake.
Memory and history do not have to be in conflict. However, only memory that is informed by honesty, openness and willingness to encounter the other can form a basis for authentic historical enquiry.
But back briefly to my train ride from Berlin to Moscow and my attempts to help my East European fellow-travellers understand how things stand on this island. Hubert Butler always said that when he wrote about Russia or Latvia or anywhere else in the world, he was always writing about Ireland. Forty years on and I am still polishing my account. It’s all about the framing, after all. Archimedes had it right: “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I can move the world”. Every time I reflect on Archimedes’ aphorism I find myself deciding that – in discussions of history and conflict – the facts, documentation, evidence and argument constitute the lever, but they are all of secondary importance.
What is crucial is finding the right “place to stand”: the cultural context, the disposition of the discussants, the purpose of the discourse. Why after all are we talking about this? Are we seeking to understand? Or are we advocating for a pre-held position? Memory and history do not have to be in conflict. However, only memory that is informed by honesty, openness and willingness to encounter the other can form a basis for authentic historical enquiry. I remember, but my memory is informed by the evidence I have collected. Ní féidir leis an gobadán an dá thrá a freastal. And yet the sandpiper always has to keep trying to do just that.
