PART IV: THE WAR FOR MEMORY
HYSTERICAL REVISIONISM
Early in the evening on New Year’s Eve, Moscow was blanketed by a huge snowstorm. The city ground to a halt in solid traffic jams. There stood buses with steamed-up windows, delivery vans carrying presents for the holiday, family saloons and official limousines, yellow cabs and nippy Smart cars. Also stuck were the sinister-looking black cars with their blue flashing lights flanked by four-by-fours carrying their guards, helpless before the raging elements. Pot-bellied policemen in their sheepskin coats froze at their posts on the crossroads, like memorials to time, while little mounds of snow grew on their winter hats. Pedestrians laden down with bags full of presents made their way along the pavements, trying to avoid the snowdrifts, and the fairy lights of the New Year markets continued to twinkle. The streetlights shone brightly on the Garden Ring Road, on Gogolevsky Boulevard children were throwing snowballs, and along Tverskaya Street someone had even made ski tracks.
Above all this New Year hustle and bustle, unseen by the pedestrians, by the drivers and even by the air defence radar, high up in a cloud of snow, Santa Claus raced along with his frisky reindeer. He was hurrying to Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, where the grown-up children of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Parliament, were considering rewriting history. In his boundless sack, among the cuddly teddy bears and the Barbie dolls, Santa was bringing them a law that changed the 1954 Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet about the transfer of Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – a transfer from one Soviet republic to another. And Santa Claus also had to get to Okhotny Ryad, to visit the children of the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Parliament, who wanted to change the 1989 Decree of the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies of the USSR, which condemned the USSR’s war in Afghanistan.[1] Coming lower over the city, Santa’s sleigh circled and Rudolf’s red nose shone out like a landing light through the billowing gusts of the snowstorm…
The Russian political elite was seized by an epidemic of historical revisionism. Desperate to change something in the gloomy present, suffering humiliation after humiliation (even the annexation of Crimea was to prove a foreign policy defeat, leaving Russia with a problem asset on its hands, placed under painful sanctions by the West and having alienated its closest allies and neighbours), Russia’s politicians decided to play around with the past. The past wouldn’t be able to answer back and they could rewrite their own history. The proposal was put forward to reconsider everything, from Russia’s territorial losses – Crimea in 1954 and Alaska in 1867 (a petition to return Alaska was put by Russian activists on the website of the US White House, but failed to receive the 100,000 signatures it needed in order to be considered) – to colonial wars, such as that begun in Afghanistan in 1979. To justify Russia’s claims, the boldest historical analogies were put forward. So as a basis for justifying taking back Crimea, Vladimir Putin quoted the annexation of Texas by America in 1845. If one follows this route, one could use the genocide of the American Indians in order to justify Russia’s war in Chechnya. Or cite the Spanish Inquisition to show that chasing after ‘foreign agents’ in today’s Russia is not so cruel. Indeed, even deeper historical arguments are possible: as is known, in their summing-up of the case against the art group Pussy Riot for singing a punk prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, experts in all seriousness quoted the decrees of the Church Councils of the fourth and seventh centuries.
These initiatives by Russian law-makers fit in with the general tendency towards history in our country. History is simply the servant of the authorities, yet another resource at the disposal of the state, along with grain, furs, oil and a submissive population. As they say: ‘Russia is a country with an unpredictable past.’ Generation after generation, like some primitive magic, people believe in the ritual of rewriting history. So in Stalin’s times, schoolchildren blotted out names in their text books and cut out photos of politicians and military leaders who had been declared enemies of the people. And in the late 1940s geographers carefully obliterated German names in what had been East Prussia and was now joined to the USSR, and Tatar place names in Crimea, from which all Tatars had been exiled. So it is now, when politicians naively believe, like children, that if they declare that Nikita Khrushchev (who was responsible for transferring Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954) was an enemy of the people, and if they rewrite the Supreme Soviet Decree, then Crimea will become ours and the international community will recognize this. Why not, then, call Yeltsin an enemy of the people and rewrite the Belovezha Accords of December 1991 about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in order to re-establish the USSR, for which part of the population and the political elite have such nostalgia?
The fantasy of revisionism knows no bounds. We could look once again at the result of the 1986 World Cup Round of Sixteen match, when the USSR lost 3–4 in extra time to Belgium – I still feel in my heart the pain that this defeat brought. Why don’t we also look again at the results of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5? Or the Crimean War of 1853–6? We could also reassess the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre; and call an international tribunal in which Britain could be charged with putting down the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 in China. The wind of history blows through the heads of the revisionists like the crazy December snowstorm.
…After lunch on 31 December, the Federation Council, working at a great pace, passed the laws on changing the 1954 Decree on the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, the 1989 Decree criticizing the invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1867 Agreement on the sale of Alaska. Warmed up by their very effective work and talking excitedly, the senators pulled on their coats and got out their cigarettes as they hurried to the exits and their cars, which should whisk them home to their heavily laden celebratory tables. But as they came out onto Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, they felt that something in the air had changed. And on the ground, too – there were no cars waiting for them, no bodyguards, no colourful advertisements shining; on the cold, snow-laden street among the two-metre high snowdrifts stood gloomy, unlit houses with strange sloping roofs. The snowstorm had stopped, the frost had deepened, and the moon shone out from under the low dark clouds. In the distance they heard the sound of horses’ hooves and wheezing, and further down the road they saw a patrol on horseback: horsemen in shaggy caps on squat horses were racing along Bolshaya Dmitrovka, sitting up in their saddles with long bows and arrows…
1
In 1954, Crimea was transferred from Russian jurisdiction to Ukrainian jurisdiction, as a gesture to mark three hundred years of unity between Russia and Ukraine. As both republics were part of the Soviet Union, at the time the gesture was largely symbolic. In 1989, following the withdrawal in February of that year of the last Soviet troops which had been conducting a military campaign in Afghanistan since late 1979, the Congress of People’s Deputies declared that the campaign had been a political mistake, ordered by a small group within the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo.