Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

The Interpretation of the
Soviet Union’s History:
The Baltic Dimension
121
Česlovas Laurinavičius
The history of the Soviet Union will probably always attract very
contradictory views depending on the perspective of the observer.
The picture can be very dark, but also painted in a lighter tone.
The country went through different phases of development; the
period of Bolshevik consolidation was different from that of the
Stalin years and again different from the later era. The images will
diverge according to the period which is being analysed.
The history of the Soviet Union can be seen as an arena for a contest
about how to interpret the communist past. The Soviet Union
can also be seen as a camp in which people were physically and
mentally destroyed. But anyone who holds this view cannot ignore
the fact that many of the victims were admirers of the system that
tortured and humiliated them. The Soviet Union may also be interpreted
as a special type of social contract or even welfare state
that placed little pressure on economic units and had a flippant attitude
to work and life in general (which in the end is the very reason
that communism collapsed).
An evaluation of the Soviet Union against the background of the
national question could represent it as a prison of nations, as an
expression of brutal physical and mental ‘Russification‘ or as an unprecedented
model of ethno-institutionalisation, where ethno-cultural
or even ethno-political communities were formed.
Specialists have also put forward various interpretations of the way
the Soviet Union appeared internationally: in the orthodox version
the Soviet Union is portrayed as a militaristic system which posed
Česlovas Laurinavičius is Head of the twentieth century History
Department at the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius. He is leading
a research program of all-round comparative history of Lithuania
during the Second World War. His fields of research are political
history, diplomacy and geopolitics.