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

forests near Minsk. I was taken there in 1991 in the last month of
the Soviet Union. The locals were beginning to dig in the forest to
find the victims they knew were there. One or two of the pits had
been opened containing several hundred victims. This massive forest
was full of these pits, thousands of them. Putin closed it all
down. Arbitrary killing of this kind and on that scale never happened
in Germany. And supporting Stalin was no guarantee that you
would prosper or be spared. The level of paranoia and social trauma
after Stalin was much bigger than after Hitler.
Q: If we are honest, we have to conclude that Russia never dealt
with its own history in an open and honest way. Do you think there
is hope that Russia will confront its history? Will we continue to
have this big country as a neighbour and a partner that is unwilling
to come to terms with its past?
In fact, I think Russia will eventually confront its history. They briefly
tried to do so in the 1990s under Gorbachev and the early years of
Yeltsin. There was a movement to face the truth. Putin is going in
the other direction, but I feel he is getting into trouble. Putin is running
out of gas, literally. Russia is not producing enough gas to
honour the huge contracts it has been signing. Moreover, it is very
difficult to continue to maintain such a closed world and exclude difficult
facts in our age. This is only possible as long as people are not
interested in listening and questioning, as long as everything is, as
it were, rosy and a majority of people couldn’t care less about
history. But once Putin’s neo-imperialist regime collapses, Russians
will start looking at their past.
Q: And how has, in your view, Poland been dealing with its past
since 1989? It is the country you probably know best.
Not very satisfactorily, I think. The Poles didn’t have any doubts
about the major crimes of communism. The killing of the Polish communist
party by Stalin before the war outraged every Polish communist.
People knew about Katyn and the history of the Warsaw
Rising. These events passed quite easily. The dispute in Poland is
about Solidarność. These appalling identical twins, the Kaczynski
brothers, play a very questionable role in the debate. It is not a dispute
between government and opposition, but a dispute between
the government and a group of people who are out to obstruct by
any means possible what is going on. In particular, the Kaczyńskis
55 Norman Davies