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

confessions. The culmination of this approach was the infamous
Moscow trials and their carbon-copies in most satellite states. Any
failure of the regime had to be attributed to sabotage or conspiracy
from inside or outside. Anybody could become a class traitor. The
Nazi regime and more recent genocidal regimes were more concentrated
and radical: certain groups – above all the Jews – were
seen as enemies defined by their very existence; as the source of
all evil that had to be eliminated.
Another difference is that ideologically communist totalitarianism
was more oriented towards the future and laid less emphasis on
the past. The Nazi regime, and all fundamentalist or revivalist
regimes, was oriented towards a mythical past that has to be revived
through modern means. Hence the nostalgia for this mythical
past commands a greater attention to the elaboration of a religious
or quasi-religious fictional narrative. In both cases, however, the independent
search for truth is the enemy. This striking quote from
a 1933 speech by the Bavarian minister for education and cultural
affairs to lecturers at the University of Munich reported by Prof. Martin
Sabrow: “From now on it is no longer your task to find out if
something is true but if it follows the meaning of the national socialist
government”, finds close echo in a speech by Russian leader
Putin to history teachers in 2007. Putin denounces those who suggest
that Russia should be ashamed of its past and accuses them
of being in the pay of foreign countries. He does not deny that acts
of violence and brutality occurred in the past, but argues that they
were less serious than those committed by other countries, particularly
the United States, and above all can be explained and excused
by the need to defend Russia against a hostile environment.
This vision is no longer that of communist ideology and the struggle
for the liberation of humanity from capitalism. It is rather that of
the restoration of past Russian power and greatness. Everything in
the Russian past, whether tsarist or communist, that can be presented
as having contributed to the national or imperial glory of
Russia – including the KGB and Stalin – is to be the object of
praise. Russia present and past is portrayed as a besieged fortress,
threatened by hostile forces (even the catastrophe of Beslan is presented
as the work of “those forces that have always wanted to encircle
Russia”). The basic doctrine in Putin’s words is that: “The
collapse of the Soviet Union is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe
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