Russian History Reexamined.

Anatol Lieven has been one of the most sensible voices in the West on Russia in eschewing the messianic rhetoric about a "New Cold War" whilst seeing clearly how much Russian liberal condescension towards their own people is counter productive.

In The National Interest recently Lieven made a number of astute observations on Russia at the Valdai Club. After going down the White Sea Canal in a boat, Lieven mused

......( it was )constructed under Stalin in the 1930s by political prisoners at an appalling cost in human life and suffering, from cold, hunger and mass executions.

This and so many other mass atrocities committed under Stalin and Lenin are only to a very limited degree officially remembered or commemorated in the Russia of today, although Russians formed a majority of their victims.

This is a subject on which non-Russians have a limited moral right to speak except where their own fellow countrymen were among the mass of victims (as with Stalin’s mass murder of Polish prisoners at Katyn)—and even then, they must be very careful to acknowledge both that this was a crime of a Communist and not a Russian national state, and that innumerable Russians were also among the mass of victims.

As to Russia, the lack of public commemoration or accounting goes beyond Stalinism, even if the immense scale of Stalinism’s crimes make this the most serious issue in modern Russian history by far.

Thus the almost two million Russian dead of the First World War have also received no public memorial, even though nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past is very common in contemporary Russian cinema.

One of the problems in dealing with Russia's Soviet past is in disentangling the victory over Nazism by the USSR between 1941-1945 and the appalling crimes of Stalin on a domestic and international scale. That makes it difficult for Russian liberals to denounce Lenin and Stalin without appearing "unpatriotic".

The danger for Russian liberals, therefore, is that in denouncing the crimes committed under Lenin and Stalin they can easily appear to be—or actually be—condemning the entire Soviet period, for which many older Russians feel an element of nostalgia—not so much for imperial reasons but because it represented a secure life, or simply for the human reason that it was the country of their childhood and youth.

This in turn can encourage the liberals to do something which they are all too prone to do, which is to express open elitist contempt for ordinary Russians and for Russia itself as a country.

.....talking this way in public about your fellow citizens is no way to get elected—in Russia or the United States.

Since this approach naturally receives no hearing at all in conservative or “statist” circles, it also continues the catastrophic pattern of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century relationship between the liberal intelligentsia and the state, which contributed directly to the catastrophe of 1917 and the destruction of both by the revolution:basically, of two moral absolutisms shouting past each other’s ears.

Lieven offers none of the crude vilification that entirely trashes the history of Russia almost in its entirety by those like Edward Lucas. He realises that the only way to improve relations between Russia and the West and to promote liberal mores lies not in conflating Russia with the USSR.

As far as the Russian government is concerned, the most encouraging thing concerning its recent approach to history has been the full and open acknowledgment of the Soviet secret- police massacre of Polish prisoners at Katyn on Stalin’s orders, which has led to a radical improvement in relations with Poland. This was made possible in part because both the Polish and Russian governments recognized that in the same forest are also buried thousands of Russian and other Soviet victims of the Soviet secret police. In other words, this became a joint denunciation of Stalinism, not a Polish denunciation of Russia.

It seems quite clear that Medvedev would wish to go faster and further than Putin in denouncing Communist crimes.

At our meeting with him, now–Prime Minister Putin snapped back quite aggressively when asked why Lenin is still in his mausoleum in Red Square, asking a British colleague why there is still a monument to Cromwell outside parliament in London. One of my British colleagues reacted quite huffily to this but I must say that being half Irish and remembering Cromwell’s crimes against Ireland (which today would undoubtedly be labeled genocide) I saw a good deal of truth in this—except of course that Cromwell ruled Britain 350 years ago, and not 90 years ago.

On the one hand, Putin’s response reflected an understandable but still often counter-productive Russian tendency to lash back at uncomfortable questions rather than taking them on board.

In this regard, Medvedev, whatever his other qualifications, is by far the better diplomat. However, Putin followed up with the sensible observation that “when the time comes, the Russian people will decide what to do about this. History is something that cannot be hurried.”

The difference between Putin and Medvedev is encouraging in this regard, because it reflects in part simply the fact that Medvedev is thirteen years younger.

It is a pity that Western discussion on Russia has been too dominated by those who correctly call for more open discussion of Soviet era crimes only to be pushing "New Cold War" propaganda tropes and expansionist NATO agenda in Georgia and NATO. Lieven's is a sane and decent voice.