Normalizing Russia, Legitimizing Putin (Ex Tempore: Toward a New Orthodoxy? the Politics of History in Russia Today) (Vladimir Putin) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Judging from commentaries in Russian oppositional press and Western media portrayals of The History of Russia, 1945-2008: A Teacher's Handbook, by Aleksandr Vasil'evich Filippov et al., one would expect that this book glorifies Stalin and exonerates his crimes, presents the Soviet Union as an ideal society, and derides civil liberties and democracy; in short, that it makes a plea for the restoration of a closed totalitarian society and state in Russia. (1) Instead, what one finds is a text of considerable complexity and multiple meanings, in places well and engagingly written, in others dull, mostly informative but sometimes self-contradictory and opaque. Although some of the book's meanings are quite objectionable, one has to give its authors their due: the book is not uniformly bad. Nor would it be fair to assert, as its critics suggest, that the authors' standpoint is solely that of the central government while the perspective of common Russians is totally missing. To the contrary, even in its emphasis on the importance of a strong state the book's register is rather reflective of the perceptions of most Russian citizens, who still remember the last decades of the Soviet regime and for whom the horrors of the 1930s and even 1940s are either a distant memory or something of which they have no firsthand knowledge. Indeed, for most Russians the Soviet Union was not an evil empire, and they would probably disagree with the qualifier "totalitarian" as well. Although not necessarily nostalgic for Soviet times and not longing for their return, they tend to refract the discourse that would paint all of the Soviet experience in dark colors and by extension suggest that their own lives and the lives of their parents and grandparents were lived in vain. Even if in the late 1980s and early 1990s, under the impression of the avalanche of revelations of communist-era crimes, many, if not all, Russians were ready to adopt a highly critical attitude toward their recent history, the experience of the 1990s surely taught them that living conditions might well be worse than the ones they experienced in the late Soviet period.2 And of course, there is a powerful psychological need to impart meaning to one's life: to imagine it as unremittingly faulty is too unbearable to be sustainable for a long time. A steep decline of popular interest in all kinds of "black" literature and films and the increasing appeal of "patriotic" productions, visible already in the mid-1990s, is the best illustration of this point. (3)