Russian Schism: New and Old Believers
There’s a fascinating essay in today’s NY Times by Russian author Victor Erofeyev.
Erofeyev argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is refurbishing the USSR’s “imperial” legacy (eg, Stalin in WWII) while continuing to downplay the failure of “utopian” Communism.
His thesis:
Today’s Kremlin has neatly split the history of the Soviet Union into two, like splitting a block of birch wood with an axe. It has cast aside the country’s communist experiment as an unworkable utopia and begun glorifying Soviet Russia’s imperial pretensions. In other words, what has happened is pretty much the opposite of what Khruschev did in the 1950’s when he sacrificed Stalin’s dictatorship in the name of Lenin. Now the Kremlin is sacrificing Lenin in the name of Generalissimus Stalin.
Schism is a terrible word in Russia, where Christians were once divided into the “old believers” and the followers of the reformed Othodox Church. Now a battle over the interpretation of Russian history is provoking a schism throughout society.
Here’s how the schism Erofeyev detects leads to ideological civil war:
Half of the population - elderly people, the poor, those not very well educated and resentful of perestroika - see the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin as a return to true values. They are ready to erect monuments to Stalin the Victor around the country. They are not disconcerted by his political crimes, for which they sometimes produce justifications that are beyond all comprehension. There is no more logic in all this than there would be in Jews suddenly deciding to erect a monument to Hitler.
However, the other half of today’s Russia, made richer by the experiment of perestroika, knows more about Stalin’s crimes than it did even 15 years ago. Enlightened Russia affirms that we won the victory despite Stalin. It hates him for his terror, his failure to prepare for war, his use of soldiers as cannon fodder, and for much more besides. Enlightened Russia sees Stalinist totalitarianism and Hitler’s regime as two sides of the same coin.
But the Kremlin is pandering rashly and none too intelligently to the unenlightened, socially backward half of Russia, refusing to understand that this bloc has no future. In short, the schism has led Russia into an ideological civil war.
The “repackaging” obviously upsets Russia’s neighbors– and is one reason Poles think NATO is still quite relevant:
By adopting the ideas of the Soviet Union as its heritage, Mr. Putin’s Russia is entering into intellectual conflict with her western neighbors. The Kremlin is once again emphasizing its historical justification for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - which gave Germany permission to invade Poland in exchange for Soviet dominion over Finland and much of the Baltics - and denying that Baltic states were occupied; it is also again trying to gloss over the massacre of Polish troops at the Katyn Forest in 1940 (after a period of public confessions from Yeltsin) and the rapes of hundreds of thousands of women by soldiers in the territory liberated by the Red Army.
The Kremlin does not seem to understand that it no longer has any Warsaw Pact satellites that will applaud its every move. Rather, Russia’s neighbors now resent the way the Soviet Union treated them, and are new members of NATO who like not feeling afraid of the Kremlin any more. They are justifiably furious at being offered old versions of history in the Kremlin’s new packaging.
Read the whole thing.
