Though Cowards Flinch

Has anyone else noticed the extent to which the media love representing “Putin’s Russia” as a throwback to the Soviet Union? Whether it is pointing out that the former President was a KGB officer, or that recent developments in Russian foreign policy reflect a desire to reconquer the old Soviet Empire, it seems the media is never happier than when it can fit Russia into a pre-existing stereotype.

A recent article about the renaming of “Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya” (Big Communist Street) after dead writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn indulges in this with abandon, under the title, “Renaming a Moscow street [...] doesn’t mean an end to Soviet ideology in Russia.” Well, I’m no expert on Russia but didn’t the fall of communism and the dismantling of the command economy mean that?

What is this Soviet ideology which pundits seem so pleased to exhume and expound upon whenever the subject of present-day Russia comes up? Pundit James Marson elaborates:

“Putinism represents a sanitised version of the Soviet Union. The resurgence under Putin of Russia as a military and economic power, loved and feared in equal measure by Russians, has demonstrated the true meaning of 1991: the ideological aspect of communism has been rejected, but a great deal of the Soviet mentality remains.”

So basically everything that made the Soviets Soviet in the first place has been rejected, but the nationalism and Great Russian chauvinism which got tacked on has been moved front and centre. And this still qualifies as Soviet ideology how? It’s one thing to attack the ideas of communism or the practices of the Soviet Union -and those things have indeed left a legacy in today’s Russia.

For example, the Russian constitution includes a guarantee of free healthcare for every citizen. On the other hand, the reinstitution of military parades in Red Square is hardly feature unique to the Soviets – in fact virtually any dictatorship enjoys the pomp and ceremony of military celebrations. The Putin/Medvedev dictatorship is not Soviet – not even the bastardised version represented by Stalinism.

Political corruption and nepotism, endemic to the Stalinist governments, are common in today’s Russia but these hardly represent a deliberate continuity with a Soviet past. If we’re going to be even handed, surely these things are a natural corollary of any group which seeks to maintain power but doesn’t have the cultural muscle nor the integration with tradition to do so ‘democratically’.

At the root of all this, one suspects, is simply a deliberate attempt to caricature communism and the very ideas which created Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers in the first democracy Russia had seen til that point. If Stalin remains popular, Putin must be a closet communist. If Russian history textbooks are changed to reflect national mythology it must be a sign of communist-era censorship.

One wonders what such people would make of the much more subtle forms of censorship in the West? Out education system, for example, has explicitly political aims where the teaching of history is concerned. One of Britain’s top ten heroes is Oliver Cromwell, who cheerily slaughtered Irish women and children before having himself all but crowned king on the back of a popular movement which he crushed.

Don’t even start me on the caprices of Elizabeth I. Not exactly our finest hour.

Marson concludes that;

The fate of Moscow’s numerous other symbols of the Soviet past will be revealing. What about Leninsky Prospekt? Or Marksistkaya station? Or the ubiquitous hammers and sickles? A programme to replace these, accompanied by a widespread campaign to foster a more nuanced public understanding of the Soviet Union is hardly likely. Renaming one street after Solzhenitsyn is just a convenient fig leaf for the Kremlin’s pick and mix of the Soviet past.

Marson’s argument is that the Kremlin is continuing some of the bad policies from the Soviet days – which is a fair enough argument. The real issues concerning any national ruling class don’t change entirely simply because the names and faces of that ruling class have changed. Yet why should the Russian government take down the place-names and emblems of the Soviet past?

Some of it is surely worth saving – even if only from the point of view of one wanting to preserve Rome’s Colosseum or the renovated Sportspalast of Berlin. Terrible things are associated with these but some of the architecture is magnificent and moreover, we shouldn’t be so ready to sweep history under the carpet. We should be confident enough in the rationality of people that they will learn the right lessons from it.

Moreover, Marson’s own tinkering with the history books would no doubt be explicitly ideological. I suspect a ‘more nuanced’ view of Soviet history would be little other than Orlando Figes’ view institutionalized, to balance out the view of Russia as a world power and that as a Good Thing. Putin may want to use Russia’s history to his advantage, but Marson wants to use it to the advantage of Western liberal democracy.

The only difference is that in our culture, we’re expected to believe that the latter is worthy of inculcation in our children.