Great patriots

The Indian Express: Through the late ’70s and ’80s, news used to regularly emerge from the Soviet Union that the leadership had, in its wisdom, decided to “rehabilitate” some writer, politician, or ordinary citizen who had been banned, tried, or shot by Stalin. It was doubly ironic, thus, when news broke that new Russian teachers’ manuals are beginning to attempt a similar rehabilitation with Stalin. Stalin, history students in middle school will be told, was a rational man, dealing with a difficult situation; and he did what he had to in order to ensure Russia’s modernisation.

The admiration of the apparatchiki who run Russia — and especially that of the head apparatchik, ex-KGB officer, former president, current prime minister and de facto leader Vladimir Putin — for the worst aspects of Russia’s Soviet past has long been known. And none of this is because the “Russian temperament” admires “strong leadership” either — it is a normal reaction to the cataclysmic loss of power and extraordinary instability that Russia dealt with during the Yeltsin years. Yet every fresh sign of Putin’s intentions is worrying; and this is more worrying than most.

For the 50 years since he died and Khrushchev told a party meeting about his crimes, Stalin has been viewed by the mainstream Russian leadership alternately as an aberration, as monstrous, as excessive, or something not to be talked about, like a crazy uncle in the attic. This is because even the Communist Party recognised that in the pursuit of their vision, 20 million dead were too many, and that Stalin was deeply irrational if he thought it wasn’t. Putin refuses to allow Russia to feel guilt — or anything but pride — about its dark past. He refuses to accept that anything — least of all Stalin’s home, Georgia — can stand between Russia and its lost Stalinist glory. Already textbooks have told students that “democratisation was not an option” during Stalin’s period, because of external threats. Perhaps the lessons that Russia is learning from its history are the wrong ones.

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