colonelcassad
November 2, 17:51
A dozen knives in the back of Stalinism
Somewhere in the early 2000s, I published an article in a local newspaper about the phenomenon of Joseph Stalin. Her message was that this ruler was of his time and was needed, including to win the Great War. The article, as they say, went to the people. Here and there I saw a newspaper unfolded on it. This is perfectly imprinted in my memory.
Typically, such interest in the person of the famous Soviet leader is interpreted as a longing for a harsh hand, nostalgia for the Soviet era, a tradition of slavish worship, or a heightened thirst for social justice. And someone will see in this a sign of human degradation and destruction of the nation’s gene pool.
In my opinion, it is not his cult that is to blame for the growing popularity of the figure of Joseph Stalin, nor an attempt to turn everything back, to start “tightening the screws” and “cutting down the forest so that the chips fly.” This phenomenon demonstrates a desire to perceive history as a single process, as opposed to the accumulation of disparate pieces of a poorly sewn, awkward patchwork quilt. No matter what they say about her, the story is the same.
I want to say right away: what we consider to be anti-Stalinism has nothing to do with real history, its Soviet period and the personality of Stalin. It represents a worldview concept, in its extreme expression reaching the point of exaltation and unconditional religious faith. Moreover, this teaching has its own effective “fists”.
Three waves
We can schematically identify three waves of anti-Stalinism: Khrushchev, perestroika and post-Soviet. Khrushchev's de-Stalinization was used quite effectively as a means of opposing the Soviet system. Vsevolod Kochetov’s novel “What Do You Want?”, published in 1969, says that through the debunking of Stalin, “it was possible in some minds to shake the faith in the work that had been done for thirty years under the leadership of this man.” It became the main ideological weapon of the Cold War, designed to destroy Soviet society from within.
The finest hour of the denial of Stalinism came during Soviet perestroika. Ideologically, this was tantamount to a thermonuclear strike on the foundations of the country. During this period, critical, immature minds saw in Stalin and his legacy signs of the current and future apocalypse. For example, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 was interpreted as a clear consequence of Stalinism.
It is noteworthy that perestroika, proclaimed in April 1985 by the new General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Gorbachev, was initially declared as a continuation of the work of the Great October Revolution. Allegedly, it was needed because the country’s development took the wrong path. The notorious departure from the ideals of Marxism-Leninism was linked to the personality and activities of Joseph Stalin.
Soon the demonization of Stalin and his reign reached the level of absolute nihilism. Everything Soviet was a priori declared wrong and criminal. For this reason, everything created over these decades was scrapped under the slogan of “the fight against Stalinism.” For if everything is permeated with this “infection,” which for many critics of the Soviet regime is worse than German Nazism, then you don’t feel sorry for the broken.
Under the guise of calls for truth-seeking, a profanation of the view of the history of the USSR began. In an atmosphere of general nihilism and nurturing of the Soviet inferiority complex, as the famous Soviet philosopher Alexander Zinoviev wrote, “an orgy of admiring one’s ulcers” began. Perestroika transformed into “catastrophe.” Indeed, there is nothing to be proud of if behind seventy years of the history of the USSR there are only Stalinist totalitarianism and Brezhnev’s stagnation. Moreover, we have not renounced these “ulcers”, have not flogged ourselves and continue to drag them along with us...
In the “dashing” 1990s, this bogeyman successfully coped with the rejection of the inhabitants of the former USSR from the recent past and their reconciliation with new shocking realities . Society was intimidated that there was no other option. Allegedly, if you don’t undergo “shock therapy”, it will only get worse. Do you want to go back to the Gulag? No? Then be patient until you kill Stalin within yourself. It's your own fault. Led by Western “consultants,” the ideologists of “market reforms” whipped up an atmosphere of fear and convinced that our society was being purified through suffering so as not to return to the horrors of the past... In recent
Russian history, starting approximately with the “swamp” unrest in the capital of 2011-2013 . and the Kyiv Maidan (coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014), they started talking about the need for a new de-Stalinization, “Perestroika 2.0.” As an argument, it was argued that the country had not completely cleansed itself and did not get rid of this sin of its history, because it did not learn the whole truth and tried to forget a lot. Since the lingering remnants of Stalinism are again pushing the country to a dangerous point, a new, deeper wave of de-Stalinization is needed in parallel with the restructuring of Russian society... The
principle of rejecting Stalinism is perfectly presented in the cult film by Tengiz Abuladze “Repentance” (1984), where the exhumation of the body of the deceased is played out graves and throwing him off the cliff again and again. It is according to this circular composition that the arguments and denunciations of the supporters of total de-Stalinization are built. Modern calls for de-Stalinization are just a rehash of perestroika demagoguery and campaignism and do not bring anything new to the understanding of the phenomenon. Moreover, they make a rational rethinking of this period of Soviet history impossible, leading it to the plane of “naked” emotions. In this area, it is not arguments that work, but exaltation with speculative juggling with numbers of victims of repression and any other “fried” facts that affect the emotional sphere.
At the same time, the real results of de-Stalinization are not the improvement of Russian society, its transformation and spiritual uplift. Let's remember the collapse of the USSR, the expulsion of millions of Russians from the former Soviet republics and what happened to Russia in the 1990s. So what is it? The triumph of freedom and humanism or indirect mass repressions against former Soviet people? If you start to unearth the horrors of the “holy nineties” (the phrase of the wife of the first President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, Naina. - Ed.) and their catastrophic effect postponed into the future, they will more than outweigh the scale of the “Stalinist nightmares” inflated by the fighters against Stalinism.
Reformatting the past
The destructive mechanism of de-Stalinization continues to work today. It is not customary to subject the Stalinist period of Soviet history to a comprehensive scientific understanding. We are in a nihilistic ideological matrix successfully instilled from the outside, we operate with primitive myths, ideologemes and cliches. Stereotypes of thoughtless overthrow of everything domestic. After all, if any path in Russia leads to repression, an ax and the Gulag, it is necessary to follow the “light of Western truths.”
Again, if Stalin is so bad and terrible, then the shameful 1990s in the history of Russia and the crime that occurred in 1991 (the year the so-called market reforms began) are quite natural and justified. It is obvious that post-Soviet de-Stalinization serves as an instrument of ideological defense and preservation of the “gains” of democracy.
Thus, we get an ideological “black hole” that absorbs everything around. It is based on the idea of the historical sin of the Russians, a killing shot according to the formula of the famous Soviet philosopher Alexander Zinoviev - “they aimed for communism, but ended up in Russia.” The speculative cliché about a country that, for the most part, wrote denunciations to the NKVD, brings this “sin” into the category of the original, with the search for causes in the history of national civilization. Among the origins of the “fall” are the adoption of Orthodoxy and the inheritance of the traditions of Byzantium. According to Russophobes, this is where the centuries-old traditions of Asianism and the slave psychology of the Russian people lie.
Since de-Stalinization is a speculative project of nihilistic cleansing, it is far from a true search for the truth about the Soviet past. In essence, this is an ideological reformatting of the past. Since this mechanism has already shown its effectiveness in past years, one should not think that today it is forgotten or shelved.
Do you want to disavow any opponent? Easily. It is enough to call the doubter a Stalinist. If you do not vehemently denounce Stalinism, then you yourself are a criminal. The “collective” (or silent majority) is always right. Dogmatic tradition.
Let us recall the perestroika campaign of defamation of Nina Andreeva, who was called “a bander from a brothel” for her rather balanced article “I cannot compromise on principles.”
She just dared to write: “...Together with all Soviet people, I share anger and indignation at the mass repressions that took place in the 30s and 40s due to the fault of the then party and state leadership. But common sense strongly protests against the monochromatic portrayal of contradictory events that has now begun to prevail in some press organs.” But her “letter” was branded as a “Stalinist attack.”
She compared the role of Joseph Stalin in history with the reign of Peter the Great, who was named by anyone, right up to the Antichrist. At the same time, “today few people are embarrassed by the personal qualities of Peter the Great, but everyone remembers that during his reign the country reached the level of a great European power.” Such arguments and analogies could be perceived as reasonable if the main goal of the “subverters” was not to destroy history. Hence the difference in ratings. Peter I, with all his shortcomings, is perceived through the prism of the blissful “cutting” of a window to Europe. Whereas Stalin should be mercilessly branded. And not him alone. Why not completely destroy the building built under his leadership in order to begin to recreate something new from scratch, from the void.
Let me quote Kochetov once again: “This is a means of struggle... to come up with frightening terms, to speculate on the words “Stalinism” and “Stalinists.” With the help of this trick, how many scum crawled into the light of day from the bedbug cracks!”
In this way, a primitive ideological interpretation of history is created, working on the principle of substitution. For example, there once was a prosperous Tsarist Russia. But then a landing party of Bolshevik demons landed on it, who, using foreign money and malicious intent, initiated unrest and massacre. The “red wheel” rolled...
Through the prism of a popular print
It is easier for many ordinary people to perceive history through the prism of such a popular print than to start a conversation with the fact that at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia there were a huge number of opposition political organizations and a real terrorist war was waged against the state. As a result of the February coup, or bourgeois revolution of 1917, which occurred as a result of the betrayal of the ruling elites, any state power was overthrown in the Russian Empire and the very fact of its existence was called into question. The same Bolsheviks took over the country that had fallen into anarchy and began to stitch it together (imagine what would have happened if Boris Yeltsin had been in their place) in a situation of fierce confrontation on all sides. It is precisely in the political diversity and rampant terrorism of the beginning of the century that the reasons for the constant struggle of the Bolsheviks for power lie, which in our country is interpreted as a purge of opponents.
From the above it follows that it is impossible to distill a complex historical process into a simple formula. Just as primitive as applying plantain to any sore spot is the explanation of the causes of any Soviet and Russian evil with the grave legacy of Stalinism.
Who needs this bogeyman and why? Why do they constantly replay the plot from the movie “Repentance” and scare us with relapses? Anti-Stalinism is an important dominant feature of the post-Soviet ideologeme, built on a sweeping opposition and a black-and-white perception of the world. She relies on an artificial split between the Stalinists and people of the new formation. This opposition reveals the contours of social careerism - renounce the past and become successful.
In this context, a successful Russian is one who has gained access to capitalist benefits and joined the cream of society. All others are mostly alienated from the “gains” of democracy and civilizational benefits. Not because of someone’s malicious intent, but because of the inheritance of the “original” sin of Soviet history.
Any attempts to reconcile the above social groups are perceived by the transmitters and guardians of the post-Soviet ideology of alienation as illegal and unacceptable. Recently, one of the beneficiaries of the “democratic reforms” - oligarch Oleg Deripaska - in his blog categorically rejected the possibility of reconciliation between the “whites” and the “reds”. Even such obvious arguments as the need to consolidate society in the conditions of the Northern Military District did not work. Such reconciliation for modern bearers of “democratic” ideological bonds is more terrible than the danger threatening Russia from the West.
Therefore, any sober, balanced assessment of the Soviet period of history is now “out of format.” Otherwise, we will have to admit the criminal collapse of a huge country, looting of its ruins and the emergence of a gigantic demographic hole from which Russia has not yet emerged. It is too difficult to discuss painful issues in a reasoned and substantive manner. It’s much easier to get hysterical about Stalin’s horrors and nightmares.
Stalin as a historical figure
Today, Russian society for the most part, out of inertia and for ideological reasons, resists the obvious. However, history will inevitably put everything in its place. The same processes occurred with the assessment of the figure of Peter I, who has long been not perceived in the public consciousness as the Antichrist. Everyone assesses his role differently, generally agreeing on a positive perception of the Peter the Great period in Russian history.
The same thing will happen with Stalin over time. But this requires ideological demilitarization of this topic. Otherwise, it works as a lethal weapon, sowing historical nihilism and alienation between people.
The desire for a scientific rethinking of Russian history is not a conversation about justifying or exposing one or another of its subjects or figures. Individual assessments may be subjective, but the most important and objective thing is to build the overall plot of national history, its logic, purpose and purpose. A providential plot from which nothing can be erased, where everything matters and is imbued with rhymes.
At the same time, the period for rethinking the past should be commensurate with the past in terms of event intensity. For example, after February 24, 2022, much of the Stalinist period became much clearer: from the non-aggression pact between the USSR and Hitler's Germany and the mystery of June 22, 1941 to the purges of the Soviet elite. All that is needed is the will of the researcher, not clouded by a heap of stereotypes and ideological dogmas.
(c) A. Rudalev
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