National Review, July 13, 2023 (July 31, 2023 Issue)

After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutineers had taken control of Rostov-on-Don, Vladimir Putin appeared on television to appeal, above all, for unity. At a time when “Russia is waging a hard fight for its future,” the mutiny was “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” So far, so predictable, but what came next was less so. This rebellion was

exactly the kind of blow that was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was fighting the First World War. But her victory was stolen. Intrigues, quarrels, politicking behind the back of the army and the people turned into the greatest upheaval, the destruction of the army, and the collapse of the state. . . . In the end was the tragedy of the civil war. 

Talk of a “stolen victory” is a good example of how Putin’s regime twists Russian history into a unified patriotic saga in which Russia’s setbacks are best attributed to foreigners or division at home. It was also a reminder of how the creation of a “useable past” has been central to Putin’s state-building project, so central that some of it is protected by “memory laws” against the “falsification” of history, where “falsification” can mean telling the truth.

To the Soviets, the First World War was a conflict between imperialists. They did nothing to commemorate Russia’s fallen. But in Putin’s useable past, patriotism prevails over old ideological divides: Russia’s First World War dead are (rightly) now honored with monuments and an annual memorial day.

More striking still is how Putin implicitly aligned himself with Russia’s old order rather than with the Bolsheviks who established the state to which he, a KGB officer, remained loyal until the end and, in some respects, afterwards. In 2005, in his annual state-of-the-nation address, he told Russians that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.”

Putin was lamenting the demise not of Soviet ideology but of the Soviet state that had been the vehicle through which Russia became one of the world’s two superpowers. Moreover, its breakup had been a Russian “tragedy.” “Tens of millions” — in fact, around 25 million — had been stranded “beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” In some former Soviet republics, Russians were transformed from a privileged class into an unwanted minority.

This was not the case in Belarus and, mostly, Ukraine, but many Russians living there or back “home” could not accept that these two countries were anything other than artificial entities hacked out of a historically Greater Russian whole. This attitude, years later, also lay at the core of Putin’s now notorious article from 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In it, he fashioned a useable past out of his interpretation, as ludicrous as it was self-serving, of the overlapping histories of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, rejecting the notion that they were distinct nationalities rather than parts of “the large Russian nation, a triune people.” With modern Belarus barely more than a Russian vassal, Putin concentrated his fire on Ukraine, belittling the concept of a separate Ukrainian identity (in a way not entirely consistent with the genocidal ferocity with which Russia is now trying to extinguish it) and questioning the borders Ukraine had, allegedly, been “given” by the Bolsheviks: “Russia was robbed . . .”

The “robbers,” to Putin, were the Bolsheviks, who compounded their sins by forming their new state “as a federation of equal republics,” each of which “had a right to freely secede from the union.” At the time, that right was purely nominal, but in Putin’s view it was a “time bomb” planted in the USSR’s foundations, and once the party lost control, it “exploded.”

The USSR’s disintegration triggered economic turmoil throughout its old imperium, but citizens of Eastern Europe’s once “captive nations” took some solace in the return of self-determination and glimpses of a path back to the security and the prosperity of the West. Russians had no such consolation. To the extent that their sense of themselves was wrapped up in a notion of their country as an imperial superpower, they had no reinstatement of full nationhood to celebrate, only its diminution to mourn.

If, in 1991, Russia had made a cleaner break with its Soviet past, it might have embarked on a course that offered its people more hope, but there was no appetite for a Soviet Nuremberg or any other proper reckoning with the nature of communist rule. This omission not only helped foster an undeserved nostalgia for the Soviet past but also allowed most of the old power structure to adapt to an era that, in the end, was not new enough. The result was to undermine Russia’s nascent democracy, its attempts to nurture a market economy and to take a decisive turn west.

Their expectations of a better future quickly battered by inflation, slump, and spiraling crime, many Russians either looked back to a supposedly changed Communist Party or turned towards the nationalism that, in different forms and to varying degrees, had been a constant presence in Soviet politics since the 1930s. In 1993, just two years after what had looked like a democratic new dawn for Russia, the Liberal Democratic Party, a party of the ultranationalist Right (and, probably, a KGB concoction), won 23 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections, an early warning sign of dysfunction and disillusion. There were others.
Among the ingredients for a stable society missing from Yeltsin’s Russia was a common understanding of the past, an absence made more dangerous by the toxic residue of decades of disinformation. Yeltsin recognized this problem, even commissioning a group in 1996 to devise an “all-Russian, common-national idea.” But with some exceptions, including disclosures of Soviet wrongdoing and encouragement of a revived role for the Orthodox Church (which later fully embraced Putin, in an echo of its old role as one of the three pillars, along with autocracy and “nationality,” of 19th-century czarism), his governments did little to tackle the problem, perhaps hoping that economic and democratic reform, albeit incomplete and uneven, in conjunction with a growing civil society would eventually provide a solution.

To be sure, some cities and streets were renamed, and some statues were toppled, but for the most part, two versions of the nation’s history settled into a historically absurd coexistence that accidentally anticipated aspects of Putin’s unifying national narrative. Thus, the rediscovered bodies of the last czar, his wife, and three of their children were buried in St. Petersburg in 1998, but Lenin’s tomb remained in its mausoleum in Red Square, still a place of pilgrimage. It’s somehow appropriate that, when Yeltsin replaced the old Soviet anthem, no one was ever able to agree on the words.

Putin was propelled into the presidency on the back of bellicose promises (which he made as prime minister) to crush terrorism by Chechen separatists after a series of conveniently timed apartment bombings. After years of the ailing Yeltsin, most Russians wanted a stronger leader in the Kremlin, and as the military defended Russia’s integrity by tearing Chechnya apart, Putin gave them what they wanted, boosting his nationalist credentials as he did so.

In 2000, the year he first became president, Putin replaced Yeltsin’s new national anthem with a revised version of its Soviet predecessor. The tune, originally chosen by Stalin, was the same, but the words were not. Out went references to the Soviet Union, Lenin, communism, and the red banner. In came God and the veneration of the nation.

Some objected to a tune that is (or at least ought to have been) indelibly associated with tyranny. What mattered more was that there were enough for whom that familiar melody conjured up pride in the Soviet past — victory in the Great Patriotic War, Gagarin in space, and all that — as well as (for some) rose-colored memories of the deceptive comforts of the Brezhnev era. The useable past had been joined by a useable anthem. Underlining the ideological eclecticism of that past, the partial restoration of the Soviet anthem was accompanied (finally) by the formal adoption of the pre-revolutionary white, blue, and red tricolor as the state flag, and of the czarist double-headed eagle as the state symbol. There are many other examples of similar incongruities. Thus new statues of czars, and even two of Admiral Kolchak, perhaps the best known of all the White leaders in Russia’s civil war, have joined all those Lenins that still infest Russia’s public spaces.

However odd this may seem, it is in keeping with Putin’s vision of absorbing and neutralizing the divisions of the past, even those between White and Red, to bring the nation together — under him, needless to say. Dedicating a monument in 2021 to the end of the civil war, Putin declared that “Russia remembers and loves all its devoted sons and daughters no matter what side of the barricades they once were on.” Soviet horrors are not necessarily denied (although they may well be minimized, obfuscated, or explained away), but neither are they to be dwelt on. To do so, Putin maintains, would risk division and demoralize those millions who have fonder memories of their own Soviet pasts. In 2017, he dedicated a memorial in Moscow (and there are a good number of others elsewhere) to the victims of Soviet repression, but independent investigations of that era have been “discouraged” by increasingly brutal coercive action. Memorial, the distinguished human-rights organization that has been documenting Soviet terror since Gorbachev’s time, has been banned.

This is not evidence of any lingering sympathy on Putin’s part for communism, let alone for the Bolsheviks, whom he regards as destructive fanatics. The anniversary of the revolution (November 7) is no longer a public holiday and has been replaced by “Unity Day” (November 4), a (tellingly renamed) restoration of a pre-revolutionary holiday commemorating the expulsion of Polish-Lithuanian occupiers from Moscow. Putin’s “useable past” has plenty of room for foreign enemies and Russian triumphs. These themes, naturally enough, run through extensive commemorations of the Great Patriotic War (commemorations that can, incidentally, be useful for sneaking in a little Stalin, a “complex figure,” according to Putin) that easily exceed even those of the late Soviet period and resonate powerfully with large numbers of Russians. According to a 2020 Levada poll, 89 percent of them take pride in their country’s hard-won victory. That they do (and that it still has such a hold on the Russian imagination) gives Putin, a pointedly public admirer of Pyotr Stolypin, an authoritarian reformist who was the last great czarist prime minister, an invaluable tool to work with in his effort to construct a powerful, illiberal state that will again find its place at the world’s head table. The road to that, Putin believes, lies through Ukraine, and, so far, it seems that most Russians will follow him down it.