TARTU – President Vladimir Putin is using the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe not to help Russians confront the Stalinist past but rather to engage in mythmaking that will only add to their difficulties in dealing with that past and building a democratic future, according to French specialist on how societies cope with traumatic pasts.
In adopting this approach, Sorbonne Professor Bruno Groppo told a Moscow audience last month, Putin is continuing the pattern of other post-Stalinist leaders but reinforcing Russia’s distinction from other countries which have faced up to their pasts and thus been able to turn to the future (
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Groppo, a specialist on Latin America, outlined for his listeners the ways in which Russians and their leaders have tried to deal with Stalin’s legacy. Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and some of his henchmen, arguing that the crimes of that era were the responsibility of only a few but not of the Communist Party or Soviet people as a whole.
His successor Leonid Brezhnev sought to damp down even that narrow criticism clearly viewing it as a threat to the legitimacy of his rule and the Soviet state more generally. Instead, he chose to play up Stalin’s positive role in World War II, largely remaining silent about the dictator’s criminal activities.
Then during the period of glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev, Groppo continued, many in the Soviet Union learned more about the horrors of that past than ever before. But in the minds of many Russians since that time, the discrediting of Stalin and his system under Gorbachev contributed in a major way to the delegitimation of the Soviet system as a whole.
While that confrontation with the past may have helped open the way to democracy, Groppo said, it also meant that many post-Soviet leaders with deep roots in the Soviet past and especially in the Soviet security agencies – such as Vladimir Putin and his team - are leery of the possible consequences of any further attacks on the Stalinist past.
Consequently, he and they have adopted yet another approach to avoiding any serious discussion of the past. Putin remains willing, Groppo said, to talk about tragedies under Stalin in general terms, but he has focused to such an extent on the Soviet contribution to victory in Europe – the one thing all Russians see in a positive light – that it leaves little room for any consideration of criminal nature of the Stalinist state.
In the run-up to the celebrations scheduled for May 9, for example, Putin has sought to promote only positive images of that period and has angrily dismissed any suggestions such as those by Latvian President Vaira Vika-Freiberga that 1945 may have brought liberation from one kind of totalitarianism but led to the imposition of another kind on half of Europe.
Putin’s approach, Groppo said, almost certainly will prove counterproductive over time, however much it appears to work for him now. A traumatic past at some point must be addressed, Groppo argued, or it will continue to poison the future. And countries that hope to become or remain democracies must in the end face up to the past.
"It is impossible to overcome a traumatic past until society in an extensive way analyzes its past, establishes the truth about the crimes that have been committed, condemns those responsible and as far as is possible compensates the victims for their loss," the Paris-based scholar concluded.
Those countries, which have done so, had great success as a result, Groppo said. Germany, for example, has not only been willing to focus on its horrific Nazi past but even build a monument to the victims of the Holocaust not far from the Brandenburg Gate in the center of its capital city. And now it is a flourishing democracy.
But countries like Putin’s Russia that have failed to take similar steps about their terrible pasts or to celebrate aspects of that past in order to ignore its evils have had a much more difficult time in building democracy, even as they continue to search for and develop "comforting new myths."
Groppo argued that even if successor governments try to ignore the past, groups of concerned individuals will ensure that eventually the truth comes out. That is what happened at the end of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and that is what will eventually happen in Russia, however much Putin and his regime try to delay it.
But Groppo concluded with another observation that may be critical for all those involved in the May 9 celebrations: The longer any society puts off the confrontation with a traumatic past or tries to deny the necessity of it, the more difficult, painful and politically explosive it is likely to find this process to be.
