Remembering Stalin

I have a great research staff. Actually it's just my Mom. She sends me all kinds of interesting articles. This morning she sent me an article from the American Enterprise Institute by Leon Aron about what's happening in Russia. It would seem those wily Ruskies are up to their old tricks. Yep, right out of Stalin's playbook. The first paragraph of the article say it all.

On June 18-19, 2007, a national conference of high school historians and teachers of social sciences convened in Moscow. The agenda called for discussion of "the acute problems in the teaching of modern Russian history" and "the development of the state standards of education."[2] It soon became clear, however, that the real purpose of the gathering was to present to (or, more precisely, to impress upon) the delegates two recently finished "manuals for teachers." One of them--soon to be published in a pilot print run of ten thousand copies--was The Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006; A Teacher's Handbook (referred to in this Outlook by its Russian short title, Istoriya), which will become a high school textbook for use in classrooms this coming September (Aron, 2008, Sept. 8th. Emphasis added).

What's wrong with that, you ask? While it is true that all countries have some ugly episodes, sweeping them away by re-writing history is a huge mistake. That's the difference between totalitarianism and freedom. In America, we are sorry for our transgressions, and try to learn from our mistakes, but apparently Vlad Putin would rather paint the history of Russia in a much softer and filtered light. He would rather blame the transgressions of the former Russian (Soviet) leaders on forces outside that empire. At a conference in June of 2007 Putin justified the need for a standardized telling of the Russian story that would give the people of his country a greater sense of pride. He closed the ceremonies with this:

"As to some problematic pages in our history--yes, we've had them. But what state hasn't? And we've had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let's remember the events beginning in 1937; let's not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as it was in Vietnam, for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt--they'd better think of themselves."

Pretty sad. Doesn't this sound like the definition of insanity? Whatever will he do with the thousands of people who know the truth of the brutality of the former Soviet regimes? Will they be "edited" so as to paint a happier picture? 

Perhaps some of you have seen the picture of Joseph Djugashvilli (Stalin's real name) walking along a river alone. Well the original picture showed another man walking next to him. The other man probably wound up in a mass grave in Siberia. Stalin was a master of propaganda, show trials and misdirection, and he isn't the only one. On a site put out by Dartmouth University one can view a slew of doctored pictures. The research tends to make one think that this sort of thing happens all the time. It probably does, but who has the time to check every image that comes across our screen, newspapers and magazines, billboards and the like? 

So what have I learned from this? One must remember that almost everything we see affects how we think about the world, and that one should be skeptical - especially when someone is trying to get us to think a certain way. In other words, don't believe everything you read, because seeing isn't necessarily believing.