STALIN'S HISTORY LESSON
Norman Davies argues that
Mr Gorbachev is heir to Stalinist schemes of Russian nationalism
POLITICAL legitimacy is derived from different sources in different systems. In democratic states, it derives from the ballot box. In theocratic states, it derives from God's will as interpreted by a priestly caste. In the world of Marxism-Leninism, it derives from the scientific Laws of History as interpreted by the Communist Party.
For Mr Gorbachev, there- fore, history has more than academic significance. Having reached the pinnacle of power In the Soviet Union without a single popular vote ever being cast in his favour, he can only justify his position, and that of the ruling Party, by reference to the historical developments Which supposedly gave 'the avant-garde of the working- class' an absolute right to rule through 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'. Despite his wel- come moves in the direction of greater democratisation and public debate, he is perched atop a particular ideological interpretation of history, whose over-enthusiastic revision could rapidly reduce the whole com- munist edifice to ruins.
The withdrawal of history books from Soviet schools is sure proof of the gravity of the current crisis. The official admission that the authorised version of Soviet history has been so crammed with lies that schoolchildren can no longer be expected to swallow them is damning beyond belief. One is tempted to compare it to a withdrawal of the Catholic Catech- ism from the schools of the Vatican City. So far, Western comment has paid little attention to the deeper aspects of this Issue. There has been a flood of reports about the revision of particular episodes Or personalities of the Stalinist era. Bukharin has been rehabilitated. Trotsky has been mentioned. The devastating effects of collectivisation, of the famines, and of the purges have been denounced; and the number of Stalin's victims has been revised upwards into the tens of millions. But there has been little curiosity about the ideological framework within which these revelations have been made. No one seems to have goticed that the recent celebrations of the 'Christian Millennium' in Moscow were staged in a manner which endorsed all the basic assumptions of the Stalinist theory of history. If the General Secret- ary's patronage of the celebrations can be read as official approval, then on this issue he must be seen to have lent his support to Stalinism.
The Stalinist theory of history, as de- veloped in the 1930s, married two hitherto unrelated elements — one, the Marxist concept of historical materialism, which demands that the past be interpreted in terms of the progress of the class struggle, and the other, the so-called 'Russian Scheme of History', which was elaborated by 19th-century nationalists to justify the existence of the Russian Empire. In its origins, the Russian Scheme drew heavily on the earlier Muscovite tradition which linked the expansion of the Russian state to Moscow's alleged right of inheritance to the lands of Kievan Rus'.
The Baptism of Rus', which took place in 988 AD, three centuries before the destruction of the Kievan state by the Mon- gols and four centuries before the rise of Muscovy, nonethe- less provides the starting point of the story for nationalists and Stalinists alike. It was used by the nationalists to confirm the natural 'seniority' of the Rus- sian nation over the other peo- ples of the state. By the Stalin- ists, it was used as the first stage of a historical programme, which, after a thousand years of progress, led inevitably to the emergence of the USSR.
Within the nationalist scheme, a special role has al- ways been reserved for Russian Orthodoxy, the monopoly reli- gion of the Muscovite state. Although the Russian Orthodox Church did not come into being until 1458, when it was forced by its political rulers to break with the main Orthodox confes- sion of Slavonic rite beyond Moscow's borders, and to abandon its allegiance to the Patriarch of Constantino- ple, the fiction was put about that it was founded by St Vladimir at the Baptism of Rus'. (English readers will best compre- hend this sleight of hand by imagining a claim by Henry VIII's commissioners that the Church of England had been founded by St Augustine.) Yet once the fiction was in place, the Russian Orthodox Church could proceed to brand all the other, non-Russian descendants of Kievan Ortho- doxy as heretics, apostates and traitors. Hence, as the Muscovite state expanded, all the assorted communities of Byelorus- sian and Ukrainian orthodox and uniates were forcibly converted to the Russian variant of their religion. The -campaign took one major step forward in 1589, when Ivan the Terrible set up his Patriarchate of 'Moscow and all Russia', and another in 1686, when the Metropolitanate of Kiev was carved out of lands annexed from Poland. It continued until 1946, when the uniates of western Ukraine were suppres- sed by Stalin.
In the early 20th century, the Russian Scheme of History came under attack from two separate quarters: from non-Russian historians such as Mykhailo Hrushevsky, and from pioneer Marxists such as M. N. Pokrovsky. Pokrovsky, who had succeeded in publishing his History of Ancient Russia before the Revolution, and who under Lenin became a Deputy Commissar for Education, is mainly remembered as the author in the 1920s of the first Soviet textbooks. He had developed his ideas during the Bolsheviks' internationalist and militantly atheist phase, when they were more concerned with the world-wide re- volution than with the construction of the Soviet state in Russia. He was an arch- opponent of Russian Nationalism. 'Great Russia was built on the bones of the non-Russian nations,' he wrote. 'In the past,' he declared in 1929, 'we Russians were the greatest robbers on earth.'
For Stalin, this rejection of Russia's imperial traditions was anathema. In any case, the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, and the policy of 'Socialism in One Country' had changed the Party's priori- ties. Traditional Russian nationalism gra- dually returned to fashion, and with the advent of 'National Bolshevism' the once- favoured Pokrovsky School could be open- ly vilified as 'a spying-wrecking band of pseudo-historians'. Pokrovsky himself died of cancer in 1932. Most of his unrecanting followers were shot. Under the guidance of his former assistant, Anna Pankratova, Stalinist historiography took over. Hence- forth, the Revolution of 1917 was not to be seen as the terminus of the Russian Empire, but as its finest achievement. The success of the indomitable Russian nation in building their vast empire was to be seen as a glorious prelude to their later triumphs in constructing 'the world's first socialist state'. The Russian Scheme of History, wedded to the doctrine of class struggle, was to be revamped for the next generation of textbooks. The Soviet Un- ion, like the Tsarist Empire, was to be acclaimed as the rightful heir of Kievan Rus'. The historical role of the Russian Orthodox Church was to be recognised. According to a key Stalinist directive on history-teaching, in the decree of 16 May 1934: 'The official adoption of Christianity by St Vladimir in 988 AD is to be seen as a progressive step in the history of the Russian nation.'
This is the history which Gorbachev has inherited. After more than 50 years, the cult of personality has been and gone; but the ideological, Stalinist core remains. It is doubtful if the young agricultural specialist from Stavropol gave much thought to historical matters, though he may now wonder if Stalin's rewriting of history was any more 'scientific' than his collectivisa- tion of agriculture. The point is, what can he do to escape the consequences? Does he intend to limit his reforming broom to sweeping out the piles of smaller lies? Or will he dare to re-examine the Big Lies, which underpin so much of Soviet ideolo- gy? Is it really possible to deStalinise the Soviet system, and still have something left? Can he possibly contemplate an hon- est revision of History which might destroy his own legitimacy?
In other spheres of policy, Gorbachev has shown that he learns fast, and has made more radical proposals than envis- aged at first. On the other hand, he may prefer to hold support for the more practic- al aspects of perestroika, by leaving the ideological facade untouched. With a crumbling empire to protect, he may well have seen the point, as Stalin did, of appealing to Holy Russia.
Norman Davies is Professor of History at London University.
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