“If we agree that the symbols of the preceding epochs, including the Soviet epoch, must not be used at all, we will have to admit then that our mothers’ and fathers’ lives were useless and meaningless, that their lives were lived in vain. Neither in my head nor in my heart can I agree with this.”

Vladimir Putin, 2000

“I share the anger and indignation of all Soviet people about the mass repressions which occurred in the thirties and forties and for which the party-state leadership of the time is to blame. But common sense resolutely protests against the monochrome depiction of contradictory events which has become prevalent in some press organs…”

Nina Andreeva, 1988^[1]

Have the views of Nina Andreeva, as expressed in her famous anti-glasnost epistle, now become more popular than ever? In justifying his support for preserving the music of the old Soviet anthem, President Putin similarly called for a generous approach to remembering the communist era. Indeed, Nina Andreeva’s preference for a national history in which unfortunate events remained in the shadows while feats of labor, military valor, and artistic accomplishment took center stage seems little different from Putin’s ideal portrayal of Russia’s past. Yet, it would be intemperate to dub Putin a neo-Stalinist or to place him in the camp of socialist diehards. What Putin shares with perestroika era conservatives, I would argue, is disaffection with anti-Stalinism rather than admiration for Stalinism. This essay comments on the fate of anti-Stalinism in the post-perestroika period and offers an interpretation as to its present unpopularity.
Rereading in 2004 Nina Andreeva’s impassioned protest against sensationalist stories of Stalinist crimes, one is struck by the artful fashion in which she posed her argument in favor of a positive version of national history. Nina Andreeva introduced herself to readers as a teacher concerned about the patriotic upbringing of young people. She framed her fears about anti-Stalinism with the example of students questioning a decorated veteran of World War II about repressions in the army. Nina Andreeva cited some listeners’ disappointment and disbelief when the colonel told them that he had not encountered any. “Now that it has become topical,” she warned, “the subject of repressions has been blown out of all proportion in some young people’s imagination and overshadows any objective interpretation of the past.” She went on to observe that criticism of the past had ballooned to the extent that, “Industrialization, collectivization, and cultural revolution, which brought our country into the ranks of great world powers, are being forcibly squeezed into the formula ‘cult of personality’.” She vehemently rejected the idea that the purges should color perceptions of a whole complex era.
In her carefully crafted letter, Nina Andreeva placed herself in the same camp as the experienced old veteran. She contrasted his real memories (and her family’s experiences) with the media-generated false impressions held by naпve youths. In this morality tale, the teacher and the colonel stood for patriotism and wisdom. In trying times they were defending the achievements of socialism and continuing the Party tradition of service by mentoring the new generation. As an experienced moral guide [vospitatel’nitsa], Nina Andreeva was warning Gorbachev that the young generation was alienated from reform and that obsession with repressions was producing nihilistic attitudes. By directly connecting interest in past crimes and current pessimism, Nina Andreeva was explicitly challenging Mikhail Gorbachev’s rationale for permitting discussion of socialism’s mistakes.
During the years of perestroika, Gorbachev consistently took a very pragmatic stance toward Soviet history. Soviet people needed, in his view, to be cognizant of shortcomings of past Soviet leaders and policies. Complacency could not mobilize the “human factor.” Therefore, Party leaders had to take the initiative in pointing out problems and their historical roots. Though he endorsed glasnost as a means to promote constructive criticism, Gorbachev himself did not test its bounds. Even as Memorial chapters sprang up across the Soviet Union and as intellectuals began to identify the roots of Stalinism in Leninism, Gorbachev continued to approach criticism of the past as a tool for motivating reformers, not as an inherently good thing. He epitomized reformism on the subject of Stalinism. Though his own evaluation of Stalin was clearly negative, he was not deaf to conservatives’ pleas for restraint. He too feared that reform might gather too much momentum and sweep away the foundations of socialism.
Gorbachev was right to worry. Anti-Stalinism often did lead to anti-Sovietism. Indeed, disappointment with Gorbachev’s cautious approach to coming to terms with past repressions served as a catalyst for radicalization for many people. Party officials’ hindrance of measures to commemorate victims of Stalinism, their reluctance to countenance a reevaluation of collectivization, combined with ever more revelations in the press about the horrors of the Soviet past bred disillusionment about the Soviet system’s capacity for change. In some people, continued dissembling about the extent of past repressions inspired an increasingly fierce commitment to total democratization.^[2]
By the time of the first Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1990, Soviet citizens were attuned to debates about the past and the future. At the Congress, the nation was bombarded with harsh truths from the podium and it seemed as if a turning point had been reached. Even a conservative crackdown would not be able to erase new understandings about the consequences of the socialist experiment in Russia. Defenders of Stalin and Stalinism had been pushed to the margins. With a sense of success, activists who had begun by organizing around the issue of commemorating Stalin’s victims shifted their attention to more contemporary political topics.^[3]
Ironically, however, the emotional catharsis achieved by glasnost and its tidal wave of truth-telling about Russia’s painful past had started to dissipate by the time of the actual downfall of the Soviet system. By 1991, even faithful readers of liberal editions seemed weary of history, impervious to tragic tales, and understandably preoccupied with their own survival in a precarious economy. Capitalist woes may have fostered nostalgia for Brezhnev era prices and stability, but I would argue that ultimately disenchantment with anti-Stalinism had more to do with the actions and inaction of politicians and propagandists. While Gennadii Ziuganov and other communists sought to rehabilitate the Party’s record of leadership, liberal intellectuals and politicians focused on other issues. In my opinion, the Yeltsin administration squandered the opportunity to institutionalize a revised version of Soviet history in the process of creating a new state. I see two primary reasons for this failure: first, Yeltsin and his advisors thought that an anti-Soviet (including anti-Stalinist) consensus had been firmly consolidated by 1991; second, they considered propaganda (including promotion of a national identity) to be one of the ignoble aspects of totalitarian regimes. Democrats believed, therefore, that they neither needed to nor ought to use state resources in promoting a politicized version of the past.
In my book, Mythmaking in the New Russia, I examine lack of official commemoration of the August Coup defeat, the belated trial of the Communist Party before the Constitutional Court, and the feeble celebration of Russia’s new national day for evidence of liberal politicians’ laissez faire attitudes toward crafting legitimating myths for the new Russian state. Lack of anti-Stalinist initiative was most evident in the genesis of the so-called “trial of the CPSU” – which stemmed not from democrats’ interest in evaluating the past, but from Communists’ desire to save their old party organization. In the first years in power, the Yeltsin government eschewed pompous parades and displays of state symbolism, but did not create new national celebrations. Liberals mocked communists love of public demonstrations and banners, but did not mobilize their supporters in any way.
In the early years of the new Russian state, few liberal politicians were disturbed by polemics defending Stalin and Lenin. It was easy to dismiss rants by Viktor Anpilov, Ziuganov, and others as the last words of a dying ideology. Even the KPRF’s strong showing in the 1993 parliamentary election evoked mostly ridicule in the form of references to a communist electorate of brainwashed pensioners. Not surprisingly, however, one of the few people to react strongly to the resurgence of the Communist Party was Aleksandr Iakovlev, the most liberal of Gorbachev’s former advisors. In 1988, Iakovlev had written the authoritative response to Nina Andreeva’s missive. In that unsigned Pravda editorial, Iakovlev had defended anti-Stalinism and attacked the notion of patriotism based on the search for internal enemies. He wanted to see a new patriotism grounded in constructive deeds for the good of the country and a new morality based on respect for the truth. Liberals did not disdain the contributions of millions of ordinary citizens during the Stalin era, he argued, but – unlike Nina Andreeva and her ilk – neither did they interpret honest labor and loyal service as indications of popular support for Stalinist illegality.^[4]
By 1993, Iakovlev was clearly worried that nostalgia for the past might be conducive to a whitewashing of Stalinism. In the aftermath of the disappointing parliamentary election results, for instance, he pushed Yeltsin to take the step of publicly rehabilitating the participants in the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. Speaking for the President, Aleksandr Iakovlev emphasized that the decree was intended to confirm the view that repressions, executions, and deportations of civilians began already under Lenin. He sought to force the Communists, and by inference their supporters, to “look at the bloody trail you left and to draw a lesson.”^[5] Meanwhile, the Russian Communist Party blithely followed the template demonstrated by Nina Andreeva; it kept positive slogans such as “for our Soviet motherland,” while declaring that it was not “the party of Trotsky and Beria, Vlasov and Iakovlev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin.” In the new Russia unpleasant truth-telling seemed to be losing out to facile scapegoating in the struggle for popular support.
In the 1990s, the KPRF and other nationalists were winning popular acclaim for their defense of trophy art and for their attacks on Western cultural colonization. Conservative nationalists and reformed communists had captured the patriotic high ground with their rhetoric about the Great Patriotic War. Finally, with the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of victory in World War II, the Yeltsin government seemed to bow to the need for some state patriotism to compete with the Communists’ claims to represent national pride. Liberals had tried to dispel any nostalgia for the old Soviet-style celebrations by recalling the pompous nature of official events and war memorials under the old regime. Under communism, after all, official commemorations had focused first on Stalin then on Brezhnev rather than on the contributions of ordinary soldiers. The new Russian government had not paraded on Red Square. The notion that Victory Day should be marked in low key celebrations by former soldiers and their families was intended to appeal to veterans’ pride in their own actions and also to reinforce the democrats’ preferred version of victory as having come in spite of the Stalinist state. But, as competition between democrats and Communists over patriotic credentials heated up, democrats reconsidered their earlier experimentation with untraditional forms of marking Victory Day.
In 1995, the Yeltsin administration invested considerable financial and diplomatic resources in marking the jubilee anniversary of Victory Day with showy military parades. Both the use of Red Square and the presence of foreign dignitaries added to the authority of the ceremonies. Besides reviving the form of celebrating through a display of military might, the Russian government also “rehabilitated” Soviet symbols perceived to be close to the hearts of veterans. In 1995, they allowed the red victory banner with its five-pointed star to be hung alongside the Russian tricolor; and in 1996, the military parade featured the actual Soviet flag that flew over the Reichstag in 1945. Moreover, in his 1996 address Yeltsin declared that, “All the country now clearly sees the continuity of times contained in our symbols, the proud spirit of the motherland in the unity of generations, in each of us.”^[6]
Despite Yeltsin’s proclamation of patriotic continuity with the Soviet period and his revival of old authoritative political rituals and symbols, he and other liberals retained their untraditional perspective that the Soviet Union had won the war in spite of, not because of, Stalin. Though by 1995 liberals had begun to tone down reminders of the horrors of war and to avoid explicit critiques of wartime policies, they continued to recall the USSR’s defeats, as well as its victories, on the battlefields of World War II. And they traced the roots of Russia’s present woes back to the totalitarian system, which they argued had begun in 1917 and which had been inadvertently strengthened by the USSR’s victory in the war.^[7]
The new patriotic mix, however, did not always ring true. A Nezavisimaia Gazeta correspondent complained of the contradictory messages sent by the 1995 ceremonies:

“...the synthesis of great power status [derzhavnichestva] and democracy clearly did not succeed. The ritual of the first parade of the “democratic epoch”: the leader on the mausoleum, the minister of defense inspecting the columns of soldiers from an open car to a loud “hurrah” – was totally in accord with the scenarios of Soviet times. The Red banners with hammers and sickles supplanted the tricolor, and Soviet marches and songs sounded out more often than the Russian hymn.”^[8]
In other words, the ceremonies were now too Soviet, and yet still did not accomplish their goal of uniting all Russian citizens. Indeed, political opponents of the Yeltsin regime, although pleased for veterans’ sakes with the return of the Red flag to the official celebrations, ridiculed democrats for hanging garlands over Lenin’s name on the mausoleum. “Recycling” Soviet symbols had pitfalls for those who had scorned them so vigorously in the recent past.
Nevertheless, Yeltsin soon found himself again turning to the past as a resource in his 1996 election campaign. Initially, Yeltsin followed the advice of those in his inner circle who advocated against an anticommunist strategy. In his early speeches, Yeltsin told voters that, “We have ceased to see the world in terms of red and white. Before our eyes it became multicolored, vivid, and bright.”^[9] Billboards proclaiming “Yeltsin is our Presi-dent” and “Yeltsin is the President of All Russia” proliferated. But with his main opponent running on a platform that combined nostalgia for the Soviet past and Russian nationalism, Yeltsin could not avoid taking a stance on national history. In this case, however, he was able to mobilize divisive collective memories to his advantage.
Despite the forward-looking campaign envisioned by his advisors, Yeltsin’s most powerful advertisements made striking use of black and white images, group portraits of young people taken in the 1940s and 1950s, and more recent photos of veterans. The smiling faces of today’s grandparents were accompanied by the simple handwritten text: “I believe, I love, I hope” and Yeltsin’s signature. Television clips from the same series featured old family snapshots and voice-overs recalling the good and bad of the past, followed by a contemporary shot of the speaker explaining, often in less than enthusiastic terms, why despite the difficulties of the present he or she would vote for Yeltsin. Carefully choosing excerpts that focused on the hardships of the past and hopes for the future, the ads’ designers skimmed over the problems of the present day, problems that might easily be ascribed to Yeltsin’s administration. The unadorned personal histories collected by the Yeltsin campaign contrasted sharply with the official, faceless version of the past long propagated by Soviet history textbooks. Although the short clips did not provide complex narratives of the past, they did directly challenge the nostalgia for the Brezhnev era promoted by the KPRF.
Yeltsin’s “Vote or Lose” posters were also calculated to draw on differences between life before and after the end of the Soviet system. They juxtaposed a denim jacket versus a prisoner’s striped coat, a globe versus a coil of barbed wire, and a person’s feet shod in sneakers versus the bronze legs of a statue. Thus, designers placed once rare western consumer goods next to objects evoking two of the most disliked aspects of Soviet life – the GULAG and the cult of the leader. The “Vote or Lose” posters not only recalled consumerist pleasures, they also reminded young people of the sorts of freedom – to travel, to speak out, to enjoy foreign cultures – that their parents had not had. Without actually using political symbols, the ads drew a sharp contrast between the ideological monopoly of the past and the freedom of the present, and hence contributed to the Yeltsin team’s emerging theme that this election constituted a choice between polar opposite political systems, not just between personalities or policies.
Toward the end of the campaign, the Yeltsin team moved beyond gentle reminders of stagnation to frighten viewers with the prospect of a second communist revolution complete with bloodshed, turmoil, even civil war. The same advisor who had discouraged anticommunist campaigning in April 1996 was telling journalists in June that Russian Communists had not evolved into social democrats as in Poland. On the contrary, he argued, their program reeked “not even of Khrushchev’s era, but of long ago Stalinist times, of the 1930s.” He accused the KPRF of trying to hide its real face, which was that its orthodox communist members, like the supporters of the GKChP conspiracy Varennikov and Luk’ianov.^[10] Rather than addressing Ziuganov’s record or program, the president’s team articulated negative aspects of the CPSU’s whole seventy-year history. “Either back to revolution and upheaval, or forward to stability and well-being,” as Yeltsin announced after the conclusion of the first round of voting.^[11]
Yeltsin won with his creation of a stark choice between the past and the present. Yet just a few weeks after winning reelection, President Yeltsin would announce that Russia needed a national idea. He asserted that, unlike every other period of modern Russian history, the new democratic era had no ideology. Hence, he called upon his supporters to “think about what national idea, what national ideology is the most important for Russia.”^[12] His administration quickly assembled a commission to head the search, and Rossiiskaia Gazeta immediately initiated a year-long contest for readers to identify or compose a set of principles capable of inspiring Russian citizens to unite as a nation.
The notion that Russia was suffering from an identity crisis came as no surprise to the politically aware in 1996. The simultaneous collapse of Communist rule and the Soviet empire in late 1991 had given new life to centuries-old intellectual debates on the nature of Russia’s national interest and the proper definition of the nation. But what motivated the members of the Yeltsin administration to admit that they had failed to unite citizens around democratic or other values at a juncture when they might have rested on their laurels? In part, I would argue, the political establishment was motivated by the fear that the anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist rhetoric employed so frequently in Yeltsin’s 1996 campaign would not suffice in the future to mobilize voters around economic reformers. Although Yeltsin’s advertising designers cleverly used individual life stories, rather than national narratives, to present reasons for voters to stick with the president in 1996, these ads reflected democrats’ inability to distill personal stories into simple symbols or historical analogies. Neither the Yeltsin administration nor liberal political parties had been able to discover or “manufacture” some potent, meaningful shorthand to communicate their principles to the public.^[13]
Communists, by contrast, were seen as having at their disposal a symbolic repertoire replete with flags, songs, and myths of past military, scientific, and economic achievements. Few elements of the Communists’ patriotic armory appealed to the liberals per se, but some democrats now embraced the notion of having a set of positive memories to invoke as markers of a shared political identity. As Yeltsin’s future advisor on the Russian idea put it on the eve of the presidential election, “When totalitarianism was being destroyed, the idea of ideology was being destroyed, too. The idea was formed that a national idea was a bad thing. But the baby was thrown out with the bath water. Our Kremlin polls show that people miss this.”^[14] In other words, whereas the Communists, in effect, had partially compensated for the unpopularity of Marxism-Leninism by rapidly embracing patriotism, democrats had mistakenly shunned patriotic rhetoric and rituals as somehow exclusive to totalitarian regimes.
When Yeltsin stepped down as president three years later, however, he had not found a new “idea for Russia” and the contest initiated by his advisors had been quietly discontinued without a winner. One problem was that the broad, abstract nature of the enterprise allowed for extreme diversity and encouraged high-minded rhetoric. Readers’ ideas for the nation ranged from “communication” to “repentance” to “empire.” Others tried to coin modern versions of the old imperial slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.” For instance, one person suggested “Health, Unity (or sobornost’), Charity” as a new statement of priorities.^[15] To a certain extent, the contest entries simply mirrored Russian society’s diverse concerns about economic development, Russia’s status in the world, federalism, the environment, and so forth. Yet, unlike the Communists’ invocation of specific heroes and concrete collective memories, the liberals’ discussion of cultural traditions did not excite any patriotic fervor. Lists of virtues or sets of priorities neither provided blueprints for action nor sparked strong emotional reactions. It seemed that myths of national character could not substitute for narratives about statehood.
Despite the fact that the oceans of ink spent printing ruminations about Russia’s special path produced no winning pithy formula or catchy slogan, the “idea for Russia” contest did offer several revelations about the potential grounds for “democratic patriotism.” Not surprisingly, as a source of positive role models or moral lessons, the Soviet period was conspicuously absent. On the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1996, Yeltsin spoke of a “Year of Reconciliation.” But his recasting of the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution as an occasion for forgiveness and mutual tole-rance appealed to neither Communists nor anti-Stalinists. A second interesting feature of the “idea for Russia” contest was its revelation of a strong disdain on the part of many “liberal” patriots for the dissident tradition. The contest’s opening announcement quoted Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, implying that contest participants might find the roots of a democratic Russian patriotism in the brave actions and intriguing philosophies of those who had dared to challenge Soviet rule. Yet, not only did few participants point to the dissidents as heroes, but also several authors denigrated their role in the history of democratization.
In a series of sharply written articles, political scientist, member of Yeltsin’s Commission on Human Rights, and frequent Rossiiskaia Gazeta contributor, Aleksei Kiva explained that the former dissidents had no place in modern Russian society. Having been accustomed to fighting authority and to mistrusting officials, they, according to Kiva, had little to offer now that the time had come for constructive work. He alleged that, “For a long time, if not forever, they will feel closer to the person on the defendant’s bench than to the person who guards him.” Hence, he thought that they made unsuitable candidates for government service. Indeed, just as Solzhenitsyn’s return in 1994 had provoked a fair amount of scorn for the would-be moral authority who came to Russia with harsh criticism for all politicians only after reform was well under way, so too did the whole dissident tradition come under fire from supporters of the Yeltsin regime for being overly judgmental. The dissidents’ highly developed consciences had led them to hold all governments to strict standards. Such attitudes, Kiva believed, led former dissidents like Sergei Kovalev to exa-cerbate Russian relations with the breakaway republic of Chechnya by siding with the underdogs, rather than supporting the guardians of law and order. Kiva felt that too often human rights activists praised the West and scorned the idea of love for state and army. In short, he blamed the dissidents, along with radical democrats, for fostering Russians’ inferiority complex.^[16]
In sum, from a variety of commentators in the late 1990s came the sentiment that previous liberal attitudes toward the national past had been too critical. Outspoken anti-Soviet stances no longer garnered praise. Though purveyors of a new patriotism certainly did not rush to embrace the Soviet period, they wanted all Russian citizens to be able to take satisfaction in their long shared history. Indeed, although Yeltsin did not directly contribute to the “idea for Russia” contest, he seemed to signal an important change of heart toward dealing with the past with his call for reconciliation on the 1996 anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The president, who had fiercely opposed amnesty for his political opponents in 1994 and who had recently campaigned with harsh anti-Communist rhetoric, now appeared ready to adopt a more forgiving attitude for the sake of harmony. In practice, however, reconciliation promised to carry its own difficulties. Besides burying Nicholas II, and not interring Lenin, the Yeltsin government did not realize its idea of making conciliatory gestures for the sake of creating or reinforcing patriotic culture.
Vladimir Putin from the very first eschewed Yeltsin’s relatively laissez faire style of mythmaking. In one of his first appearances as prime minister, Putin warned Moscow State University students that, “Sausage and freedom” would not do as an idea for Russia.^[17] Neither a market zealot nor a Western-style liberal, Putin’s view on national history is probably closer to Egor Ligachev’s than to Aleksandr Iakovlev’s. Looking back after the end of the USSR, Ligachev has argued that,

“At first this striving to restore historical justice was salutary: it emancipated people’s minds, liberated them from a feeling of fear, and generated initiative… But later, the stress shifted and some writers started talking about past lawlessness caustically, gloatingly; with castigation rather than healing… In so doing, they were leading the readers to a single conclusion: the social system was guilty of everything, and therefore had to be changed.”^[18]

Putin has benefited from the new political system, but as an ardent patriot he is suspicious of anyone who dwells on national misfortunes. He probably shares the mistaken, in my opinion, view that anti-Stalinists were gloating over every new tragic revelation about the past. (It seems to me that anti-Stalinists’ sometimes exultant tone was more often due to joy and triumph at having rescued another piece of long hidden information.)
Putin’s attitudes toward Soviet history became clear in the debate over the Russian anthem. Liberal politicians and intellectuals accused Putin of pandering to public opinion and of honoring a repressive regime with the restoration of the Soviet anthem. Even Yeltsin criticized his heir: “The president of a country should not blindly follow the mood of the people. On the contrary, it is up to him to actively influence it.”^[19] But Putin defended the compromise that finally brought Russia a full set of state symbols. In terms reminiscent of Ziuganov’s campaign speeches, the president reminded opponents of the anthem that the Soviet period had consisted of more than “Stalin’s prisons and repression.” He cited Soviet achievements in space and culture, while noting that the tsarist regime “had repressed peoples and dissidents of its own.”^[20]
Yeltsin had been willing to appease veterans by producing the red banner on Victory Day. But it was one thing to recognize a historic relic as such, and another thing to adopt an old symbol as relevant and fitting in the present. Liberals never endorsed forgetting that Russians had fought, sometimes died, and finally triumphed in World War II under the communist flag. But they had come to power based on a promise to replace the Soviet regime with a democratic variant and, even though that promise had not been fully realized, they could not look at the old system as anything other than a foil to what they wanted to create. Yeltsin had tried to mend the breach between those who looked back with nostalgia and those who scorned the past by urging depoliticization of history. By burying the Romanovs, he removed one locus of acrimony, but Yeltsin and his allies could not really reconcile with the Soviet era.
Putin, by contrast, seems free of the liberal habit of soul-searching. He has expressed no regrets or qualms about his own career in the KGB, apparently seeing no contradictions between his past work and his more recent service in ostensibly democratic administrations – first under Sobchak in St. Petersburg and then under Yeltsin. As befit his personal history, Putin easily endorsed an amalgam of Soviet and Russian symbols for the state. In this, he clearly showed that he did not share earlier democratic leaders’ self-consciousness about borrowing from the Soviet political repertoire or their discomfort with patriotic pomp.
Yet Putin’s disdain for invoking “inverse legitimacy,” that is, for holding up the old regime as a negative example, should not be ascribed solely to a more tolerant attitude toward communism. It also reflects the priority that the new president has given to strengthening state power. Whereas Yeltsin was motivated by the tasks of transition to underscore breaks with the past, Putin acts in accordance with the idea that consolidation can be promoted by avoiding divisive memories whenever possible.^[21] In theory, both transition and consolidation could involve extracting positive lessons from the past, but Russian liberals never identified some “golden age” from which to draw guidance or inspiration. Some intellectuals were happy to live without historic myths – preferring critical approaches to the past to patriotic simplifications – but humility regarding the nation’s common history created the impression of weakness and even shame, sentiments unappealing to statebuilders.
Does this statist approach to mythmaking mean the inevitable rehabilitation of Stalin? Not necessarily. Putin has not echoed Ziuganov’s praise for Stalin as a great military leader, sincere nationalist, or nurturer of Russian culture. Nor has he endorsed the logic behind positive reinterpretations of Stalin’s leadership. But the statist motivation does require remembering industrialization and the conduct of World War II at the very least as unmitigated successes. While liberals and historians still ask to what extent Stalinist policies facilitated or undermined these processes, these questions are to be absent from state commemorations of the past. Without such analysis, in my opinion, one gets a dumbed-down, overly simplistic and hence fragile patriotism. National myths that do not allow for complexity cannot hold up well in the complexities of the real world. An insistence on honoring the positive also allows for a creeping rehabilitation of Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and other historical figures who have some record of state service amidst their myriad of disservice to individuals.
Like Yeltsin, Putin would prefer to focus on the contributions of more ordinary people to the achievements of the Soviet state. Yet given his determination to weld disaffected Russian citizens into a patriotic collective, Putin seems nostalgic for the 1930s and 1940s (or at least for their cinematic version) as a time of apparent unity, mobilization, militancy, and morality. The fact that horrible totalitarian excesses also characterized these decades is not denied, but simply ignored. All the negative events take place off screen in this historical drama.
Putin’s attempt to have the best of both worlds with the national anthem – keeping the form while changing the content – is unlikely, however, to have the desired effect of resolving the controversy over state symbols. The multiplicity of Russia’s anthems – from “God save the Tsar” to the “Internationale” to Stalin’s anthem to Glinka’s “Patriotic Song” – rightfully reflects the nation’s turbulent history. Twice Russia even had music without words: first, after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, when lyrics praising the late leader proved an embarrassment; and in 1991, when a new melody was chosen, but suitable words could not be found. Given the fundamental divisions in Russia today, the writer Vladimir Voinovich contended that the recent absence of words in the national song was appropriate. The words of the anthem should express national identity, he noted. Yet, “What image can we have if we ourselves do not know who we are? We know what the Soviet Union was, and tsarist Russia also. But what is Russia today? Some pray to Jesus Christ, while others bow down before the chief atheist in the mausoleum.”^[22] Putin’s pragmatic approach to overcoming the deadlock on state symbols by granting concessions to the Soviet part of the Russian people could not end the battle over what to take from the past. It simply reaffirmed the extent of divisions.
The emotions unleashed by the reinstatement of Stalin’s anthem, complete with new lyrics by one of the co-authors of the original, serve as a reminder that historical amnesia has not prevailed in Russia. When Communists, liberals, and statists have attempted to strip symbols of their context, all have encountered resistance. Images of the past are not infinitely malleable. The Russian experience shows that politicians can neither escape the past, nor mold it completely to their will. Collective memories are shaped gradually and hence the struggle over interpretations of the nation’s common history will persist as Russians continue to forge new identities. In the future critical approaches to the Stalinist past may come back in fashion. For the present, anti-Stalinists can console themselves with the knowledge that all the historical revelations of the past two decades cannot be stuffed back into Pandora’s box.