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October Issue |
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Utopia in Power: A History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present
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10841 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1986 |
10,908 Words |
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Mikhail Heller And Aleksandr Nekrich
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The man of the future is the one who will have the longest memory.
--Friedrich Nietzche
From time immemorial, history has been written by the victors. "Woe to the vanquished," said the ancient Romans, by which they implied not only that the vanquished may be exterminated or turned into slaves but also that the conquerors write the history of their wars; the victors take possession of the past and establish their control over the collective memory. George Orwell, perhaps the only Western writer who profoundly understood the essence of the Soviet world, devised this precise and pitiless formula: "Whoever controls the past controls the future." Orwell was not the first to say this, though. Mikhail Pokrovsky, the first Soviet Marxist historian, anticipated Orwell when he wrote that history is politics applied to the past.
The history of the Soviet Union is not just another example confirming the general rule. In this case history was placed at the service of the state to the greatest possible extent and in the most conscious, systematic way. After the October revolution, not only the means of production were nationalized but all spheres of existence, and above all, memory, history.
Memory makes us human. Without it people are turned into a formless mass that can be shaped into anything the controllers of the past desire. Count Alexander Benckendorff, a Baltic-German nobleman and Russia's first chief of gendarmes under Czar Nicholas I, advised this approach to history: "Russia's past is admirable; its present more than magnificent; as for its future, it is beyond the grasp of the most daring imagination; it is from this point of view…that Russian history must be conceived and written." The chief of gendarmes was convinced of the correctness of his view. So was Maxim Gorky, the leading Soviet writer under Joseph Stalin, who said: "We must know everything that happened in the past, not in the way it has been written about heretofore; but rather, in the way it appears in the light of the doctrine of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin."
Beckendorff's worthy suggestions seem to have been adopted and grafted onto the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine, with the result that the Soviet people were successfully deprived of their social memory. In the decades after the Bolshevik revolution an unparalleled expertise was developed in manipulating the past and controlling history. Not only was the history of the Soviet Union controlled and manipulated; the history of Russia and of the nations which had been part of the Russian empire suffered
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