An unbiased analysis of foreign policy events and tendencies often prompts the more or less well-versed observer to make paradoxical conclusions. What happened on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I – that horrendous war that claimed millions of human lives, destroyed empires and created bloody revolutions at its end?

Nothing special happened at all in 1984, except that some elderly veterans laid wreaths on Trafalgar Square in London and there was a slightly more pompous than usual military parade on the Champs Elysees in Paris. As for the Soviet Union, the start of the “first imperialist” war was not marked at all, as that war had sunk deep into history.

And now let us look around and see what is happening in social and public life in Russia and its European neighboring countries now that the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II is drawing nearer. The picture is completely different this time, with the ghosts of the past emerging as full-fledged actors in current political discussions and which have an invisible presence in parliamentary hearings and even in daily diplomatic practices, at least in some countries. But if your partner wants to discuss the wounds inflicted by history, you simply cannot say no to him. Otherwise he will not discuss with you the things that you are interested in. Thus, the historical agenda draws ever more new people.

It is not accidental that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev devoted part of his speech at a conference of Russian ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry to historical issues in politics. “We simply can’t accept the attempts seen in some countries – especially if they receive governmental support – to bring into the light claims about the ‘civilizing and liberating mission’ of the Nazis and their accomplices,” he said.

AN ASYMMETRIC RESPONSE

Indeed, the debates about the war often contain inadmissible and even blasphemous elements. Yet the topic of the war also draws out issues of a more conceptual nature, including the problem of the role that totalitarian and authoritarian regimes played in the fate of the 20th century.

It is true that many of those who raise such issues do so not because of some scientific interest, but rather because they pursue practical propagandist foreign policy aims – including with regard to Russia. “Fighters on the ideology front” rely on a tough algorithm, which implies that Soviet totalitarianism should be denounced through a comparison with German Nazism as the first step. As a second step, responsibility, including material responsibility, should be apportioned to today’s Russia. Worse still, those propaganda tricksters do not stop at that and try to wrap the year 1945 in mourning banners and pass it off as the onset of the Soviet yoke in Europe.

Frankly speaking, Russian society, and even the most politically advanced part of it, has proven to be simply unprepared for such a turn. It produces irritation and bitterness. The torrents of accusations poured on our heads mostly by former friends from the former “Socialist camp” and, more importantly, from former fellow-countrymen living in the newly independent states do not facilitate mutual understanding and good-neighborliness as a minimum.

The people who blame the past – and many of them shared it with us – are reluctant to see the shades of colors or to admit that the Soviet system had evolutionary elements. I personally object to factoring out totalitarianism from the history of democratic countries, since it is neither an exception nor a misfortunate accident in historical development. It is rather a logical result and a manifestation of concrete social and historical circumstances.

After all, how could the leaders of, say, new Baltic countries mature into full-fledged high-quality democrats in an absolutely totalitarian Soviet society? How did it happen that former functionaries of the Young Communists League and the Communist Party, who used to collaborate closely with secret services, eventually brought their countries into the lairs of liberalism – NATO and the European Union? Could it be that history, including Soviet history, and totalitarianism are more complex elements than what the simplistic and biased interpreters present?

Discussions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism were widespread in Russia at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. As representatives of Russia’s intellectual milieu, we would think then that we had rounded up the process of conceptualization and that the shadows of the past had been “buried in a coffin” as Stalin would say. Alas, our conclusions were premature.

Many people – including whole societies – must have found themselves outside the context of such discussions, as at that time they pursued entirely different goals. For instance, the winning of independence by the countries of the Baltic region and, partly, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Perhaps this is why we have to return to the problem now.

There exists another and highly disconcerting tendency – the obliviousness of Russians themselves to the lessons of totalitarianism that seemed to have been learned by heart. The generation of Russians that grew up in the 1990s must have missed movies like Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance or Alexander Beck’s novel A New Appointment or Varlam Shalamov’s prison camp stories. As for The Gulag Archipelago, those people just skimmed it – just the same way they read War and Peace. Far from all of this generation can discern the allusions that landmark Soviet-era bards such as Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava made in their songs. Remarkably, a young Russian will typically assign the same ranking of popularity to Soviet-era bards and dictators.

The mentality of the generation of Putin’s “stability era” and the generation that matured in the “frenzied 1990s” does not draw a distinct line between the historical good and bad or between the country’s grandeur and the crimes of a regime. This factor is aggravated by the swelling primitive chauvinistic patriotism and the popularity of radical ideologies among the youth. Nor should one discard the fact that we often make use of extremely simplified and blunt arguments in our debates with those who refashion history and move Soviet monuments to other places. Mass consciousness accepts these arguments as false ideological hallmarks. In the meantime, this is not the case when an enemy should be crushed with his own weapons. The response should be asymmetric, whatever the banality of this statement.

That is why a willingness to attain absolute ideological uniformity, which rules out differences in interpretations of the country’s history, may become the cornerstone of a new totalitarian ideology, even if we place motivations like “rebuffing the libelers” behind this over-simplified uniformity.

Many people today perceive discussions on the issues of history as a pain in the neck. The debating simply grates against their teeth. Yet it does go on, and even on a pan-European scale, and we cannot afford to stand aside. Otherwise the Europeans – or the ‘new Europeans’ – will draw Russia’s portrait without us.

One cannot help becoming unpleasantly puzzled by the overblown weight of “historical policy” in the context of European and Euro-Asian international relations. The factor adds more ballast to positive communications between countries and peoples, breeds and replicates negative images of neighbors, and shapes a hostile perception of other nations.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SOBRIETY

The discussion today has a multifaceted genesis varying from a genuine, but over-stimulated willingness to settle accounts with the heinous past to a trivial and often anti-Russian propaganda. But we can gain consolation from not being the only “bad guys.” Foreign policy propaganda based on history or, rather, the “historical foreign policy” has an anti-Polish, anti-German and anti-Ukrainian dimension as well. Everything depends on what notes you can pick out of the general cacophony and what strings you pluck.

Making historical issues a matter of politics is a dangerous thing and any historian can cite a dozen examples where the “shadows of history” did their erosive work.

Look for instance at how the “historically-grounded foreign policy” proclaimed by some members of the former Polish cabinet added stamina to Erika Steinbach and her very controversial Bund der Vertriebenen (Federation of German Expellees), or how it complicated relations between Moscow and Warsaw for a period of time. Today, such obstructions of the past are being cleared out by a special Russian-Polish working group which deals with complicated problems stemming from the history of bilateral relations. In this case, both sides managed to depart from the past and turn their eyes to a search for concord in the name of the future.

As I said above, it is counterproductive to ignore such tendencies. So, Russian thinkers and public quarters should take part in this discussion and fend off the things we find unjustified, biased or false.
However, our participation in it should still be based on an adequate perception of our own selves.

George Orwell’s classical maxim suggesting that “he who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past” can be applied only if society controls itself, its public debates and its mass consciousness in a worthy manner.

The majority of society and experts in Russia recognize that the Russians were among the largest victims of authoritarianism and totalitarianism in the 20th century – of the homemade brand (Stalinism) and of the exported one (Hitler’s Nazism). This extremely bitter experience prompts many of them to think soberly.

However paradoxically this might sound, Soviet authoritarianism bred a number of foreign policy problems, around which swords are crossed – and sometimes shots are fired – to this very day.

Suffice it to recall the arbitrarily drawn borders between ethnic republics in the Caucasus or the handover of a whole peninsula from one Soviet republic to another without account of the wishes of its population. Did anyone heed the will of people amid all of these geopolitical exercises? No one did. And who is suffering from it? Today’s Russia and its closest neighbors.

Sober assessments of totalitarianism and its legacy are not synonymous with self-flogging. Everyone who joins historical discussions about or with this country must understand that today’s modern Russia condemned the crimes committed by the totalitarian regime of the past in the last years of its Soviet-era incarnation.

Russia today has conscientiously chosen a different path of development, which has nothing to do with Stalinism or post-Stalinist authoritarianism. Today’s Russia does not bear responsibility for the crimes of the past and does not in any way act as an ideological successor to the Soviet Union. For proof of this one only needs to look at the preamble to the Russian Constitution.

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It is clear to any person who thinks realistically that any nation state will seek to produce its own version of history. Even the Socialist camp failed to produce a common version for everyone. This history – or rather, its interpretation, will be slightly different from that of one’s neighbors. Yet the writing of “national histories” should not proceed from adversely directed historical materials, from the philosophy of hatred or from historical claims. Divergences of interpretation should not exceed a certain percentage. We will not be able to build a future without this kind of self-control.

What I have said above does not mean that politicians should not remember history or that historians should not interpret policies. They can and should do this, but with a positive result of some kind. It appears that the postwar generation has showed special wisdom in this sense, as many modern European institutions came about as a result of a rethinking of the continent’s tragic history and simultaneously as a recipe for stopping tragedies from repeating themselves.

The drama of 20th-century European history is our common European heritage, and we Europeans should manage it in a way that will not generate new “hotbeds of historical tensions.” We should build relations of good-neighborliness on the basis of lessons that have been learned.