Tsars, Soviets, Putin by Wojciech Materski (.PDF)
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Tsars, Soviets, Putin: A Study of Russia’s Politics of History (2017) by Wojciech Materski
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Overview: The original Polish edition of the present volume was published as Od cara do “cara” (From Tsar to “Tsar”) in 2017, in the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014. The latter “Tsar” in quotation marks refers to today’s Russian autocratic ruler, President Vladimir Putin. The book traces and examines the politics of history (Geschichtspolitik) in Russia (the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation) over the centuries. History is such an essential part of human life that it is politicized in every country and every society. Democracies, where competing political forces vie publicly for power, confront the challenge of history being used as a political tool. Yet academic freedom and historical truth remain essential elements of democratic states. By contrast, dictatorial regimes almost unilaterally interpret and use history to suit the domestic and external political needs of the time. In such regimes, as is often said, those who control the past will control the future. The records over the several centuries examined in this book demonstrate the extraordinary lengths to which the Russian/Soviet state has gone and still goes to mold historical research and historical memory for political purposes. The only occasions when the state has allowed relatively free historical research and discussion are the reform era under Tsar Alexander II in the second half of the nineteenth century (“emancipation of history as an academic discipline”), during the “Thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev, the late Soviet period of glasnost’ and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, and the several years under Boris Yeltsin following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. After Putin took over in the late 1990s to the present day, the state of historical research has regressed to old and persistent patterns of abuse of history by the state. In many respects, the situation has now become even worse than during the Soviet era. For example, while the Soviet state never officially denied the separateness of the Ukrainian ethnicity and the Ukrainian language from its Russian counterparts, Putin denies this distinction and embarked decisively on destroying Ukraine in 2022, in an all-out war that continues today. Quite appropriately, Putin, a former Communist, has become the new Russian “Tsar.”
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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