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PARTISAN REVIEW
mask of the man holding a pipe that has gone out and wearing
soldier's boots:
In all ages, when things were going hard,
The country was ruled by stern men
Who loved it with all their might.
In the crowd, mutinous men and enemies crossed themselves
When on the block, chopped-off heads
Obscenely cursed the Czar-the "Little Father. ..."
Only the centuries proved those stern men right.
With their field-glasses, pipe in hand,
Wearing jackboots or soldier's boots,
They stand there in the history of the empire.
One should not overestimate the importance of Stalin's rehabilitation
in Soviet publications of the seventies. Neo-Stalinism is not an end in
itself but merely one of the means employed in the current ideological
revolution: it is the nearest historical example that is positive within
the context of this campaign. Much more significant is the promotion
of Stalin from the ranks of the Bolshevik revolutionaries to a different
historical-and hence semantic-rank: that of the autocratic czars. In
the poem quoted above, which also mentions Ivan the Terrible and
Alexander Nevsky, the jackboots and field-glasses belong to Peter the
Great.
If
we do a bit more decoding of the poem's subtext, we can see
that the author insists on the
historical
rightness of those bloodthirsty
tyrants. Their deeds, he tells us, were not entirely understandable to
their unfortunate contemporaries, but they should be lauded by a
grateful posterity.
Paul Valery once noted that in a totalitarian state, history is
politics' most faithful servant and the chief source of chauvinism.
Current Russian historical propaganda offers many striking proofs of
that observation. Today writers in all genres are doing a job of
historical restoration, singing the praises of the glorious Russian past,
including Russian feats of arms in conquering foreign territories–
although only yesterday those wars were recognized as predatory. The
magazine
Znamya
regularly prints essays on the glory of Russian arms,
stressing the continuity between the czarist and the Soviet armed
forces-even though previously, except during World War II, the two
were strongly contrasted.
Needless to say, this about-face also affects those historical figures
who took up arms against the "prison of peoples" in the past century
and were, until very recently, counted among the bravest of autocracy's
enemies. For example, Shamil and Haji-Murat, leaders of Moslem
rebellions in the Caucasus, are now being accused of pernicious
separatism and bourgeois nationalism. Again, the Russian language
