The first decree, approved as soon as the ceremony for the start of the fifth term concluded, refers to the “Fundamentals of state policy in the field of historical education.” The desire to rewrite history is the feeling that most agitates the conscience of Putin and the entire generation that has been resentful of the fall of the Soviet Union. And this global and eschatological vision is what Putin tries to embody today, even alongside Xi Jinping in Tiananmen Square.
Many comments have been dedicated in recent days to the changes in the Moscow government team that the recently re-elected President Vladimir Putin has decided on, first of all the replacement of Defense Minister Sergej Shojgu by the economist Andrej Belousov, which portends scenarios increasingly apocalyptic world conflict. In reality Mikhail Mishustin’s government has remained more or less unchanged – with the inclusion of relatives and friends of the president to have even more guarantees of loyalty – but it does not seem that there is a great revolution on the horizon: puppetry and “doubles” “of Putin move from one chair to another for a matter of image, such as the cleaning that is being carried out in the Ministry of Defense to celebrate the “end of corruption”, while the Shojgu, Patrushev, Medvedev and many others They continue to act as decoration or sycophants for the “Putin collective”, regardless of the position they hold at the time.
What truly indicates the significance of Putin’s “fifth term,” beyond all the grandiose promises about war and the economy, is the first decree he passed as soon as the coronation ceremony ended, titled “Fundamentals of State Policy in the field of historical education” which, to refer to “education”, uses the term prosveščenie, the “enlightenment” of the people carried out by the State to disseminate and definitively implant in the minds and souls “the historical knowledge that corresponds to the truth and scientifically proven”. The desire to rewrite history is the feeling that most stirs the conscience of Putin, Patriarch Kirill and the entire generation that has been resentful of the fall of the Soviet Union, which was supposed to be the “perfect society” that put an end history and, instead, sent Russia plummeting to year zero. Enlightening history, then, means making it start over from the beginning, resuming all that has been lost in a new-old collective identity that gives meaning to Russia’s very existence in the world.
Historians know well that the events of the past can only be “scientifically demonstrated” to a certain extent, beyond the documents, testimonies and archaeological remains, because in History the interpretation of those events always has a lot of weight. History is generally written by the winners and is rewritten according to changes in dominant positions. The more there is an attempt to impose a definitive and “enlightened” vision, the more evident is the ideological distortion of whoever holds power. The clearest example, to which Putin’s Russia evidently tries to refer today, is the History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the USSR, which Stalin had written in 1938 by a commission appointed by the Central Committee and chaired by himself, and that Mao Tse-Tung also imposed as mandatory reading for the Chinese communists. The Georgian dictator set out to demonstrate that Russian communism was exactly the realization of all the aspirations of the people since the origins of history, and the sciences themselves were put at the service of this definition: geography and chemistry, physics and literature were equally at the service of that global and eschatological vision that Putin tries to embody today alongside Xi Jinping in Tiananmen Square, in his first “historic” visit of the new mandate.
Putin’s decree affirms that Russia is a “country-civilization”, strana-tsivilizatsija, that is, no longer the “scientific” system of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, but the coryphaeum of “traditional moral and spiritual values”, the refrain of recent years that accompanies and justifies all wars in all latitudes. In fact, the greatest sin of the “collective West” is not even the denial of family and gender principles, “LGBT propaganda” or democracy entrusted to the “strong powers”, but the “denial of historical facts “, that is, the fact that it is not recognized that Russia has saved the world. The scenario evoked is always the Great Victory over Nazism, which today is intended to be replicated in Ukraine and which the Anglo-Saxon allies of the Second World War seek to attribute to themselves, instead of glorifying the eschatological sacrifice of Stalin’s armies. Behind these events of the last century all the great crucial moments of the past are “illuminated”: of Europe defended by the Slavs against the Tatars, of Asia conquered by the Cossacks against the Mongol peoples, of the Middle East protected by the Tsars against the Turks , from colonized Africa and revolutionary Latin America, to the empires of Rome and Byzantium, whose glory spills over to the Third Moscow Rome.
It is not just the megalomania of a despot who wants to inscribe his name in the annals, although Putin does everything possible to focus the comparison with the great tsars and emperors on himself, which is, moreover, an extremely grotesque copy of already quite monstrous characters from the past. It is the sign of a change in the conception of the State in the contemporary global world., which is no longer affirmed by the free consensus of individual peoples nor represented by their institutions, but seeks to redefine itself according to a different space-time dimension. Today distances are annulled and memories are blurred, real and non-virtual reference points are missing, and it is no coincidence that Putin’s provisions do not only apply to books and manuals, films and documentaries, but also impose the adaptation of video games and digital applications to the “authentic vision” of the world and History.
The decree creates commissions to “control the contents of historical literature”, not only to avoid falsehoods about the historical role of Russia, but also to eradicate any other type of “heretical” content not desired by the official ideology, such as in the Stalin times. Putin’s decree on History is in a certain way above the Constitution itself, already reformed in 2020 in an extremely “sovereignty” sense, considering that it declares that the “Fundamentals” are “the values on which all principles and norms of international law and agreements at all levels accepted by the Russian Federation”, despite the numerous contradictions that they introduce precisely at the legal level.
Article 13 of the Russian Constitution affirms, at least on paper, the principle of “ideological multiplicity”, which was introduced in Yeltsin’s first version to free itself from the totalitarian legacy, prohibiting the establishment of a “state ideology”. Evidently the detail has escaped Putin’s latest amendments, since the “foundations of state policy” reestablish the dictates of a single idea to which one must submit, “illuminating” History to obscure any divergent version. In fact, the president of Russia’s Central Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, had already suggested a long time ago that Yeltsin’s indigestible article be deleted, but in the Kremlin they thought it was enough to trample on it without remorse and approve the presidential decrees without unnecessary discussions.
The official definition of History, as the decree says, aims to “form a scientific understanding of the past and present of Russia”, where “scientific” properly means “ideological”, not only in the evaluations of events or of the protagonists of the story, but also with respect to its very methodology. It is about “understanding the history of Russia in the development of its autonomous path of civilization”, excluding any type of external influence, which is actually unthinkable for any country in the world; We are all “contaminated” by our neighbors, except Russia, which for centuries tried by all means to imitate Europe and the West, and then reject such influences at the beginning of each century, as the most Western of the 18th century stated in the early years of the 18th century. the tsars, Peter the Great: “We will take from Europe everything we need, and then we will show them our backs.” Anyone in Russia today who even dares to think with “Western” criteria is immediately included in the list of “foreign agents.”
Putin proclaims “historical enlightenment” to counteract the “information war”, the true front where all troops must be deployed, much more than the kilometers of territory to be conquered in the Donbass; because these weapons could lead to the “destruction of the integrity of society and the Russian State”, as stated in point 6 of the decree. Point 5 specifies, however, that “Russia is a great country with a thousand-year history, which has brought together all branches of the Russian people and many other peoples of the great expanses of Eurasia, in a single historical-cultural communion” . After the Tatars, the Bashkirs and the Chuvashes, now has come the turn not only of the Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Moldovans, but of all the peoples of the world who seek their “enlightenment”.
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