Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941

APPENDIX 4 Russia’s New History Textbooks

In the introduction to this book, I referred to the Soviets’ Orwellian Memory Hole. The distortions introduced into Soviet historiography, including military history, have been so potent—and convincing—as to mislead not only Soviet citizens but also Western observers, who, in some cases, still rely on Soviet interpretations of major events. Such distortions may crop up at any time and on any topic. Distinguishing the chaff of lies from the wheat of truth is an ongoing task for all students of Soviet history, especially in the West. That certainly includes those who take an interest in Stalin’s policies from 1939 to 1941 as well as the other events and issues raised in this book within the context of Stalin’s Grand Strategy.

When the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, it became necessary to begin thinking freely in new, un-Soviet ways. As to education, because of Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist indoctrination and the party line in the schools’ texts, it became necessary to write new history texts for both the secondary (high) schools and institutions of higher learning in Russia. Every topic of Soviet history—the former official ideology, Soviet foreign relations, domestic policy, Red Army military doctrine and strategy, Stalinism, the purges, the Nazi–Soviet pacts, the Winter War against Finland, the causes of the Great Fatherland War, everything, in fact, that happened in the preceding seventy-four years of Soviet rule—henceforth had to be explained to students truthfully without the Marxist-Leninist or propaganda glosses on the past.

Here is the background for these revolutionary changes in Russian education and the way they impound, directly or indirectly, on various topics and events covered in the present book. Educating children in the old, pre-1917 way, Lenin had said, meant “cramming their heads full of knowledge, 9/10ths of which was useless, 1/10th of which was distorted.” Under communism, he continued, students are indoctrinated in “socialism by its vanguard, the Communist Party [in order to raise] a generation able to accomplish the final realization of communism.”

The “distortion” was thereupon updated and augmented by the Communist rulers themselves. For over two generations under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, the teaching of Russian history and world history was shaped—that is, deformed—to fit the mold of Marxist-Leninist “science.” Teachers were ordered to serve as “transmission belts” imparting to students “the idea of communism” and absolute loyalty to the regime. They were to describe the world as an “arena” of “inevitable” two-camp struggle between capitalism and socialism. Teachers were trained to be purveyors of class hatred, proponents of “class struggle” against “bourgeois enemies” at home and “capitalist-imperialist states” abroad. They were, in effect, “engineers of human souls.”

Soon other elements were added into Soviet education and indoctrination of the masses, in and out of school. These methods became totalitarian prototypes that were deliberately copied by the Nazis (as Hitler himself admitted) as well as by other one-party dictatorships then and now. One of these Soviet methods was the promotion in education of the Lenin Cult, later adapted to Nazi conditions as the “Leadership Principle” embodied in the person of Adolf Hitler. Lenin and Stalin, as Hitler was later, were each depicted for children and adults as a Vozhd’ (a Russian term equivalent to Führer, Duce, Caudillo, et al.). He was a historically incomparable “genius,” a role model who, “Christ-like,” delivered mankind into the earthly paradise as depicted in the official ideology.

Concomitant with this is the notion of the Leader’s selfless sacrifice for The Cause. This is found in tales of Lenin’s exile to Siberia and his wounding in an attempted assassination in 1918. Both adapted to Nazi propaganda in Germany, such as in Hitler’s incarceration in 1924 or his wounding in the 1944 assassination attempt, together with, in both the Soviet and Nazi cases, the taking of hostages and demonstrative executions. All this was personified in the heroic, even lovable Leader.

SOVIET PROPAGANDA ECHOES IN THE WEST

That this Soviet propaganda could be—and was—echoed in the West is seen in a number of distorted eulogies to Stalin that have appeared in Stalin’s day in the American press. For instance, in former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Joseph E. Davies’ best-selling book (later made into a Hollywood film), Mission to Moscow, Davies claims that Stalin’s trumped-up show trials, the purging and execution of Old Bolshevik leaders and of military officers in the Soviet Union in 1937–38, was an instance in which “justice had indeed been.” Davies depicts Stalin as a goodhearted reformer who only wanted peace and prosperity for Soviet Russia, not war or world revolution.

Collier’s magazine, in December 1943, under the title “What Kind of Country Is Russia Anyway?” told readers editorially that Russia is “neither socialist nor Communist [but] a modified capitalist set-up [advancing] toward something resembling our own and Great Britain’s democracy.” Look magazine, with a readership in the millions, ran a cover story with a band that read, “A Guy Named Joe.” Stalin, the story said, is into “Arctic meteorology. Leatherstocking Tales, soap, and war [and is] among the best dressed of the world leaders, making Churchill in his siren suit look positively shabby.” Life magazine (March 29, 1943) described Stalin’s and Beria’s secret police/Gulag police organization, the NKVD, as “a national police similar to the FBI.” For that matter, the U.S. Office of War Information and U.S. Army orientation materials regularly referred to the USSR as a “democracy” (see introduction).

In his messages to Churchill, President Roosevelt himself referred to Stalin in a jolly way as “Uncle Joe.” At same time near the time of his death, FDR is reputed to have angrily observed to an aide: “Averell [Harriman, U.S. emissary to and adviser on Russia] is right. We can’t do business with Stalin.”¹

PURGING SOVIETISMS

For Soviet youths to be true “comrades,” said the former Communist Party indoctrinators and educators, they must be taught to merge their wills into the “general will” of the mass, the community, as expressed in microcosmic form in the school classroom. In such a rigid curriculum there was no place for “bourgeois individualism” or for open discussion. Individuum (individual) in Russian, in fact, became no less a pejorative buzzword than a Soviet epithet like bourgeoise, wrecker, cosmopolite, or hooligan.

Fortunately, with the demise of communist rule in Russia in 1991, the country’s educational system has been steadily purged of all such “Com-munazi” contents and methods. No longer do youths flock to Octobrist and Komsomol youth organizations, those former junior auxiliaries of the “paternal” Communist Party. Nor do boys and girls in Russia any longer wear student uniforms with red neckerchiefs, flash the stiff hooked-arm Lenin salute, or stand at rigid attention at their desks when reciting. Nor do they squeal on members of their families to authorities if mama and papa or brother and sister show anything less than complete loyalty to the leader, the party, and the state.

All of these totalitarian methods were exported not only to Nazi- and Fascist-ruled countries but to Sovietized nations and client-states before and after World War II—in Eastern Europe, Cuba, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. More than one-third of all educational institutions in today’s Russia are nonpublic—that is, not supported by the government. In the latter “public” schools, education likewise looks quite different from that in Soviet days, as do the textbooks that the students read in such institutions. Russian students today are no longer forced to read texts whose chapters are slanted according to partiinost’ ideology imbued with “class consciousness,” global struggle, and adulation of the Leader, living or dead, or both dead and living.

NEW CONTENTS

Then, what are Tolya and Tatyana reading today as they do their homework for their history classes? How do their education and textbooks differ from those of Soviet days? What light do the new books throw on topics discussed in this book? Two representative textbooks well illustrate the sea change that has come over latter-day Russian education. ² They are written for tenth and eleventh graders in the tuition-free, public-supported secondary schools as well as in some private schools. They are recommended for voluntary adoption by the Ministry of General and Professional Education of the Russian Federation. Titled The World in the 20th Century and A History of Russia, the books are accompanied by an “apparatus” (e.g., “Questions for Discussion”) that is designed, state the authors, to stimulate free discussion in the classroom. Indeed, the questions are mostly thought provoking and well intended. Each chapter includes fragments of primary source material, some of which would be edifying even for some Soviet specialists in the West; tables of governmental organization under the tsars and Soviets; and the post-1991 political structure.

One of the pair of books includes a glossary, and both contain chronologies and maps. The glossary is noteworthy for its nonideological definitions in contrast to those found in the texts of the Soviet period right up to 1991. The latter provide only “correct” definitions designed for uncritical student consumption. These were additionally boilerplated in the well-known “Political Dictionaries” that provided strict, party-line definitions for civilians and soldiers.

The general topics for the domestic scene in Russia covered in both books are predictable: the fall of Tsar Nicholas II and the short, nine-month rule by the Provisional Government under Lvov and then Kerensky; the seizure of power by Lenin’s handful of Bolsheviks; the Soviet-inspired civil war and “War Communism”; the advent of Stalin’s rule following Lenin’s death; the Five-Year Plans and collectivization; the Gulag and Soviet genocide; the consolidation of totalitarian rule under both Lenin and Stalin and their successors through Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko; the ambivalent Gorbachev period after 1985; and the attempted coup of August 1991. Covered, finally, are the events marking the Yeltsin presidency through 1996. All periods are treated in the main with stunning candor, laced with primary-source documents.

In international relations, the topics are also predictable, including as they do Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and their successors’ plans for subversive world revolution; the interwar period; the Nazi–Soviet pact and its consequent Soviet territorial expansion; World War II and the Great Fatherland War; the Cold War; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the U.S.–USSR arms buildup and nuclear standoff; the Soviet-led invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968; “détente” during Brezhnev’s rule; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and so on.

All of these topics—with few exceptions—are treated no less objectively than they are in many contemporary Western history texts. As a matter of fact, as Westerners pore over the pages of these Russian texts, they may be struck by the contrasts in content and cogency in some cases between the Russian books and those used at equivalent educational levels in the United States and perhaps elsewhere. That is, the Russian books in many cases are much more candid and incisive, as, for example, in their presentations of the minority coup aspect of the “October Revolution”; Lenin’s and his colleagues’ wily, conspiratorial methods; Soviet genocide; the Soviet-led, global “ideological struggle,” which, it is intimated, helped unleash the Cold War; Soviet “offensist” diplomacy and military strategy; and so on. The Russian student draws, certainly, sharp conclusions from this reading and discussion of the topics—inferences totally different from those that the two preceding generations in Soviet Russia were obliged to draw.

At the end of each chapter and elsewhere, the textbook authors remind the students what the “lessons from history” might be. One of the above books phrases it this way in the introduction:

The end of the 20th century once again confronts us with the question of what roads of development our country should take. Above all, we see that Russia exceeded the limits of “revolution” of the type that does not lead to national harmony but, rather, to catastrophe and the destruction of human life. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeating it over and over again.... We trust that this text will provide a truthful way of thinking about the past while helping everyone find ways of leading the country to true greatness.³

In interviews with young high school–aged students I conducted informally, it became clear that their reading of such post-Communist texts has created a generational “time warp” of knowledge and understanding about their own country and the world in comparison with the awareness of previous generations of students. One senses that today’s students have experienced shock and horror in learning so much about the grimness and hypocrisy of the Soviet past. To a foreigner—in this case, an American—a given Russian student, as he or she discusses such historical events, communicates a sense of embarrassment crossed with the resolve “never to let it happen again.” At the same time, several of the teenaged students expressed a pent-up pride in their country projected, as it were, into the future. Too, their interest in pre-1917 Russian history, which in Soviet histories had been routinely distorted by the Communists, and their involvement in Russia’s millennium-old religious traditions are strongly characteristic of today’s younger generation.

SOVIET-CLEANSED INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Perhaps one of the most striking threads running through both textbooks concerns the loss of democracy, civil liberties, and individual freedom in Russia as a consequence of what one of the books terms the “despotism” imposed by the Bolsheviks on Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union. On the international front, students are frankly informed that when it was aimed at democratic countries abroad,

peaceful coexistence [as conceived by the Communists] was a temporary set of relations with the “capitalist encirclement.” The West had legitimate grounds for fearing the export of revolution from the capital of the Soviet Russia.... This gave much support to the view that [Communist parties in other countries] were forces that were hostile to the parliamentary system together with the perception that these parties were “agents of Moscow.”

In its glossary, the above textbook provides students with the following, ideology-free definition of parliamentarism: “It is a system of governmental rule in which the functions of the legislative and executive are strictly delimited, and in which the parliament plays the leading role. In this system, the parliament is viewed as both subject and object within the political struggle and is linked to traditional democratic values existing in the country.”

Contrast this 1997 definition of political democracy with that found in the 1988 encyclopedic dictionary titled Sovremenniye Soyedinenniye Shtaty Ameriki (The Contemporary United States of America), edited by six ideologists including, ironically, Russia’s sometime post-Soviet prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov: “The most important aspect of the American political system is its two-party system[, which is] an instrument for retaining political domination by the monopolistic bourgeoisie.” Or contrast it with this definition of Western democracy made by Lenin, which cropped up in many textbooks in the Soviet period: “Capital dominates and stifles everything [and] this they call ‘democracy.’”⁴

Today’s schools throughout Russia, their administrators and teachers, enjoy broad freedom in the choice of textbooks. No longer are they bound to adopt texts, as in the Soviet period, that were passed by the censor or approved by a remote Ministry of Education in Moscow. Moreover, free, outside reading by curious students of other books, domestic and foreign, is very common. Open discussion in the classroom is encouraged as seen in the “apparatus” of discussion questions provided at the end of chapters in the history textbooks.

A new generation of Russian youth is being educated at an early age to be freethinking individuals as they assimilate the main developments of the twentieth century. This is perhaps one of the most, if not the most, important consequences of Russia’s transition away from Communism. It is a valuable preparation of that country’s future adults for the new century and millennium.

NOTES

1

Quoted in Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993), p. 17.

2

See O. S. Soroko-Tsyupi, ed., Mir v XX veke, 2d ed. (Moscow: Proveshcheniye, 1997), for tenth-eleventh grades, recommended by the Russian Ministry of General and Professional Education of the Russian Federation; and V. P. Ostrovskyi and A. I. Utkin, Istoriya Rossii XX vek, 2d ed. (Moscow: Drofa, 1997), for eleventh grade, recommended by the Ministry of General and Professional Education of the Russian Federation.

3

Ostrovskyi and Utkin, Istoriya Rossii XX vek, p. 3.

4

V. I. Lenin, “Report to the Seventh Congress of Soviets” (1919), in Albert L. Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s Publishers, 1987), p. 84.