Rewriting History has a Long and Ugly History

 

In 1937, Nikolai Yezhov was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. He was head of Stalin’s secret police, the dreaded NKVD, which was rebranded years later as the KGB. Most important, he was, at least for the moment, in Stalin’s good graces, a precarious place to be. As he well knew.

Yezhov was everything Stephen Miller wants to be. He was the guy responsible for carrying out what became known as the Great Terror. His job was the systematic and ruthless elimination, often through summary execution, of anyone Stalin suspected might be an “enemy of the people.” This was a lengthy list, numbering in the many thousands, and from all reports Yezhov made a substantial dent in it.

That year, there was an official photo taken of Stalin, Yezhov, and two others walking along a canal in Moscow. (One of the others was Vyacheslav Molotov, whose notorious cocktails had not yet been introduced). A mere three years later, Yezhov was out of the picture, quite literally. He was himself arrested for no rational reason and promptly executed. That photo was famously altered — long before we could do it in PhotoShop — so that all trace of Yezhov was airbrushed out.

I only mention this because it wasn’t enough for Stalin to have Yezhov killed. He needed Yezhov to have never existed. Yezhov’s status was now something  unique to the Soviet Union at the time: a “nonperson.”

In 1984 — the novel, not the year — George Orwell created the totalitarian state of Oceania, and gave it an entire ministry, the ironically-named Ministry of Truth, which was wholly devoted to lies. Its ongoing mission was the rewriting of history and the removal of any facts deemed inconvenient to the state. Orwell didn’t just make this up — he had Russia under Stalin as proof of concept — and the novel is in some ways a treatise on how it’s done.

Fascist systems depend on propaganda for their own survival. They need a steady supply of lies, disinformation, and phony narratives to brainwash their populations into blind obedience. Inevitably they feel the need to backfill their own history in ways that suit their current propaganda needs, erasing anything in the past that contradicts what they want their audiences to think today.

Stalin was especially devoted to the practice, and Yezhov was far from the only top official who became a nonperson. He wasn’t even the most famous, an honor that would have to go to Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated in Mexico, years after being hounded out of Stalin’s increasingly lethal regime.

When the official history of the Communist Party was written in 1938, Trotsky — the brains behind the 1917 Revolution that gave Stalin his big break — was recast as an enemy of the people.

That official history — nicknamed the “Short Course” — was fiction from one end to the other. Yet it became the primary teaching text in the Soviet school system — mandatory reading for students, soldiers, and all Communist Party officials. Ultimately it became the definitive version of reality for all Soviet citizens, containing everything a good citizen was required to believe, or else.

It’s a cliché to say that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Apparently, Russia has still not gotten that message. A few weeks ago, the Putin regime announced the closing of the Gulag History Museum, and its reopening as the Orwellianly-named Museum of Memory. I’m guessing this might have slipped under your radar.

The Gulag History Museum was a major attraction in Moscow for the past two decades, and the fact that it existed at all is something of a miracle. It represented an epic re-examination of history by a battered country that has never been comfortable with national introspection. Think of it as a re-rewriting of Russian history.

The museum forced the country to confront the thirty years of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn forever dubbed the “Gulag Archipelago” — that vast network of prisons and forced labor camps that were the hallmark of Stalin’s three-decade reign of terror. The nation was taking a painful but important step towards making sure its own history is neither forgotten nor, as the cliché says, repeated.

As I’ve written before, the horrors of the gulag system are simply not comprehensible to American sensibilities. Our minds have no tools to absorb the idea of a slave labor system that methodically works millions of people literally to death. Imprisoned in unspeakable conditions, for no reason at all, over 20 million Russians passed through the gulag, and roughly two million of them died. Stephen Miller, eat your heart out.

Putin grudgingly tolerated the museum, which was founded not long after he first came to power. But now it no longer comports with his vision of a new Russian empire, which, truth be told, is not much different from Stalin’s. Putin has, in fact, built a police state at least as oppressive as Stalin’s, and his need to remove insufficiently docile citizens could certainly bring back the gulag subculture, if it hasn’t already. We know that Alexei Navalny died two years ago in a sub-zero Siberian hellhole that probably dates back to the gulag era, and I’m guessing a lot of those old camps were never torn down, just de-commissioned for possible future use.

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that a far more sophisticated infrastructure of “detention facilities” is being created in this country right now. And once those facilities are built, they’re easily repurposed to accommodate any group of people deemed not sufficiently white, male, Christian, or straight. That’s what the $90 billion appropriation for ICE is really about. But I digress.

Having a museum that reminds people of what those Gulag camps were really like is not convenient for Putin at the present time. And since it made the Stalinist past look a whole lot like the Putinist present, the museum had to go.

Actually, it’s been repurposed as the Museum of Memory, a highly propagandized version of World War II, packaged for today’s highly propagandized audience. Museum goers, many of whom will have lost someone in Ukraine, will be asked to contemplate Nazi war crimes and the “genocide of the Soviet people.” They won’t be asked to think about why so few of them have grandfathers.

There is no need to dwell on the parallels here. Everyone knows the Trump regime is lusting to give the history of this country a complete makeover. It wants to remove the icky parts — enslavement, Civil War, tribal genocide, Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps, January 6 insurrection — and whitewash them over.

But the thing is, it’s really hard to do, and the job is never complete. There are too many inconvenient truths to keep up with, and the fictions get too unwieldy to maintain.

Nikolai Yezhov is a nonperson, whose entire existence was erased. Yet here I am, nearly 90 years later, writing about him, drawing his story from thousands of available sources. You can even see the famous photo — both versions — right here.

All through history, autocrats have tried to eradicate history. They rarely succeed.