The Guardian 22 February, 2006
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Targeting Russian youth
The Australian Financial Review last month devoted the better part of two pages to reprinting an article from the right-wing semi-government US journal Foreign Affairs.
The article was a blatant call for stepped up psychological and propaganda warfare against and within Russia, "backed by international donors" (a code phrase for imperialist governments and their stooge "foundations for democracy").
Foreign Affairs is published by the "bi-partisan" Council on Foreign Relations and proudly boasts on its website that it is "a non-profit and nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to improving the understanding of US foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas.
"Its 3,400 members include nearly all past and present [US] Presidents, Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, other senior US government officials, renowned scholars, and major leaders of business, media, human rights, and other non-governmental groups."
The article reprinted in the Fin Review was headed "There once was a man named Stalin" and was a shock-horror account of how studies conducted in Russia by the article’s US authors found that people (especially young people) "do not view Stalin with the revulsion he deserves".
Worse still, neither does the Russian Government.
The article claims that a majority of young Russians think Stalin did more good than bad. As well, the authors are disturbed to find that young Russians’ attitudes to Stalin were more positive last year than in either of the two preceding years.
To the authors’ distress, "there is no stigma associated with Stalin in the country [Russia] today".
One of the authors of the article, Sarah Mendelson, is a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a right-wing Washington think-tank.
Her co-author, Theodore Gerber, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. It is not surprising then to find that the article is based on surveys and "focus groups" (in Russia) designed and organised by Mendelson and Gerber.
Mendelson and Gerber were obviously disappointed that their surveys did not produce the attitudes they had hoped for. "Only 28 percent felt that Stalin did not deserve credit for the Soviet victory in WW2."
Mendelson and Gerber know better: "Russia won the war despite, not because of, some of Stalin’s actions".
These actions include the Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact, which successfully thwarted Anglo-French imperialism’s efforts to foment war between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 and instead turned Hitler’s army’s westwards, thereby buying time for the Soviet Union and laying the foundation for the eventual Anglo-Soviet alliance and the defeat of the Nazis.
In May 2005, on the eve of the anniversary of that historic defeat, the US actually tried to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to denounce the Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact!
Mendelson and Gerber use the fact that Putin "strongly rejected" what they call "America’s request" as evidence the Russian authorities’ are fostering pro-Stalin attitudes. Gosh.
Not surprisingly, they view with distinct approval the outright anti-Sovietism of the Gorbachev period, remembering with nostalgia the "flurry of historical re-evaluations" conducted then.
One of the manifestations of those "re-evaluations" was to impose on Russian schools as a text book Igor Dolutsky’s revisionist and anti-Communist National History — 20th Century.
Mendelson and Gerber are of course familiar with it, describing it as "a text widely hailed [we can guess where and by whom] for its thorough and meticulous discussion of Stalin’s repressions and his role in WW2".
Imagine their distress when, in response to protests from historians and teachers alike, Russian authorities "with the approval of Putin himself" removed the book from Russian schools.
Worse still, in April last year, Putin declared that "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century". Our intrepid US researchers ruefully report that "78 percent of the respondents to their 2005 survey agreed" with Putin’s assessment.
Mendelson and Gerber ask what can be done about this shocking situation. "Can Russian youth be persuaded that Stalin is not a neutral or positive figure in their country’s history?"
The answer, they tell us, is "yes" — but only through a widespread effort "with help from the outside". In a part of the article that is apparently meant as advice to anti-Communist forces in Russia, our US experts call for the creation in Russia of a "mass education campaign on Stalin".
They then presume to offer some practical advice: "There are plenty of ways Russian educators could make the past — even a negative one — come alive for young people.
"One way would be to tell compelling stories about the many mysterious disappearances during the Stalin period or about ordinary people of the time doing extraordinary things." Curious, that last bit: I always thought that was what Soviet education and culture laid great emphasis on.
But I suppose by "ordinary people doing extraordinary things", Mendelson and Gerber do not mean the young people building Magnitogorsk, or the heroes of How The Steel Was Tempered or the Komsomol kids who formed The Young Guard to carry out anti-Nazi agitation in occupied territory, until they were caught and hanged as "terrorists".
No, they would have been "Stalinists", and their record has to be falsified and distorted just like Stalin’s.