Morphine of history

Understand the past as a living product requires art. Any national movement, any dictatorship needs the symbols of the past that legitimize claims to law and tradition. This is evident both on the example of Nazi Germany, with its cult of Wagner, and on the example of the USSR, where the pantheon of national heroes was created, both from the midst of military leaders (Suvorov, Kutuzov, Nakhimov), and among artists (Pushkin, Repin, composers of the "mighty pile"). Historically significant victories play a special role here, whether it be Poltava (for Russia) or the Crimean war (for the European coalition). The case ends with curios. Toponymy is an indicator and diagnosis: metro stations in Paris and London, the capitals of two neighboring states, are named after the battles won to each other; And in Krasnoyarsk, the houses on Mira Avenue are decorated with signs, which lists the five names of the street, which she changed over the last century.

For memory policies, the sign is always more important than the signified, mythologization here is the main means of preparing the past to extract the benefits of "in favor of the present." But one thing is an order for power, another is the power of an artistic image. In the triangle "Ivan the Terrible - Stalin - Eisenstein" the weak link was found quite quickly, and only the leader thought that Eisenstein was such a link.

But Stalin himself did not have long to wait for his own “reformatting”. In the framework of the fight against excesses and departures from Leninist principles, his associates and accomplices of Post Mortem determined the extreme one, not wanting to become in one row with him. The weakness of the entire project "The Thaw" was largely explained by the fact that it was controlled by his own anti -heroes. The best way to decapitate the process is to lead it yourself.

Hundreds of people, institutes and unions are busy with the rewriting of history, and we are talking not only about the Soviet era. So, after the revolution, they decided to publish a list of all the secret agents of the "security". It turned out that there were about ten thousand such: only the lazy did not collaborate with the “guard”. Contrary to the opinion of the provocateurs’s fault, the revolutionaries themselves often willingly went to contacts with her - either out of the desire to play with fire, or trying to wrap the situation for their benefit, and most often lost the party long before the endguspile. As one memoirist writes, " Gendarmerie only chose them (secret agents. - A.M. ) from the revolutionary environment. They were created by the revolutionary environment itself. First of all, they were members of their revolutionary organizations, and only then they went to spy about their friends ... ".

Without rewriting the past, the Soviet myth would have been impossible. The degree of selectivity of affinity reached such sophistication in the twentieth century that it is time to introduce the concept of "History 1" and "History-2", to leave one of them as a field of activity for politicians and ideologies, the other-to perceive as a space of academic research. Such a division does not guarantee the detection of truth, because the more the desire to falsify and interpret the fact, the higher the desire to fetish it. But gaining truth is not the goal of historical science, as well as historical progress itself does not lead to progress. History strives, rather, to gain meaning, whose quality is not always discussed, and the variety of history policies shows how illegible the means used on this path can be. Nowadays, artificial amnesia is in demand. There are many examples of this, starting with the Russian Cossacks issued by the Councils of the British after the end of World War II for obvious death. Even the authority of Solzhenitsyn did not break the conspiracy of silence in the West around this topic.

Today, the effect of silence, blocking memory is a successful tool in the struggle of the "happy future" against the "uninvited past." Thus, in France, the press and politicians for decades practically did not mention the genocide, made by the Nazis against the French people, and the history of their own Holocaust has long remained for Paris to be taboo. A veil of silence was covered by the story of the return of German prisoners of war from the USSR, to which Stalin seemed ready much earlier than adenauer.

Blocks can be strong, but not eternal. No one admits the desire to accept history as morphine, saving at least for a short while.