Do you know what Kremlin Byzantium is?

They said that his techniques were often used by the main theoretician of the CPSU and the second person in the party, M. A. Suslov. Some issue is being discussed at the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee, arguments begin, and suddenly he says in a quiet, monotonous voice: “But the comrades are right in saying that...” But no one said anything like that. But Suslov’s individual decision suddenly begins to look like a general opinion, against which no one and nothing can object.

But his Byzantineism could not be compared with Stalin’s. Stalin, a member of the Politburo responsible for affairs in the Caucasus, after Turkish troops helped take Georgian Batumi in 1921, telegraphed his comrade-in-arms Ordzhonikidze: “Try to expel the Turks from Batum with a strong blow, and then declare it a misunderstanding.”

How, if not Byzantium, can one explain the special methods of governing the country developed by Catherine II, which allowed her to reign for more than thirty years?

And how else can you call the process of eliminating private ownership of real estate in cities, which the Bolsheviks began in the interests of the working people, if in the end it was not the proletarian elements who won?

Well, the work of Soviet censorship was generally Byzantine from beginning to end. After all, only real Byzantines could draw far-reaching political conclusions from the fact that the Soviet and American flags on the poster dedicated to the struggle for peace are the same size.

The new issue of Kommersant-History is dedicated to these and other episodes of past times.

Evgeny Zhirnov, head of the historical and archival service of the Kommersant Publishing House

Kommersant-History No. 11