Translated material
Lesses of history
The new purpose of Medinsky and the future "case of historians"
Former Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky was appointed head of the new commission on historical education, which will defend official ideas about the Russian past from unnecessary doubts. The work of the commission is organized in a wide foot: it will include representatives of the Presidential Administration, the Council of Ministers, the Prosecutor General, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the FSB - in short, all our prominent historians. Medinsky at a high state level will deal with what he used to do in the form of a hobby and on a voluntary basis, namely: finding foreign structures that “cause damage to the national interests of Russia in the historical sphere”, the prevention of “falsification of history”, the development of a unified state approach to historical education and “counter -propaganda events”.
As you can see, the situation in the historical sphere is pre -war: the dark forces strive to doubt that we are the greatest, and in our past everything was fine. In today's Russia, everyone wants to be security, and even to control the thoughts of history, actually a power body is created. Vladimir Medinsky, with a detachment of the noble knights of the owls attached to him, will go to smash the enemy so that no one can doubt a single word of the new brief course of the history of Russia (great power). Such a text is probably not written, but here the hope of Medinsky - according to the textbook, edited by this historian, Russian schoolchildren will already study this year.
The historiosophy of Medinsky, a regular client of Dissernet , a public organization involved in the study of plagiarism in scientific works, is well known. The only problem in the eyes of the ex-minister is Russophobia and malicious myths about Russia. Otherwise, our past is excellent, from Kievan Rus to the Russian Federation it is a series of glorious state victories. If any of the victories is not quite good, say, the execution of Polish officers in Katyn, then the task of a state-minded historian is to come up with why this is not so important, but where it is necessary to ravage, for the highest historical purposes. How the historian Medinsky works, the easiest way to understand, recalling his famous statement about the “feat of 28 Panfilovites”.
“My deepest conviction is that even if this story was invented from beginning to end, even if there were no Panfilov, even if there was nothing, this is a holy legend, which simply cannot be touched. And the people who do this are over -shuffle ” -
Medinsky reported in 2016. Ideally, the undoubtedness of the holy legends should be reinforced by state millions to create a high -budget patriotic blockbuster - it was the minister of the film of the same name that did not doubt the historical content of the history of 28 Panfilovites (initially the money for the film was collected with crowdfunding, but more than 100 million rubles eventually added minimal).
The scum of the finished is awaited not only by the indignation of the newly appointed chairman, but also to criminal articles. It is possible to judge citizens who are incorrectly imagining the past for a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, an insult to veterans, disrespect for the days of military glory and memorable dates of Russia. There is also a “sleeping” law on the regulation of educational activities, to which the government has not managed to write by -laws. There is no doubt that the main thing that they will now want to regulate is teaching humanitarian disciplines and history in particular. Many people ask what will happen next, after the defeat of the political opposition and the recognition of most independent media “foreign agents”? The new commission collected under Medinsky gives an answer to this question: there will be a case of historians.
All eras are taboo for scientific discussion. The prospects for the study of Russian-Ukrainian relations and Russian colonialism as a whole. Honest stories of the war in Afghanistan, the latest wars in Chechnya or the history of imperial and Soviet deportations will never be written (you know something about the “eviction of the Circassians” in the 1860s, after which the empire acquired the deserted resorts of the current Krasnodar Territory?). If you are a Russian researcher, you better not write anything about the Second World War in general, the Molotov -Ribbentrop Pact and the events in Poland in September 1939, the history of collaboration, life in the occupied territories, about the blockade of Leningrad in particular. More precisely, you can write if you are ready to limit yourself to a repetition of patriotic slogans that are relevant to justify the current policy of the Russian state. But if you are not as a scientist as Medinsky, and you do not see the scientificness in thinking of a pleasant version of the authorities in the country, you will have to tightly. In the Higher School of Economics, for example, there is an outstanding center for studying the Second World War , working at a world level and included in a global intellectual discussion about the meaning of what happened in the 20th century, and these people are scary.
At the same time, the intellectual forces of the “new historians” of Medinsky will be thrown on how to maintain an idea of the past, not going beyond the Brezhnev textbook for universities, but at the same time clean up everything related to communist ideology and Marxism. With this approach, the historical process boils down to a simple change of our great rulers, and such brilliant research can already be carried to the Kremlin.
It is said that in Soviet times an honest scientist-historian could find Shelter, engaged in a classic Middle Ages, and even better, antiquity, in extreme cases-an era of "bourgeois revolutions." It was only necessary for ritual purposes to insert several quotes from Marx into the preface. But even then this greatly threw back the development of the Russian historical school. Now not only the dark pages of World War II, but also any modern themes for historical science can become toxic. The methodology of Hayden White and Frank Anchorsmith, for example, exposes state propaganda as “another narrative”. The gender history and history of everyday life raises questions about the correctness of the information of the entire historical narrative to the "remarkable lives of our political leaders." The concept of the “two bodies of the king” of Kantorovich looks completely undesirable in Russia.