From Nestor to Zygar, from Medinsky to Brzezinsky: one story, there can be many “stories”

History manipulation is not an accident, not the mistakes of individual ministers and not the stupidity of individual readers of the quasi -star bestseller. There are different groups of interests behind the formation of different stories

Vladimir Putin at the monument “Sons of Russia, who fought in the Civil War” (another name is “Monument of Reconciliation in the Civil War”), November 4, 2021. As a result of the confrontation that arose around the monument, the opening period was postponed several times. The memory of the Civil War in Russia, writes the American historian Ivan Kurill, is able to cause no less conflict than the one that has erupted in the United States in the case of their civil war.

Photo: kremlin.ru

Starting to read the book of Ivan Kurilla “The Battle of the Past: How Politics Changes History” , I immediately remembered what battle for the past was in my head at the end of the Soviet era, when politics clearly influenced history, but still left a place for interpretations.

The official story for me, a student of the University of Leningrad, was an expanded history of the CPSU with all its indispensable elements: the cult of the revolution and its leader, the contrast of the success of the Soviet system to the eternal crisis of building the USSR as a stronghold of all progressive humanity struggling with capitalism.

But, having once bought tickets for a cycle of lectures on ancient Rus' in the famous lecture of the Knowledge Society on Litein (Zinaida Yusupova mansion), I found that a completely official Soviet historian can develop the cult of the Kyiv princes, throwing out the whole historical materialism with its Marxist economic determinism, the exploitation of workers and the interpretation of religion as opium for the people. The course turned out to be almost as boring as the history of the CPSU, but I suddenly began to understand that there could be many stories.

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