Heathen History – Russia

Last week marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Pyotr Stolypin. He remains very popular in Russia, and in 2008 a television poll voted him the second greatest Russian in history (although we should perhaps note here that Stalin came third !). The statue shown above was erected last year to mark the centenary of his assassination. It is also worth noting how keen modern Russian politicans like president-elect Putin are to associate themself with the former Prime Minister.

 He is of course a contradictory figure. He is most know to us as the author of agricultural reform which could have made him “a potential saviour of Tsarism” (Hite). In his own words “give me twenty years of peace at home and abroad, and you will not recognise Russia.”  Yet at the same time economic reform was coupled with political repression. He set up a system of field court-martials to deal with serious anti-governement crimes. All cases were conducted in two days, and without a defence counsel. The death penulty could not be commuted, and was carried out the next day. Chris Read estimates that thousands died this way, year after year. Indeed, the gallow’s noose became known as the “Stolypin’s necktie” (see below).

This newspaper biography of his life is well worth a read. It includes the view from a exhibition on Stolypin from the State Historical Museum that “in the opinion of many historians, Stolypin was the person who could have prevented World War and revolution.”

How far do you agree ?

Mr Kydd.

Following on from the previous post on Putin this article from today’s Guardian introduced me to a new term – re-Stalinisation.

The dispute focuses on a new school text book which names Stalin as one of twenty Great Russians.  Miriam Elder suggests “Liberal figures have been fighting against creeping “re-Stalinisation” in Russia. Three years ago, a refurbished Moscow metro station was opened featuring a large quote from the dictator. Last summer, members of the Communist party unveiled a bust of Stalin in the central Russian city of Penza.” In a similar vain, Orlando Figes claims here that “his Russian publisher had cancelled a contract to publish his latest book on life under Stalin, saying it had apparently dumped the project because of political pressure”.

The first story presses lots of buttons for me. Beyond drift to reaction point I made in the earlier post, it also raises the question of what school History should be for.

One final thought – the book also includes Ivan the Terrible. Stalin greatly admired Tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich, but claimed he made one mistake – at the end of his life he repented his brutality. Stalin however, never said sorry…

I am presently reading Masha Gessen’s horrifying and damming biography of Vladimir Putin – “The Man Without A Face”.  She describes him as a “small and vengeful man, prone to furious vendettas, fond of helping himself to other people’s property, and the godfather of a mafia clan ruling the country”. There is a good review of the book from The Guardian here.

Whilst I do not know enough above post-Soviet Russian politics to make really informed comment on some of the accusations in it, I would make this point in relation to our course. As things stand in 2012, Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Yelstin years of the 1990s can be seen as  just another “moment of reform” akin to the Emancipation, the October Manifesto or the N.E.P. Perhaps absolutism is Russia’s usual form of government. As Birdiev said of Stalin, “all the past is repeating itself, and acts only behind new masks“. Perhaps…

Mr Kydd

Or so they say. This BBC slideshow of photographs made on the eve of revolution by the Russian ariotocrat, Sergei Michaolovich Prokudin-Gorrskii can even make povertry look beautiful. It is of course literally a snapshot of a world that was about to disappear, and that alone is enough to make it noteworthy.

For our course however it gives a visual representation of Lenin’s declaration that the Tsar’s Empire was in fact a “prison of peoples”. In an age of growing nationalism this was only ever going to increase as a problem. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the official policy of Russification usually made things worse. Here we can note that many of the leading Communists came from the repressed races. Trotsky was a Jew, Lenin had Tartar blood, Stalin and Beria were Georgians and Khrushchev was from Ukrainian peasant stock.