History, to those who do not write or read it, sometimes seems dry stuff. Yet in the current moment, the past rouses extraordinary passions. It influences politics and policies, and empowers nationalist governments. It has become weaponized. Consider some comments from a Russian, which landed on my own website last week:
I read your book about the Second World War. And how are you better than the Nazis? A disgusting lampoon of the Soviet people and their Victory. While the British were holed up on their island, wiping their pants in Africa, and delaying the opening of a second front, the Russians were the only ones who broke Hitler’s offensive. It is a pity that Hitler invaded the USSR, and did not finish off Britain, a country that breeds storytellers like you.
Not an ounce of gratitude. Lies and provocations. Of course, only the British won this war … What did Stalin do to you? I think you would have chosen to serve in the ranks of the SS and to participate in Operation Barbarossa. 1 Shame and shame. As such the earth bears.
Tens of thousands of such missives a week hit Western websites and media comment platforms, almost all of them written by trolls under false identities, and many of whom are on the payroll of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some address current issues — for instance, disputing allegations of Kremlin sponsorship of murder plots on Russian dissidents in the West, such as the poisoning of the political opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Many trolls, however, like the one quoted above, challenge the Western version of recent Russian history.
Moscow’s narrative is rooted in claims that Americans, the British and others allies fail to give adequate recognition to the dominant Soviet role in World War II; malign Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union’s great leader; libel the Red Army by asserting — for instance — that its men raped hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of German women in 1945.
My purpose here is not to debate these issues in detail, but to express the dismay of those of us who devote our lives to the pursuit of truth, even if we often fail to catch it. We see large parts of the world systemically committed to concealing or annihilating realities. Whole generations of Russians have all their lives been denied access to books, teaching and internet sources that would enable them honestly to explore their past.
Putin was born in 1952. It is possible that he knows no more about the reality of World War II than does the commenter to my website quoted above, or the many Moscow taxi drivers who carry miniature images of Stalin on their windshields. Putin, too, despite overwhelming testimony, may sincerely believe it to be a myth that Russian soldiers raped their way across Europe in the last months of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. He claims that the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact was a legitimate response to Western appeasement of Hitler. He justifies Stalin’s collusion with Hitler to dismember Poland with the ludicrous assertion that the Poles started World War II.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese exist in the same miasma of ignorance and deceits. An American friend with a company in Beijing tells me that when he visits the Chinese capital, he sometimes has lunch with one of his brightest and best-educated employees, a woman in her 30s. She quizzes him with urgent fascination about the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.
This was a huge, ghastly event in her country’s past. Millions of “intellectuals” were persecuted, driven out into the countryside to till the fields to atone for supposed ideological crimes. Tens of thousands were murdered. In 1971, I heard a scientist at Beijing University, who had once worked on jet propulsion at Pasadena, California, parrot before a group of Western correspondents apologies for his sins, and declare that working with peasants had prompted his humble repentance.
Afterward, my BBC producer and I chanced to find ourselves walking beside the old man. We demanded of him that surely he could not believe the nonsense he had spouted. He turned to us, a face of anguish, and said, “You do not understand how things are here, now.”
Yet my American friend’s employee and her compatriots aren’t taught anything about that traumatic era. Nor are they told of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, the disastrous drive for industrialization in the late 1950s and early 60s, which generated mass famine and millions of deaths.
The Chinese currency, the renminbi, still bears the face of Mao. The narrative of the country’s history promoted by President Xi Jinping takes pride in asserting that he is lineal successor to the “Great Leader.”
Half a century ago, Chinese state propaganda vented its spleen upon “capitalist running dogs” and class traitors. Today, Beijing mobilizes the past to advance China’s foreign policy objectives, which means emphasizing Chinese claims to Taiwan, horrific Japanese aggression before and during World War II, and historic Western exploitation of the “Heavenly Kingdom.”
It’s not only autocrats who are excavating the past in pursuit of contemporary advantage. France has more history than it can comfortably accommodate, and argues about much of it. President Emmanuel Macron, politically besieged by the right, recently attended a ceremony at Napoleon’s tomb, beneath the dome of the Invalides in Paris, to deliver a rousing patriotic speech, calling the emperor’s life “an ode to political will.”
French politicians are divided about Napoleon. Some recoil from him — as I do myself — because his most conspicuous legacy was a mountain of corpses, of lives squandered in the pursuit of “la gloire,” his nation’s supposed glory. Napoleon lost as many dead from his Grand Army in the 1812 Russian campaign alone as the U.S. did in World War II.
Yet a significant number of the French highlight the emperor’s extraordinary contribution to the administration and legal systems not only of their homeland, but also of some European neighbors. Macron appeared at Napoleon’s tomb because many of his people yearn for more gloire, as well as fewer African migrants — and threaten to expel him from power at next year’s presidential election unless he can deliver on both. He has trailed right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen narrowly in the polls all year.
France’s difficulties with its past extend beyond Napoleon. The country is as reluctant to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about World War II as is Russia. It is the only major participant in the conflict never to have published an official history of its experience: Even in the 21st century, the French cannot achieve a consensus about what happened to them between 1939 and 1945.
Most of the important research on the period has been done by American and British historians, including Robert O. Paxton, Julian Jackson and Robert Gildea. Charles de Gaulle, first as wartime leader of the exiled Free French and later as president, created a legend of his country as gallant resisters against Nazi occupation. The truth, of course, is that most French people collaborated actively or passively with the Germans. But no modern French politician, never mind a president seeking re-election, could dare to acknowledge this in public.
Many of the same inhibitions have deterred Spanish historians from addressing their country’s experience under the four-decade dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Some of the most authoritative work on the period has been done by two Britons, Paul Preston and Hugh Thomas, and an American, Stanley G. Payne. Spain’s politicians still fiercely contest Franco’s legacy, with the right upholding the claims to greatness of a leader who was morally at the level of Hitler and Mussolini, merely smart enough not to fight the Western allies in World War II.
Eastern Europe’s nations face serious problems, partly in coming to terms with their past as Soviet satellites, and partly in reconciling a lot of ugly history with a modus vivendi with today’s Kremlin. Russian myth, aggressively promoted by Putin, holds that the Red Army in 1945 liberated Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States and Romania.
In truth, the hapless peoples of those countries merely exchanged Nazi servitude for the Soviet variety. Anticommunist Poles continued fighting their new Russian oppressors for many months after the German surrender in May 1945. One of the most chilling documents I have ever read was a July 1945 memorandum to Stalin from his secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, describing how he had invited leaders of all the Polish political factions to a conference in Warsaw, supposedly to discuss their country’s future, then shipped the anticommunist delegates to Siberia or a firing squad.
The Czech Republic, a success story among the former Soviet Bloc nations, is having its own battles over the past. On May 8, there were tense scenes at Prague’s Olsany Cemetery, where several hundred Red Army soldiers are buried. Russian sympathizers arrived to lay flowers for the anniversary of VE Day. But protesters also assembled, waving European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization flags around an effigy of Putin seated on a toilet. They shouted “traitors!” and “collaborators!” at the pro-Russia enthusiasts.
A Czech political scientist who was present, Michael Romancov, made the cynical observation that only 14 of the Soviet dead in the cemetery were killed taking Prague from the Germans: “The rest died in traffic accidents, or drank themselves to death.” Putin and his people, however, rail against the supposed ingratitude of Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and others who decline to accord to the World War II Soviets the gratitude that the Kremlin claims as their due.
Lest any modern Russians should acquire unacceptable ideas about the wartime behavior of the Red Army, Moscow’s parliament has passed a law making it a criminal offence, punishable by five years’ imprisonment, to libel its veterans — for instance, by suggesting that they were rapists and pillagers. Books on the period written by many modern authors, including myself and Antony Beevor, are banned from sale or translation.
It is the same story in Beijing. A few years ago I signed a contract with a publisher for a Chinese edition of my book on the Korean War. Some months later, however, he contacted me to report that regretfully, he must cancel the deal: China’s censors refused to approve my text.
Turkey follows a similar path, with its government’s ferocious denials of the 1916 Armenian genocide, which U.S. President Joe Biden recently acknowledged as fact. No Turkish writer who offers a view of the country’s past at odds with that of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is likely to remain long at liberty. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist party embrace a narrative of his country’s past in which tens of millions of Muslims have no honorable place.
Japan is a successful democracy and staunch Western ally. Yet most of its World War II archives remain closed to historians. Japanese students and schoolchildren are reared on a vision of their nation’s past that few Western historians would recognize. Japanese prime ministers have resumed public pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine, where many of their country’s convicted war criminals are commemorated. Voters expect it of them. The version of Japan’s bestial 1931-45 operations in China that is taught to Tokyo schoolchildren is a travesty.
It is depressing to see how few countries encourage or even permit their citizens freely to chronicle and discuss their pasts, and how many instead forge fictional histories to support modern political purposes. In the U.S. and most of Europe, we take for granted a license to seek out truth. The Germans have an exemplary record, especially with regard to the mid-20th century, recently enhanced by Harald Jahner’s new book “Aftermath,” on German life after 1945.
Yet such freedom is increasingly threatened: The torrent of misinformation and disinformation peddled through social media is making matters worse. Trolls bombard online sources indefatigably, swamping them with lies.
The new populism, entwined with nationalism, demands partisan visions of history few scholarly historians would recognize. A generation ago, some of us were naive enough to suppose that the global village and the internet would make us better informed, more educated people. This has not proved so.
The difficulties with history faced by such democracies as France and Japan pose less alarming dangers for mankind than do those of the autocracies. But every society, including the U.S. and Britain, is weakened and diminished if its leaders or scholars forsake the perpetual search for truth which is the rightful business of us all.
As children, we mocked people who believed the moon to be made of green cheese. Today, a frightening number would swallow this, if informed of it by the government or political faction that they support. Increasingly in many nations, people are selecting their own personal truth about both the past and the present, and it is seldom the kind we were once taught in school.
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The German invasion of the Soviet Union was given this code name in honor of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. It didn't end well.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
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Max Hastings: Skewed History Is Becoming a Global Superweapon - Bloomberg
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