Despite this bloody history, Russian authorities today avoid giving official assessments of either the Soviet past in general or individual Communist leaders in particular. That was not always the case. In 1987, during the period of liberalization known as glasnost, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech marking the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in which he said that Stalin had committed “enormous and unforgivable” crimes. Today, such a clear statement would be unthinkable. In 2000, during his first inauguration as president, Putin set the new official tone, declaring that “there have been both tragic and brilliant pages in our history.”
Since then, the Kremlin has maintained this official line. On the one hand, in 2015, the government announced a new policy called the Program for Commemorating the Victims of Political Repression. Last October, as part of that policy, Moscow saw the opening of the Wall of Grief, a memorial to the victims of Soviet totalitarianism. This marked an important watershed: official government acknowledgment of the scale and gravity of the mass repressions. But many human rights advocates have expressed skepticism of the Russian government’s ability to properly acknowledge the past. They point to the growing human rights violations in Russia and the fact that the archives containing the records of the security services’ crimes remain closed. [...]
In that light, the new popular Russian ideology is worrying. It consists of a paternalistic conception of government paired with the glorification of the past, including the entire Soviet period. The ideology’s basic principles are simple: the government is always right, and if in the past its policies created any victims, even a great many of them, they were necessary to continue down the special path chosen by the country. To ensure popular acceptance of these ideas, the state increasingly intervenes in the teaching of history.
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