Reverse Revisionism

Leon Aron reviews Putin’s views on Russian history in a lengthy article in TNR (September 24). At a conference, for instance, Putin admitted that there have been “problematic pages in our history,” but goes on: “what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as it was in Vietnam, for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt.”

It’s as if Solzhenitsyn never existed: No terror or gulag before 1937. Aron notes, “the old version, the Soviet version, of the ‘repressions’ perpetrated by the Soviet regime, according to which they were confined to the slaughter of the party nobility, the top military commanders, and the intelligentsia during the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937-1938, has now been officially reinstated.”