Memorial and the liberating power of history. By Timothy Snyder

By Dilip -

NB: Attempts to rewrite history with the use of political power are taking place in India as well. Ironically, the infamous habit has been connected to communist regimes, but is quite clearly popular with anti-communist ones as well. As George Orwell remarked in his dystopian novel 1984: "He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present, controls the past." How true.

Unfortunately the rectification of the past is an impossible task, even for Supermen. Equally misfortunate is the popular fascination for neatly-laundered versions of the past; a fascination that I can only explain by comparing it to being perpetually high on a particularly potent dose of medical cannabis. DS

For three decades, Memorial has delivered the facts that have enabled Russians to seek the truth about the Soviet past. Without its research, international accounts of the GULAG would also have been impossible. The attempt to close the NGO is the latest move in the Putin regime’s attempt to monopolize history.

Democracy requires reflection. It is easy to fall for stories about how our group was always right and some other group was always wrong. Once these tales turn us into tribes, we follow the tribal leaders who tell them, rather than thinking for ourselves. Democracy means that people rule, but to do so, they need tools to see through the lies told by the powerful. Reflection requires facts, and getting at them is harder than it seems.

In the Soviet Union, dissidents set an ethical and practical example of how to do this. Do not engage the propaganda stories themselves, at least not at first. Take an interest in the most basic facts. Find out the names of the persecuted, record the details of their trials, their interrogations, their sentences, their time in the camps. Write it all down, and take the consequences. Treat small truths as worthy of risk. Be arrested in your turn, trusting that others will record your name…

https://www.eurozine.com/memorial-and-the-liberating-power-of-history/


Solidarity with Memorial: Russia’s most prominent civil rights group in danger


The destruction of society EUROZINE REVIEW


STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis


Book review: Peter Pomerantsev's 'This Is Not Propaganda' is quietly frightening. By Steve Bloomfield


Andrew Roth - The problem is Putin: protesters throng Russia's streets to support jailed Navalny // Russia’s courageous historic protests against Putinism


Vasili Arkhipov, the man who stopped nuclear war


Book review: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev - Putinism and the oil-boom years


Allies of slain Putin critic Nemtsov allege cover-up after guilty verdict


Russian Justice: Sergei Magnitsky’s Torture and Murder in Pre-Trial Detention


British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money


Lawyer For Russian Whistleblower’s Family Falls From Building One Day Before Hearing


Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition figure, unconscious in hospital


Simon Tisdall: Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people


Madhavan Palat lectures on Dostoevsky


Books reviewed: Solzhenitsyn as he saw himself


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival by Madhavan Palat


Apollinariya Yakubova: The face of the woman Vladimir Lenin loved most is revealed


Lev Kamenev's Preface to Machiavelli (from New Left Review)


Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Communism and Revolutions


The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon


Alexander Rabinowitch: The Bolsheviks Come to Power in Petrograd: Centennial Reflections


Marcel van der Linden: Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same


Jairus Banaji: A Hundred Years After October Revolution, Rethinking the Origins of Stalinism


The Soviet Retreat From the Emancipative Ideas of 1917. By Arup Banerji


Jairus Banaji - Revolution Destroyed


Jairus Banaji: A Hundred Years After October Revolution, Rethinking the Origins of Stalinism


Love and Anarchy: Emma Goldman's passion for free expression


Book Review: Victor Serge; Memoirs of a Revolutionary


State memory: 1917 and Russian memory politics. By MANFRED SAPPER and VOLKER WEICHSEL


The legacies of 1917 Orlando Figes & Daniel Gascon


Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia


Book Review: Inside the Stalin Archives, by Johnathan Brent (2009) // Books from "Annals of Communism Series", Yale University Press


Review essay - What’s Left? Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 5 new books on the Russian Revolution


Book review: Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge – life in the Stalinist Soviet Union // Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – review


Book review: - The Conscience of a Revolutionary


Alec Luhn - Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia


100 years of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution March 8 (February 23), International Women's Day


Anil Nauriya - Indian Struggles in 1917 : On the eve of the Russian Revolution


March 8, 1917: February Revolution begins in Russia


Hari Sankar Vasudevan (1952 – 2020). A tribute by Madhavan K. Palat


Book review: ‘The Zhivago Affair’ was one of the most fascinating of the Cold War’s cultural skirmishes // Boris Pasternak's refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son's memoirs


Hari Vasudevan and the Soviet Archives: A Personal Remembrance. By Sobhanlal Datta Gupta


The Red Army, indisputable Vanquisher of Nazi Germany // Berlin battleground - 70 years later. Photos from then and now



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