By Andrew L. Jaffee

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is busily rewriting the history of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s blood-thirsty dictatorship over the Soviet Union. So says the BBC in a story entitled, “Stalin could win Russian vote,” published today. This is a frightening development given the well-documented terror under which the Soviet people lived during Stalin’s reign. But it is not unexpected given Putin’s own history. Indeed, this is par-for-the-course for Putin, who spent 17 years working for the dreaded KGB, one of the largest and most brutal “security services” in world history. Vladimir has surrounded himself with other former KGB goons, so in the Kremlin nowadays “[u]nder Mr Putin, influence stems from the former Soviet organs of repression.”

At least the BBC isn’t buying into Putin’s historical revisionism:

The former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin could win a nationwide TV vote for the greatest Russian ever to have lived.

One of Russia’s biggest television stations is due to announce the winner later today and Stalin is seen as a contender despite having been one of the most blood-thirsty leaders of the last century who killed millions of his own people. …

Here are some selected transcripts from the BBC’s audio-visual presentation, including some text I’ve added to put the quotes into a more readable context:

Stalin was a “mass murderer and torturer of his own people.” …

“Many [Russians] … want Stalin rehabilitated. … We can forgive his mistakes,” said one man who was interviewed.

Stalin was “a brutal dictator who sent millions to prison camps to die as slave laborers… hundreds of thousands of people were also executed. … [Stalin's] opponents either real or imaginary were simply picked up and shot by the secret police.”

[In a scene where Russian police ransack an organization's office whose mission is to collect and record evidence of Stalin's crimes against humanity:] “And this is what happens now to those still documenting Stalin’s atrocities. … the police confiscated their entire digital archives.”

“The official line now is that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country,” said a women from the organization whose offices were ransacked.

[BBC reporter Richard Galpin] “was shown evidence of how the government is literally having the history of Stalin rewritten.”

[A Russian historian showed Galpin] “a new manual for schoolteachers which says what Stalin did was entirely rational.”

[The historian] “believes the initiative [to sanitize Stalin's history] came from PM Vladimir Putin himself.”

There are many Russians still alive today who must clearly remember Stalin’s reign, yet Russia is in the throws of mass delusion — and an inferiority complex, hoping that Russia will reclaim its “glorious” past of conquering and plundering her neighbors.

Putin’s activities violate the axiom that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.” To forget history is a mistake. To sanitize history is plain stupidity. Putin’s motives to revive Russian prestige may be politically crafty, but these motives don’t make him smart. Rather, Putin’s chicanery makes him a very dangerous man, as the people of Georgia, whose nation was recently invaded by Russian forces, can attest to.

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Related: Communism / Socialism, Dictator Watch, History, Russia

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