Rewriting History Easier Said Than Done for Soviets

In Leningrad, where the reign of the czars crashed down in 1917, Russian history expert Richard Pipes recently caught a glimpse of the Soviet Union’s resurgent ghosts.

As he posed for a portrait by a street artist in the city once called St. Petersburg, Pipes was asked by the painter, “Did you in the West already know what we are learning about our history today?”

The question summed up the gulf between Westerners and the masses in the world’s first communist country. What has long been common knowledge abroad about the tumultuous and often-cruel legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution is beginning to be told to the Soviet people--officially.

Some Uncensored Probing

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, particularly over the last few months, has permitted some uncensored probing of the Soviet past--largely of the Stalin era when millions were imprisoned, shot or starved to death.

As recently as last week, a Soviet newspaper, Moskovskaya Pravda, published an interview that further revamped the image of Nikita Khrushchev, the former Communist Party chief. Khrushchev, who was ousted from power in 1964, was lauded for his “courage” in implementing some reforms. Perhaps more importantly, early last month Soviet television broadcast an uncompromising documentary, “Risk-2,” which compared dictator Josef Stalin with Adolf Hitler and portrayed Stalin as a paranoid killer. News accounts indicated that the broadcast was seen by millions, apparently the largest Soviet audience ever for the sweeping remake of their own history.

Rehabilitation Completed

In July, the Soviet Communist Party completed the rehabilitation of Nikolai I. Bukharin, a Bolshevik economist who opposed the policies of Stalin. Branded an “enemy of the people” and executed 50 years ago, Bukharin is now viewed as a pioneer of reforms backed by Gorbachev.

Western observers believe, however, that the Soviet Union has embarked on a difficult and perhaps impossible course.

“There is no more sensitive, explosive or political subject than history in the Soviet Union. . . . History is a battleground in the Soviet Union,” said Stephen Cohen, professor of Soviet history and politics at Princeton University.

Sensational recent developments have come fairly easily, say Pipes, Cohen and others. What comes next will require “a serious and courageous indictment of their past,” said Dimitri Simes, a Soviet affairs specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Pipes, a hard-liner from Harvard who helped shape the Reagan Administration’s early policy toward the Soviet Union, added: “There’s no end to the amount of revising they’d have to do. . . . If they’re going to revise their history, they’re going to have to revise their whole political system.” But he conceded that “there seems to be no limit to their boldness.”

Measure of True Reform

Cohen, a more liberal scholar than Pipes, said one measure of true historical reform would be the creation of “a popular history to overcome this Stalinist mythology.” Another yardstick, he said, would be making sure that “all the people who were shot” during Stalin’s rule are included in school textbooks.

Jerry F. Hough, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform,” said the Soviets run the risk of going too far in their reaction to years of historical suppression.

Maintaining that history is a political weapon even in the hands of glasnost -minded reformers, Hough said that historical discussions are dominated by “black and white denunciations of people in the past who are much more complex figures. What they’ve got to do is sort of calm down. . . . A lot of radicals are playing symbolic politics with the past. They’re praising Khrushchev for attacking Stalin while ignoring Khrushchev’s suppression of (novelist Boris) Pasternak.”

Particularly in the area of popular history, the Soviets could end up with a lurid and distorted impression of the past, Hough added. “The problem that they’ve got is on the sensational . . . the blood and thunder of the (labor) camps and the show trials (of the 1930s). It’s the blood and thunder that’ll sell the books,” he said. “If you give people total freedom, the result is not an objective truth but a range of truths in which the most sensational has the greatest appeal.”

The problems of revisionism are likely to be thorniest in areas such as the Baltic republics where nationalist feelings are running high, Hough said. “When people start writing history to make a nationalist point, it really gets quite extreme,” he explained.

Along the same lines, Adam Ulam, a biographer of Stalin and a Harvard professor, commented: “Even in a country such as the United States it is difficult to get a balanced view of the past.”

Although its roots stretch to the 1950s when Khrushchev launched a cautious--and ultimately repudiated--version of glasnost, many Western specialists say this latest round of historical revision is unprecedented, in the Soviet Union or anywhere else. Though perspectives on the past--the French Revolution and the fate of the American Indian, for instance--are always changing in other countries, no regime or nation has ever voluntarily tried to break free of its own rigid orthodoxy, Princeton’s Cohen said.

Since late last year the tempo has quickened as Soviet magazines and newspapers boldly began resurrecting figures like Bukharin from the socialist equivalent of hell. Lately, a tentative foray has even been made against Lenin, mastermind of the Bolshevik Revolution and until now the one sure saint in the communist pantheon.

History Exams Canceled

The shift in historical viewpoint has been so rapid that the government announced in June that final history exams for 53 million school children and adolescents have been canceled because much of what was taught was wrong. The effort to fill in what Gorbachev has called “blank spots” in history is “a purifying torture of revelation,” the newspaper Izvestia proclaimed in announcing the decision.

Some tortures of revelation apparently are better endured by others. In late July, a Polish Communist Party weekly became the vehicle for the first publication of Khrushchev’s secret attack on Stalin, a 32-year-old indictment accusing the dictator of killing political opponents and botching Soviet conduct of World War II. Khrushchev did not publicly release the report because he wanted to be sure “our enemies are not given nourishment and our abscesses are not uncovered,” the Polish newspaper said.

This revolution in history--if that’s what it proves to be--almost certainly will be crucial underpinning in Gorbachev’s campaign to democratize and restructure the Soviet Union’s politics and economy, other Western experts say.

Stanford University Prof. Alexander Dallin noted that Gorbachev was reluctant at first to rattle skeletons in the Kremlin closet. “At first he was against it; Gorbachev had no time for it,” Dallin said. “For his first year and a half he did nothing, but by last year he had been convinced it was necessary--to attract intellectuals and to gain credibility.” Now, however, historical re-examination “has gone beyond that,” he added.

The more time and effort the Soviets devote to looking backward, the more they will have to refine their approaches to the past, the outside experts say. Most commonly, they agree that the Soviets will have to reach a decision on whether to shape a new “party line” on history.

‘Enormously Important’

“The fact is that history is enormously important to the party, to ideology,” said British historian Geoffrey Hosking, author of “The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union From Within.” He added, “It’s possible that what we shall see is a certain amount of tolerated diversity. But I still think the party will want to rewrite its own version of history.”

Echoing Hosking, Stanford’s Dallin said, “Given the whole Soviet fear of anarchy and spontaneity, the party is likely to issue some general guidelines.”

While agreeing that a new official view of Soviet history probably will be considered, Princeton’s Cohen said, “It’s not clear they can ever again come to a single point of view.” It is more likely, he said, that varying levels of historical sophistication will develop--popular histories for general readers, approved textbooks for primary and high school students and diverse interpretive studies for advanced students and professional scholars.

Impressive as Soviet advances on the history front have been, scholars here say breakthrough gains probably won’t be made until long-forbidden archives are thrown open to researchers. Materials related to the once-discredited Bukharin have been unlocked, said Cohen, whose biography of the reform-minded Bolshevik will be published in the Soviet Union later this year. News reports from Moscow indicate that the author of a Stalin biography to be published in the Soviet Union had access to many of the former dictator’s personal files. But other key documents have been kept under wraps for as long as 60 years and they will be needed to produce accurate accounts of major events, such as the decision to collectivize agriculture, a move that wreaked havoc on the population and set back Soviet food production for decades, Cohen and others said.

Not All the Secrets

But even the archives don’t contain all the secrets of the past.

British scholar Hosking pointed out that the Soviets have begun oral history projects to preserve the recollections of the dwindling numbers of citizens old enough to remember the early days of the Soviet state.

Perhaps not least, several experts noted that the Soviet Union suffers from a shortage of historians--both those specializing in the history of their own country and those willing to examine it objectively.

“The slowest in the whole business have been the historians,” said Stanford University’s Alexander Dallin, who added: “The good (Soviet) historians generally have not gone into contemporary Soviet history.”

Finally, there are the riddles of the present.

The Brookings Institution’s Hough said his standards of historical openness include current events. In this area, he noted, there have been few disclosures about Gorbachev and his background like those routinely made known about Western leaders and how they govern.

Among other things, it’s not clearly understood how Gorbachev made his way to the top and much of the Soviet leader’s background is obscure. (A Soviet documentary broadcast on Polish television recently included an interview with Gorbachev’s mother that added some detail to the Soviet leader’s little-known past. The 47-minute film, which has not been aired in the Soviet Union, revealed that as a youngster during World War II Gorbachev was kept out of school for three months because his family couldn’t afford shoes for him.)

“We don’t know the most elemental things about Gorbachev,” Hough said. “This is the kind of history that is almost totally blacked out.”

Hough conjectured that the Soviet leader may believe it is necessary to maintain an aura of mystery in order to rule. “When you start getting into details of leaders, when you humanize them, you take some of the legend away from them,” he said.