As horrific news kept pouring in from Ukraine -- tempered by President Vlodymyr Zelenskyy’s unexpected bravery and stories of his troops holding back Russian tanks with more success than expected –- The New Yorker’s David Remnick offered insightful commentary in that magazine. Remnick’s observations are particularly valuable as he covered the end of the Soviet Empire as Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post and earned a 1994 Pulitzer for his book Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. And on the topic of last days, Remnick comments that in Putin’s mind, “this is his moment, his triumphal historical drama, and damn the cost.”
Putin controls Russian history, Remnick writes, like his predecessors going back at least as far as Tsar Nicholas I, with a special shout-out to Stalin, who was named chief historian of the Soviet Union in 1928 by the All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians. Carve out Nikita Kruschev’s “secret” criticism of Stalin in 1956 (after he was dead, of course) for purging party members, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader who held the single hope for Russian freedom and liberty in the 20th Century. Then Putin took over for Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, in 1999. From that moment, Russia’s history was history.
Presently, Putin is controlling the perception of history in that he is claiming to the Russian people that he his undertaking a “special military operation” in Ukraine to “stop a Ukrainian ‘genocide’ against the Russian-speaking population in that country.”
Which, of course, is “alternative history.”
Remnick’s point, mainly, is that so long as Putin can control Russian history up to and including the point its first draft is being written, he controls his country. Remnick does not use the column to connect Putin’s “history” with the ongoing efforts by the Trump wing of the GOP to similarly control American history.
The Big Lie is obvious, as should be Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. (Remember the historic summit in Helsinki, 2018; “I don’t see any reason why it would be (Russia). President Putin was extremely powerful in his denial today”?)
There is Trump’s command, diffused by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, to call in the 82nd Airborn to quash June 2020 protests in Washington over a Minneapolis policeman’s killing that May. In a kind of preternatural irony, Trump sought to invoke the Insurrection Act as the reason for calling in the military, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write in Peril.
Nearly two years later, Trump is still in charge of the GOP as Putin tries to wrest control of Ukraine. Last Saturday, before the brouhaha over his praise of Putin on a right-wing radio show could begin to die down, Trump told well-heeled donors at a Republican National Committee fundraiser in New Orleans we should “put the Chinese flag on F-22 fighter jets” and “bomb the shit” out of Russia. Seems like he is no longer keen on his former pals Putin and Xi. Although that line was reported as a joke, according to The Hill, it’s not so much a joke as another Trump fabrication: his suggestion came just after his former national security advisor, John Bolton told The Washington Post that Trump would have pulled out of NATO had he won a second term.
But it’s not all Trump. His wing of the GOP has been on a tear in local school boards and at the state level with proposals to outlaw “Critical Race Theory,” in quotes here because, of course, it has never been taught in K-12 schools, anywhere, in order to codify the sort of “history” that whitewashed the Confederacy as a disagreement over states’ rights. Controlled history.
It has never been my intent to take sides on any issues appearing in The Hustings. However, while this outlet seeks to provide equal voice to both the left and the right, we make no excuses for being anti-authoritarian.
Slava Ukrain!
—Todd Lassa
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