The 1984 playbook: Putin airbrushes history just as Stalin did
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana once wrote.
Which is why a common practice of both totalitarian regimes like those of Stalin or Hitler, or authoritarian ones like Vladimir Putin's today, is a propensity to try to airbrush embarrassing events out of history. The tactic was satirised in extreme form by George Orwell in the book 1984.
In terms of current events, the age of the internet and social media makes it virtually impossible to censor an event out of the current consciousness, so the purveyors of Russian propaganda today tend to work by broadcasting multiple conspiracy theories and attacks on the integrity of any of their critics or sources of an independent point of view (at its worst this led to the attempted extermination of the "White Helmets" civil defence organisation in Syria) with the result that people give up attempting to work out which explanation is true.
But where events of the past are concerned, the Putin regime reverts to the Stalinist tactic of removing references to events they don't want people to remember.
There is an article by John Sweeney on the CAPX site about the way four important events in recent Russian history were conveniently excised from the "Russia: My History" event in Moscow and how events which might show Stalin in a bad light or the west in a good one do not get much attention in Russian school history books today, which you can read here.
Which is why a common practice of both totalitarian regimes like those of Stalin or Hitler, or authoritarian ones like Vladimir Putin's today, is a propensity to try to airbrush embarrassing events out of history. The tactic was satirised in extreme form by George Orwell in the book 1984.
In terms of current events, the age of the internet and social media makes it virtually impossible to censor an event out of the current consciousness, so the purveyors of Russian propaganda today tend to work by broadcasting multiple conspiracy theories and attacks on the integrity of any of their critics or sources of an independent point of view (at its worst this led to the attempted extermination of the "White Helmets" civil defence organisation in Syria) with the result that people give up attempting to work out which explanation is true.
But where events of the past are concerned, the Putin regime reverts to the Stalinist tactic of removing references to events they don't want people to remember.
There is an article by John Sweeney on the CAPX site about the way four important events in recent Russian history were conveniently excised from the "Russia: My History" event in Moscow and how events which might show Stalin in a bad light or the west in a good one do not get much attention in Russian school history books today, which you can read here.
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