Joseph Stalin, according to Alexander Golovanov, once said: “I know that when I’m gone, a lot of mud will be poured over my head. But I am sure that the winds of history will blow it all away.” The winds of history are us. And the mud is our parents. This is how he saw the future from the difficult year of 1943. However, it all turned out the opposite: there was much more mud among us than he expected from his closest followers, and the winds of history are still not heard.
A few days ago, I was talking to an old acquaintance of mine. He is an American who found himself in Ukraine for a while. Having studied our history, apparently through books and blogs, he told me that Stalin killed 30 million Ukrainians, and Putin took Crimea from Ukraine. In connection with this, he wondered why we tolerate all this? Why don’t we take up arms and fight for our freedom? To him, as an American with innate love for freedom, this is incomprehensible.
I asked him how exactly Stalin managed to kill so many people if he had never been to Ukraine. I even joked, asking if he did it with some kind of super-accurate rifle with ultra-long-range shooting. After that, the conversation took a completely different direction, and I was accused of not sharing the grief and sadness for the innocent victims, and therefore, there was nothing to talk to me about.
I share. Both the grief and the sadness.
However, I ask myself, is it really necessary to simplify negative historical experience so categorically in order to draw the right conclusions from it? Is it really necessary to declare one of its leaders a messenger of Satan in order not to repeat genocide, and all the deceased as great martyrs? Will such simplification not lead to the opposite result, namely to new senseless victims and new unjustified violence?
Did Stalin kill Ukrainians? Did Putin annex Crimea? Did Hitler burn Jews? Did Bin Laden blow up the towers in New York?
I don’t know. There are different opinions on this matter.
However, I know for sure that the more convinced we are that we know for sure who the villain is and who the savior is, the higher our chances of acquiring a new anti-hero. And very soon. The more actively we seek out the guilty and the more eager we are to blame them for what happened, the less responsibility we leave on ourselves.
By losing the ability to take responsibility, we inevitably become hostages of someone else’s will. And most likely, this will be directed against us. New genocides, famines, repressions, and wars await us if we do not stop simplifying history and demonizing its individual characters.
As Sergei Dovlatov said: “We endlessly curse Comrade Stalin, and, of course, for good reason. And yet I want to ask - who wrote four million denunciations?”
It was not Stalin who killed Ukrainians, it was the whole country, including the efforts of Ukrainians themselves. It was not Putin who annexed Crimea, but the people living in Crimea and Russia. It was not Hitler who killed Jews, but German, Polish, Italian, and even Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers.
In other words, it was us. And our ancestors.
For a better future, we must not be afraid to look soberly at the past and acknowledge our personal guilt in what happened. We should not strive for simplification of what happened, but to see all the facets of past tragedies. We must try to become that very wind of history that the Generalissimo relied on. Right now, we look more like a mudslide.
Translated by ChatGPT gpt-3.5-turbo/42 on 2024-04-20 at 17:36
