HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019264.jpg

BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians

up” the agreement between British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler that resulted in Germany’s seizure of parts and eventually all of Czecho-slovakia. This clearly falsified the historical record. Far from suppressing Chamberlain’s actions, historians and politicians alike have held up the Munich agreement as a symbol of all that went wrong due to the European democracies’ appeasement of Hitler.7

Putin has also justified the Hitler-Stalin pact on the grounds that it kept the Soviet Union out of war for a time and was in keeping with the amoral power politics practiced in that era. As for the divvying up of Eastern Europe, he repeated the hoary lie that the record was unclear as to whether the pact’s secret protocols—in which the two parties agreed on which territories each would subsequently control—were genuine.8 Predict-ably, Putin did not go into the unwritten parts of the agreement that caused Stalin to forcibly repatriate a group of German dissidents, mostly Communists, who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union.

Both the history manual and the political leadership justify the transformation of postwar Eastern Europe into a Soviet-controlled bloc—in which the econ-omy came under state control, religious belief was persecuted, civil society was destroyed, the press was converted into a monolithic instrument of propagan-da, and opposition political parties were crushed—by claiming that Moscow needed a layer of territorial security to protect it from the hostile West. “Historical necessity” is how Putin’s spokesman described Soviet domination of the region. Putin likewise blames the democracies for the Iron Curtain: “We understand the fatality of an ‘iron curtain’ for us. We will not go down this path. No one will build a wall around us.”9

The manual recalls Mikhail Gorbachev not for his attempts to reform and liberalize the Communist system, but instead for his having permitted the unraveling of the European security belt in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Moving into the 21st century, the manual denounces the color revolutions in neighboring countries like Georgia and Ukraine as Western-backed schemes to replace pro-Russian leaders with pro-American usurpers. In this view, the centuries may change and the Soviet empire may fade into history, but Russia’s geopolitical predicament remains constant.

Sakharov as nonperson
Because Putin is intent on blaming the West for Rus-sia’s problems, both past and present, he has worked to ensure that critical domestic voices are removed from Russian history. This explains the near total ab-sence of Andrey Sakharov from any discussion of the Soviet past or Russia’s future course.

Today Sakharov is recalled abroad as a dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In Russia, however, he has been relegated to the status of nonperson. Putin and other leaders never refer to him, his legacy, or his views. The organizations that were launched to promote his principles are harassed and placed on the “foreign agents” list.10 In an age of flourishing digital media, Russians are ironically less likely to know what Sakharov stood for than was the case under Soviet censorship, when underground samizdat literature was reproduced on manual typewriters to reach an audience of a few hundred.11

In fact, Sakharov was an imposing global presence from the mid-1960s until his death in 1989. His stat-ure derived from his prominent role in the develop-ment of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. He was sometimes called the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and because of the respect he enjoyed in the global scientific com-munity, his views on arms control carried enormous weight.

His initial forays into political dissent consisted of cau-tious statements about the importance of weapons treaties between Washington and Moscow. But the more he thought about arms control, the more closely he looked at his own society. And soon he was making caustic comments about the yawning gap between Soviet boasts on the achievements of socialism and the reality of Soviet backwardness.

He eventually came to see the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union as inherently repressive. Sakharov attributed Russia’s epidemic of alcoholism to the leadership’s having purged the governing system of moral considerations. He said it was “important that our society gradually emerge from the dead end of unspirituality.” He spoke of the need for the “system-atic defense of human rights and ideals, and not a political struggle, which would inevitably incite people to violence, sectarianism, and frenzy.”12

The Kremlin has worked hard to make Russians forget that he once ranked among the eminent figures of global political protest. The current leadership is especially determined to ensure that Sakharov’s core goals disappear from the debate: a Russia committed to humane and democratic values, a government that

30
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019264