In fourteenth-century B. C. Pharaoh Akhenaten made the worship of the sun god Aten the state faith and strove to remove all references to the past god Amun-Ra from stone columns and inscriptions. After his reign, the heretical habit of the emperor was punished with a form of damnatio memoriae: the Photographs were erased, his call was erased from the archives, and photographs and references to Amun-Ra were restored.
On the death of Roman Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus in 211 AD. He bequeathed the empire to his two sons, so that they would rule together. But Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (known as Caracalla) had his brother Publius Septimius Geta brutally murdered to avoid sharing power. To silence critics, he ordered the damnatio memoriae of his victim. All of Geta’s photographs were destroyed, more than 20,000 of his followers were massacred, and mention of his call was declared punishable by death.
The practice of removing Americans from old records reached its apogee in Stalin’s Russia, where those who fell out of favor were killed twice: first physically, and at a time when all traces of them were erased. In his quest to erase the memory of his brother, the biggest challenge facing Caracalla was the way in which mass-produced coins bearing Geta’s image circulated throughout the empire. It took several years to bring them all together. When Stalin unleashed the Great Terror on the rest of the Russians in the 1930s, there was another technological advance that stood in the way of damnatio memoriae: photography. The physical eradication of Stalin’s warring political parties by the secret police was temporarily followed by their eradication from visual records through organizations of snipers and retouchers. The printed photographs were edited with airbrushes and scalpels to make what was noted before disappear. The paintings were removed so that only the faces of the organization’s portraits could be painted. Entire editions of works by others embarrassed by the regime were banished to limited sections of the state archives or destroyed.
Stalin expelled Leon Trotsky from Russia in 1929. Six years later, the Central Committee of the Communist Party ordered Trotsky’s works removed from the libraries of the Soviet Union. This ban was later extended to conceal anti-Trotsky material, even for negative reference. it would show that Trotsky had existed, and any evidence of his lifestyle cannot be tolerated. In 1940, he was finally assassinated by the NKVD in Mexico City. After his death, his memory was written in Soviet history books.
The names of those who had been arrested or disappeared may no longer be openly discussed. Children were encouraged to remove complaints from their textbooks. To avoid guilt by association, many Soviet citizens lacerated their own copies of books and photographs with knives and scissors or smeared them with Indian ink, to remove any evidence that the non-persons they presented had ever existed, thus killing them for a moment. There are hardly any Stalinist-era archives or publications that do not bear the scars of this vandalism. The erasure was not only perpetrated against public figures: photographs of loved ones who had fallen under the influence of the state were removed from photographs or destroyed by husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, lovers and friends, who tried to avoid accusations. of disloyalty to the State.
In the 1970s, British artist David King began combining visual evidence of Stalin’s forgeries, pasting the original photographs alongside their doctored progeny in his eeebook The Commissar Vanishes. His collection includes Ten Years of Uzbekistan by artist Alexander Rodchenko, a painting containing photographs of Uzbek bureaucrats, commissioned through the state in 1934 to celebrate a decade of Soviet rule in the republic. During Stalin’s purges, many of those who appeared in Rodchenko’s eeebook were killed or disappeared, and the eeebook itself was banned. Rodchenko forced to deface his own paintings. King reproduces the brutal and macabre effects of Rodchenko’s desktop publishing: page after page of grim black squares on uniformed shoulders where faces used to be. In the last few pages, the blackness has spread almost to fill entire photographs, as if eaten away from the inside. King also includes a series of photographs of Lenin playing chess on Capri. In these photos, the spectators of the chess games have gradually been disintegrating one by one. One of them has been replaced by a ghostly stone pillar.
More recently, we have noted the damnatio memoriae of Lenin and other Soviet leaders. After gaining independence, Ukraine controlled the dismantling of the 1,320 statues of Lenin, as well as the renaming of roads and structures. After the Russian invasion, they got rid of more statues and changed their names. Hungary’s Memento Park is an open-air museum on the outskirts of Budapest, dedicated to monumental statues and plaques from the country’s communist period. After the fall of the regime in 1989, many statues and monuments were removed. Calls were made for all to be destroyed, such as the statues of Akhenaten and Geta, but the Hungarian government stopped them.
On June 29, 1993, the time of the anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the park reopened in a grand rite as an open-air public museum. The park’s designer, Ákos Eleőd, commented:
As you walk along the park’s concentric walkways, situated on an exposed hill overlooking the Danube, statues of Lenin, Marx and Engels tower above you, but now that they have been removed from their dominant position in the city below, they are no longer symbols of power, but relics and curiosities. The afterlife has not been forgotten but recontextualized.
Every country has elements of its beyond that it prefers to forget. No country offers an equivalent area in classrooms, in textbooks, and within its broader culture for its darkest hours and its best hours. Debates rage over how the visual symbols of the dark times deserve to be treated. In the United States, some other people view the tearing down of statues of Confederate Civil War leaders as a form of damnatio memoriae, while those who campaign to have the statues removed say they are not forgetting the afterlife or they do not eliminate the Americans. of the record, but recontextualize them. Here in the UK, there have been similar debates about figures from our colonial afterlife, such as Edward Colston, whose statue was toppled by protesters and thrown into Bristol harbor. The UK Home Office has also pledged its own edition of damnatio memoriae opposed to the Windrush generation: the organization of Commonwealth citizens, many of them Caribbean, who have answered the call to help fill the shortage of hard work : the British post-war workforce. . The government did not keep records of those allowed to stay and did not issue documents to those who arrived before the 1971 Immigration Act. Successive governments made adjustments to immigration law in the 2000s, and in 2010 the destruction of the Windrush’s landing maps, like the records of Akhenaten and Geta centuries before, led to wrongful arrest, loss of employment, denial of legal rights and medical treatment. in at least 83 cases, deportation of British subjects. In a society where almost each and every moment is recorded, there was no official record of them. Like the character K in Franz Kafa’s Castle, they have found themselves trapped in a surreal bureaucratic nightmare, dealing with an authority unable to admit wrong.
There is an old Soviet adage: Russia is a country with a secure future; It is only the afterlife that is unpredictable. In post-Stalinist Russia, the war for history continues. Vladimir Putin has recently followed some of the same tactics as Stalin. History is again disfigured when, in essays and speeches, Putin attempts to wipe out a country of 40 million people, with his claims that an independent Ukraine simply does not exist.
It has become more difficult, of course, to eliminate other individual people from history. After Stalin ordered the murder of Kira Kulik-Simonich, the wife of the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, Grigory Kulik, all photographs of the woman disappeared and historians have no idea what she looked like. While the virtual age presents more opportunities to falsify history, the internet has made such erasure impossible. But that hasn’t stopped Putin from erasing his enemies in a more traditional way. In Putin’s Russia, those who fall from grace fall out the window. Executives, oligarchs and doctors critical of the Kremlin’s reaction to covid have fallen from cliffs, balconies and boats, stairs and railings. Some of those killings are possibly the result of an economic festival. Among the elites, as the strain of sanctions squeezes their profit margins, however, the maximum is probably the moves of a state that does not tolerate dissent.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government has accelerated long-standing plans to expand RuNet, a Russian Internet isolated from the rest of the world, making tampering with public records more feasible. introduced in 2016 to block Internet sites in Russia, restricting the data that citizens can access. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, more than 2384 of these sites have been blocked. These range from independent Russian news websites and Ukrainian domain names to Big Tech and foreign news sites.
Putin also attempted to rewrite the history of Stalinist repressions. Under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, there was a greater openness to the horrors of Stalinism. This continued until Putin’s early years, in which the Russian prime minister attended ceremonies marking some of the worst atrocities and seemed in a position to admit that mistakes had been made. In the early years of his reign in power, Putin was ambivalent about Stalin. But that soon changed.
The history of Soviet totalitarianism is being rewritten. In 2008, masked men from the Prosecutor General’s Office raided the offices of Memorial, a Moscow-based NGO that aimed to maintain a public reminiscence of Stalinist-era repression. They confiscated hard drives containing data on more than 50,000 victims. In early 2022, just before the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government closed Memorial completely. and persecution of independent and critical voices in Russian society. “
The Perm 36 Gulag Museum in Siberia founded in 1992, on the site of a deserted criminal camp. It aims to commemorate the suffering of millions of citizens, who were sent to forced labor camps during Stalin’s regime. In 2015, it was closed by the authorities. When it reopened in 2016, there were no more mentions of political criminals or forced hard labor; Instead, there are now exhibits celebrating the camps’ role in the Soviet war effort against the Nazis.
Putin distorts the history of World War II to feed Russian ethnonationalism, the dominant political force in recent years. His edition of occasions conveniently omits Stalin’s two-year collaboration with the Nazis. As part of the effort to imbue schoolchildren with a patriotic spirit. , they were sometimes asked to write letters to or from the Eastern Front, as if the war were continuing. The daughter of journalist Andrei Kolesnikov was ordered to write a letter in her grandfather’s voice, although, like most schoolchildren today, she does not. Having a grandfather who would have been old enough to have served in the war. Kolesnikov advised him to write instead a letter from his great-grandfather, David Traub, dated in the gulag in the far north of Russia where he had been sent as a “counterrevolutionary. “activity. “
People are no longer convicted of “counterrevolutionary activity”; however, the Kremlin is lately taking advantage of a law that opposes “foreign agents” to limit the activity of dissidents. Originally introduced in 2012, the law targeted politically active NGOs that obtained foreign funding. It was used to justify the closure of the Gulag 36 Museum in Perm. More recently, it was used to silence journalists and human rights defenders. In 2017, the Russian Ministry of Justice began designating the media as “foreign agents. “Then, in December 2020, the government began employing the label for Americans; Fortunately, until now, those who have been designated as such have only had to submit to Kafkaesque bureaucratic constraints, rather than disappear.
However, disappearances have occurred. Ironically, one of the developing thorns in Putin’s side is the Russian military’s inability to be accountable to his own people. One of the NGOs banned in 2014 was the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia. It was founded in 1989 and officially registered three hundred soldier moms that same year. The organization campaigned on behalf of mothers whose sons were seeking to end their military service early to resume their education. He rose to prominence in the 1990s the war in Chechnya. With the organization’s help, many mothers traveled to Chechnya to bring their children home. They negotiate with the Chechen army and release certain prisoners of war. They also organized the Mothers’ Compassion March and lobbied the government on behalf of conscientious objectors. In 2014, one of the organization’s members said that one hundred wounded Russian soldiers, probably wounded in Ukraine, were taken to hospitals in Saint Petersburg. As a result of this disclosure of what the government considered sensitive military information, the organization violated the Foreign Agents Act and its members were threatened with arrest. The organization still exists, but now limits its activities to collecting food, clothing, medicine and other donations for Russian troops in Ukraine.
However, new networks have evolved as women seek to gather materials for their loved ones and download data about their well-being. The Council of Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers has been forthright in its complaints. The organization is not opposed to the war itself and turns out to give little importance to the Ukrainian people, however, it protests the fact that its children were sent to the front without the apparatus and education and, increasingly, because they have no idea what happened to their loved ones. In January, the Kremlin arrested Olga Tsukanova, the head of the council, as she traveled to Moscow to deliver “more than 700 statements from mothers of prisoners, missing persons and conscripts” to army prosecutors and the prosecutor general.
Since the beginning of the war, the Russian army has left its dead on the battlefield. This is an unacceptable practice in the most modern armies. The U. S. defense accounting firm is still missing from the Korean Wars, Vietnam and World War II. Armies regularly gather their dead as a sign that their lives mattered. Not knowing if the one you enjoy is alive or dead is one of the worst intellectual tortures. That is why the tactic of lacking other people has been used during the most brutal autocratic regimes and the history of terrorist groups.
Failure to repatriate the remains of Russian foot soldiers will not erase their deaths or hide the defeats in which they were involved. Russian losses were high. Putin himself met with a carefully selected organization of mothers of foot soldiers in November 2022, two days before Russians celebrated Mother’s Day. The photographs of this meeting were not faked, but the occasion was obviously choreographed. It was a popularity of the importance of seeking to meet. moms. No amount of virtual or physical manipulation will convince a mom that the child who passed on to the state never existed.
Countries want unifying myths. According to historian Mark Galeotti, “Russia is a country without herbal borders, without a single tribe or other people, without a genuine core identity. ” He has responded to his lack of defensible borders with steady expansion over the vast distances the country now spans, bringing in new ethnic groups, religions and cultures, all of which have posed challenging situations for those seeking centralized control. The history of Russia has been largely explained through the invasions it has suffered: through the Vikings, the Mongols, the Teutonic Crusading Orders, the Poles, Napoleon, and Hitler. Russia responded to this constant sense of risk by generating a series of founding myths, sometimes based on the battles fought against the various invaders. The more precarious a country is, the more fervently others cling to those founding myths. The rise of nationalist myth-making in recent years suggests that Putin is insecure, no matter how much he presents himself as the strongman savior of Russian ethnic pride. And, unfortunately, it is imaginable that the nationalism that he unleashed will be and that his successor will have even more jingoistic and vengeful visions.
The unpredictability of Russia’s history may be extreme, but it is not unique. No country’s history is set in stone, but there is a difference between revising our understanding of ancient times and rewriting history. Our afterlife defines us, but we can and will be in an ever-evolving relationship with it, learning from our most productive and darkest hours. However, deleting history is a completely different thing than reevaluating it. In the latter case, the sins of the afterlife are forgotten; The heroism of the past is exaggerated and anyone who deviates from the legal narrative is silenced. This is a strategy that is unsustainable and deeply harmful. And it turns out that Russia is once again embarking on this harmful path.
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