Lenin and Stalin (whose cook was Putin’s grandfather), Source
WWII database: Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin in Gorki, Library of Congress,LC-USZ62-111092
by Maria Ulyanova  public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia 

Richard Cohn, at The Smithsonian Magazine, reveals:

“I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway,” wrote George Orwell in 1942…. Three years later, he went further: “Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.” Chief among the culprits were the falsifiers of the Soviet Union, in particular Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

… (Coincidentally, Lenin and Stalin shared the same cook—the grandfather of current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has promoted a distinctly ahistorical version of 20th-century history amid his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.)

In her history of Eastern Europe, Anne Applebaum writes of the “peculiarly powerful combination of emotions—fear, shame, anger, silence—[that] helped lay the psychological groundwork for the imposition of a new regime,” Stalin’s Soviet Union. The completeness of the state, the pervasiveness of every institution from kindergarten schools to the secret police, put an end to independent historical inquiry. In this brave new world (Orwell described Soviet commissars as “half gramophones, half gangsters”), historians were not just to do Stalin’s bidding; if, in his eyes, they failed to do so, their lives were ruined and often shortened. …

…

From the start, Putin appreciated the effectiveness of historical rhetoric for his nationalist agenda, particularly if it played to popular nostalgia for the Soviet Union, the collapse of which was a humiliation for most Russians. This was a point emphasized by historian Orlando Figes in a 2009 article on Putin’s approach to controlling the historical record as far as Russians are concerned. As he summarized their situation: “In a matter of a few months they lost everything—an empire, an ideology, an economic system that had given them security, superpower status, national pride and an identity forged from Soviet history.”

…

Copyright © 2022 by Narrative Tension, Inc.. From … Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen…

Slava Ukraine!