Mike Nova comments:
Вот это у человека - чалма так чалма! С благородными корнями. А у тебя что? Один кошмар: ни себе ни людям. И вообще:
"Не гляди на меня с упреком, Я презренья к тебе не таю..."
("Не гляди на меня с упреком")
Не гляди на меня с упреком,
Я презренья к тебе не таю,
Но люблю я твой взор с поволокой
И лукавую кротость твою.
Да, ты кажешься мне распростертой,
И, пожалуй, увидеть я рад,
Как лиса, притворившись мертвой,
Ловит воронов и воронят.
Ну, и что же, лови, я не струшу.
Только как бы твой пыл не погас?
На мою охладевшую душу
Натыкались такие не раз.
Не тебя я люблю, дорогая,
Ты лишь отзвук, лишь только тень.
Мне в лице твоем снится другая,
У которой глаза - голубень.
Пусть она и не выглядит кроткой
И, пожалуй, на вид холодна,
Но она величавой походкой
Всколыхнула мне душу до дна.
Вот такую едва ль отуманишь,
И не хочешь пойти, да пойдешь,
Ну, а ты даже в сердце не вранишь
Напоенную ласкою ложь.
Но и все же, тебя презирая,
Я смущенно откроюсь навек:
Если б не было ада и рая,
Их бы выдумал сам человек.
1 декабря 1925
Не гляди на меня с упреком,
Я презренья к тебе не таю,
Но люблю я твой взор с поволокой
И лукавую кротость твою.
Да, ты кажешься мне распростертой,
И, пожалуй, увидеть я рад,
Как лиса, притворившись мертвой,
Ловит воронов и воронят.
Ну, и что же, лови, я не струшу.
Только как бы твой пыл не погас?
На мою охладевшую душу
Натыкались такие не раз.
Не тебя я люблю, дорогая,
Ты лишь отзвук, лишь только тень.
Мне в лице твоем снится другая,
У которой глаза - голубень.
Пусть она и не выглядит кроткой
И, пожалуй, на вид холодна,
Но она величавой походкой
Всколыхнула мне душу до дна.
Вот такую едва ль отуманишь,
И не хочешь пойти, да пойдешь,
Ну, а ты даже в сердце не вранишь
Напоенную ласкою ложь.
Но и все же, тебя презирая,
Я смущенно откроюсь навек:
Если б не было ада и рая,
Их бы выдумал сам человек.
1 декабря 1925
Сергей Александрович Есенин родился в сентябре 1895 г. в селе Константиново Рязанской губернии в семье зажиточных крестьян. Детство его прошло в доме деда Федора Титова, куда мать вернулась в 1899 г., после того как временно разошлась с мужем. В 1904 г. Есенина отдали в Константиновское земское четырехгодичное училище, а в 1909-м отправили продолжать учение во второклассную церковно-учительскую Спас-Клепиковскую школу. В 1912 г., по окончании школы, он уехал в Москву с твердым намерением посвятить себя стихотворству. В 1913 г. Есенин устроился работать в типографию Сытина - сначала грузчиком, а потом корректором.
Сергей Есенин очень не любил, когда его называли поэтом "из низов". Он всегда говорил: "Я просто поэт". Деревенский юноша с копной золотых волос и васильковыми глазами эстетствующие окололитературные слои еще долго воспринимали как простачка. Александр Блок горячо поддержал юное дарование, и вскоре Есенина стали печатать во всех передовых литературных журналах. В литературных кругах постоянно обсуждалась и личная жизнь Есенина, связанные с ним скандалы, дебоши. Есенин, очень любивший розыгрыши, с удовольствием играл роль гуляки, выпивохи и драчуна.
О романе Есенина с Дункан написаны сотни томов. Делались многочисленные попытки разгадать тайну отношений этих двух таких не похожих друг на друга людей. Но была ли тайна? Всю жизнь Есенин, в детстве лишенный настоящей дружной семьи (его родители постоянно ссорились, часто жили врозь, Сергей рос у бабушки с дедушкой по матери), мечтал о семейном уюте и покое. Он постоянно говорил, что женится на такой артистке - все рот разинут, и будет иметь сына, который станет знаменитей, чем он. Понятно, что Дункан, бывшая старше Есенина на 18 лет и постоянно разъезжавшая с гастролями, никак не могла создать ему семью, о которой он мечтал. К тому же, Есенин, как только оказывался в браке, стремился разорвать сковывавшие его путы.
В конце декабря 1925 Есенин приезжает из Москвы в Ленинград. В ночь на 28 декабря в гостинице "Англетер"
Сергей Есенин очень не любил, когда его называли поэтом "из низов". Он всегда говорил: "Я просто поэт". Деревенский юноша с копной золотых волос и васильковыми глазами эстетствующие окололитературные слои еще долго воспринимали как простачка. Александр Блок горячо поддержал юное дарование, и вскоре Есенина стали печатать во всех передовых литературных журналах. В литературных кругах постоянно обсуждалась и личная жизнь Есенина, связанные с ним скандалы, дебоши. Есенин, очень любивший розыгрыши, с удовольствием играл роль гуляки, выпивохи и драчуна.
О романе Есенина с Дункан написаны сотни томов. Делались многочисленные попытки разгадать тайну отношений этих двух таких не похожих друг на друга людей. Но была ли тайна? Всю жизнь Есенин, в детстве лишенный настоящей дружной семьи (его родители постоянно ссорились, часто жили врозь, Сергей рос у бабушки с дедушкой по матери), мечтал о семейном уюте и покое. Он постоянно говорил, что женится на такой артистке - все рот разинут, и будет иметь сына, который станет знаменитей, чем он. Понятно, что Дункан, бывшая старше Есенина на 18 лет и постоянно разъезжавшая с гастролями, никак не могла создать ему семью, о которой он мечтал. К тому же, Есенин, как только оказывался в браке, стремился разорвать сковывавшие его путы.
В конце декабря 1925 Есенин приезжает из Москвы в Ленинград. В ночь на 28 декабря в гостинице "Англетер"
Тело Есенина было перевезено в Москву для захоронения на Ваганьковском кладбище. Похороны были грандиозные. По свидетельству современников, так не хоронили ни одного русского поэта.
http://esenin.niv.ru/esenin/biografiya_3.htm
http://esenin.niv.ru/esenin/biografiya_3.htm
-
Yesenin and Trotsky - GS
"Let us prepare the future, let us win for every being the right to bread and song."
Yesenin and Stalin - GS
Mike Nova comments: The death of the famous Russian poet Sergey Yesenin, which was most likely, as it is noted in this brief bio sketch above, a murder by the Russian Secret Services at that time, in 1925, still remains a tantalizing mystery and one of the darkest spots of modern Russian history. The year of 1925 was a time of intense power struggle between L. Trotsky and J. Stalin, or rather and more correct, a watershed year which marked the Trotsky's irreversible (as the future events showed: he was exiled four years later and murdered himself sixteen years later) political defeat and Stalin's also irreversible political ascendance, achieved, among other tools and factors by him gaining the firm control of Secret Services, the CheKa, or, later the NKVD and the KGB. Trotsky was not interested in this control, although he was one of the chief architects and founding fathers (just like of many other post-1917-revolution institutes of the new state) of these services in early 1920-s. He probably felt that he was above it and that his position in the revolutionary hierarchy is indisputable and unshakable, (with characteristic for him "political arrogance", for the lack of the better and more precise term) and secondary only to Lenin, who, by the way, felt intensely competitive with Trotsky, just like almost with everyone else, especially in his final years, marked by the severe illness and personal and political decline of his powers.
Yesenin was a protege and a favorite of Trotsky, who, being the first rate literary critic in his own right, valued Yesenin from aesthetic point of view, as a very gifted poet. Trotsky promoted Yesenin as a poet and tried to help him in his personal life, for example by giving him the travel documents to go abroad with Icedora Duncan after their marriage. Stalin viewed Yesenin mostly from his (rather limited and primitive) "ideological perspectives" and hated him because he viewed him as a "peasant poet". Just a few years later Stalin waged a real war against Russian peasantry because he perceived them as the "class enemy" and tried to subdue and even "eliminate" them "as class".
1925 was also the year of the VKP(b) - Russian Communist Party historical 14-th Congress, which cemented Stalin's political victory. The murder of Yesenin (unproven, but in these days broadly assumed), besides the value of "eliminating the political and ideological enemy", had also a deep symbolic meaning for him and his allies: it was a demonstration of his indisputable and final victory over Trotsky and his allies and others: his former co-triumvirs Zinovyev and Kamenev, who now were turned into his defeated rivals also.
This my personal interpretation of these events. I am not a professional historian by far, of course, just tried to read about them and to understand them.
The point is that this story about Yesenin and his death still remains one of the modern Russian history many, many blind spots. The truth about them was suppressed for years and decades and even now it is revealed only very partially and incompletely.
I say: open the archives on these past, by now almost hundred years old events completely and fully, make them available to the public on the Internet, let the professional historians in Russia and abroad study them carefully and tell us the truth or their versions of historical truths.
The brief "thaw", when some archives were briefly opened after Gorbachev's "perestroika" turned into the deep winter freeze again, with Putin's gradual but relentless "tightening of the screws" course: he is also the careful "master of dosages", just like his historical predecessor Stalin.
It seems to me, that without the historical truths been explored in depth and layed out as honestly and clearly as possible, the old wounds will never heal and Russia will never get better and healthier as the state, as the society and as the culture.
Mitrokhin files might be just a drop in the bucket.
And why, Mr. Putin and Co., wouldn't you do it, ah? R-e-a-h-h-h-l-l-y?!
Links and References:
Trotsky and Stalin - GS
trotsky and stalin comparison - GS
trotsky and stalin rivals - GS
trotsky and stalin russian revolution - GS
See also other search items under the general heading "Trotsky and Stalin - GS"
trotsky literary criticism - GS
trotsky as literary critic - GS
"Yessenin And The Imagists" - by Leon Trotsky from
"Literature and Revolution"
SERGEY YESSENIN
Yessenin (and the entire group of Imagists – Marienhof, Shershenevich, Kusikov) stand somewhere at the crossing of the road between Kliuev and Mayakovsky. Yessenin’s roots are in the village, but not so deep as those of Kliuev. Yessenin is younger. He became a poet at the time when the village was shaken up by the Revolution, when Russia was shaken up. Kliuev was formed entirely in the pre-War years, and he responded to the War and to the Revolution only within the limits of his backwoods conservatism. Yessenin is not only younger but also more flexible, more plastic, more open to influences and to possibilities. Even his peasant underpinnings are not the same as those of Kliuev; Yessenin has neither Kliuev’s solidity, nor his somber and pompous sedateness. Yessenin boasts that he is arrogant and a hooligan. But if the truth must be told, his arrogance, even his purely literary arrogance (The Confession) is not so terrible. Still, Yessenin is undoubtedly the reflection of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary spirit of the peasant youth whom the disturbed life of the village has driven to arrogance and turbulence.
The city has told on Yessenin more sharply and clearly than on Kliuev. Here is the point where the undoubted influences of Futurism come in. Yessenin is more dynamic, to the extent that he is more nervous, more flexible, more responsive to the new. But Imagism is the reverse of dynamics. The self-sufficient meaning of the image is bought at the expense of the whole; the parts become separated and cold.
It is said incorrectly that the abundant imagery of the Imagist Yessenin flows from his individual tenderness. As a matter of fact, we find the same traits in Kliuev. His verses are weighted down with an imagery which is even more isolated and immobile. At bottom, this is not an individual, but a peasant aesthetics. The poetry of the repetitive forms of life has at bottom little mobility and seeks a way out in condensed imagery.
At any rate, Imagism is overladen to such an extent with images that its poetry seems like a beast of burden and therefore slow in its movements. An abundance of imagery is not in itself an evidence of creative power; on the contrary, it may arise out of the technical immaturity of a poet who is caught unawares by events and feelings which are artistically too much for him. The poet almost chokes with images and the reader feels as nervously impatient to get on as fast as possible to the end as when one listens to a stuttering speaker. In any case, Imagism is not a literary school from which one can expect serious developments. Even the tardy arrogance of Kusikov (“the West at which we Imagists sneeze”) seems curious and not even amusing. Imagism is perhaps only a stopping point for a few poets of the younger generation who are more or less talented, but who resemble one another in one thing only, that they are all still unripe.
Yessenin’s effort to construct a big work by the Imagist method has proved inadequate in Pugachev. And this is so regardless of the fact that the author has unloaded his heavy imagery quite considerably and stealthily. The dialogue nature of Pugachev got the better of the poet rather mercilessly. The drama in general is a most transparent and unyielding form of art; it has no room for descriptive and narrative patches, or for lyric outbursts. Through the dialogue, Vessenin came out into clear waters. Emelka Pugachev, and his enemies and his colleagues, are all without exception Imagists. And Pugachev himself is Sergey Yessenin from top to toe: he wants to be terrible, but he cannot. Yessenin’s Pugachev is a sentimental romantic. When Yessenin introduces himself as a somewhat bloodthirsty hooligan, it is amusing; but when Pugachev expresses himself like a romantic, burdened with imagery, it is worse. The Imagist Pugachev becomes a bit ridiculous.
Though Imagism, having hardly existed, is gone already, Yessenin himself is still of the future. To foreign journalists he declared himself more left than the Bolsheviks. This is in the natural order of things, and frightens no one. At present Yessenin, the poet, who may be more left than we sinners, but who smells none the less of medievalism, has begun his “wander-years”, and he will not return the same as he went. But we will not surmise. When he returns, he will tell us himself.
Literature and Revolution - From Wikipedia
Mike Nova comments:
Soviet Russia, its mentality and ideology were shaped to a significant degree by Trotsky and his thought which was later appropriated (simply speaking, stolen, as their criminal habit always was and still is, in its today forms and modalities) and misappropriated, vulgarised and perverted to almost its caricature opposite form and content by Stalinists and later post-Stalinists, including Putinistas. Therefore, if we really attempt to understand modern Russia and its mentality we should also try to understand one of its sources: Trotsky and his thinking and also his literary criticism, which by the way is quite easy and pleasurable reading: he was called "The Quill" definitely for a reason.
The general point is that modern Russia does not really know and does not really understand its immediate history, the public is still fed the sanitized and neutered version of it, and Putin's attempt and course at sanitizing it further and covering up the blind and expunged from the collective memory spots does the further and very serious and dangerous disservice to the spirit, culture and collective soul of his country.
» New Way of Teaching History to Be Finalized by Next Month
23/10/13 17:43 from The Moscow Times Top Stories
Government officials, lawmakers and education officials will finalize changes to the way history is taught in schools by Nov. 1, State Duma Deputy Speaker Lyudmila Shvetsova said Wednesday outside a roundtable discussing new state textbo...
putin and teaching of history - GS
» Europe court criticises Russia over Katyn massacre inquiry - BBC News
21/10/13 13:15 from Russia - Google News
BBC NewsEurope court criticises Russia over Katyn massacre inquiry BBC NewsThe European Court of Human Rights says Russia has failed to explain why it kept key files secret when it investigated the 1940 Katyn massacre of more than 20,000 ...
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14th congress russian communist party - GS
Mike Nova comments: Mr. Lavrov, Da Me Una Sonrisa, Por Favor.
You look so solemn and scary, I am going to faint.
-
Full coverage - G News
Yesenin and Trotsky - GS
"Let us prepare the future, let us win for every being the right to bread and song."
Yesenin and Stalin - GS
Mike Nova comments: The death of the famous Russian poet Sergey Yesenin, which was most likely, as it is noted in this brief bio sketch above, a murder by the Russian Secret Services at that time, in 1925, still remains a tantalizing mystery and one of the darkest spots of modern Russian history. The year of 1925 was a time of intense power struggle between L. Trotsky and J. Stalin, or rather and more correct, a watershed year which marked the Trotsky's irreversible (as the future events showed: he was exiled four years later and murdered himself sixteen years later) political defeat and Stalin's also irreversible political ascendance, achieved, among other tools and factors by him gaining the firm control of Secret Services, the CheKa, or, later the NKVD and the KGB. Trotsky was not interested in this control, although he was one of the chief architects and founding fathers (just like of many other post-1917-revolution institutes of the new state) of these services in early 1920-s. He probably felt that he was above it and that his position in the revolutionary hierarchy is indisputable and unshakable, (with characteristic for him "political arrogance", for the lack of the better and more precise term) and secondary only to Lenin, who, by the way, felt intensely competitive with Trotsky, just like almost with everyone else, especially in his final years, marked by the severe illness and personal and political decline of his powers.
Yesenin was a protege and a favorite of Trotsky, who, being the first rate literary critic in his own right, valued Yesenin from aesthetic point of view, as a very gifted poet. Trotsky promoted Yesenin as a poet and tried to help him in his personal life, for example by giving him the travel documents to go abroad with Icedora Duncan after their marriage. Stalin viewed Yesenin mostly from his (rather limited and primitive) "ideological perspectives" and hated him because he viewed him as a "peasant poet". Just a few years later Stalin waged a real war against Russian peasantry because he perceived them as the "class enemy" and tried to subdue and even "eliminate" them "as class".
1925 was also the year of the VKP(b) - Russian Communist Party historical 14-th Congress, which cemented Stalin's political victory. The murder of Yesenin (unproven, but in these days broadly assumed), besides the value of "eliminating the political and ideological enemy", had also a deep symbolic meaning for him and his allies: it was a demonstration of his indisputable and final victory over Trotsky and his allies and others: his former co-triumvirs Zinovyev and Kamenev, who now were turned into his defeated rivals also.
This my personal interpretation of these events. I am not a professional historian by far, of course, just tried to read about them and to understand them.
The point is that this story about Yesenin and his death still remains one of the modern Russian history many, many blind spots. The truth about them was suppressed for years and decades and even now it is revealed only very partially and incompletely.
I say: open the archives on these past, by now almost hundred years old events completely and fully, make them available to the public on the Internet, let the professional historians in Russia and abroad study them carefully and tell us the truth or their versions of historical truths.
The brief "thaw", when some archives were briefly opened after Gorbachev's "perestroika" turned into the deep winter freeze again, with Putin's gradual but relentless "tightening of the screws" course: he is also the careful "master of dosages", just like his historical predecessor Stalin.
It seems to me, that without the historical truths been explored in depth and layed out as honestly and clearly as possible, the old wounds will never heal and Russia will never get better and healthier as the state, as the society and as the culture.
Mitrokhin files might be just a drop in the bucket.
And why, Mr. Putin and Co., wouldn't you do it, ah? R-e-a-h-h-h-l-l-y?!
Links and References:
Trotsky and Stalin - GS
trotsky and stalin comparison - GS
trotsky and stalin rivals - GS
trotsky and stalin russian revolution - GS
See also other search items under the general heading "Trotsky and Stalin - GS"
trotsky literary criticism - GS
trotsky as literary critic - GS
"Yessenin And The Imagists" - by Leon Trotsky from
"Literature and Revolution"
SERGEY YESSENIN
Yessenin (and the entire group of Imagists – Marienhof, Shershenevich, Kusikov) stand somewhere at the crossing of the road between Kliuev and Mayakovsky. Yessenin’s roots are in the village, but not so deep as those of Kliuev. Yessenin is younger. He became a poet at the time when the village was shaken up by the Revolution, when Russia was shaken up. Kliuev was formed entirely in the pre-War years, and he responded to the War and to the Revolution only within the limits of his backwoods conservatism. Yessenin is not only younger but also more flexible, more plastic, more open to influences and to possibilities. Even his peasant underpinnings are not the same as those of Kliuev; Yessenin has neither Kliuev’s solidity, nor his somber and pompous sedateness. Yessenin boasts that he is arrogant and a hooligan. But if the truth must be told, his arrogance, even his purely literary arrogance (The Confession) is not so terrible. Still, Yessenin is undoubtedly the reflection of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary spirit of the peasant youth whom the disturbed life of the village has driven to arrogance and turbulence.
The city has told on Yessenin more sharply and clearly than on Kliuev. Here is the point where the undoubted influences of Futurism come in. Yessenin is more dynamic, to the extent that he is more nervous, more flexible, more responsive to the new. But Imagism is the reverse of dynamics. The self-sufficient meaning of the image is bought at the expense of the whole; the parts become separated and cold.
It is said incorrectly that the abundant imagery of the Imagist Yessenin flows from his individual tenderness. As a matter of fact, we find the same traits in Kliuev. His verses are weighted down with an imagery which is even more isolated and immobile. At bottom, this is not an individual, but a peasant aesthetics. The poetry of the repetitive forms of life has at bottom little mobility and seeks a way out in condensed imagery.
At any rate, Imagism is overladen to such an extent with images that its poetry seems like a beast of burden and therefore slow in its movements. An abundance of imagery is not in itself an evidence of creative power; on the contrary, it may arise out of the technical immaturity of a poet who is caught unawares by events and feelings which are artistically too much for him. The poet almost chokes with images and the reader feels as nervously impatient to get on as fast as possible to the end as when one listens to a stuttering speaker. In any case, Imagism is not a literary school from which one can expect serious developments. Even the tardy arrogance of Kusikov (“the West at which we Imagists sneeze”) seems curious and not even amusing. Imagism is perhaps only a stopping point for a few poets of the younger generation who are more or less talented, but who resemble one another in one thing only, that they are all still unripe.
Yessenin’s effort to construct a big work by the Imagist method has proved inadequate in Pugachev. And this is so regardless of the fact that the author has unloaded his heavy imagery quite considerably and stealthily. The dialogue nature of Pugachev got the better of the poet rather mercilessly. The drama in general is a most transparent and unyielding form of art; it has no room for descriptive and narrative patches, or for lyric outbursts. Through the dialogue, Vessenin came out into clear waters. Emelka Pugachev, and his enemies and his colleagues, are all without exception Imagists. And Pugachev himself is Sergey Yessenin from top to toe: he wants to be terrible, but he cannot. Yessenin’s Pugachev is a sentimental romantic. When Yessenin introduces himself as a somewhat bloodthirsty hooligan, it is amusing; but when Pugachev expresses himself like a romantic, burdened with imagery, it is worse. The Imagist Pugachev becomes a bit ridiculous.
Though Imagism, having hardly existed, is gone already, Yessenin himself is still of the future. To foreign journalists he declared himself more left than the Bolsheviks. This is in the natural order of things, and frightens no one. At present Yessenin, the poet, who may be more left than we sinners, but who smells none the less of medievalism, has begun his “wander-years”, and he will not return the same as he went. But we will not surmise. When he returns, he will tell us himself.
Literature and Revolution - From Wikipedia
Literature and Revolution is a classic work of literary criticism from the Marxist standpoint written by Leon Trotsky in 1924. By discussing the various literary trends that were around in Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Trotsky analysed the concrete forces in society, both progressive as well as reactionary, that helped shape the consciousness of writers at the time.
In the book Trotsky also explained that since the dawn of civilisation art had always borne the stamp of the ruling class and was primarily a vehicle that expressed its tastes and its sensibilities. Nonetheless he went on to argue against the seemingly obvious conclusion that after a proletarian revolution the proletariat as ruling class should therefore strive to create its own proletarian art as many at the time thought.
Mike Nova comments:
Soviet Russia, its mentality and ideology were shaped to a significant degree by Trotsky and his thought which was later appropriated (simply speaking, stolen, as their criminal habit always was and still is, in its today forms and modalities) and misappropriated, vulgarised and perverted to almost its caricature opposite form and content by Stalinists and later post-Stalinists, including Putinistas. Therefore, if we really attempt to understand modern Russia and its mentality we should also try to understand one of its sources: Trotsky and his thinking and also his literary criticism, which by the way is quite easy and pleasurable reading: he was called "The Quill" definitely for a reason.
The general point is that modern Russia does not really know and does not really understand its immediate history, the public is still fed the sanitized and neutered version of it, and Putin's attempt and course at sanitizing it further and covering up the blind and expunged from the collective memory spots does the further and very serious and dangerous disservice to the spirit, culture and collective soul of his country.
» New Way of Teaching History to Be Finalized by Next Month
23/10/13 17:43 from The Moscow Times Top Stories
Government officials, lawmakers and education officials will finalize changes to the way history is taught in schools by Nov. 1, State Duma Deputy Speaker Lyudmila Shvetsova said Wednesday outside a roundtable discussing new state textbo...
putin and teaching of history - GS
Russian Schools to Teach Putin's Version of History - Bloomberg
www.bloomberg.com/.../russian-schools-to-teach-putin-s-version-of-hist...
Jun 18, 2013 - Like Josef Stalin before him, Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided that schoolchildren are confronted with too many versions of their ...Russian Schools to Teach Putin’s Version of History
Like Josef Stalin before him, Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided that schoolchildren are confronted with too many versions of their country’s history.So he’s planning to provide his own.This week, the newspaper Vedomosti published a document in which government officials set out guidelines for a definitive series of history textbooks, meant to replace the myriad texts currently being used in Russian schools. Under Putin’s orders, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Historical Society must submit proposals for the official books by November 1, after a public discussion period.History has always been a political issue in Russia. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was arguably undermined as much by a flood of public revelations about Stalin’s purges as by falling energy prices. Now, as Putin works to establish a new Russian ideology, based on Orthodox Christian values and a sense of national pride, he needs his own official version of history for the classroom.“This is a battle for the future,” eminent historian Yuri Pivovarov told TV Dozhd. “What version of the past we get will determine our future.”Judging from the guidelines, the official version of history will hew close to Putin’s. For example, they paint a stark picture of the rule of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin: “By the end of the 1990s the country started losing manageability. A crisis of central authority was exacerbated by economic failures, rapid changes of government and a war in Chechnya. Public discontent and separatist sentiment in the regions grew. The integrity of the country was at stake.”The section on Putin, who took over from Yeltsin in 2000, glosses over some important episodes. It makes no mention of a second war in Chechnya and describes the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 as a “tactical correction in socioeconomic development.”It’s possible that the Putin section won’t make it to the final version. Two government ministers have said they favor ending the textbooks in 2000. As Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky put it, under the Romanovs “the textbooks only mentioned the previous emperor.”The guidelines also attempt to paint a “balanced” picture of Stalin’s rule. They describe Stalin as a modernizer who brought about Russia’s ultra-fast industrialization, laid the foundation for the Soviet Union’s scientific achievements and its victory in World War II, but also orchestrated mass purges “to liquidate a potential fifth column” and used forced labor to achieve an economic breakthrough.The soft-lens picture of Stalin is consistent with some of Putin’s utterances on the tyrant. “I very much doubt that had Stalin had the atomic bomb in the spring of 1945, he would have used it on Germany,” Putin said during a recent visit to the state-owned Russia Today TV station.In the 1930s, Stalin presided over his own effort to craft a version of Russia’s 1,000-year history. He personally edited textbooks, painstakingly marking up manuscripts with a pencil and criticizing academic working groups for ideological lapses. The exercise culminated in the publication, in 1938, of the “Short Course of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” a chiseled propaganda masterpiece for which Stalin wrote a chapter on Marxist philosophy.Until the demise of the Soviet Union, all history books were based on Stalin’s structure, terminology and interpretations, slightly modified by the dictator in charge at the time. Yeltsin allowed multiple history textbooks that needed to be vetted only by the Education Ministry. Teachers could choose freely which book or books to use in class.Would a single textbook be a totalitarian throwback? Not at all, according to Putin: “It is the teacher’s business to bring it to the students’ attention that there are divergent views of such and such an event.”The real problem, according to Putin, is the lack of an official version of events. “Without an official assessment there will be no backbone of understanding what happened to our nation in the past decades and centuries,” he said during a call-in session with voters in April. “Last year, we had 41 recommended 10th grade history textbooks, this year we have 65. Is that normal?”The guidelines have already provoked harsh reactions. The popular nationalist blog Sputnik and Pogrom slammed them for being too soft on Stalin: “The ’new education standard’ illustrates the disgusting things that can replace historical memory if the people (or the ruling Soviet elites) refuse to talk honestly and frankly about their past.”The outcome probably won’t please anyone. Given the amount of disagreement that exists among Russians over the interpretation and even the facts of their history, it may be impossible to write a single fair and balanced text.“We live in transitional times. So the textbook and the standard approach to history can only, of necessity, be transitional,” political scientist Dmitri Oreshkin told Echo Moscow radio. “The only thing we can hope for now is a departure from the Soviet tradition of direct lies and historical falsification.”To be fair, the new guidelines are an improvement on the Stalin textbooks. Still, I’ll miss the heedless pluralism of the Yeltsin era. In Russia, teaching dozens of versions of national history may be the only honest approach.(Leonid Bershidsky, an editor and novelist, is Moscow correspondent for World View. Opinions expressed are his own.)To contact the writer of this article: bershidsky@gmail.com.To contact the editor responsible for this article: Mark Whitehouse atmwhitehouse1@bloomberg.net.Vladimir Putin to have entire chapter on him in Russian history book ...
Sep 23, 2013 - In 2007, controversy broke out after Mr Putin endorsed a manual for history teachers justifying Stalin's dictatorship as necessary and promoting ...
Russia Needs Standard Approach to Teaching History - Putin ...
en.ria.ru/russia/20130329/180322943.html
Mar 29, 2013 - ROSTOV-ON-DON, March 29 (RIA Novosti) –President Vladimir Putin said that Russia needs a unified, standard approach to teaching history ...
» Europe court criticises Russia over Katyn massacre inquiry - BBC News
21/10/13 13:15 from Russia - Google News
BBC NewsEurope court criticises Russia over Katyn massacre inquiry BBC NewsThe European Court of Human Rights says Russia has failed to explain why it kept key files secret when it investigated the 1940 Katyn massacre of more than 20,000 ...
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14th congress russian communist party - GS
14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 14th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was held during 18-31 December 1925 in Moscow.
This congress was marked by the struggle between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky for control of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
External links[edit]
- Fourteenth Congress of the CPSU (Bolshevik) in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979).
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Mike Nova comments: Mr. Lavrov, Da Me Una Sonrisa, Por Favor.
You look so solemn and scary, I am going to faint.
Lavrov: 6-9 months enough to resolve Iran nuclear issue ... - RT.com
Oct 8, 2013Six to nine months of cooperation between Iran and International Atomic Energy Agency, aided by talks ...
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Full coverage - G News
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Last Update: 8:34 AM 10/24/2013
