Alexei Venediktov, "This is a small world and we all live here together."
In partnership with the RIA Novosti information agency, the Echo of Moscow radio station intends to combat the perversion of history this year - but in their own way. The project's originators published a colourful calendar with each week marked by a certain controversial fact about history. Echo of Moscow will then hold weekly discussions of the events marked on the calendar featuring historians and lawmakers who have opposing viewpoints.
Editor-in-Chief Alexei Venediktov discusses the idea with Novaya Gazeta head of politics department Alexandra Samarina.
Q: Alexei, who came up with the idea for this immense project? And when and how was it suggested?
A: When the government set up a commission to prevent the perversion of history, my colleague, RIA Novosti Editor-in-Chief Svetlana Mironyuk, and I decided to make the definition of that term more clear. After all, we represent the media and we fill people in on what the commission members speak about. We decided that we should make a multimedia project that would involve not only those who make decisions, but also the public, the audience of Echo of Moscow and RIA Novosti. The cornerstone of this project turned out to be, quite unexpectedly, a calendar. We selected 52 different events from Russian history. Our partners are experts in visual presentation, and we have journalists who can air programmes on history. We got the initial results this week, the calendar itself. We asked ourselves, had Georgia joined Russia of its own free will? And what exactly did Ivan the Terrible contribute to history? Prince Dmitry's murder, the story of Kirov, the story of Tukhachevsky... We picked out all the most painful facts in our history...
Q: How deep did you dig into history? And where did you stop?
A: Chronologically, the first event is the assassination of Boris and Gleb. Was there really an internecine war? The calendar finishes with the year 2000. The rest isn't history yet. It's politics.
Q: What do you hope to achieve with this project?
A: Everybody tries to use history as a weapon. It's nothing new for our country, just as it's nothing new for our neighbours and partners. There's a great book that focuses on how children are taught national history in different countries. I've seen African history textbooks in French; they're clear and concise. A small country is involved in fair wars with its neighbours, and whoever attacks it is always the one waging an unfair war... And this happens over and over again for centuries. Our goal was to collect facts on the events that everybody knows about. What we wanted to show with these well-known events and names is that it can't just be called a perversion of history. We don't know what really happened. We can only offer versions and interpretations of the events. We can only speak about people's right to believe that Stalin was either a great leader or a great villain. We're saying, let's make it clear and get to the bottom of these events. Let's not turn it into a war.
Q: Your project is not just about the calendar though...
A: We'll be airing a short weekly programme on Echo of Moscow. On January 3, we'll discuss the Stakhanovite movement to mark Alexei Stakhanov's birthday. The next topic is the War in Afghanistan, because January 10 is Babrak Karmal's birthday. Our colleagues from RIA Novosti even promised to hold round table meetings with the states involved in these topics. If we're discussing whether Hetman Mazepa was a hero or a traitor, for instance, we'd like to hear from Kiev... These talks will then be interesting to not only experts, politicians, journalists and historians. They'll also be quite interesting to our audience and website visitors.
Q: What is the main idea behind the project?
A: It's purely educational. We can't just throw around words like ‘falsification'. Opinion should be based on facts, not on a rejection of them. We will make three thousand calendars as New Year's gifts for people who make decisions. We'll send them to the presidential administration, the government, governors, ambassadors and members of parliament. Hopefully, they'll hang them up on their walls and each day be reminded that there are certain things you just cannot neglect.
Q: Did you talk to the commission head about this?
A: I spoke with Sergei Naryshkin, head of the presidential administration, when the commission was set up. I asked for a meeting and he responded immediately. During the meeting I expressed my doubts about the commission's goals, certain members of the commission and some other points. He tried to convince me that it would be a useful project. He outlined the commission's tasks. And he asked, "Would you like to contribute?" I replied, "I would, though not the commission, but to history." "Ok, it's a deal then," Naryshkin said. To some extent, we're helping the commission. We would like all commission members to participate, regardless of their views on the project. We're also ready to involve historians and politicians from neighbouring states and, of course, we do realise the difficulties... But despite the difficulties, we realise that this is a small world and we all live here together..."
Q: How can two contrary views be reconciled though? Alexei, as a former teacher, do you know the answer?
A: It's perfectly normal to have different attitudes to history. After all, people are different. I met a former U.S. minister of education once. She was from Texas and I asked her, "There are southern and northern states in your country. When children study the Civil War, the northern heroes are considered traitors in the South. And a child from Texas goes to Boston and reads in a textbook that his heroes are not heroes in the North." Her response was, "We still have common heroes: our founders." And there is no tragedy in the fact that Tatarstan has one history and Tver region has another. We all have common heroes. And by that same token, there is no tragedy in the fact that our friend Mongolia has monuments to Genghis Khan. He's their hero! We have a monument to Ivan the Terrible. The point is, we should see history as a whole. It would be easier for politicians. Our project is absolutely honest and open for discussion.
Q: People think in stereotypes today. Not everybody will like the project.
A: Criticism is always useful. Just look at our calendar. Who do we have commenting on the war? Kennedy and Johnson's advisor in one corner, and Boris Gromov in the other. We don't need a common opinion. We want every person to have his own opinion. Just don't say something never happened. It's an absolute shame to talk like that. We're completely open to different opinions. Even our talk show hosts differ in their opinions. And that's appropriate.
Q: What is your personal interest in the project?
A: When I worked at school we had three history teachers. One of them was a true communist and she taught her class from a communist perspective. Another teacher, my friend Alexei, was a sort of nativist, a Slavophile. He taught history based on Slavophilia and didn't hold a favourable view of Peter the Great. As one would expect then, his students weren't fans of Peter the Great either. And I was a sort of liberal, a follower of Granovsky, Western-oriented. One day we were all sitting together and it dawned on us: we were flunking students on exams because we thought they were providing the wrong answers. So we agreed that we would assess only their motivation from that point on. It doesn't matter what opinion they have as long as they can back it up with facts, without ignoring other facts. It was 1982, the Soviet era. And even despite our different views, we managed to come to an agreement like normal people that we would no longer hold children hostage to our ambitions. The authorities should also agree not to trap people because of their own historical and political ambitions. Another story focuses on the war of textbooks. Some politicians actually went so far as to request a unified history textbook. First of all, this would be impossible. We can read anything we want on the internet. I didn't like the fact that our officials were ready to listen to those cries of falsification. I said to my friends in the ministries, "Do you really know whether False Dmitry was false? Maybe he was a real prince? We don't know the truth". "Oh, how interesting", they all answered, right before running off to find Natan Eidelman's books.
Q: Falsification is such a strong word!
A: There should be some place for rhetoric in politics. The problem is, in our patriarchal and hierarchical society, any top official's speech, even if he wasn't entirely sincere about it, becomes a guideline for some regional baron who will make a decision immediately. I know, for instance, that people were quite infuriated when Putin said in Gdansk that a secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was immoral and inefficient. "How can we teach that?" teachers exclaimed. But some lawmakers would actually dictate the curriculum and rewrite textbooks! It wasn't what Putin said! But they always start to raise a fuss. Putin did not want this and Medvedev does not want this, but our minds are wired to believe that we must salute and follow the authority's idea and keep guessing about what it is. And I just know that Putin and Medvedev have read a lot about our past. Unlike me, they have access to the president's archives. They read documents and they are extremely interested in it all. Their minds certainly aren't flat and they understand different aspects of the events, even sometimes making crucial decisions about it. They of all people have a profound understanding that history is not black and white. The smaller minds the lawmakers have, the less they will understand, which is why they try to guess what the big bosses will say. We want our people to see that there cannot be only one way of thinking. Our project is a fight against narrow-minded thinking in Russia.