Behind Putin's Curtain by Stephan Orth

Author:Stephan Orth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

The tour of the museum begins in a movie theater. A technically elaborately produced, wide-screen animated film condenses a thousand years of Russian history into eight minutes. From Ivan the Terrible to Nicholas II, from Peter the Great to Brezhnev, almost all of the rulers look like boss villains from video games. A female voice speaks of the dark times of Stalin’s Great Purge, when “ten to twenty million people died.” Toward the end you see Gorbachev in a crane with a wrecking ball, because he came to the conclusion that if you “couldn’t improve or reform the system, then it has to be destroyed.” The final image shows the ten most important rulers from the past gathered together; Yeltsin is at the far right of the line at “the beginning of the history of a new, free Russia.”

The video is remarkable because it doesn’t relativize the many gruesome acts of history, unlike the typical Russian history books. The economic advances under Stalin remain unmentioned and Lenin is depicted as a deceiver, promising the people a brighter future but leading them into an era of fear and violence.

Conservative commentators reacted pretty angrily to these eight minutes of scary cinema. The accusations went as far as suggesting that American propagandists were behind the whole thing. Critics considered it absurd to allow school classes into this showing. A version of the video available online was only “liked” 70 times but had more than 750 thumbs down.

Sure enough the exhibition glorifies Yeltsin as a saint, although in a pretty entertaining way. Like the Seven Days of Creation, the seven most important days in the political life of the president are depicted in photos and film documents, with voiceovers from comrades and experts. A historian states that Yeltsin himself admitted it was a mistake to start the Chechen War, but that history later proved his decision was right. Gradually a picture emerges of a statesman who in the most difficult times made forward-looking (and somehow always correct) choices. As proof, every visitor can take home a copy of the constitution, which took effect after a referendum toward the end of 1993. A young red-haired museum guest gets pretty upset as she reads through the various points. “‘No one should be forced to follow an ideology’? It happens. ‘Free university education’? Not true. ‘Freedom of expression’? No. ‘Sexual liberty’? ‘Equal rights for men and women’? Also no!” Today’s realities do not live up to these ideals.

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Kiselyov, Dmitry • КИСЕЛЁВ, ДМИТРИЙ

Head of the government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya, and often termed the Kremlin’s chief propagandist. While Americans might settle down on Sunday evenings in front of a crime show on TV, at the same time in Russia, on Kiselyov’s program Vesti Nedeli (“News of the Week”), the crime is always Western politics. As a host, Kiselyov enjoys being provocative, sometimes hitting the wrong note: once he compared Obama to an ape; another time he compared Putin to Stalin (and he meant it in a

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