The Undead Hand of
History
In the Prologue of his book The
Red Prince, The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke, brilliant Yale
historian Timothy Snyder says this about how both the Nazis and the Soviets
treated the question of a person’s nationality:
Both Nazis and Soviets treated the nation
as expressing unchangeable facts about the past rather than human volition in
the present. Because they ruled so much of Europe with so much violence, that
idea of race remains with us—the undead hand of history as it did not happen.[1]
Snyder isn’t talking about the
United States or about contemporary Europe. He is talking about the jumble of
overlapping nationalities in central and eastern Europe around the time of
World War I.[2]
But when I read these words of his, I immediately thought of two historical
developments, one of which we are living through as I write. I’ll start with
the older story, then move to the one we’re living through now.
The Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was a totalitarian state made up of dozens upon dozens of different
nationalities. The Russians, however, were by far the dominant group in that
late, unlamented country. The Soviet Union was essentially the Russian Empire
minus Finland and part of Poland with a very different, and very much more
brutal, government than the Russian Empire proper ever had. The Communist Party
of the Soviet Union controlled every aspect of Soviet life. It controlled all
publishing. It controlled all public media including radio, television, and
journalism. It controlled all education. The extent of the one-party control
under which millions upon millions of people lived between 1924, when Josef
Stalin took control of the Party, and 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to
exist, is hard for most Americans to get their heads around; but it is a
perfect example of Snyder’s phrase “the undead hand of history as it did not
happen.”
One of the things the Soviet Communists
controlled was history. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was
Marxist-Leninist. That means that he had inherited and believed, or at least
taught, a political and economic doctrine grounded in history. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
developed a theory of how history progresses. His theory is complete nonsense
of course, but the Soviet Communists claimed to be using it and required
everyone to study it. In Marx’ theory, history is advancing toward the creation
of a universal way of life called Communism. To get there, history passes through stages called capitalism and
socialism. History’s march toward Communism is, supposedly, inexorable. But to
convince people of that alleged truth, the Soviet Communists had to make the
history of all of the people of the USSR conform to Marxist theory. Stalin
complicated matters by also making history laud him and his accomplishments and
damn anyone Stalin considered to be an opponent either in the past or in Stalin’s
present. The history taught in the Soviet Union was a fabrication created not
to discover and convey historical truth but to further the program of the
Communist Party.
By the time I lived in the Soviet
Union for one academic year in the mis-1970s, few educated people really
believed Marxism-Leninism or the propaganda of the Communist Party that was
thoroughly grounded in it. Many people. especially educated young people,
resented the censorship the Party imposed on every public expression of
opinion. They resented the travel restrictions the Party imposed that meant,
that while I could go to their country to learn about it and experience it,
they could never do the same in my country. They resented the puritanical
morality the Party tried to impose on the people.
And there was one more thing they
resented. They resented the way the Party had stolen their history from them. The
Party had prevented them from learning the truth about Russian or any other
history, but they discerned enough to know that that is precisely what the
Party had done. They all took history classes at one level of education or
another, but what they got was a Marxist-Leninist lie not the historical truth.
I’ll tell one personal story to
illustrate the point. In the spring of 1976, when I was doing PhD research in
Russia, I got to know a young Russian man who was a 5th year
journalism student at Moscow State University. Soviet journalism was, if
anything, a bigger lie than Soviet history was. This journalism student once told
me how hard it was for him that everything he saw around him was bad but he was
permitted only to report on what was good. I don’t know why this very
intelligent young man was studying what they called journalism but what was
really propaganda, but he was.
As my time in the Soviet Union
was coming to an end, the pastor of the Anglo-American Church that was attached
to the American and British embassies gave me a book to pass along to anyone I
had the chance to pass it along to and who wanted it. It was a book by Nikolai
Berdyaev, the greatest modern theologian of Orthodox Christianity. He was, perhaps
obviously, a Russian. He had left Russia after the Bolshevik coup in 1917 and died
in Paris.
Berdyaev was a leading figure in
what is called the Silver Age of Russian culture, a flourishing of all aspects
of Russian culture in the years just before World War I. He was also a member
of what is called “the Vekhi group.”[3]
This group consisted of a number of Russian intellectuals who had once been Marxists
of one sort or another but who had abandoned Marxism and returned to the quintessential
Russian institution, the Russian Orthodox Church. Berdyaev and all of the
members of the Vekhi group were described as class traitors and
therefore as great villains if they were mentioned at all in the teaching of Russian
history.
My friend the journalism student
was an atheist. He made no bones about that fact. He said that having religious
faith was one thing he just couldn’t understand about westerners. He surely had
no real interest in Russian Orthodox theology. He wasn’t the least bit Orthodox
himself. I wasn’t at all sure that he would want a book by Berdyaev.
I offered the book to him anyway.
He took it into his hands and nearly broke down in tears. He said, “You will
never know what you have done for me.” It certainly is possible that there were
aspects of what I had done for him that I don’t know, but I believe I
understand a good deal about his reaction to receiving that book. Berdyaev is a
significant figure in the history of Russian culture. I’m sure my friend had
heard of him, and I’m sure he’d been told that Berdyaev was a traitor to the
Communist cause. I’m sure my friend never thought he’d ever be able to read
anything by Berdyaev himself. Berdyaev’s work certainly wasn’t published in the
USSR.
I understand my friend’s reaction
as an expression of what the stealing of real history means to smart, educated
people. The Communists had stolen Russian history from the Russian people. They
taught history “as it did not happen,” to use Snyder’s wonderful phrase. To
quote Snyder again, my friend along with countless other educated Russians felt
that false history as an “undead hand” keeping them from learning the truth
about their own history, especially any of its good parts, and thereby keeping
them from becoming truly themselves. Whenever I remember this friend, I hope
that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party’s loss of
power he and countless other Russians got the chance they’d never had before to
learn true Russian history. Russian intellectual life and Russian culture were
never going to flourish if they did not.
The other historical development
I think of when I read Snyder’s “the undead hand of history as it did not
happen” is the effort currently underway in the American South to rewrite
American history, actually, to whitewash American history as it relates to
slavery and other aspects of America’s sinful history of racial oppression and
segregation. There simply is no doubt that race-based slavery in the American
South was a horrific institution that broke the spirits and bodies and stunted
the lives of millions of Americans just because of the color of their skin. The
American history of race relations is more appalling than most people of my
generation were ever taught.
I was educated in a public school
system in the 1950s and 1960s. No one ever told me that my home state of Oregon
has a truly awful history of racism against both Black Americans and Asian
Americans. I didn’t learn of it until I was in law school at the University of
Oregon in the late 1970s. No one ever taught me that slavery existed in this
country not just in the South but in the North as well. No one ever taught me
about the Black Wall Street Massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in
1921. No one ever taught me about the brutal racial attacks on returning Black
American veterans after World War I.
No one ever taught me just how horrific
that Atlantic slave trade was, how it was grounded in kidnapping and how many
kidnapped, enslaved people died on slave ships bound for the Americas. Less
dramatic but still significant is that fact that no one ever taught me that,
while Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr. were big stars in Las Vegas, they were
not permitted to stay in the hotels where they performed because they were
Black.
No one ever called what white
Americans did to Native Americans genocide though that’s what it was. No one
ever taught me that Adolf Hitler used what white Americans did to Native
Americans as model for what he wanted to do to Europe’s Jews, but he did. No
one ever taught me that the US government broke every treaty it ever signed
with any First Nation, but it did. No one ever told me that American soldiers
used Indian men, women, and children for target practice, but they did. Westerns
were popular movies when I was growing up, but in them the whites were the good
guys and the Indians were almost always the bad guys though American Indians
were simply trying to defend their land and their way of life as white
Americans stole the land and tried to turn Indians copies of white Americans. When
I was in public school, American history was indeed whitewashed.
In recent times there has been a
movement in American intellectual circles to teach the truth about America’s racial
history and how truly awful it was. It’s called Critical Race Theory. Black and
white Americans are working to wash the whitewash off of that history. Black
and white scholars are working to tell the real truth about race relations in
America, perhaps in a way that gives white Americans that truth for the first
time. It would be perfectly appropriate to call Critical Race Theory “Critical
Race Truth.”
A countermovement is afoot in the
American South to make sure the whitewash doesn’t come off. Governments and public
school districts are prohibiting the teaching of Critical Race Theory. They say
don’t teach real history because it makes some people “uncomfortable.” Never
mind that the last thing a good historian is trying to do is make people
comfortable. These reactionary racists have turned the phrase Critical Race
Theory into one of condemnation rather than one of historical honesty.
Some white Southerners say
slavery was a jobs program and the slaves were happy being slaves. They deny
the brutality of American slavery. They deny the beatings. They deny the rapes.
They deny that husbands and wives were sold away from each other and that
children were sold away from their parents. Yet all of those things are
historical truth. They happened and not in isolated incidents. They were what
slavery was.
Russian people were never going
to be able to become Russians fully informed about the truth of their history
and thus to become fully who they are under the Soviet Communists. The
Communists stole Russian history from the Russian people. They gave the people
a badly distorted view of their history, one designed to conform to
Marxist-Leninist theory not to historical reality.
We Americans are never going to
be fully informed about the truth of our history and thus to become fully who
we are if the racist reaction against the truth of American history cannot be
reversed. Few Americans think history is very important. They think the past is
dead and past so that it really doesn’t matter. The undeniable truth, however,
is that history is not dead, and it matters a lot. Snyder’s phrase the “undead
hand” of history is absolutely appropriate. A people’s history conditions every
aspect of that people’s present.
Institutional racism remains
powerful in our country precisely because of the history many white Southerners
are trying to erase today. We will never begin adequately to address racism in
our country if we whitewash the history of the racism of the past. Yet that is
precisely what the people opposing teaching the truth about the history of
American slavery and racism are trying to do.
We have to ask why they are doing
it. I believe that there is only one answer to that question. They are doing it
because they are white racists who want to hold onto their positions of power
and privilege in American society and culture. They say Critical Race Theory
makes them uncomfortable. It does that because it calls them and all of us
white Americans on our racism. They are doing it because they know that the
truth of American history condemns them and people like them both past and
present for that racism. We must defeat today’s efforts by American racists to turn
history into propaganda rather than a search for the truth.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus says
to a group of his Jewish disciples, “You will know the truth, and the truth
will make you free.” John 8:32. False history has never made anyone free. Those
who seek to whitewash history always do so because they fear that the truth
will indeed make the people free; and free people are hard to oppress. People
in positions of power in a society almost always want to oppress other people
in that society because doing so preserves the power and the privileges of the
powerful. Distorting history can be a powerful element in a policy of
oppression. Let us all insist that our schools teach real history not whitewashed
history. Then we will know the truth, and perhaps the truth will indeed make us
free.
[1]
Snyder, Timothy, The Red Prince, The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke
(Basic Books, New York, 2008) p. 4.
[2]
Though we all know to some extent how brutal both the Nazis and the Soviets
were, Synder will show you that they were much worse than you could ever have
imagined. Read his book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic
Books, New York, 2010). Both the historical overview and the personal stories
he gives of eastern Europe between 1934 and 1945 are hard to read at best
because they are so violent. They are, however, worth knowing if only because they
give us some idea of the depths to which we humans can so easily sink.
[3] “Vekhi”
means signposts. It was the name of a journal the group published.
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