For nearly two decades, Russian governments have sought a new identity for post-Soviet society by reshaping national history. Although they no longer celebrate the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, they don’t want to alienate the populace by abolishing what for so long has been a two-day holiday. So when Boris Yeltsin was in command he kept the holiday but renamed it the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. Yet the public remained largely ignorant of the change. In 2005 Vladimir Putin moved the holiday forward to Nov. 4 - commemorating Russian success in driving out Polish invaders in 1612 - and designated it the Day of National Unity. Is it any wonder that Russians like to say they live in a country with an “unpredictable past?’’
Twisting history
Revising the record, for better or worse, provides a lesson for our time
That sense of a malleable record reveals the essence of a universal problem: that history gets revised to serve the ideological ends of a regime, the political needs of a party, or the concerns of a group that has suffered subjugation or sheer omission from the record. More often than not, historical accuracy and legitimacy suffer in the process. On occasion, however, revisionism serves as a corrective to unworthy causes or lapses that need to be rectified. Late in 2007, for example, after historians, writers, and filmmakers had begun to explore the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the government in Madrid enacted a Law of Historical Memory that has led to the Franco regime being formally repudiated and removed from public commemoration.
These kinds of kaleidoscopic shifts provide us with a variegated pattern of vignettes in Margaret MacMillan’s “Dangerous Games.’’ A professor of modern history at Oxford and Toronto universities, MacMillan is the author of wide-ranging books titled “Nixon and Mao,’’ “Women of the Raj,’’ and “Paris 1919.’’ In this book she turns her talents to a succinct but sweeping inquiry concerning lessons of the past, or as she puts it, the uses and abuses of history. Although she devotes considerable space to disturbing cases from Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere, she has much to say that is revealing about the United States - quite often sharply, though not unfairly critical. Her mission is to illuminate the perils of historical manipulation and ignorance, especially when they serve the cause of national pride.