From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   The Man Behind Putin’s Warped View of History   
   By Mikhail Zygar, Sept. 19, 2023, NY Times   
      
   Starting this month, all high school students in Russia have a new history   
   textbook. On its pages, they’ll find a strikingly simplistic account of the   
   past 80 years — from the end of World War II to the present — that all but   
   comes with the Kremlinâ   
   €™s signature.   
      
   Revisionism doesn’t begin to cover it. Stalin, in contrast to the standard   
   depiction in Russian textbooks over the past 30 years, is presented as a wise   
   and effective leader thanks to whom the Soviet Union won the war and ordinary   
   people began to live    
   much better. Repressions are mentioned, but in an accusatory way. The reader   
   is left with the feeling that Stalin’s victims were guilty and suffered a   
   well-deserved punishment.   
      
   The telling of the end of the Soviet Union is similarly distorted. Previous   
   textbooks analyzed the collapse of the Soviet system and the inefficiency of   
   the planned economy, writing about the arms race and the irrationality of the   
   elderly Soviet leaders.    
   The new tome blames everything on Mikhail Gorbachev, castigating him as an   
   incompetent bureaucrat who succumbed to pressure from the United States. Then   
   there are the 28 pages on the war in Ukraine. They contain, of course, no   
   history and only outright    
   propaganda — a set of clichés recycled from Russian television.   
      
   The book was written, along with others, by Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s   
   former culture minister and now a presidential aide. Mr. Medinsky has another,   
   more secret role: He is President Vladimir Putin’s ghostwriter. Working with   
   a team of assistants,    
   he writes texts about history under Mr. Putin’s name. Given the   
   president’s obsession with history and use of it to justify his regime, Mr.   
   Medinsky occupies an important position in Russia today. From the shadows, he   
   has helped construct the    
   ideological and historical edifice on which much of Mr. Putin’s rule rests.   
      
   But who is he?   
      
   Mr. Medinsky was born in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine in 1970. But he is not   
   Ukrainian at all. His father was a military man and his childhood was spent   
   traveling across the Soviet Union, from garrison to garrison. In this   
   peripatetic environment,    
   according to close acquaintances, Mr. Medinsky was brought up with very   
   conservative values and as a sincere patriot of the Soviet Union. Education   
   was important too — his mother was a schoolteacher — and, in time, led him   
   to the Moscow Institute of    
   International Relations. A model student, he excelled in the School of   
   Journalism and was a member of Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth   
   organization.   
      
   But by the time he graduated, the Soviet Union had collapsed. Mr. Medinsky had   
   no difficulty adjusting. In 1992, with a group of classmates, he created his   
   own advertising company, Ya Corporation. Its clients were mostly financial   
   firms and tobacco    
   companies. He soon became a P.R. man for the tobacco lobby — a bit like the   
   unscrupulous main character in Christopher Buckley’s 1994 book “Thank You   
   for Smoking.â€� Even so, he didn’t neglect his studies, continuing to work   
   toward a doctorate.   
      
   That’s when I met Mr. Medinsky, when I was an undergraduate at the institute   
   in the late ’90s. He was 10 years older than me, aloof, and had just started   
   to teach public relations. It was a new and very fashionable discipline, and   
   many of my    
   classmates, who wanted to become “P.R. people,â€� dreamed of learning from   
   him. Something of a star on campus, Mr. Medinsky was considered a successful   
   businessman and willingly supported students, taking the best of them for   
   internships at his company.   
      
   In 2000, Mr. Putin became president of Russia, taking over from Boris Yeltsin.   
   As any P.R. man should, Mr. Medinsky adapted to the change in atmosphere,   
   parlaying a job in the civil service into a political career. By 2004, he was   
   a member of parliament    
   for Mr. Putin’s United Russia party. Despite accusations that he continued   
   as an elected official to lobby for tobacco companies and casinos, Mr.   
   Medinsky was a man on the rise.   
      
   It helped that he started trading in patriotism. In 2007, this former tobacco   
   lobbyist began to write books about history — or, rather, he began to create   
   historical P.R. In a series of books called “Myths About Russia,â€� he set   
   out to debunk    
   Russian stereotypes and to put new stories in their place. There were volumes   
   on “Russian drunkenness, laziness and cruelty,â€� “Russian theft, soul and   
   patienceâ€� and “Russian democracy, dirt and imprisonment.â€�   
      
   In each of the books, Mr. Medinsky argued that everything bad in Russia’s   
   history is the slander of enemies. For example, Ivan the Terrible was not   
   really an insane tyrant — because, for one thing, he was always motivated by   
   the interests of his    
   people and did everything possible for the good of Russia. For another,   
   Western rulers at that time were even crueler. And, in any case, all his   
   supposed atrocities were actually fantasies of European historians.   
      
   From the start, Mr. Medinsky’s work was criticized by real Russian   
   historians. But he never hid that his work was not based on facts. They were   
   not important to him; the real goal was to create a persuasive narrative.   
   â€œFacts by themselves don’t    
   mean very much,â€� Mr. Medinsky wrote in one of his books. “Everything   
   begins not with facts, but with interpretations. If you love your homeland,   
   your people, then the story you write will always be positive.â€�   
      
   Armed with such an approach, Mr. Medinsky fashioned a myth of Russia as   
   benevolent and powerful, always justly triumphant over supposedly lesser   
   countries. It clearly caught the president’s eye and, in 2012, Mr. Putin   
   appointed him minister of culture.    
   According to a source close to the Kremlin, he was given a clear task by the   
   president: to carry out the militarization of Russian society.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)