Letter

Russia will not face the past

Sir,

With reference to "The long shadow of the Gulag" (September 8). The ambivalence Russians show to the Stalinist era is explicable in terms of the mental mindset of ordinary Russians. Boris Pasternak spoke of the "glittering lie": the official version of events foisted on Russian citizens during the Soviet era. The average Russian believed these lies as part of a coping process challenging the brutality of the past. These lies were incorporated into each person's experiences and their views. Comfort derived from sanitised views of the past is part of Russian history.

Evidence is those heroic military films about the second world war that were the mainstay of Soviet cinema, rather than real representation of the horrors inflicted on Russians during the war. Negative views of history were suppressed by Russians as a threat to the comfortable world ordinary people during the Soviet era had built for themselves. That explains widespread nostalgia for this brutal era and indeed the demand for order and strong leaders and ambivalence about Stalin. The average Russian resents western sympathy about the Soviet era and is contemptuous of any westerner raising it - and indeed has built an image of superiority. Ask an average Russian if the US ever went to the moon and the almost universal answer even today is that it was a US hoax.

It is all part of a protective wall Russian society has built around itself and part of the reason why talk in Russia is about surpassing the west within 10 years. Andrei Zubov's optimism about the country facing its past, while admirable, is not likely to be vindicated.