Afanas'ev: The Past and Us

Iu. N. Afanasev. The Past and Us (1985)

Afanas'ev was a Russian historian and former Communist loyalist who became a leading democratic politician in the late Soviet era. He became an editor, in 1983, of Kommunist, the Communist Party’s flagship journal, and caused a furor two years later when, in an article titled “The Past and Us,” he suggested that the Soviet authorities distorted history.

Original Source: Iu. N. Afanas'iev. Proshloe i my. Kommunist. - April 1985, pp. 24-29.

... Talking about our attitude to the past, we have in mind not only what has passed and what is not, is not the past as such, in its completeness, its exhaustedness. History was there before and will be there after us. We are its passing moment, its present. In this sense, we - who are now alive - are always at the center, the core, on the crest of history. Not outside, not simply "after" all the events and circumstantances of history that ever occurred, but at the zenith, to which its consequences have taken it. In other words, the present is the outcome of all that has come before. The outcome of that outcome is still ahead. The shifting present is the semantic culmination of, say, of antiquity, or of Peter's reforms, or the revolt of the Decembrists, or discovery and colonization of America. This is most clearly evident in culture, because everyone feels like artistic works of the past are directly involved in our being. ...

Poorly understood history is something extremely dangerous. Interesting observations on this subject have been made by one of the most talented French publicists and poets, Academician Paul Valery. In the early thirties, keeping in mind the bourgeois historiography of his day, he wrote that "the relationship of primary importance" slip out of its view, and since the selection of "facts" is not subject to scientific method, this science is a "terrible hash", and contains everything in itself and sets an example for everything. Because of this, it teaches absolutely nothing, moreover it "makes people dream," intoxicates peoples, generates false memories in them, aggravates their old wounds, engenders megalomania and persecution complexes in them, making nations bilious, arrogant, intolerant and conceited”, and in this sense, "history is the most dangerous product produced by the chemistry of the intellect." ...

The idealization of the past, the presence in publications of patterns of silence, disregard of what constitutes the logic and essence of the past, -- a patent disrespect of it, and, moreover, one of the worst forms of amnesia. No matter how well-intentioned the inspiration of idealization, it is always the enemy of the critical mind, memory and understanding. ...

The historical truth. It would seem that nothing could be easier than to "write history the way it really was." However, there are often great obstacles to accomplishing that seemingly simple rule. And it not only that there will always be inexpert scholars or unscrupulous writers accessing the days of yore. Serious difficulties arise from the specific object of historical science, which is society in time and evolution. The development of society is a centuries-old universal human drama, in which passions rage, individual and collective emotions, the will and consciousness of their protagonists become manifest. To detect movements invisible to the naked eye in objects of knowledge of this kind, movements which roil the “Old Mole” of history, that is to identify patterns that exist in human activities is a very difficult task. Moreover, since the facts of the past not only have a certain significance, but also an inherent meaning, comprehension involves an emotionally charged approach, along with scientific, theoretical and moral evaluations. But such an approach does not seem to meet strict scientific criteria. As for the subject of historical knowledge, that is the historian himself, his relationship to the past and contemporary social life, here there are no fewer difficulties. After all, he, like every man, looks at the facts of the past mostly through the prism of his own attitude toward them, his likes and dislikes. It is important to bear in mind that every historian is an individual, formed socially and therefore not disinterested, inevitably sharing a particular class ideology. Finally, it should be borne in mind that the epoch itself does not remain indifferent to the past and is biased in its own way, and interprets it differently to some degree. ...

Historical scholarship is called to deal with all aspects of the historical process, because there is no understanding without the fullness of the world-historic picture. Strictly speaking, there is no more or less "relevant" version of the past. Even from the point of view of "the requirements of the historical moment," it turns out that the phenomena of the past, which yesterday presented "distant" and "irrelevant", can tomorrow acquire primary importance. The severity of some problems of our time requires a corresponding adjustment, an updating of our research plans. ...

Translated by James von Geldern.