The battle for revolutionary history

The plaque commemorating 17th century Leveller leader Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, unveiled in a Wapping churchyard yesterday, appropriately comes at a moment when a modest civil war has broken out about the country’s history.

Rainsborough, one of the ablest and most courageous officers in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, was murdered by Royalists in 1648, at the siege of Pontefract Castle.

His was killed a year after the famous Putney debates in which he and others put forward an Agreement of the People. Tensions between the democratic forces and the emerging new ruling class were at their sharpest. During the debate, Rainsborough made this epic, revolutionary statement: 

For really I think that the poorest he that is in England have a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.

 The Levellers’ demands were not realised during their lifetimes, but they put down a daring and far-seeing marker, to be partially realised in the form of parliamentary democracy.

Naturally, a period when Parliament and the Crown fought it out on the battlefield, ending with Charles I losing his head in 1649, is not exactly what education secretary Michael Gove wants to emphasise.

He has come under heavy fire for his new history curriculum, which is viewed by many as “too prescriptive and Anglocentric”. Enter radical historian Tristram Hunt, Labour MP for Stoke on Trent Central.

In yesterday’s Observer, Hunt lampooned pro-imperialist, ultra-conservative and ultra-successful historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson, now a Harvard professor, who last year supported Mitt Romney’s election campaign, recently had to deny that he was homophobic. Ferguson had indeed made a personal attack on the economist, and old Labour idol, John Maynard Keynes which linked his sexuality to his ideas.

There can be no doubt that Ferguson has played a key role on the ideological front, with his histories of money, global finance, the role of the British Empire as well as in setting up the elite private New College of the Humanities in London.

Hunt is right to highlight the crucial importance of history in British public life and that the school history curriculum is, as Gove himself has said, “an ideological battleground for contending armies”.

Hunt goes on to praise the post-war schools of largely Marxist historians. For the first time writers like E.P. Thompson, Asa Briggs, Christopher Hill and Raphael Samuel provided an alternative narrative, based on the underbelly of historical change.

They played an important political role, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, by revealing the social forces driving historical processes and the role of the masses in shaping change.

Hunt bemoans the “worrying conservative consensus” about “our national past”. And naturally the main media, which is indeed dominated by people like Ferguson and David Starkey, with their unashamed pro-capitalist political agenda.

This is not news. Marx pointed out long ago, that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

But should we be like rabbits in the headlights – terrified by the fact that the media and education is dominated by the ideology of those in power? Of course not. The notion that the ruling elites and their ideologists like Ferguson can brainwash us is a pathetic cop-out.

As one comment on Hunt’s piece says: “Information has proliferated so extensively that it no longer matters what people with agendas select or omit, the full story is only a few clicks away on the internet, and no statement can be made by a prominent individual without it being challenged.”

We should take courage and inspiration from 17th century revolutionaries like Rainsborough and continue his work by supporting the Agreement of the People for the 21st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win

Putin rehabilitates Stalin

There are few families in Russia today untouched by the horrors of the Stalin period. Nearly everyone has a story to tell about a relative who suffered in the forced collectivisation and the purges that consumed up to 20 million people. So when Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB man who is now president of Russia, sanctions a rewriting of history that eulogises Stalin and glosses over his regime’s crimes, it amounts to a warning to opponents of today’s Kremlin. Several critics of Putin’s government have met with untimely deaths, including the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Only yesterday, a member of an opposition group led by the former chess champion Garry Kasparov was released from a psychiatric clinic after being held against her will for 46 days. Larisa Arap, 48, was forcibly taken to hospital in Murmansk after exposing alleged abuse of children in a local psychiatric hospital.

New laws give the Putin government sweeping powers over the content of school textbooks and a series of “patriotic” history books are set to be unveiled in the new school year. A handbook for teachers calls Stalin a "contradictory" figure, and states that while some people consider him evil, others recognise him as a "hero" for his role in the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) and his territorial expansion. Stalin is described as “the most successful leader of the USSR". The book skates over the purges, declaring: “Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite." Putin himself admitted that "problematic pages in our history exist" but "we have less than some countries”. He compared the Great Terror of 1937, when 700,000 people were murdered in a purge by Stalin's secret police, to the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

This sickening reverence for Stalin because he allegedly made the country strong is a complete travesty of history and an insult to all those who died or suffered at the hands of his regime. In fact, the Stalinists left the Soviet Union at the mercy of Nazi Germany and their policies added to the build-up of World War II. The cream of the Red Army was purged in 1937 and a non-aggression pact struck with Hitler lulled the USSR into a false sense of security. When Nazi Germany invaded in June 1941, no one was more surprised than Stalin to the extent that he refused to believe the reports and prevented border troops from opening fire until it was too late. "In the official state view of history, the main event of the 20th century is the victory in the Second World War," said Boris Dubin, an expert at the Levada Centre think tank and polling agency. "The Holocaust is hardly taught at all in Russia, nor is the history of the gulag system. The rehabilitation of Stalin is connected to the emphasis on the war victory."

Far from being a great “war leader”, Stalin was compelled to hand control over military affairs to generals like Zhukov because of political paralysis in the Kremlin. In the end, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany in spite of and not because of Stalin’s “leadership”. Putin is building his own authoritarian state, this time based on the capitalist oligarchs that now own Russia as a result of the counter-revolution of the early 1990s. But thanks to the perestroika and glasnost period of the Gorbachev period, the truth about the Stalinist regime is available to the Russian people. Putin’s attempt to rewrite the last 90 years of his country’s turbulent history to suit himself is, like the Stalinist regime itself, doomed to failure.

Paul Feldman, communications editor
A World to Win