BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians

BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians In May 2014, Putin signed a new law that criminalized the purposeful distortion of the Soviet Union's role in World War II. It could easily be applied to historians who, for example, criticize Stalin's Great Terror and its decimation of the military leadership in the years before the war.'® Historians who make the “wrong” interpretations of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the huge casualties suffered by the Red Army, or the rape and plunder committed by Soviet troops as they marched toward Berlin might also risk criminal penalties. In late 2016 the Russian Security Council discussed the establishment of a new center to counter the “falsification” of history. The council placed the pro- posal in the context of the country’s national security, pointing to “deliberate destructive activity by foreign state structures and international organizations to realize geopolitical interests by means of carrying out anti-Russian policies.” A group of experts identified six topics from Russia's past that they claimed were being actively distorted as part of an anti-Russia strategy. Among the topics: the Soviet Union's ethnic policies, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Soviet Union's conduct during World War Il, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Union's suppression of uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany during the Cold War.” In each case, the most serious and respected historical accounts have been written by foreign scholars, due largely to the pressures, including outright censorship, brought to bear on Russian historians during Soviet times and more recently during the Putin era. China: Evading the past Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward ranks among the most deadly politically inspired catastrophes in human history. From 1958 to 1962, Communist Party authorities, under strict orders from Beijing, forcibly herded millions of farmers into communes and then proceeded to seize grain harvested in the countryside to feed the urban population. The result, according to long-standing estimates, was the death of some 30 mil- lion people in the provinces. Historian Frank Dikotter, who studied the archives in some of the most seriously affected regions, has argued that the number of deaths was at least 45 million, and others have cited higher numbers. While most died of starvation, many were tortured to death or murdered by local Communists.” To this day, Communist Party officials have refused to acknowledge anything approaching the full dimen- sions of the tragedy. Nor have they admitted that the party, and especially Mao, were responsible. Often they blame the weather. There are no official monu- ments to the victims, no days of commemoration, no serious histories available to the general public, and most significantly, no effort to place accountability where it belonged. Chinese leaders may be even more concerned about presenting the “correct” interpretation of history than their Russian counterparts. An updated offi- cial version of the party history that was released in 2011 took 16 years to draft, including four extensive rewrites. It was vetted by 64 state and party bodies, including the People's Liberation Army. In telling the story of the Great Leap Forward, the history admits that the project brought great suffering, but credits Mao with wanting to “change a picture of poverty and backwardness and make China grow rich and strong so that it could use its own strength to stand tall in the forest of nations.””? In other words, one of the century's great politically driven famines was justified because it supposedly contributed to China's emer- gence as a world power. The history also insists that Mao tried to change course when he learned of the growing rural suffering—an outright lie, as Mao actual- ly doubled down on the most disastrous policies. The determination to suppress any real assessment of the dark corners of Chinese history under the Communist Party is also reflected in the exhibits at the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square. Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period of polit- ical terror and violent nationwide purges, is dispensed with through one photograph and a brief caption, located in an out-of-the-way part of the facility. As for the famine, it is glossed over with the euphemistic phrase, “the project of constructing socialism suffered severe complications.’ Seven ‘don’t mentions’ In 2013, the General Office of the Communist Party Central Committee issued a secret directive prohib- iting universities from permitting the discussion of seven themes—the “Seven Don't Mentions.” Accord- ing to the directive, lecturers were not allowed to take up universal values, freedom of the press, civil society, civic rights, elite cronyism, Judicial independence, and past mistakes of the Communist Party. To independent-minded scholars, the most disturbing item in the roster of Don't Mentions was the leader- ship's mistakes. While the authorities have never come close to permitting a serious investigation of either 32 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019266