Recently I read a novel, "The Kingdoms of Savannah" by George Dawes Green. It's a crime drama set in today's Savannah, GA, where past slavery and other crimes haunt today's citizens, black and white, affluent and poor. One of the book reviews brought up a quote from William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
It struck me that this applies to Russia even more than to the US.
The US had in its recent past the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, and bloody civil war in the 19th century; the Great Depression, civil strife in 1960s, and several bloody overseas wars of choice in the 20th century. It's still trying to come to terms with this history – and it hurts. But the society keeps trying.
Russian history is complex and dark. In the US, it’s all but unknown. In Russia, it’s taught and discussed in a simplistic and distorted way – as propaganda of Russian greatness, not a history.
Here are some deeply traumatic events that Russia went through just in the 19th and 20th centuries (the list is far from complete.) These are either passed over or lied about by the state-controlled educational system and media:
Centuries of serfdom – it was abolished in 1861, reintroduced during Stalin's collectivization and dekulakization (раскулачивание) after 1928, and lasted until 1974, when the rural population (37% of the total) was granted the right of free movement inside the country. That's in my lifetime...
Authoritarian rule by the caste-based absolute monarchy until 1905. Official religion, subjugation of the church by the state.
Colonial wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and China, Circassian genocide, multiple military campaigns to suppress revolutions in Europe in the 19th century.
The state policy of Russification of minorities, Jewish “pale of settlement” and pogroms.
World War I fought in the west of the Russian Empire, with ~3 million casualties (for comparison, the US lost 117 thousand.)
The bloody carnage of the revolution and bolshevik coup, red terror, and civil war of 1917-1921, with 7 to 12 million dead. (See this cycle of documentary sketches by Ivan Vladimirov.)
The famine of 1921-1922 that killed an estimated 5 million people.
Genocidal de-Cossackization (расказачивание.)
The famine of 1930-1933 – the result of collectivization. Ukrainian Holodomor was a part of it. Estimates are that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of famine across the Soviet Union.
Comintern and other efforts to spread radical communism and Soviet control throughout the world.
Stalin's Great Purge of 1936-1938, about 1 million were killed.
Pact with Hitler that kicked off World War II in Europe, with its unknown number of Soviet casualties – estimates range from 20 to 27 million.
The post-war occupation of Central Europe, suppression of anti-Soviet insurgencies in Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia
Many post-WWII declared and undeclared military operations from China and Korea to Afghanistan and Angola. Massive efforts to infiltrate and subvert foreign countries. These were driven mostly by ideology, not by national interest.
70 corrupting, suffocating years of the socialist "experiment," three generations brainwashed with Marxism-Leninism, millions of political denunciations of colleagues, friends, and neighbors.
The collapse of the USSR, its ideology and centrally planned economy. Millions migrating between the former Soviet republics, mostly in and out of Russia. The chaos of the 1990s, deindustrialization, poverty, banditry, and corruption.
Two Chechen wars.
22 years of increasingly authoritarian and repressive Putin's regime.
War with Georgia in 2008.
Military intervention in Syria since 2015.
And the nastiest of all Putin’s wars – the Russo-Ukrainian war since 2014…
The suffering was immense. There were millions of crimes... many (most?) perpetrated by millions of fellow Russian citizens. Most of them are now dead, many are alive.
I don't think any of these events are fully understood and worked through by Russian society. There were honest attempts to do that for some aspects of its history in the 1990s. All this stopped as Putin consolidated power. Putin and his inner circle seem to have some weird ideas about history in general and elites, castes, and oprichnina (опричнина) in particular. Large swaths of Russian society are still stuck in the past, and I believe it's a huge problem.
This is too many unburied ghosts.