History, I tell my students and anyone else willing to listen, is a rather curious dance between retention and erasure. The stories we tell, the monuments we build, the exhibitions we mount, the pageants we enact and the rituals we perform make their way, often uneasily, between these two poles of human activity.
Lest anyone doubt the veracity of this observation, tuning into and taking the measure of the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Sochi would make abundantly clear what I mean. Pulling out all the stops and giving new meaning to spectacle, the Russians put their history on display: The Cyrillic alphabet danced, chariots floated magically in the air, brightly colored onion domed structures bobbed up and down, the Black Sea rushed in and out and even Chagall himself put in a brief appearance.
What was omitted from this narrative of national pride was more stunning still: revolution, Communism, gulags, the Siege of Leningrad, the Leningrad Seven -- the list goes on and on. I didn’t expect to see an acknowledgement of pogroms or the Doctor’s Plot or the repression of Soviet Jewry, certainly not in a forum given over to effusions of the national spirit. All the same, so conspicuously and painfully absent were some of the most important personalities and moments of Czarist and Soviet history that it made this pyrotechnical pageant about as compelling as an ice capade: Skillful, yes, but icy cold at its core.
It got to the point where I couldn’t watch any more. Razzle dazzle can go only so far in shoring up the spirit before it turns hollow.
