Ghosts of the Past
"Ghosts of the Past" was the title of a 2010 trailer for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the last one Blizzard released before the game came out. It features Sarah Kerrigan, who in the game's story was once a Ghost: a psychic operative trained by the state to kill on command, then abandoned by the man she served and left to die on a planet overrun by the enemy. The point of the trailer is simple. What you discard does not stay discarded.
I am borrowing the title for something that is not a game. Communist regimes have also tried to discard their past. They rewrote it, sealed it in archives, buried it in forests and called every witness a slanderer. The past did not stay buried.
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A cellar in Yekaterinburg
On the night of 16 to 17 July 1918, in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, a Bolshevik firing squad killed Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters and their thirteen-year-old son Alexei, together with four people who served them. The children were not combatants. Some of them survived the first volleys and were finished with bayonets.
The new government announced that the former tsar had been shot. It said his wife and son had been taken to "a safe place." The bodies were burned, doused with acid and hidden. Their grave was found by amateurs in 1979 and could only be opened in 1991, the year the Soviet Union ended. The last two children were not found until 2007.
A forest near Smolensk
In the spring of 1940, on a Politburo order signed by Stalin, the NKVD shot about 22,000 Polish prisoners: army officers, police officers, doctors, teachers, lawyers, priests. These were the people a nation needs in order to govern itself. Thousands were buried in the Katyn forest.
When German troops found the graves in 1943, Moscow blamed Germany, and it kept blaming Germany for almost half a century. Saying otherwise was treated as anti-Soviet propaganda. The Soviet government admitted the truth only in 1990.
A train from Zurich
In April 1917 Russia was at war with Germany. That month Germany let Lenin and his comrades cross its territory from Switzerland in a sealed railway carriage, because Berlin expected him to take Russia out of the war. German Foreign Office records later showed that German money reached the Bolsheviks as well; historians still argue about how much. Less than a year later Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and gave up territory holding about a third of the old empire's population.
A man who comes home in wartime, with the enemy's help and the enemy's money, and takes his country out of the war on the enemy's terms: in any other army there is a word for that.
A branch office in Shanghai
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai in July 1921 with Comintern envoys in the room. It joined the Communist International as its China section. It took Moscow's money, Moscow's training and Moscow's instructions, and sent its cadres to Soviet schools. A party built like that is not a national movement that happened to have foreign friends. It is a branch of a foreign revolutionary and intelligence network, and it behaves like one: it serves the centre first.
The Party's own history books tell a different story. That is what those books are for.
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What denial cannot do
Each of these regimes understood that power over the present requires power over the past. So they reinterpreted history, staged the memory of war, and pressed down on every experience that contradicted the official story. They wanted certain pasts to disappear for good.
They did not disappear. The Soviet Union tried to build a new historical order through revolution, war, purges and the forced remaking of society. In 1991 it dissolved. Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine and the other nations it had absorbed or controlled came back with their memories intact. Those memories are one reason Ukrainians are in trenches today instead of in Russian uniforms.
The same thing is now happening in Asia. Ideas pushed to the margins by war, defeat and the post-war settlement did not leave history. Among them is the old idea that Asian peoples can stand together without an imperial master. The ghost of Pan-Asianism is walking again.
A regime can order its historians to be silent. It cannot order the past to stop having consequences. The communist states believed they had buried their ghosts. They never noticed that they had been living, all along, in the world those ghosts made.