By Vestnik Kavkaza
This year the 100th anniversary of the beginning of one of the most wide-scale military conflicts in the history, the First World War, is marked. The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) suggests calling the war the Second Patriotic War.
Leonid Reshetnikov, Director of the RISS, doesn’t hide that the initiative of reconsideration of the First World War events came from President, as “there is understanding that we cannot build our history, our state, our past, our ideological education based on deeds of our nation in the Great Patriotic War. It is not enough for such a country as Russia.”
According to Reshetnikov, “in the world the war is called great. And only in our country it was narrowed down to a number – the First World War. When the war started, it was declared by our state power a Patriotic war. And we returned the historic title to the war in our project – the Second Patriotic War. And we focus on this. It was not an imperialistic, invasive war for the Bosporus and Dardanelles. We have a mutilate and wrong view on the First World War.”
Mikhail Smolin, Head of the Center for Humanitarian Studies of the RISS, recalls that “in the Soviet and post-Soviet times school textbooks represented the war as a threshold of the revolution. The revolution shut down the great event. The whole ideological construction of teaching history was built in the 20th century on the basis of proving that the Russian Empire wasn’t able to hold up its internal policy and foreign policy, and the First World War was the brightest signal for collapse of the empire and inevitability of the revolution.”
Konstantin Zalessky, a scientist of the RISS, is sure that in February 1917 a rise of Russia was interrupted: “When they say that we suffered constant failures, we should simply look at the situation in the beginning of 1917. In early 1917 the front was stabilized, the lack of soldiers in the army was eliminated, troops were ready for an attack. The level of the military industry in Russia of early 1917 can be described by the fact that the Bolsheviks fought during the whole Civil War due to supplies which were produced in the Empire. So, we cannot speak about Russia’s failure in the Second Patriotic War.”
According to Zalessky, the USSR declared the war criminal, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was another approach – borrowing of an English interpretation of the First World War: “It began to be considered through the view of a London, a Washington. I.e. the victory of the First World War was ascribed to these powers, while the Russian Empire was listed to a number of losers. The RISS project is aimed at returning memory of the war and showing our real fights and successes of the Russian army and the Russian Empire.”
