Rethinking the Cold War by Natalia Narotchnitskaïa

Résumé du document

Natalia Alekseïevna Narotchnitskaïa, born in 1948, is Alexeï Leontievitch Narotchnitskii's daughter; a historian specialized in Russian history during the 19th century. Natalia Alekseïevna Narotchnitskaïa, who has a doctorate in history from the State Institute of international relations in Moscow, is, as her father, a historian and philosopher, but specialized in international relations, the director of the Science Academy of Russia, and the director of Russian history institute Andreï Sakharov. She is also a politician, who worked from 1982 to 1989 at the secretary of the United Nations (UN) in New York, for a soviet diplomatic mission. Since 2008, she also was a member of the Duma, in the group called “Justice Russia” for her engagement in the patriotic party called Rodina. As a fervent nationalist and partisan of an orthodox civilization, she is known for her engagements in favor of Russia and anti-Atlantic positions. For instance, she strongly defended the Serbian politic during the Yugoslavian war and was against the NATO's intervention, and more recently the Russian power during the conflicts in Chechnya.

Nowadays, she is a member of the Institut russe de la démocratie et de la cooperation based in Paris, where she tries to give answers to the questions about Vladimir's Putin politic, which is often considered as dictatorial and denounces the infringements of human rights in Occident. It is also important to notice that in 2009 she agreed to work into a Commission created by Dmitri Medvedev, which struggles against the falsification attempts of the Russian history. This commission was part of a great campaign lead by Dmitri Medvedev to restore Russia's image during the Second World War, and wanted to create a law which would have provide three to five years of detention in case of negation of the Russian victory during the Second World War.

Extraits

[...] This memorial war, according to this book is really strong between Russia and the occidental world: Europe and United States toward the victory of the Second World War and the Cold War. This memorial war is really violent for the historians whose work is normally just to establish the facts and give them an interpretation. If we clearly listen to what Natalia Narotchnitskaïa exposes in this book, the historian also has to take party for one of the memory, or at least to directly confront the two memories. [...]

[...] This book invites us to forget the classical history of relations between Europe of Russia, elaborated by occidental historians, that we learnt. The question of the great patriotic war is central in Natalia Narotchnitskaïa's book, because it is by this victory that the historical Russia got back its statute of superpower, lost in 1917 and finally in 1990. Nationalist, this is the reason why she strongly protests about what she describes as repeated attempts from the Occident to tarnish the key-moment of the Russian national history. [...]

[...] To conclude this introduction to our analysis, we may also present the sources of Natalia Narotchnitskaïa's work. Her approach is strictly geopolitical, so she most of the times uses the theories of Mackinder, an British geopolitician, and other references found amongst Russian and occidental authors to demonstrate the permanence of an hostile politic of weakening Russia from Occident. Critical summary of the book As we said, we will concentrate our study on the part of the book where Natalia Narotchnitskaïa tackle the Cold War, to fit with the subject of the lecture: rethinking the Cold War. [...]

[...] For instance, she strongly defended the Serbian politic during the Yugoslavian war and was against the NATO's intervention, and more recently the Russian power during the conflicts in Chechnya. Nowadays, she is a member of the Institut russe de la démocratie et de la cooperation based in Paris, where she tries to give answers to the questions about Vladimir's Putin politic, which is often considered as dictatorial and denounces the infringements of human rights in Occident. It is also important to notice that in 2009 she agreed to work into a Commission created by Dmitri Medvedev, which struggles against the falsification attempts of the Russian history. [...]

[...] She considers as Marxist, nihilist and anti-Communist the interpretation that considers the USSR as totalitarianism. She insists on the fact that occidental tried to erase the past of Russia before 1917 and denied the millenary reign of Russia on territories where the population is since their birth Slavonic and Russian: to her, the occidental world gave the image that the USSR was an of nations that should have been independents, under the yoke of the communist totalitarianism. To face this idea and legitimate the Cold War, the occidental world was claiming the defence of the free world, of liberty and democracy, in order to hide the real issue of the Cold War: discredit the USSR as a superpower and its rights to ask for its initials territories from the historical Russia, leaving the USSR far from the Baltic and the Black sea. [...]