Utopia in Power

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My contribution to this book was written at the Russian Re­search Center of Harvard University, where I enjoyed the stimu­lating conversation and encouragement of an unusually congenial group of colleagues. I would also like to thank the National En­dowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies for their support of var­ious portions of this work. Finally, I would like to thank Steven Jones for his valuable contribution in preparing the final version of the English translation.

Aleksandr M. Nekrich

INTRODUCTION

The man of the future is the one who will have

the longest memory.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

From time immemorial history has been written by the victors. "Woe to the vanquished," said the ancient Romans, by which they implied not only that the vanquished may be exterminated or turned into slaves but that the conquerors write the history of their wars; the victors take possession of the past and establish their control over the collective memory. George Orwell, perhaps the only Western writer who profoundly understood the essence of the Soviet world, devised this precise and pitiless formula: "Whoever controls the past controls the future." Orwell was not the first to say this, though. Mikhail Pokrovsky, the first Soviet Marxist historian, anticipated Orwell when he wrote that history is politics applied to the past.

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