There is every reason to believe that the falsification of history began in the days of the earliest civilizations. As soon as mankind began to preserve information about its past in one way or another, there were immediately those who were interested in distorting it. The reasons for this are very different, but basically it is the desire to prove to contemporaries the truth of the ideological and religious teachings that existed at that time using the examples of past years.
Basic methods of historical falsification
The falsification of history is the same fraud, but on an especially large scale, since entire generations of people often become its victims, and the damage caused to them has to be replenished over a long time. Historical falsifiers, like other professional swindlers, have a rich arsenal of tricks. Passing out their own conjectures as information allegedly taken from real-life documents, they, as a rule, either do not indicate the source at all, or refer to the one they themselves invented. Often known fakes published before are cited as evidence.
But such primitive tricks are typicalfor dilettantes. True masters, for whom the falsification of history has become a subject of art, are engaged in falsification of primary sources. It is they who own "sensational archaeological discoveries", the discovery of previously "unknown" and "unpublished" chronicle materials, diaries and memoirs.
Their activity, which is reflected in the Criminal Code, certainly includes elements of creativity. The impunity of these false historians is based on the fact that to expose them, serious scientific expertise is needed, which in most cases is not carried out, and sometimes it is also falsified.
Fakes of Ancient Egypt
It's easy to see how old the tradition is based on the falsification of history. Examples from ancient times can be proof of this. A striking evidence is the monuments of ancient Egyptian writing that have survived to our times. In them, the deeds of the pharaohs are usually depicted in a clearly exaggerated form.
For example, an ancient author claims that Ramses II, participating in the Battle of Kadesh, personally destroyed a whole horde of enemies, which ensured victory for his army. In fact, other sources of that era testify to the very modest results achieved that day by the Egyptians on the battlefield, and to the dubious merits of the pharaoh.
Falsification of the imperial decree
Another obvious historical forgery, which is appropriate to recall, is the so-called Konstantinov gift. According to this "document", the RomanEmperor Constantine, who ruled in the 4th century and made Christianity the official religion of the state, transferred the rights of secular power to the head of the church. And later they proved that its production dates back to the VIII-IX centuries, that is, the document was born at least four hundred years after the death of Constantine himself. It was for a long period the basis of papal claims to supreme power.
Fabrication of materials against disgraced boyars
The falsification of the history of Russia, carried out for political reasons, is clearly demonstrated with the help of one document relating to the reign of Ivan the Terrible. By his order, the famous "Facial Code" was compiled, which includes a description of the path traveled by the state from ancient times to the present day. This multi-volume tome ended with the reign of Ivan himself.
The last volume says that the boyars, who fell into the tsar's disgrace, were ruthlessly accused of numerous crimes. Since the rebellion of the sovereign's associates, which allegedly took place in 1533, is not mentioned in any of the documents of that era, there is reason to believe that it is a fiction.
Historical fakes of the Stalinist period
The wide-ranging falsification of Russian history continued in Stalin's times. Along with the physical massacre of millions of people, including party leaders, military leaders, as well as representatives of science and art, their names were removed from books, textbooks,encyclopedias and other literature. In parallel with this, the role of Stalin in the events of 1917 was extolled. The thesis about his leading role in the organization of the entire revolutionary movement was steadily introduced into the minds of the broad masses. It was a truly great falsification of history, which left its mark on the development of the country in the coming decades.
One of the main documents that formed a false idea of the history of the USSR among Soviet citizens was the Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, edited by Stalin. Among the myths included here, which have not lost their force to this day, absolutely false information about the victories of the “young Red Army” on February 23, 1918 near Pskov and Narva stands out. Despite the most convincing evidence of its unreliability, this legend is still alive today.
Other myths from the history of the CPSU(b)
From this "course" the names of all the figures who played a prominent role during the revolution and the Civil War were deliberately excluded. Their merits were attributed personally to the “leader of the peoples” or persons from his inner circle, as well as to those who died before the start of mass repressions. The true role of these people was, as a rule, very insignificant.
As the only revolutionary force, the compilers of this dubious document represented exclusively the Bolshevik Party, while denying the role of other political structures of that time. All prominent figures who were not among the Bolshevik leaders were declared traitors and counter-revolutionaries.
It was straightfalsification of history. The examples above are by no means a complete list of deliberate ideological fabrications. It came to the point that the history of Russia of past centuries was rewritten anew. This affected primarily the periods of the reign of Peter I and Ivan the Terrible.
Lie is a weapon of Hitler's ideology
Falsification of world history entered the arsenal of propaganda tools of Nazi Germany. Here it acquired a truly comprehensive scale. One of its theorists was the ideologist of Nazism Alfred Rosenberg. In his book The Myth of the 20th Century, he argued that the German defeat in World War I was entirely to blame for the betrayal of the Social Democrats, who stabbed their victorious army in the back.
According to him, only this prevented them, who had sufficient reserves, to crush the enemy. In fact, all the materials of those years indicate that by the end of the war, Germany had completely exhausted its potential and was in a critical situation. America's joining the Entente inevitably doomed her to defeat.
During the reign of Hitler, the falsification of history reached ridiculous forms. So, for example, on his orders, a group of theologians engaged in the interpretation of the texts of Holy Scripture in order to change the generally accepted idea of the role of Jews in biblical history. These, so to speak, theologians agreed to the point that they began to seriously assert that Jesus Christ was not a Jew at all, but arrived in Bethlehem from the Caucasus.
blasphemous lie about war
Extremely unfortunate fact is the falsification of the history of the Great Patriotic War. Unfortunately, it took place both at a time when the past of our country was completely controlled by the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and in post-communist times, when the burden of freedom was placed on the shoulders of the people and their ideologists, the ability to use which was destroyed over the long years of the totalitarian regime.
In the context of new historical realities, public figures appeared who put an equal sign between freedom and permissiveness, especially when it concerned the achievement of certain momentary goals. One of the main methods of political PR of those years was the indiscriminate denunciation of the past, reaching the complete denial of its positive aspects. It is no coincidence that even those components of our history that were previously considered sacred were subjected to fierce attacks by the figures of the new time. First of all, we are talking about such a shameful phenomenon as the falsification of the history of the war.
Reasons to lie
If during the years of the ideological monopoly of the CPSU history was distorted in order to elevate the role of the party in the victory over the enemy and depict the readiness of millions of people to die for the leader Stalin, then in the post-perestroika period there was a tendency to deny the mass heroism of the people in the fight against the Nazis and belittle the significance of the Great Victory. These phenomena are two sides of the same coin.
In both cases, deliberate lies are put at the service of specific politicalinterests. If in the past years the communists used it to maintain the authority of their regime, today those who are trying to make their political capital are trying to use it. Both are equally unscrupulous in their means.
Historical falsifications today
The pernicious tendency to reshape history, noted in the documents that have come down to us from ancient times, has successfully migrated into the enlightened XXI century. Despite all the opposition to the falsification of history, attempts to deny such dark pages of the past as the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the Holodomor in Ukraine do not stop. The creators of the so-called alternative theories, not being able to generally deny these events, are trying to cast doubt on their reliability, refuting insignificant historical evidence.
The relation of art to historical accuracy
Deliberate distortion of history is reflected not only in the works of party ideologists, but also in works of art. This should not be surprising, because it is fully a reflection of real life. However, here the matter is somewhat more complicated. Unlike science, art allows a certain fiction in the depiction of historical events, of course, only if the work of a writer or artist does not pretend to be documentary.
It should be noted that in recent years, in addition to the science fiction familiar to us since childhood, a genre called fantasy has become widespread. As in oneso in another case, the plots of works often develop in a historical canvas, distorted by the author in accordance with his artistic intention. Such an artistic phenomenon is singled out by art historians as an independent subgenre, called alternative history. It cannot be regarded as an attempt to falsify real events, but should be taken only as one of the artistic devices.
The fight against counterfeiters is everyone's business
Among the most effective ways to counteract attempts to falsify the history of our country, one should first of all name the commission created under the President of the Russian Federation, whose task is to combat this harmful phenomenon. Public organizations created locally are also of no small importance in this direction. Only by joint efforts can we put a stop to this evil.
