History Is Bigger Than Any Flag

What follows comes from my own experiences, my reading, and, naturally, my limitations. My opinions are mine. Facts, however inconvenient we may find them, remain facts. One does not excuse the other: disagreeing with an interpretation does not give anyone the right to rewrite what happened.

It was 2008, and I was in Russia. I was young, engaged to a beautiful Russian woman, and just a few months away from our wedding. A wedding that, like certain economic forecasts and campaign promises, never quite materialized.

That year, Dmitry Medvedev became president of the Russian Federation on May 7. The following day, Vladimir Putin, who had left the Kremlin after two consecutive terms, became prime minister. On paper, it was a perfectly legal reshuffling of offices. But even then, people were asking where the power had actually gone.

I was deeply interested in the country's history. History had always been my favorite subject, in fact. I loved dates, wars, revolutions, historical figures, the great turning points. Like so many students, I thought I knew World War II reasonably well. What I learned on that trip was that knowing what happened and understanding how another people remember it are two very different things.

The Old Man in Red Square #

We were walking through Red Square when I noticed an elderly man reciting something. My beginner's Russian wasn't good enough to make out exactly what he was saying. Truth be told, I could barely tell where one sentence ended and the next began. So I asked my fiancée.

She explained that he was talking about the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

That caught me off guard. Not because I denied the Soviet Union's role in the war, but because the version of history I'd absorbed in Brazil—from school, books, films, and popular culture—placed the United States at the center of the victory. Of course I knew Hitler had been defeated by the Allies. But in my mind, the Americans occupied a much bigger part of that story. Standing there, listening to that old man, I realized that Moscow remembered the war from a very different center of gravity.

That was what surprised me. I hadn't discovered a different war. I'd discovered that the same war could live in people's memories in radically different ways, even when the underlying facts were the same.

And those facts matter. Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Eastern Front was the largest and deadliest theater of the war in Europe. Soviet forces stopped the German advance, launched counteroffensives, and took Berlin in 1945. None of this erases D-Day, the American and British contribution, or the efforts of the other Allies. It simply means we cannot turn a collective victory into the heroic story of one country alone.

Nor does any of that make Soviet history innocent. In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland after the German invasion and took part in partitioning the country under the secret protocol of the German-Soviet pact. The Soviet state could be an aggressor at one stage of the war and decisive in defeating Nazism at another. Both things can be true.

It was on that walk that I first began to think seriously about the word 'narrative.' Not in the lazy sense that everyone gets to invent their own truth, but in the sense that someone always decides what to emphasize, what to explain, what to leave out, and where a story ought to begin. Even school textbooks deserve that kind of scrutiny. A study published in 2021 examined how Brazilian high-school history textbooks presented World War II. It doesn't establish what I personally studied decades earlier. My memory is my own. But it does show that the selection and arrangement of historical events are legitimate subjects of historical research.

Hannah Arendt made a distinction that might have saved me a few years of confusion: facts are not opinions. In her 1967 essay 'Truth and Politics,' she explored how vulnerable factual truth becomes when struggles for power try to reduce it to just another convenient version of events. Interpretations can be debated. Whether something happened is not decided by a vote.

The Prediction I Thought Was an Exaggeration #

During that same walk, my fiancée said something I have never forgotten: 'You know, Pablo, Putin is going to be prime minister now, but he'll never really give up power. He wants the USSR back.'

At the time, I thought she was exaggerating. After all, I was a foreigner fascinated by that history. She was someone who had grown up much closer to its consequences. No amount of reading quite erases that difference.

I can't turn a private conversation from 2008 into proof of Putin's innermost intentions. Nor do I believe that today's Russia is simply the Soviet Union brought back to life. What I can say is that the years that followed gave her concern more weight: the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008; the occupation and internationally unrecognized annexation of Crimea in 2014; and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022.

When a state decides that its memories, its security, or its past greatness entitle it to another people's territory, the nation stops being a community of human beings and becomes a justification for subjugating them. Freedom is reduced to an administrative detail.

I considered calling the present war a new Holodomor. I understand the emotional impulse, but historically it would be imprecise. The Holodomor was the famine caused by the Stalinist regime's policies in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, which killed millions of people. The invasion today is a different tragedy, with different circumstances and different responsibilities. We don't need to confuse the two to recognize something deeply troubling in both: when entire populations are treated as instruments of power, human lives become disposable.

Freedom Belongs to No Political Party #

Don't ask me to choose between communism and capitalism as though I were choosing a religion, or to treat the political right and left as automatic certificates of virtue. Economic systems can be debated. Public policies can be compared. Ideas can be criticized. The problem begins when a set of ideas becomes so sacred that reality no longer matters, and people can be sacrificed in its name.

In his 1689 'Letter Concerning Toleration,' John Locke argued against using the coercive power of the state to impose religious beliefs. His thinking had historical limits, as so much thinking does. Still, his central question reaches across the centuries: what gives anyone the right to turn personal convictions into a license to persecute a neighbor?

John Stuart Mill went further in 'On Liberty' (1859), arguing that coercive interference in someone's life requires a justification grounded in preventing harm to others. Mill also feared the tyranny of public opinion. Not all oppression wears a uniform. Sometimes it comes from the neighborhood, the family, the group, the crowd that has decided how everyone else should live.

And in 1958, Isaiah Berlin reminded us that freedom has different meanings: freedom from interference, and the freedom to shape one's own life. Both matter. After all, what kind of freedom lets me praise my country's greatness, but won't let me exist outside the role it has chosen for me?

This is where politics stops being an abstraction and starts knocking on people's doors.

Another Conversation in the Same City #

While we were still in Moscow, my fiancée told me about the situation gay people faced. I remember how cautiously she brought it up, almost as though she wasn't sure how I'd react. That hesitation said a great deal. She spoke of prejudice and violence, and of the sense that someone could be beaten in the street while everyone around them simply looked the other way.

It disturbed me at the time. And this wasn't just her impression. In 2006 and 2007, Human Rights Watch documented attacks on LGBT demonstrators in Moscow and serious failures by police to protect them. Years later, Russia's 2013 law against the so-called 'propaganda' of nontraditional relationships made the exercise of basic rights more difficult still.

But there is an essential distinction here: there is no such thing as 'the Russian' as if an entire people were a single, uniform creature. There were Russians protesting, being attacked, standing up for their neighbors, and challenging the authorities. To reduce a whole population to a single trait would be to repeat, on a smaller scale, the very intellectual violence I claim to oppose.

You don't have to approve of someone else's way of life, understand whom they love, share their religion, or agree with their convictions to recognize one elementary principle: they have as much right as I do to live in safety. Disagreement is not permission to humiliate. Tradition is not a license to beat someone. And no culture should be an excuse for the cowardice of watching an assault and not caring.

Not Everything Is a Matter of Perspective #

Here I need to correct something I might easily say myself in a moment of impatience: 'Everything is a matter of perspective.' No. There are different perspectives on the same facts. There are competing interests and selective memories. But a person being assaulted is not a point of view. An invasion is not just an opinion. A life lost is no less lost because someone has managed to tell a convincing story about it.

In 1945, Karl Popper formulated the famous paradox of tolerance: a society that extends unlimited tolerance to those determined to destroy tolerance itself risks losing it. That is not an invitation to silence every opponent. Popper's own argument leaves plenty of room for rational disagreement. The limit comes when intolerance replaces discussion with persecution and violence.

Being tolerant, then, does not mean agreeing with everybody, much less pretending to be neutral between the person throwing punches and the person taking them. It means recognizing a dignity in others that does not depend on my approval. And it means resisting violence without becoming what I'm fighting against.

Arendt's distinction between power and violence, developed in her 1970 work, is useful here too. Acting together, persuading others, and building a public life are not the same as forcing people into submission. Violence can destroy political relationships; it is no simple substitute for legitimacy.

And perhaps this is what exhausts me most about political arguments today. The slightest political convictions can be enough to make us hate one another. The strongest convictions sometimes leave us simply disillusioned. Somewhere along the way, we forget that the person who disagrees with us is still a person, not an avatar of the enemy camp.

I'm not saying that every ideology has committed the same crimes, that every political choice has the same consequences, or that oppressors and the oppressed always share equal blame. That would be a false equivalence. I'm saying something more uncomfortable: any conviction can stop being thought and turn into fanaticism the moment someone decides that being on the right side means no longer having to question their own actions.

I'm writing this at 1:51 in the morning, tired and with absolutely no intention of settling centuries of political philosophy in a single essay. But perhaps the conclusion can fit into one line: defending freedom requires us to recognize the humanity of others, even when they're nothing like us.

And if the best thing you can say about yourself is that you're on the right or the left, I've got some bad news: you can still be nothing more than an asshole waving a flag.

Look out for your fellow human being. Learn to be human. Work on becoming a better person without demanding that the entire world turn into a copy of you.

In the end, that is what my walk across Red Square gave me. Not a chance to trade one narrative for another and come away convinced I had the whole truth, but a reason to be a little more suspicious of the certainties that fit so neatly into a slogan.