CIA Document – National Cultural Development Under Communism
Document of14 pages, typewritten in 1957. It sat behind a classification stamp for 42 years. Nobody outside the intelligence community could read it until August 24 1999. On page 9 a CIA analyst described something that should disturb anyone who cares about history. He describes a government ordering the complete rewriting of an entire nation’s past and he uses a very specific word. He calls it falsified. The nation whose history was falsified is Tartaria.
The CIA document is titled National Cultural Development under Communism was addressed to all Muslim peoples of Russia and the East, Tatars of the Volga and Crimea, Kyrgyz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and Tatars of Transcaucasia, Chechens and mountain peoples of the Caucasus.
Readings from the CIA Document
The promise was explicit. “Your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are forever free and inviolate. Organize your national life in complete freedom. This is your right.” The rest of the 14 pages is a meticulous accounting of how every syllable of that promise was broken. Mosques destroyed, languages corrupted or suppressed, Muslim literary works banned unless they praised Russia and Russians.
Folk epics that had survived centuries were reclassified. The Kazakh epic Kublandi Batir, once celebrated as a monument of national literature, became what Soviet authorities called lo pata, extolling violence and brigandage. An entire culture’s literary heritage made illegal unless it served Russian interests.
Then page 9, August 9, 1944. The Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow issued a very different kind of directive, not a military order, a historical one. It was sent to the Tatar Provincial Committee. The instruction was to proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians.
The CIA analyst writes “what follows without hesitation or diplomatic softening. In other words, Tatar history was to be falsified.”
Rewriting the History of Tartar-Russia (Tartaria)
In order to eliminate references to great Russian aggressions and to hide the facts of the real course of Tatar-Russian relations, the analyst continues, in the CIA‘s own words. “A government ordered the history of a specific territory rewritten.” A CIA analyst documented that order and called it falsification. Truthful histories were physically destroyed, and the CIA‘s own report about all of this was classified for over four decades. The question is what was so dangerous about the history of Tartaria that it required to be falsified in the first place.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, first edition ever published. Edinburgh, 1771. Tartary, a vast country in the northern parts of Asia, founded by Siberia on the north and west. This is called Great Tartary, was described as the largest country in the world.
Hidden Maps of Tartar-Russia (Tartaria)
That’s where the mystery begins. Hundreds of maps from the 16th to the 18th century labeled a massive region simply as Tartaria. Then, by the 19th century, the name had almost disappeared.
That disappearance has fueled theories of a lost civilization, while historians offer a different explanation. Either way, it doesn’t
CIA-RDP78-02771R000200090002-6 – NATIONAL CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT UNDER COMMUNISM
PDF Document Below: Left Nave Page 10, Actual Page 9 on right. 3rd (Large) Paragraph Down
Library of Congress – Worlds Revealed Geography & Maps at the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Tartary Link
