The official Russian calendar lists Oct. 30 as the day to commemorate political prisoners, but the day is not yet “ours.” The notion of acknowledging the crimes of the Soviet state has not been fully accepted by Russian society, let alone the current political establishment.
Many Russians still believe that the entire issue is “foreign,” that it is being imposed on us by the West, that to confront the past would be divisive. Divisive not because they are committed Stalinists, but because many believe that condemning the crimes of the Soviet regime would demean them, or demean their parents and the older generations of true believers in Communism, darkening their memory and depriving them of something important. Also contributing to the amnesia is a deep traditional distrust of the intelligentsia — the “liberals,” “reformers,” “democrats” and “human-rights defenders” who are associated with condemnation of the past.
These feelings would fade away if they were not artificially sustained. Russians can see that historical research on Stalinism is being done by homegrown scholars, that more books on the subject are published in Russia than abroad. We are far past the time when an unbiased study of Soviet history was only possible outside Russia.
But the Kremlin’s political engineers continue to fuel a defensive stance. If a Baltic country, say, points at our past, Russian leaders promptly retort that Estonians or Latvians served under the Nazis. This is adolescent behavior.
Dealing with the past is first and foremost a challenge for the Russians themselves. We must show that we can deal with our past. The West has other problems, and former Soviet republics can justify their history by blaming Russia. We don’t have this luxury.
And Russians, especially the younger generation, appear ready to proceed. In a recent survey conducted for the Center for Strategic and International Studies by the Levada Center, a Russian polling organization, 45 percent of respondents agreed that “it is important to learn about the Stalin era to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.” Only 24 percent said that the country should “move forward and avoid stirring up the past.”
Memory should be activated. It should be evident in public life and in politics.
Everything around us is literally permeated with our Soviet legacy. Yet very few of the buildings, railways, canals and factories built by prisoners have memorial plaques. Streets and neighborhoods across all Russia are still named after leaders and even executioners of the Terror (often the same people). Most of the sites of executions and mass burials have not been identified. Millions of people still do not know where their forebears lie. To this day, Russia has no national museum of the Stalinist era, only regional and private ones.
The names of all the victims are not yet known. Memorial, the nongovernmental organization that has done the most work on uncovering the facts of Stalinism, has compiled a database of more than 2.6 million names (http://lists.memo.ru/index.htm), but it is far from complete. “To compile a full list, if the works continues at the present tempo, will take decades,” the head of Memorial, Arseny Roginsky, told an international conference.
If we view the task of restoring memory in broader terms, it becomes far greater. The state must accept responsibility for the difficult conditions of people who live in the decrepit housing and single-company towns of the 1930s. These conditions are the result of forced urbanization and industrialization achieved by borrowing against the future. The debt must now be repaid.
We have been speaking of victims. But who committed these crimes? The perpetrators not foreign occupiers or foreign agents. Our own killed our own — a fact difficult for the mind to accept, as Roginsky noted in that same speech: “When dealing with our past we are not capable of properly distributing the roles, we are not capable of putting the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ in their proper place.”
But each victim had very concrete “they” — those who followed orders, those who fulfilled some quota, those who set those quotas for the number of “enemies of the people” who had to be rounded up, those who formulated those policies. All of them shared one feature — all were functionaries of the state. The Soviet state was the chief perpetrator of the crimes of the Soviet era.
Recognizing this fact must be the first step in coming to terms with the past. But this is hard for a political system that insists on the infallibility of the state. This explains the amnesia — why there is no national museum, why textbooks are rewritten, why there are victims but not perpetrators. Policies that may appear as attempts to rehabilitate Stalin are really attempts by Vladimir Putin and his people to maintain the state as the only source of legitimacy in Russia.
This year witnessed the most dramatic instance of the Russian government acknowledging Soviet crimes. Speaking of the killing of thousands of Polish officers in 1940 by Soviet security police in the presence of Polish leaders, Putin said, “These crimes cannot be justified. ... They already have been given the correct moral and legal assessment.” Yet no legal action has ever been taken. Not a single trial has ever been held in Russia in connection with any act of terror committed by the Soviet state.
This is wrong. Acknowledging the crimes of the Soviet state would not mean the end of the Russian state. On the contrary, it would be a beginning. It would create a moral basis for battling corruption, for reforming governance and for a general improvement of the moral health of the nation. “We” and “they” — we and the state — remain in conflict, and it will not end until the Soviet past has been confronted.
Maxim Trudolyubov, editorial page editor of Vedomosti and currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.