12 September 2024
by Nikolai Epple
Source: Facebook
This story may well be lost in the frenzy of the news cycle, but it really shouldn’t. We’re talking about the amendments to the State Policy Concept for Perpetuating the Memory of the Victims of Political Repression and the draft order of the Prosecutor General’s Office on revoking decisions on the rehabilitation of “Nazi accomplices” and “traitors to the Motherland”. Essentially, this is an attempt to legally formalise everything that has been happening in recent years with the memory of Soviet state terror in Russia, the most recent example being a wave of dismantling of Last Address plaques and desecration of memorials to the victims of Soviet terror in Sandarmokh, Krasny Bor, and other places. This attempt to formalise things is primarily symbolic. The process of rehabilitation has always gone alongside a rejection of repressive policies that came before: following Stalin’s death, after the beginning of perestroika, and then finally the 1991 Rehabilitation Law (which is actually the only legislative act in post-Soviet Russia that classifies the USSR as a totalitarian state and condemns its crimes). And now that we see this backwards movement, the state adopting terror as government policy, it is therefore quite logical to formalise this “de-rehabilitation”.
I shall draw upon an excerpt originally published by Novaya Gazeta, a post by Grigory Vaypan, and I quote:
It’s hard to overestimate the significance of this document. Basically, a campaign has officially been launched to de-rehabilitate the victims of Soviet terror. There have already been cases in recent years where rehabilitation has been revoked. But this was the first announcement about the need to put this ‘work’ ‘on a permanent footing’. (…) The main purpose behind it (…) is to essentially discredit the idea of rehabilitating the victims of Soviet terror. As is the case with the use of terror, where one need only repress a single person to keep many thousands of people in a state of fear, so it is with rehabilitation – there is no need to revoke millions of decisions if you can sow distrust in the entire process. A few dozen or hundred cases to make a point, and lo and behold, rehabilitation was rife with errors and abuses all along! And the victims of repression, it turns out, were not victims at all but criminals who had been let off the hook. Since we are talking here about prosecutors revoking rehabilitation decisions they themselves made 20-30 years ago, ‘victim status’ is now most elusive – after all, it can be taken away at any moment. It’s like there are no longer any ‘victims of repression’ at all, in fact, just a list of people waiting to be background checked once again (perhaps there are more to come? Who knows how many there will be?) So you see, things aren’t so simple when it comes to “repression”, because at any moment it could turn out not to be repression at all, but the restoration of ‘historical truth’. The list of state crimes can simply be crossed out, as was done with the text of the Policy Concept. But sometimes, it seems, there is no need to cross things out, just to blur everything, suspend it all in the air, sow doubts, and cast shadows.
I shall include links in the comments to the key posts on this subject. My thanks to the esteemed authors Boris Vishnevsky, Igor Yakovlev, and Tamara Eidelman. If anyone knows of any other posts, please do provide the links.
And finally, one more quote, which although general in nature, merits a mention here. It is from Neighbours by Jan Tomasz Gross:
The history of a society can be conceived as a collective biography. And just as in a biography—which is also composed of discrete episodes—everything in the history of a society is in rapport with everything else. And if at some point in this collective biography a big lie is situated, then everything that comes afterward will be devoid of authenticity and laced with fear of discovery. And instead of living their own lives, members of such a community will be suspiciously glancing over their shoulders, trying to guess what others think about what they are doing. They will keep diverting attention from shameful episodes in the past, all the while defending their good name, seeing in their every failure a conspiracy of strangers.
Translated by Lindsay Munford
