11 September 2024
Source: Novaya Gazeta
The political struggle is now being waged not for power, which is totally concentrated in the hands of one person, but for a picture of the world
The Federal Portal of Draft Regulatory Legal Acts has published a draft order by Russia’s Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, ‘On amending Order No. 21 of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation dated 05/02/2008 “On organising the activities of the Prosecutor’s Office with a view to the enforcement and monitoring the enforcement of Russian Federation Law ‘On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression”.’
The upcoming order reads as follows:
‘Having regard to the main strategic objective of the State Policy on Perpetuating the Memory of the Victims of Political Repression, approved by Order No. 1561-r of the Government of the Russian Federation dated 15/08/2015, and taking into account the changes introduced by Order No. 1564-r of the Government of the Russian Federation dated 20/06/2024 on the inadmissibility of rehabilitation and acquittal of persons guilty of serious and very serious crimes, war crimes, and crimes against peace and humanity… the authorities shall be provided with documentary materials with which to restore historical justice and the rights of victims of political repression, preventing the acquittal of Nazi accomplices and traitors to the Motherland.”
In simple terms, this means that relevant departments within the Prosecutor’s Office will have to dig through a huge volume of cases held there regarding the rehabilitation of victims of political repression during the Stalin years and revise decisions that were made in successive waves in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s.
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office itself and Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2002, over the entire rehabilitation period, as of 1 January 2002, over four million citizens were rehabilitated. Surely, only a handful of these rehabilitated people, and even their children, are still living.
There are unlikely to have been many cases of wrongful rehabilitation, but then, not many are needed, since the important thing is to show a ‘trend’. To create an ideological basis for the liquidation of Memorial in 2021, one case was enough (discovered, incidentally, by a certain Israeli citizen): a certain Dmitry Makarchuk participated in the mass execution of Jews in 1943 and was convicted of treason in the 1940s but appeared in the Memorial database. That is to say, he was indeed rehabilitated by mistake.
In a caseload of many millions, it is possible other bad decisions will emerge. But is this really the most pressing issue for Russia? The right response, from the point of view of the authorities, would be “yes”. Moreover, Prosecutor General Krasnov is not acting on his own initiative but carrying out a recent (June) government decree.
This is a direct quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984:
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”.
The hero of Orwell’s novel worked in a department tasked with rewriting previously published newspapers. The Prosecutor General is essentially ordering the same thing to be done: ‘To report on the activities of prosecution agencies in the media, based on the constitutional principle of ensuring the protection of historical truth, as enshrined in Part 3, Art. 67.1, Part 3, of the Constitution of the Russian Federation.’
What is at issue is also ‘rehabilitation’, but the rehabilitation of Stalinism. Putin never explicitly approved of Stalinist repression and, as you will recall, even opened the ‘Wall of Grief’ on Sakharov Avenue. But there are probably plenty of people waiting for Stalin to be reinstated as a ‘firm hand’ and hero of Russian history, both in the president’s circle and, more particularly, in the electorate on which the regime relies. The rehabilitation of Stalinism will indirectly legitimise the current political repression in the eyes of citizens.
Attempting to rewrite Russian history in order to remove anything dark or frightening would be inherently contradictory. Many of those who suffered repression in the 1930s–1950s were supporters of the previous (pre-1917) government and opposed the Bolsheviks as usurpers. So how can we navigate through all this and build a common ‘heroic’ narrative? That is a question for propagandists.
Pierre Bourdieu defined symbolic power, which is the basis of all its other forms, as ‘the power to create things with words.’ Let us not deviate from the classical definition. We will only add that symbolic power means that the opposite might also be possible: with words, to make it so that past events ‘never happened.’
The highly dubious criminal case of Yury Dmitriev, who investigated the site of the Sandarmokh massacre, the liquidation of Memorial and the Sakharov Centre (designated a ‘foreign agent’), the crackdown on historians and, after the start of the special military operation, disproportionate prison terms for anyone characterising the events taking place in Ukraine in a different way to that mandated by the Ministry of Defence, should by rights be seen as censorship. Just as, according to Carl von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of politics by other means, so political repression is essentially a continuation of censorship, but by more radical means.
The line between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, in my opinion, should be drawn with regard to what is at stake in the political struggle. At the previous stage, until February 2024, repression primarily targeted those who sought to encroach – even if only from their own point of view – on political power (such as the participants in the ‘Bolotnaya affair’). The transition to totalitarianism is characterized by a change in what is at stake. Now it is the very picture of the world and, above all, the place in this picture (in history) of President Vladimir Putin. The figure of Stalin the Victor is just one of the supporting elements of this picture.
Power no longer rests on law; it rests only on ideology, which legitimizes it in the eyes of the ‘majority.’ But no one, including sociologists, knows what this majority consists of or to what extent it can be relied upon. Censorship and repression become more severe the more unconvincing the picture of the world the authorities seek to impose on us.
Translated by Lindsay Munford
