30 October 2024
by Lev Shlosberg
Source: Facebook
Today Valery Fadeev, a former journalist, intellectual, and one-time talented man, now unfortunately for himself and society finding himself chair of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, after laying flowers at a memorial to victims of political repression in Moscow, told an Interfax journalist: ‘That which we see now – yes, we have a complicated, tough situation, we are engaged in war with the West. And there are some minimal restrictions on those who actually side with the enemy; this is not repression, these are minimal sanitary measures.’ Sanitary. This about people.
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Fadeev tried to devalue the suffering of victims of contemporary political repression with the help of the suffering of victims of repression of the 20th century – having fallen into history, and therefore already cooled off, not on the front burner. Strangers. Others. ‘Well, what kind of repression? God forbid we experience firsthand what political repression is. There was repression in 1937-38, when 740,000 people were shot, in large part innocent people. To this day we do not know how many priests were executed in the 1920s and 1930s. This is repression,’ Fadeev told the journalist.
A distinguishing feature of Soviet thinking was always the denial of the value of one human life, the suffering and personal future of one person. In the Soviet worldview, one person was not a victim. There must be many victims, then they are sacrifices; the sacrifice must be on a mass scale.
The Bolsheviks began repressions immediately after the October Revolution, but they did not immediately become mass-scale. It took time for the authorities to acquire a taste for blood. 1937 came as a consequence not only of Stalin’s growing paranoia and his panic after the 17th Congress of the CPSU(b), at which, according to many sources, he lost the general secretary election to Kirov, but because when the moloch of repression was just beginning to move, many representatives of the Soviet elite hoped that the repression would not become mass-scale and would not impact them personally. They were so devoted to the leader, they served the party’s cause so faithfully, they worked so hard and so honestly.
Who could have thought how life would turn out? And it turned out to be frightening. Of the 1,956 delegates to that very same 17th Party Congress, 1,108 were arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary crimes. Over the course of 8 days, 97 members and candidates for membership of the party Central Committee (out of 139 people) were executed, another five committed suicide, and Kirov was killed. In a matter of days, the ‘Congress of Victors’ became the ‘Congress of Enemies of the People.’
‘Tell Comrade Stalin – a horrible mistake has been made!’ several of them said at their trials. But these were not ‘mistakes.’ This was the planned destruction of a class of independent citizens – not necessarily dissidents and dissenters, but simply victims of a campaign to ‘search for enemies of the people.’
The mechanism of political repression does not depend on the scale of repression. It depends exclusively on the political decision to fight for power with the help of the state machine and the use of violence.
In every wave of repression there is always a first person to be slandered, a first to be illegally arrested, a first to be illegally imprisoned, a first to be tortured, a first to be executed. The first victim is never the last, because violence realizes its impunity and breaks out into the operational expanse of lawlessness. Every mudslide begins with the first drop. And then there’s no stopping it.
Valery Fadeev is a tragic figure of modern Russian history. He could not resist the temptation to be an advocate for a dehumanized state in an era when the preservation of humanity, compassion, and humanism in society remained the only guarantee of saving a dying country.
Having mixed up the protection of human rights and the protection of the rights of the state, Valery Fadeev began to justify any state policy, as though he did not understand where the flow of cruelty was taking him, as though he ‘did not feel the country beneath him.’ His speeches are heard, much to his regret. And that makes them even more frightening.
Translated by Alyssa Rider
