Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 11 – Not long ago,
Vladimir Putin and his regime revived the Stalin-era term “national traitors”
to describe any Russian who opposes the policies of the Kremlin as a way to
isolate and perhaps ultimately punish them for this political crime. Now, he is
resuscitating another Stalin-era category “worker wreckers.”
Earlier this week, the Russian
interior ministry brought charges against employees of the Khrunichev Cosmic
Center for “intentionally damaging” engines for the Proton rocket, an action
that prompted Moscow blogger to reflect about what the return of the concept of
“wreckers” is all about (echo.msk.ru/blog/gagman/1337562-echo/).
In an online post yesterday, Oleg
Kozyrev said that he had to say “thank you” to the current powers that be for
doing so because as a result he has “begun to understand the past better.” He had always thought, he said, that “Stalinist
cases against ‘wreckers’ were connected simply with the very nature of a
repressive regime.”
That regime needed a constant flow
of new victims, and charges of “wrecking” were a way to guarantee that they
would appear. But the way in which these charges are being used now has forced him
“to rethink the past and see certain nuances in it” that he and many others had
missed.
Charges of sabotage and
identification of “worker wreckers” now are clearly designed not simply to come
up with victims but to provide an iron-clad defense of the leaders of any part of
the economy or the government against charges of incompetence, malfeasance or
other shortcomings.
“Wrecking” as a charge against workers allow such people to
insist that “they have organized the work process well, developed science,
[and] introduced technology;” in short, they have done everything right, only
to have their contributions undercut by workers who “on one dark night” come in
and destroy what they are supposed to be building.
But such charges do more than that,
Kozyrev says. They whitewash the entire regime by suggesting that any problems
in any branch are not the work of the power vertical but rather are the result
of the actions of ill-intentioned subordinates who must be rooted out and
punished if Russia is to flourish.
Once this process gets started and
articles in the media suggest it is likely to take off (izvestia.ru/news/572273), the blogger
continues, “we will find wreckers among doctors, among teachers, among
pensioners, [and] among those lying in a coma,” and Russians will learn that
their nefarious activities “explain all the failures in life in the economy.”
If Russia were a normal country, the
first people who should be arrested are those who are reviving this Stalin-era “criminal”
category. But Russia under Putin is far
from that, and the dangers of reviving such terms from the past will hit others
first and only much later boomerang on those promoting the idea of “wrecking”
as their excuse.
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