Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 5 – “Putin’s Russia
has already long been a Reich” much like Hitler’s Germany, but ordinary
Russians now, like ordinary Germans 75 years ago, have not taken note of the
fact because so far the state’s repressive attentions have not been directed
primarily at them, according to Vitaly Portnikov.
Portnikov, a Ukrainian commentator
who earlier lived in Moscow for two decades, says that he reached this bitter
and unexpected conclusion because the Russian Investigation Committee has
announced plans to interview all citizens of Ukraine who are on the territory
of the Russian Federation (grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.230782.html).
So far, the committee has
interviewed some 4,000 of them, a small fraction of the millions of Ukrainian
citizens living in the Russian Federation, asking them about Ukrainian military
dislocations and plans. To interview all Ukrainian citizens will require much
if not all of the resources of the committee.
But “behind these boring lines is a
picture of growing insanity,” the emergence of a situation in which “every
individual who has in his pocket ‘not that’ passport will become the object of
attention of the law enforcement organs simply because he does not have the
happiness to be a Russian citizen or a citizen of some other country which has
surrendered to the Kremlin.”
If the Ukrainian answers these
questions, he may be committing treason against his own country; if he refuses,
he may find himself accused of a crime up to and including planning for a
terrorist act in Moscow. Given that
danger, he will likely sign whatever the Russian investigators require, just
like in 1937.
In short, what is taking place is “the
most banal rape under the form of an investigation. Ordinary fascism.”
Portnikov says that it is “difficult”
for him to understand how Russia could so rapidly degenerate in this way. When he lived in Moscow with a Ukrainian
passport, he never had the sense that that document alone put him “in a zone of
risk, in a zone of interests of the sadists from the Investigation Committee.”
Having watched what is going on now,
he continues, he “very well understand what the Jews of the preceding Reich
felt when on one fine day they were forced to wear yellow stars.”
“Citizens of Ukraine who are living in Russia now are in
a position equivalent to those Jews from the Reich,” he says, even while “the
Russians living alongside them do not feel this and do not understand” because
their lives are not yet being disturbed, exactly the same reaction of many
Germans to what the Nazis did to the Jews.
“I
assure you, my Russian readers, that this is only the beginning,” Portnikov
continues. After Russian officialdom gets
through with Ukrainian citizens, it will turn to “ethnic Ukrainians or even
no-Ukrainians or simply people who have relatives in Ukraine.” And the
questions and the sense of being separated out and isolated will spread.
Members
of these groups, of course, will not be able to get positions requiring any
clearance as the Georgians have already discovered And “ethnic Ukrainians with Russian passports
and other emigrants from Ukraine await the fate of the Georgians – even if
these Ukrainians will come running with the flags” of the secessionists.
In
short, whether they have noticed it or not, ordinary Russians living under the
Putin regime are facing as Pastor Niemoller moment, when they may assume that
the authorities are only coming for others but when in fact at the end of the
day those authorities will be coming for them as well.
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