Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 23 – De-Stalinization
will have occurred not when everyone denounces Stalin in a chorus at the
direction of the state but rather when each person can assess him in his or her
own way and have debates about him, Vladimir Lukin says. Unfortunately, Russia
has not succeeded in taking that step away from Stalinism into a better future.
In an interview on Ekho Moskvy,
Lukin, the former diplomat and human rights ombudsman, said that only if that
happens will it be possible to separate the man and the myths and recognize
both the crimes he committed and the successes he achieved. Until then,
Russians will live with those myths (echo.msk.ru/programs/year2014/1439436-echo/).
That in turn will mean that some in
Russia will continue to celebrate him by treating him in isolation from his
crimes or to denigrate him by ignoring what he did for the country, and it will
mean that Stalinism will survive as an epithet that will be applied positively
or negatively to developments in Russia now and in the future.
Indeed, Lukin argues, because Stalin
was both a criminal and a hero, “de-Stalinization will be deeper and more
complete the more freely and in a cultured sense it is possible to conduct
discussion about this myth” and thus overcome it. As long as the state orders
that people think one way or the other about Stalin, Stalinism will continue.
He gives as an example the case of
Bonapartism in France. That exists “to
this day” as do opponents of that idea. “But France has been de-Bonapartized
because to say that a Napoleon I or even a III will come to power is even funny
in France. It is a completely different country … and each is free to express
his opinion” about that.
Attitudes in Russia about Stalin as
a myth, Lukin continues, reflect a fundamental divide as far as ideas are
concerned. As long as some believe that the state is the main value and the
empire an unquestioned thing, then “the myth will be one and it will always be
one.” But if the values of the human person are paramount, then attitudes will
be “different in principle.”
Lukin says that his view of Stalin
as a man is simple: “It is extremely negative. He was a son of a bitch,” given
how he behaved. But his view of Stalin
as a political figure is more complicated because political decisions reflect
not only values but also what is possible at a particular place and time.
(He notes that his parents were
arrested in 1937 and spent two years in the camps, with his father than serving
in the Red Army during World War II. Both his parents “couldn’t bear Stalin.”
On the one hand, they viewed Lenin as “the ideal,” but on the other, they “didn’t
separate Stalin from victory” over Hitler.)
He says that the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact shows his own divisions. At a personal level, Lukin says, he very much
opposes the pact and what it represented. But considering the pact at a
political level, his views are more variegated because anything that Stalin
might have done differently would have had its own “serious pluses and its own
serious minuses.”
On another issue, Lukin says he is
an opponent of lustration because in his view, it would become just another
occasion for settling accounts much as Bulgakov suggested in his novel “The
Master and Margarita,” and he argues that overcoming Stalinism and the Stalin
myth is going to take a long time.
“We have come a long way from Stalinist
stereotypes,” Lukin says, but not nearly far enough. Many continue to discuss
all current developments in terms of Stalin, but in fact, they “do not have a
relationship to Stalinist affairs then.”
The situation is very different, and using the Stalin myth to discuss
the situation now shows how far Russia still has to go.
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