Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 14 – One of the most
horrific features of Stalin’s Great Terror at the end of the 1930s was the
dissemination of quotas to regional officials to identify, arrest, and punish a
specific number of Soviet citizens as “enemies of the people,” an action that
radically increased the spread of Stalin’s repressions across the country.
Now, there is evidence that the
regime of Vladimir Putin -- whether it is in its last days or not -- has sent similar
lists to regional FSB offices, something that could open the way to
uncontrolled repression and that at the same time could become a major reason
that the force structures, who remember what happened to themselves under
Stalin, may seek Putin’s ouster.
The possibility that such lists have
been disseminated is suggested by Kseniya Kirillova, a Novry region-2
commentator, in an article today about the travails of Yury Kuznetsov, a
Ekaterinburg blogger who has been in hot water in recent months for his posts
in support of Ukraine (nr2.com.ua/blogs/Ksenija_Kirillova/V-Rossiyu-vernulis-raznaryadki-na-vragov-naroda-92162.html).
Kuznetsov was called into the FSB
and the Investigative Committee for his posts, but “at the end of January,” a
decision appears to have been made not to bring charges against him. But “now,”
Kirillova says, Kuznetsov has new reasons to fear that the criminal
investigation against him is “all the same beginning.”
He told Novy Region-2 that the
Sverdlovsk oblast office of the FSB had spoken with two of his colleagues at work,
one of whom apparently stated that Kuznetsov had called for “killing
Muscovites.” In fact, the activist had called for “killing in oneself imperial
ambitions in order to become a normal Russian man.” The security police also
questioned his wife.
Kuznetsov’s friends and supporters
say that they have learned from leaks out of the FSB office that “a directive
was sent already in January ‘from above’ not to put forward” any cases “on ‘Ukrainian’
affairs’” that might not lead directly to guilty verdicts, an order that may be
causing the security police to be more careful.
But such suggestions, Kirillova
says, have led some among this same group of people to draw another and even
more disturbing conclusion: The FSB may have been given “’lists’ in which are
indicated the number of ‘enemies of the people’ which must be identified in
each specific region,” a clear echo of “the best traditions of the era of the ‘Great
Terror.’”
Kirillova
suggests that there is indirect confirmation for this in Putin’s own recent
reference to a “15 percent” increase in
the number of “extremist crimes,” an indication that he is thinking in
statistical terms about such activities and insisting that his subordinates in the
security agencies do the same.
Further,
she points out, if the FSB in each region is required to come up with a
specific number of “enemies of the people,” that would go a long way to
explaining why its officers would be calling on the population to denounce
others, for selfish or unselfish and “patriotic” reasons, and thus providing
the basis for new cases.
Regional
media have been playing up the patriotic angle, Kirillova notes, pointing to
the case of a concerned citizen ready and able to denounce someone she didn’t
know, much as happened in Stalin’s times, and who thus has helped the FSB now
bring charges against that individual as a member of “’the fifth column.’”
That
history and others like it, the commentator says, are “indicative in all
respects.” There is the “vigilant citizen” concerned only about the good of her
country, that she is prepared to denounce someone she has no direct knowledge
of on the basis of the denunciations of others, and what is “the main thing,” the
security police act on such suspect “evidence.”
If this
continues, then in the near future, Kirillova concludes, “the epidemic of
denunciations will only grow, while the occasions for the manifestation of ‘popular
vigilance’ will become ever more insignificant,” leading “either to full-scale
repressions” or “the paralysis of the work of the force structures as such,”
condemned as they will be to investigate everything.
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