Paul Goble
Staunton,
August 7 – A VTsIOM poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Russians have
a positive attitude toward Soviet symbols but that a significant share of them
do not know what those symbols stand for, a measure of the extent to which the
Soviet past is being rapidly transformed for many of them from a harsh reality
to an attractive myth.
More
than two thirds of Russians, the poll finds, have a positive attitude toward
the hammer and sickle and the red star, while about only one in ten have a
negative one. At the same time, six percent don’t know what the hammer and
sickle stands for, and ten percent don’t know what the red star symbolizes (nr2.ru/News/politics_and_society/VCIOM-bolshinstvo-rossiyan-lyubyat-sovetskuyu-simvoliku-103322.html).
That this should
be a concern not only for Russians but for everyone is suggested by Dmitry
Bykov in his appreciation of Robert Conquest who made “a more principled and in
a certain sense more significant” contribution to the understanding of the
Soviet period and the Great Terror than even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (novayagazeta.ru/arts/69454.html).
Unlike
Solzhenitsyn, Bykov points out, “Conquest justly suggested that Stalin was not
a communist and in general for us Bolsheviks ideas were not a fetish” and
argued instead that terror was something independent of ideology but very much
rooted in certain national traditions like those of Russia.
That
insight is important, he suggests, both for Russians and the West, many of whom
in both places are too quick to assume that having ceased to be communist,
Russia is no longer a place where the most horrific things can happen. Conquest
understood that this was not the case, and it is unfortunate that his words
have not been attended to as much as they should.
“Russia,
communist or Bolshevik or Stalinist, call it what you like, was an organic
continuation of tsarist Russia and passed through the same oprichniki” that had
been true of the time of Ivan Grozny, Bykov says. “And this is what Conquest
showed,” that terror was an attractive option for its leaders and its people all
too often.
There
are several reasons for this, the Moscow commentator says. First, terror has
the great advantage for many in that it eliminates any sense of personal
responsibility and always allows people who are part of it to deny that fact.
Second, terror isn’t based on ideology; it is based on the interests of the
rulers. And third, terror doesn’t need or promote a strong economy.
Conquest’s
“The Great Terror” was not devoted to any “ideological unmasking,” Bykov says.
In fact, the historian found much “useful and healthy” in Russian socialism. Instead, he showed that Russian history,
including its Stalinist period, was “an extra-ideological history,” one that
occurred not because of a specific set of ideas but rather because of specific
interests.
The
time may have come in Russia again to ban Conquest’s book again, Bykov
suggests, “because the moral of this book is horrific:” guilt may lie not with
what was Soviet but rather with what is Russian and “that Russia alone hasn’t
been able to think of anything more interesting than the Great Terror.”
“That
is what Conquest showed the world,” Bykov concludes, “and that is why his book
hasn’t generated any interest in Russia since the perestroika period.”
To
say this is not to say that the horrors of the Stalinist period were not worse
than those Putin has visited upon the country – at least to date. Information
about those horrors continues to come out, although just like Conquest’s great
book, it seldom attracts the attention either in Russia today or the West.
One
especially noxious feature of the Stalin system, for example, was the existence
of special “hospital laboratories” where Soviet counterparts of the Nazi Dr.
Mengele experimented on human victims. Few want to talk about that or about the
fact that the NKVD/MGB doctor who headed them was given only a ten year
sentence.
His
case, which involved the death by poisoning of many Soviet citizens and
Russians abroad, has now been documented by Vladimir Ignatov, Executioners and
Executions in the History of Russia and the USSR (in Russian, Moscow, 2014) and
now summarized online at
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