Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 14 – The Kremlin’s
recent moves against the Ukrainian library in Moscow, Petr Pavlensky, Memorial,
and the Ingush Human Rights Center represent “a transition of repression to a
new level,” one that points ultimately toward a new “great terror” like the one
Stalin unleashed in 1937, according to Lev Ponomaryev.
The attack on the Moscow Library of
Ukrainian Literature, the longtime human rights campaigner says, was clearly
designed to sow “fear and horror” among “all those who seek to find out about
the history, culture and political reality of Ukraine” lest they learn things
the Kremlin doesn’t want them to (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5645BA7DCEB30).
The Pavelensky case, he continues,
is “an obvious example of selective and inadequate application of the law” in
such a way that Russians are given to understand that no one is safe from the
actions of the authorities regardless of how he or she behaves. As under
Stalin, a charge can be lodged against anyone.
And the new charges that the
Memorial Human Rights Center is engaged in “’subversive’” and “’anti-constitutional’”
acts crosses yet another line. Earlier, the authorities treated what Memorial does as “’political
activity.’” Now, they are treating it as
criminally close to extremism.
When Moscow, in response to the
adoption of the Magnitsky List, introduced the requirement that those NGOs
receiving money from abroad must register as “’foreign agents,’” the government
insisted that this registration requirement would not introduce any limitations
on their actions.
“However,” Ponomaryev points out, “very
soon, the Central Election Commission took a decision about not allowing
representatives of ‘agents’ as election observers.” Obviously, he continues, “the
authorities will never allow an army of independent observers” to cast doubt on
“’the legitimacy’” of Russian elections.
“Now has come the next step: the
treatment of criticism as ‘subversion of the constitutional system;’ and this
is not as comic as it might appear on first glance,” the human rights leader
says.
Opposition figures have treated each
new repressive action with the suggestion that it points to a new 1937, he
says, but the authorities have gone out of their way to discredit that idea and
insisted that each of their actions must be treated individually rather than
seen as part of some general plan.
“But let us consider carefully just
what the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937 was,” Ponomaryev suggests.
“Above all,” he says, “this was the
final stage of the evolution of political repressions” that began when the
Soviets punished those who took arms against them, expanded when Stalin punished
those who in the leadership who opposed his policies, and then extended this
kind of repression to society as a whole.
“The true meaning of these
repressive acts also was obvious: Stalin understood quite well that in the case
of the collapse of his regime namely those will good training and
pre-revolutionary ideas about normal life would lead the country out of the
communist dead end” into which he had driven it.
The next stage was the murder of Sergey
Kirov on December 1, 1934, an action that Stalin exploited to declare any
criticism of his policies by anyone as “’the moral support of terror.’”
Stalin’s path to the Great Terror
like Mao’s to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Ponomaryev argues, “was
no accident. The goals of both was to paralyze society with fear, to make
shootings as commonplace as they were in the civil war, and what is the main
thing to take away any desire among the elites to influence the development of
government policy.”
“And we see,” the rights activist
says, “that Putinism is evolving in the very same direction. His first victims
were major independent business, independent media, and independent
politicians.” Now he has taken the next step by accusing human rights activists
of seeking to destroy the state.
The Putin regime has provided itself
with law-like possibilities to ban meetings and censor the press and the
Internet. “It has worked out means of persecuting actions which earlier were
considered by everyone to be completely legal.”
And it has exceeded the actions of other authoritarian regimes which all
seek to “equate criticism with extremism.”
Russian
society has reacted in a “sluggish” fashion to these steps, and consequently, “the
powers have made another step toward total control” of public life. Indeed,
Ponomaryev says, they have so broadened in an anti-constitutional way the meaning
of “’extremism’” that it can now be applied to any critical comments.
That is not to say there has been no
reaction, and the Kremlin has taken steps to try to limit it as much as
possible, with military actions in Ukraine and now Syria, but both of those
entail the risk that bodies will be coming home and that there will be a
revival of “’the Afghan syndrome’ in full measure.”
And the actions of the long haul
truck drivers show the danger facing the Kremlin. The truckers were able to “instantly
organize themselves in a dozen regions and paralyze movement on the roads.
Neither the acquisition of Crime, nor the defense of Asad, nor the unending
intrigues of President Obama and President Poroshenko continually unmasked by
television could distract them from their impoverished position.”
“A non-democratic regime when it
finds itself at a dead end usually seeks to eliminate growing dissatisfaction
by three means,” Ponomaryev says. First,
itt may promote “a military-chauvinist psychosis” but that only works for a
while and can lead to open confrontation with the West.
Second, such a regime can unleash “paranoia
against ‘internal enemies,’” but the persecution of the remaining human rights
organizations which are well-known in the world can satisfy only those who are
professionally angry viewers of talk shows.” Most people won’t be mobilized by
that.
And third, in the face of rising
popular anger, the regime can unleash “a broad purge” of all those who don’t
fit into the regime’s matrix, including entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. One
should note,” Ponomaryev says, that the regime is suggesting that such people “from
the middle class” are “enemies.”
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