Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 21 – All too often,
Lev Ponomaryev and Yevgeny Ikhlov warn in a new commentary, observers focus on one
or another Moscow action in isolation and do not connect the dots; but if one
does, they say, it becomes obvious that the Kremlin is preparing on a “rushed” basis
the foundations for a return to totalitarianism.
Wherever one looks, the human rights
activist and commentator say, the Putin regime is engaged in repression,
persecution, faked judicial procedures and new laws that can be used much as
Stalin did; and one must conclude that they are part of a broader plan rather than
mere accidents (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5C9328C96AB3D).
“Political repressions in contemporary
Russia have occurred earlier, but they bore a targeted character,” the two
say. Now, “a new stage has arrived:
legal norms, judicial and police practice are again being reoriented toward a
policy of mass political persecutions” with laws like those against “fake” news
and any criticism of the authority.
“In essence,” Ponomaryev and Ikhlov
say, “the new laws are a return to the provisions of the infamous paragraph
191.1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code about ‘slander on the Soviet state and social
system.’” Moreover, the new law on
“’criminal communities’” can be used not just against professional criminals
but against business leaders as well.
But as bad as the texts of these
laws are, they continue, the fact that the authorities routinely ignore the
laws in order to punish anyone they want, either to take revenge or to spread
terror in the population. And everywhere one looks, this pattern is spreading,
affecting ever more activities and ever more groups and individuals.
And as popular anger increases, the regime
is putting in place all the mechanisms it needs to “fabricate thousands of
criminal cases.” They catalogue case
after case of persecution and conclude that “all this shows that the mechanism
of mass political terror and repressive totalitarian practices has been created
and is ready to be used.”
Russia may not yet be at another
1937, although they suggest there are many cases with strong parallels to that
horrible year; but its government now has all the tools to do the same things in
the near future – and in the current environment, the existence of such tools
and their increasing use acts to intimidate Russians in the latest “hybrid”
fashion.
In a separate article (echo.msk.ru/blog/lev_ponomarev/2392263-echo/)
appended to this one, Ponomaryev traces the ways in which a trial in St.
Petersburg that has just begun represents the first trial of the Putin era that
fully resembles those of 1937, a confirmation of the argument that he and
Ikhlov advance.
They are not alone in seeing a sea
change in Russian realities in the direction of Stalinism at a time when many
commentators are suggesting that the Putin regime is in trouble or may even
collapse. Irina Pavlova, a US-based Russian historian, is one of them (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2019/03/blog-post_20.html).
She argues that what is occurring
now is “the end of the Putin NEP. Just as in the NEP of the 1920s, the
present-day New Economic Policy also has not led to a civilizational change of
the Western type.” And “just as in the
1920s, the regime has used NEP for its purposes not only economically but politically.”
“Behind its façade,” Pavlova says, “all
these years has occurred the foundation of a new edition of Stalinism” because
Russia’s current leaders have no other idea for the future except one taken
from the past and “modernized” slightly.
Russia as so often in the past, the historian
observes, is moving cyclically rather than escaping from its past. “The problem
is that neither Russia nor the West want to soberly look at the past and draw
lessons from it for their future survival.”
Ponomaryev and Ikhlov’s article, as well as Pavlova’s, may help to
change that.
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