Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 12 – A Russian lawyer
who posed as a Stalinist and sought the rehabilitation of Stalin criminals,
sometimes successfully and sometimes not, in order to conduct what he calls “a
secret Nuremberg trial” against the Soviet system has brought his archive to
the West.
It shows that the Soviet secret
police were every bit as much a criminal group as were Hitler’s Gestapo and SS
and that there should but probably will never be a real Nuremberg trial in
which those who participated in its activities and the system which supported
them could be held accountable.
Aleksandr Busarov described his project,
code-named “Nemesis,” to Radio Svoboda’s Dmitry Volchek (svoboda.org/a/29933733.html https://echo.msk.ru/news/2424481-echo.html).
It was brilliant in its cleverness and simplicity and was designed to force the
Russian legal system to do the real work in exposing its Soviet predecessors.
Busarov’s plan, Volchek reports, was
to have “the legal machinery of Putin’s Russia,” without understanding what it
was doing, acknowledge the guilt of the Chekist system and bring sentences of a
kind to those who were its participants by calling for the rehabilitation Stalinist
criminals who had not yet received such vindication.
The Russian lawyer expected that the
Russian military prosecutors would be forced to conclude that those who had not
been rehabilitated really were criminals and therefore not qualify for rehabilitation
and that the authorities would specify that even while dropping the original
charges against them of being Trotskyites or other deviationists.
For this plan to work, Busarov had
to pose as a committed Stalinist who wanted justice for other Stalinists so
that they would view him not as some kind of democratic activist but as one of
their own; and he had to make sure that nothing about his plans surfaced in the
media which could have brought down the entire effort.
The lawyer began his effort in 2012
and sought the rehabilitation of senior secret police officials linked to Stalin
and Beria. He chose a variety of people
from a variety of periods so that his plan would not be apparent to
anyone. And he was convinced that “the
procuracy would take up the old criminal cases and confirm that the killers
couldn’t be exonerated.”
But as he confirmed and as Volchek
notes, things didn’t work out that way.
His appeals at first led the Russian
military court system to rehabilitate many of these people, albeit in secrecy rather
than in public even though the individuals involved had been responsible for
the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Soviet people. In the course of
2012-2013, Busarov was told that about 30 of those whose cases he raised had
been rehabilitated.
It appears, the lawyer says, that
after Putin’s re-election and the suppression of popular protests against
election fraud, the military justice system felt free to take these steps,
assuming that it had properly sensed the direction things were going in the
Russian Federation of today. And so Busarov decided to exploit this.
Continuing to pose as a Stalinist,
he was delighted by these rehabilitations and resolved to make sure that the
entire country found out about what its rulers were doing. To that end, he began sending letters to
various government offices demanding that the rehabilitated be give back the
honors and awards they had received and then lost.
For better or worse, this one-man
campaign was noticed, and other officials began to ask of the military
prosecutors what did they think they were doing. That led to cases in which the
system walked back the rehabilitations that the military justice system had
issued in response to Busarov’s original efforts.
“This was a completely unprecedented
case,” Busarov says. “There had never before been such a flood of de-rehabilitations
in the history of the procuracy.” And it had consequences for those who had
reached the decisions to grant these rehabilitations: they were in many cases
punished in one way or another.
But not all those Chekists who were
rehabilitated in 2012-2013 had their cases reversed, and Busarov began to send
more demands for the rehabilitation of other Chekists. But now things began to work out differently.
The prosecutors, perhaps warned about what such rehabilitations could lead to,
refused to rehabilitate any of them.
What was striking, Busarov
continues, is that no one asked what he was doing or why. The system treated
his requests as entirely legitimate even though what he was doing was a kind of
legal hooliganism designed to set the system against itself. And that prompted
him to expand his program in two ways.
On the one hand, he began to seek
justice not only for Chekists but also for their victims. And on the other, he
began to demand the rehabilitation of those charged not by the Stalinist regime
but by its Soviet successors. But in both cases, he was turned down: the
victims and especially the more recent ones weren’t going to get justice.
However, he did gain one important
victory: the creation of a personal archive of the correspondence he had with
official agencies, including sometimes secret materials that the Russian
military prosecutors sent to him to explain what they were doing or not doing.
However, the possession of such an archive became a problem.
Fearful that it would be confiscated
and he would be arrested or worse, Busarov decided to come to the West and
bring his archive with him and to share it with researchers in the West who
want to understand how the Soviet system operated and how its post-Soviet successors
are functioning as well.
His archive, Busarov says, shows that
the Soviet security police were “a criminal organization exactly like the SS
and Gestapo which were condemned at the Nuremberg tribunal.” And while no such
trial has been held or is likely to be held for the Soviet criminals, his archive
provides the legal basis for it.
He expresses the hope that “this
archive will be of interest not only to historians but to legal specialists who
could make the necessary conclusions and recognize the NKVD as the criminal
organization it was.” Busarov doesn’t say but clearly intends that they will
also draw conclusions about the nature of the Putin system as well.
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