Voluntary Stalinism of Today Far More Horrific than Enforced Stalinism of 1930s, Basilashvili Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 11 – The Soviet Union committed a most horrific crime, Oleg Basilashvili says. It destroyed “almost all who knew what freedom was,” and so when the chance for freedom did appear, there was no one among the Russians who was prepared to use it, although there were such people in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Georgia.

            In Stalin’s times, Russians resisted in the name of freedom, but they were repressed by force, the ethnic Georgian actor and Russian political says. Now, Russians are not forced to be Stalinists but rather voluntarily agree to be such, a far worse situation especially as concerns the future (facebook.com/groups/ChechnyaGlobalInitiative/permalink/1563312247170913/?__tn__=K-R).

            Under Stalin, it should be remembered, there was real resistance, with peasants resisting collectivization and Vlasovites prepared to fight against their own regime. There was an enormous group of people “who hated Stalin and the Soviet system in general. And consequently, the system required a GULAG” to survive.

            But “now, that isn’t needed,” Basilashvili says. Now, the population that is left “loves its leader even without a GULAG. Slavery caused by repression is horrific, but still more horrible is slavery where the stick doesn’t need to be used.”  The Soviet citizen in his cheap clothing was frightening. But now there is something worse.

           

            Far more horrible, he continues, is the Soviet type without Soviet conditions, who drives about in foreign cars, visits Europe but hates the West. No one forces such people to put symbols on their cars recalling and celebrating the past but “they all do it, without noting the duplicity and even comic nature of this ‘symbol of victory’ put on a Mercedes or Volkswagen.” 

            “This present-day voluntary neo-Stalinism and the voluntary rejection of the chance to be free is much more horrible than the atmosphere of the 1930s,” he continues.  “It marks the complete degradation” of the society possibly to the point where it can’t be reversed.  There were real people in the 1930s, but as a result of “negative selection,” bastards now dominate the scene.

            The beginning of perestroika, Basilashvili says, was marked with the appearance of Tengiz Abuladze’s remarkable film, “Repentance,” in which the son digs up the tyrant father and throws his remains to the winds. Unlike in Eastern Europe and a few republics, this message was too radical for most Russians to accept, and they chose not to repent but to deny.

            Still worse, any call to repentance came to be viewed as a slander on national and personal dignity. “Whom should we repent to? Before whom?’” Russians asked and ask. After all, “we saved all of them from fascism.”  Today instead of repentance, Russians have “Crimea is ours” and “rising from our knees.”

            Someone recalling the Abuladze film has suggested that Russians today, instead of casting the remains of the tyrant to the winds, have restored him to his old pedestal. “That is not entirely the case,” Basilashvili says. Instead, Russians have done something worse: they’ve propped up his corpse at home. And if it falls over, they put it back in place with an apology.