Paul Goble
Staunton, November 1 – The trauma of Stalinist terror will remain with Russians until they face up to it, Ivan Kurilla says; but instead of doing that, many are trying to forget it entirely, use “whataboutism” to diminish its horrors, and insist that, like Hitler and the autobahns, Stalin did many good things and won the war.
As long as a generation that experienced that terror on themselves or their parents, however, the great terror will remain a deep wound, the professor at St. Petersburg’s European University says; and even when that generation passes from the scene, its heirs will still be affected by the Stalinist era (rosbalt.ru/piter/2020/10/30/1870818.html).
Another “and more productive strategy,” Kurilla suggests, is “to speak about it and to name the victims and their executioners by name. Only then can one make sense of what happened, draw conclusions and learn to live with this past.” And more important remembering the past in this way is the best insurance that it will never be repeated.
The scholar’s words are one of the large number of responses to the recent decision of officials in St. Petersburg to remove a tablet that listed the names of those who had been taken from it in the 1930s, sent to the GULAG or executed immediately. Those responses underscore Kurilla’s argument.
Many Russians still want to forget the entire period lest anyone think that they are the descendants of victims and victimizers, but “only mankurts, people who have lost historical memory and spiritual values, can write such things,” Boris Vishnevsky, an opposite deputy in the Northern capital’s legislative assembly.
He suggests that such attitudes are being strengthened by “the creeping rehabilitation of Stalinism in the country,” a trend promoted by the Kremlin that is rendering people “morally deaf.”
But even those who are ready to remember the victims divide as to what they were the victims of. Most agree that they were victims of repression, but others, like TV host Kirill Nabutov insist that what happened in the 1930s was “’the genocide of the Russian people carried out by the Bolsheviks.”
What that means, of course, is that even if the names of the victims remain up on the walls of the city, their meaning will divide Russians in ways that will also extend the trauma of suffering and loss, and this division too will continue to echo as well.
Nabutov observes that he “doesn’t know how society will relate to these crimes in another three decades, but now the generation for whom ‘repressions,’ ‘exiles’ and ‘shootings’ are not empty words remains alive. They know what stands behind them.” Things may get easier when they pass.
“But now, the logic of certain Russian Goebbels consists of saying that ‘one must not shake the past because there was so much good.’” For them, the repressions don’t define that era, but rather its achievements, like the construction of industry and the laying of the ground work which allowed the Soviets to win World War II.
When that doesn’t work, Stalin’s present-day defenders fall back on procedural issues – did Last Address which put up the tablets get the necessary permission – or on an ideology, lacking confidence in itself and saying that others were doing the same thing or worse – the recrudescence of Soviet-era “whataboutism.”
But as the older generation passes away, a new generation is arising that is even more prepared to defend Stalin against truth. They insist, many observers say, that socialism is so important that any inconvenient facts about it must be ignored rather than allowed to tarnish its reputation.
The Putin regime is relying on all of these things to try to minimize criticism of the Stalinist past and instill pride among Russians into what Stalin accomplished. Tragically, that approach does nothing in the end to cure the trauma and does everything to make a new era of similar crimes more likely.
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