Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 12 – A large portion of Russia’s intellectual class is horrified by the Putin regime’s moves to shut down the Memorial Society which has done so much to inform the world about the crimes of the Soviet era over the last 34 years. But most Russians have displayed complete indifference to this latest Kremlin move.
The reason is simple, Novyye izvestiya says. “The citizens of the country do not know and do not want to know about the society that has defended human rights by restoring the names and fates of their relatives and close ones who were victims of Stalinist terror” (newizv.ru/article/general/12-12-2021/natsionalnoe-bespamyatstvo-o-tom-chto-takoe-memorial-znayut-menshe-2-rossiyan).
Earlier in December, VTsIOM asked Russians what they knew about Memorial. Five percent of adults and thus half that share of the total population said they knew about it quite well. Twenty-five percent said they’d heard something about it, but a whopping 70 percent said they hadn’t heard of it at all.
Because the poll covered those above 18, that means that the total share of Russians who know about Memorial well is just over two percent – or one in 50 – a group sufficiently small that the powers that be in the Kremlin have certainly concluded they can ignore it with impunity. Hence their actions.
Moreover, slightly less than half of those who knew about Memorial well or had heard something about it, support what the organization has been doing, although almost the same fraction believes that the government’s efforts to suppress it are a political move rather than a simple application of law.
These results, Novyye izvestiya continues, probably should not have come as a surprise. A VTsIOM survey in 2017 found that one Russian in four knows nothing about the repressions of the Stalinist era, and among those 18 to 24, 46 percent of the sample said it was hearing about them for the first time from the polltakers.
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