Paul Goble
Staunton, Jan. 3 – Many in the human rights community are so focused on the crimes being committed by the current Russian government against its own people and against Russia’s neighbors that they have reduced the attention they gave in the past to the crimes of the Soviet system. But that is a very serious mistake, Ivan Kurilla says.
Not only does it deprive the descendants of the victims the right to acknowledgement and justice and open the way for the Kremlin to whitewash Soviet times in the pursuit of its notions about “a single stream” of Russian history, but it has allowed people in Ukraine and elsewhere to blame Russia for what were Soviet crimes (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=63B3C72703934).
By not addressing those crimes and assuming the mantel of the legal heir of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has unwittingly landed itself in a dead end politically with regard to its own goals. It is allowing nationalists throughout the region to suggest that “it was Russia which pursued a policy of terror and genocide against Ukrainians, Poles and the rest.”
By acting as it has and with the unintended complicity of some in the human rights community, Moscow finds it impossible to challenge that notion and to insist that Russians were victims too of the various forms of genocide and mass murder the Soviet system inflicted on all under its control.
When a future democratic Russia is finally established, Kurilla says, focusing on Soviet crimes is not only a moral imperative but an essential national security requirement because until Russia addresses the past fully and openly, it can’t expect others to do the same. Its current approach thus supports who say that Russians were to blame for everything.
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