Putin Allows Memories of Soviet Repression Only on a Regional Basis, Cherkasov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 14 – Putin doesn’t allow any public memories about Soviet repression that tie it to the Moscow leadership, Aleksandr Cherkasov says; he only allows “regional memory,” that is, memories about repressions that happened at the level of federation subjects and that can be dismissed as the mistakes and excesses of lower-ranking officials.

            As a result, the senior official of the Memorial Human Rights organization, says, Russians to this day must speak of repressions as if they were of local or regional origin rather than view them as they in fact were the playing out of orders coming from the center (https://reforum.io/blog/2024/10/14/cherkasov/).

            And that puts memories now of Soviet-era repression in sharp contrast to memories of Soviet losses in war in which no one says “participants of the Great Fatherland War of the Voronezh oblast with Nazi Germany” but in which people do speak about “victims of political repression of Voronezh oblast,” even though the latter too were victims of an all-Soviet crime.

            That allows the current Russian leadership to identify with the earlier Soviet leadership but avoid any responsibility for that earlier leadership that it does not want to assume and thereby opens the way for the Kremlin today to take actions that violate human rights and repress the population much as its predecessors did without restriction, Cherkasov says.

            That is just one of the intriguing observations that the human rights specialist offers. Another is perhaps equally important. Cherkasov says that there was only a narrow window of opportunity for dealing effectively with the crimes of the Soviet past – and that Russia tragically but understandably missed it.

            That window, he suggests, was open only between “approximately August 1991 and December 1992” and not throughout the 1990s and until Putin came to power as many often think. During that brief period, the trial of the CPSU was aborted, and access to KGB archives first opened and then closed – and the KGB leadership was allowed to continue in the FSB.

            According to Cherkasov, Russia missed this window of opportunity in part because of conscious decisions and in part because the country’s democrats had neither the power nor the preparation they would have needed for any other outcome to be possible.  That led to a dangerous compromise.

            That compromise was that “former Chekists were ready to serve the new regime” even though there were no real former ones, and former communists were able to change their identities and serve it as well, something that was possible for them because they did not want to challenge the former Chekists or be challenged themselves.

            And this compromise or more precisely failure happened, the Memorial expert argues, not because Russians were worse than other peoples who had lived under communism but because the KGB from the 1950s through the 1980s had conducted far better “prophylactic” work than their counterparts in other communist countries.