Putin’s Rewriting of History All About Shifting Responsibility for Past Crimes Away from the State, Shor-Tchudnovskaya Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 22 – Putin’s rewriting of history all about shifting responsibility for past crimes away from the state, Anna Shor-Tchudnovskaya says; and it is succeeding because even many of that state’s victims are more than willing to accept the idea that the Russian state is innocent even as far as their suffering is concerned.

            The Russian sociologist who now works at Vienna’s Sigmund Freud University, says this pattern shows how “naïve” many Russians and others have ben in thinking that Russia “was just a step away from ‘a normal society’” (sapere.online/vsem-kazalos-chto-my-v-shage-ot-normalnogo-obshhestva-eta-naivnost-sygrala-zluyu-shutku/).

            While much has been written about the new Russian law concerning “the genocide of the Soviet people,” some aspects of it and especially “several other intriguing amendments that were quietly introduced alongside it,” the sociologist says, “slipped in amidst the general commotion” but in fact prove at least as significant.

            “For instance,” she says, “the concept of state policy for perpetuating the memory of victims of political repression,” a document that has been in place for a decade, was “completely rewritten” and effectively replaced “one group of victims” with another, and eliminated any suggestions that the Russian state was to blame.

            According to Shor-Tchudnovskaya, “this was done with a very specific objective in mind: to ensure the very notion of an "internal" genocide—a genocide perpetrated against one's own people—would never even cross anyone's mind.” The document’s provisions about perpetuating memory and the mass nature of these repressions were dropped.

            Moreover, in the new edition, “working regarding the necessity of ‘condemning the ideology of political terror” was also deleted; and replaced by d references to the Soviet period have by talk about “the achievements of the Russian state,” with emphasis placed “toward highlighting just how excellent our state is.”

            All this has been done, the sociologist suggests, in order to shift attention away from domestic problems to “the victims of ‘an externally organized genocide’” and to “rehabilitate the state” in the eyes of the population.

            “One potential consequence of this shift,” she continues, “is that resistance movements in the occupied territories following World War II could come to be perceived as ‘resistance to denazification.’  That has not happened yet, but such an interpretation remains entirely plausible.”

            But more generally, Shor-Tchudnovskaya says, in the new version of the document, “particular pride is placed upon the role of the state—a state which, if it ever did anything wrong, was merely experiencing ‘tragic chapters’ which means that “no one bears the blame for it; it is simply how fate unfolded, or how higher powers intervened.”

            Unfortunately, many Russians, even many who themselves or whose relatives were the victims of Soviet crimes are all too willing to accept this approach, something that sets them apart from the way Germans who suffered under the Nazis view their situation and condemn the Nazi state as a whole.

            Russians, the sociologist says, overwhelmingly want people to acknowledge that their mistreatment was “unjustified” but “a random error” and that they see no need to condemn the state for what happened. Blaming the powers that be, some of them have told Memorial, “is unnecessary and goes too far.”