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.”
