Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 17 – No Russian is
surprised to learn that Soviet-era archives are more accessible in Belarus,
which the West routinely calls “the last dictatorship in Europe,” than they are
in Russia, a reflection of underlying weaknesses in Russian society that mean
it will not become part of Europe for at least a generation, Anastasiya
Kirilenko says.
In a cri de coeur explaining her
decision to emigrate, Kirilenko says she did so not because of a particular
fear that she would be a target for repression by the security agencies but
rather because she sees even among those who oppose the Kremlin characteristics
that will preclude modernization and democracy (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=539EC7185A8E5).
“While reading old newspapers from
the 1990s,” she says, she found that even “liberally inclined” Muscovites
supported the Stalinist propiska system, that they viewed any criticism of the
regime as the work of the communists, and that they felt there was “no
alternative” to whoever and whatever was in power.
In part because of such attitudes,
she continues, “already in the 1990s, Russia became a mafia state with power resting
on violence” and which was going along a very different path than that of the
West.
Even those who defined themselves as
opponents of the regime were part of the problem. “Criticism is about collective responsibility
for the future of the country, but the Russian liberal has been involved in an
eternal search” for someone who will lead them and when he or she doesn’t
appear remains “disappointed. Or even not disappointed.”
“The Russian Maidan, a
self-organization of citizens, in [Moscow’s] Chistye Prudy in 2012” was staged
not so much as the launch of an effort to change the regime but with the sense
that the most important question was when the authorities would suppress it,
Kirilenko continues bitterly.
This desire for a savior rather than
a willingness to take responsibility is coupled with “fatalism and an
unwillingness to know the truth,” she says. “No one is shocked that the
archives of the Soviet special forces are already more open in Belarus than
they are” in Russia – except perhaps the West where many people do not want to
face Russian realities either.
Even now Russians do not want to
acknowledge the terror famine directed against the Ukrainians – they insist “even
in liberal circles” that “Russians also died” in it, just as some in Africa
blame Israel for its problems because the world talks “more about the Holocaust
than it does about slavery.”
But underlying this shortcoming and
a variety of others she lists, Kirilenko says is that “the word ‘solidarity’ (‘brotherhood’)
is something from Mars” for Russians. If
anyone has a problem, that is his not the community’s. And “if not every
defender of human rights is capable of recognizing a gay as a human being, then
what can be hoped for among ‘the people’?”
Overcoming all this is not going to
be easy or quick, she says. “Now is not
the time of dissidents; the KGB has already responded.” But what is saving the
regime is not a lack of information about its crimes or the work of the organs,
it is “the Soviet-Russian mentality” of imperialism, fatalism, a willingness to
inform, and the absence of a willingness to take personal responsibility.”
Under those conditions and given
those prospects, it is hard to say, Kirilenko concludes, what is the right
choice – to adapt, to be willing to serve time in jail, or “to work normally in
the West” and thus ‘save oneself.’” When
the most thoughtful people in a country have to ask such questions, that
country is in trouble, however powerful and much-deferred-to it may be.
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