Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 26 – The Soviet system committed an especially horrific crime against
the Russian nation, Aleksey Shiropayev says. It brutally suppressed its will to
freedom as shown by the fact that the last violent outburst of resistance among
Russians was the Novocherkassk rising in 1962.
The
success the Soviet system had against Russians was not matched by a similar
success in Ukraine, the Baltic countries or Georgia, the Russian nationalist
writer says. There the spirit of resistance continued and flourished at least
in part because those nations could focus their anger against not just the system
but against an empire (ehorussia.com/new/node/17991).
To achieve what it
did with the ethnic Russians, the system “required a GULAG” because Russian
resistance had to be wiped out. But “now
this isn’t needed. THIS people loves its leader” even without that kind of
repression, something that it many ways is even more horrific than a people who
shows its love because it is forced to on pain of repression.
In Soviet times,
Shiropayev continues, “the powers that be required people to put out the red flag
on holidays. If you didn’t, there would be bad consequences. Now, no one forces
anyone to put a St. George ribbon on his car, but everyone does without noting
how hypocritical and even comic this ‘symbol of victory’ looks on a Mercedes or
Volkswagen.”
“This present-day voluntary neo-Stalinism,
this voluntary rejection of the possibility of being free is much more horrible
than the atmosphere of the 1930s,” he says. “It marks the full degradation of
the people and possibly is already irreversible. This degeneration is the
result of a most powerful anti-selection” where the best were destroyed allowing
the worst to flourish.
Some will remember Tengiz Abuladze’s
film Repentance which marked the
beginning of perestroika and Stalinism. But most did not get or now have
forgotten the chief scene and message of the film: the son has to disinter the
body of the tyrant father and scatter his ashes to the wind. That is, the sons must reject the past if
they are to go forward.
That is what happened in Eastern
Europe, Shiropayev continues. But it hasn’t happened in Russia. Instead, Russians now have rejected any call
for repentance and rejection of the Soviet past as an attack on their dignity. “’We
saved everyone from fascism’” and so have nothing to repent and no one to repent
to.
The crowning point of this was “’Crimea
is ours,’” he says. It was marked by a
film entitled The Path to the Motherland. With it, “we have returned as it were ‘to the motherland.’” And we have voluntarily invited the corpse of
Stalin into our homes even if he is no longer in the mausoleum.
In
making this charge against his fellow Russians, Shiropayev follows in a long
tradition, one that was most famously contained in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago. In that work, the great Russian writer
insisted that non-Russians resisted Soviet power but that from the beginning
Russians did not.
Both
Solzhenitsyn and Shiropayev capture something important, but both overstate
their case. Solzhenitsyn’s argument was
counted by Russian émigré journalist Yuri Srechinsky in a 1974 pamphlet How We Submitted: The Price of October
that deserves to be more widely known.
In
that work, Srechinsky pointed to something that helps to explain the conclusion
not only of Solzhenitsyn but of Shiropayev” Russians resisted just as
non-Russians did, but Moscow worked far harder and more effectively to suppress
reports about Russian resistance lest Russians be inspired to continue to
resist.
Two years ago,
Moscow economist and commentator Andrey Illarionov detailed 210 acts of
resistance by ethnic Russians to the Soviet system (echo.msk.ru/blog/aillar/2003620-echo/
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-century-of-russian-revolts-against.html). That article too deserves to be better known
to put in context Shiropayev’s disturbing conclusions.
As Illarionov points out, “the theme
of [these Russian] revolts undoubtedly deserves detailed discussion.” But for
the moment, he suggests, his list provides six obvious lessons about these
popular risings:
·
First,
“there were a lot of them in the USSR: they took place much more often than in
previous periods of Russian history, the number of participants was enormous”
and this in turn means that this was in effect “a hundred-year-long war in
Russia between the anti-human powers and the people.”
·
Second,
certain periods, “the first half of the 1920s, 1928-32, and the 1940s” were “in
essence a total war against the communist authorities and the state security
agencies which defended it.”
·
Third,
“all the post-October risings were suppressed by the authorities in the
harshest manner,” far more harshly than any previous Russian government had
done.
·
Fourth,
“the hundred-year-long civil war in Russia and the loss in it of millions and
tens of millions” of Russians is a bestial tragedy for our people.”
·
Fifth,
the number of people taking part “to a large degree” depended on whether the
population had arms or not.” When it did, there were many participants; when
there weren’t, there were fewer.
·
And
sixth, “the success of risings under a totalitarian regime and of course a harshly
authoritarian one as well are determined not so much on the field of battle as
in the heads of the leaders of the regime against which the rising is
directed.” When leaders recognize that suppression is an anachronism and
counterproductive, those who have risen have won.
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