A Dangerous Development: Russian Officials Seek to Remove Monuments to Victims of Stalinism

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 1 – Prosecutors in Tver Oblast have launched what Aleksandr Golts calls “a fateful initiative.” They are seeking to remove a memorial plaque put up 30 years ago on a building there to commemorate those who were executed within it when it was the local office of the NKVD in Stalin’s times. 

            The authorities say that the plaque was put up in error because there are no available official documents proving that Russians were killed there and they add that the existence of the memorial attracts foreign visitors whose mere presence constitutes “an additional threat” to Russian national security” (ej.ru/?a=note&id=34450).

            This is far from the only such case, the independent Russian security analyst says. It follows attacks on efforts to commemorate Stalin’s victims at Sandarmokh in Karelia and in Perm Kray, among others, and is an obvious result of the Putin regime’s defense of Stalin’s actions, including its insistence that his “victims” deserved their fate.

            Most notoriously, two years ago this month, FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov said that “archival materials testify about the presence of an objective side in a significant number of the criminal cases” of those years and that those who attempt to present those rightfully convicted as victims are in the wrong and must be stopped and their actions reversed.

            Golts says that it is “extraordinarily curious” that the current Russian siloviki should be so concerned to present the NKVD as completely innocent. “It would seem,” he says, “that the only wise approach … would be a full and absolute denial of any connection of today’s special services with the killers of 1937.”

            But instead, the current secret services have adopted just the opposite strategy and are now insisting as Vladimir Putin put it at the same meeting Bortnikov made his comments that “there always were real statemen and patriots” in the intelligence services and their contribution to the country must be respected.

            All this points to a growing “desire of the authorities to justify past and present illegality by historical necessity. Yesterday, they shot people because was approaching and they had to do so to guarantee mobilization. Today, they imprison ‘those who don’t agree’ in order to block hostile Western interference.”

            And lest Russians begin to connect the dots between the present and the past, Golt concludes, Moscow has decided that it should minimize losses in the 1930s and “better yet” lead society to “forget about them” by eliminating monuments that call attention to just how evil and extensive their actions were.