If Soviets hadn’t Repressed ‘Millions,’ Russians would Live ‘No Worse’ than Those in the West, Former Investigator Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 10 – Igor Stepanov, an investigator for the Russian Procuracy General between 1999 and 2016 who tried to bring criminal charges against Stalin and now is doing so against Roman Rudenko for their crimes, says that if the Soviet state hadn’t jailed and killed “millions,” Russians now would not live any worse than people in Western countries.

            Stepanov, who now cooperates with Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia, says it is important to try to bring such charges in order to document what was done by the perpetrators even as Russia continues to rehabilitate their victims (znak.com/2020-02- 10/kak_byvshiy_sledovatel_genprokuratury_pytaetsya_privlech_k_otvetstvennosti_organizatorov_repressiy).

            The process of seeking to bring charges, he tells Znak’s Yevgeny Senshin, involves determining whether a crime had taken place and identifying who committed it and whether, for those who did so long ago, determining whether those who might be charged have been rehabilitated or not rehabilitated.

            Under Russian law, Stepanov says, even if someone who has committed a crime has died, a case may be opened against him “if this is necessary for the rehabilitation of the one who has died. In this way, even a refusal to open a case because a legal document which gives an assessment of the legality or illegality of the actions of the individual.”

            The Investigation Committee rejected his effort to bring charges against Stalin, but even that is not the end, he continues. It simply means that he must and will gather more evidence and documentation and seek charges in the future.

            Some argue that those who committed crimes under Stalin rehabilitated themselves by their role in defeating Hitler, but that is not the case, Stepanov says. “Certainly, no one is 100 percent good or bad.” But there is no good way to balance the good and the bad, and those who violate the law must be charged.

            And Rudenko, who served as Stalin’s chief prosecutor, thus should not escape because he was a prosecutor at Nuremberg or because he asked for the rehabilitation of many in Khrushchev’s time. The former was the action of someone under Stalin’s control; the latter presented no risks to him and did nothing to lessen his guilt.

            Bringing such cases exposes the crimes of the system, Stepanov argues, and helps make people aware that it was entirely possible to industrialize or fight Hitler without the excesses of Stalin.  “Had there not been millions of repressed people,” he says, he is “certain that we wouold now live no worse than in the most developed countries.”

            Russians need to recognize that Stalin’s actions from the GULAG to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were crimes against the Russian people.  And they must demonstrate this understanding by insisting that the perpetrators be charged and their names removed from cities and streets in the Russian Federation.

            The current efforts to rehabilitate Stalin and his regime are likely to have “unexpected” consequences for the regime that is carrying them out. “Having awoken ‘Stalin’s spirit, the authorities haven’t considered that it could be directed against them as well if the people see in it the cause of their misfortunes.”

            If that happens, what began as an attempt by the current powers to justify themselves could end as an attack on their failure to break with the Stalinist past. That doesn’t mean that Russia will have a Nuremberg trial as some think as there are fundamental differences between that case or even the case of East Europeans after 1989.

            “The Nuremberg Trial was conducted by the victors over the vanquished,” Stepanov says. “In Russia, ‘the Stalinists’ weren’t defeated. The participants in the repressions, their students and spiritual ‘heirs’ were not removed and remained in their jobs. Therefore, the carrying out of such a trial in Russia was impossible” and for now still is.

            Despite that, it is important to bring criminal charges against the chief actors and to continue the process of rehabilitation of their victims. Doing only the latter is not enough. “Just as ‘a war is not ended until the last soldier is buried,’ soo repressions continue until the last killer is condemned.”

            “As that has not yet happened, repressions in Russia aren’t at an end. They are only stopped,” Stepanov says.

            The European experience unfortunately isn’t suitable for us,” he concludes. “If in the countries of Europe, including those who were earlier in the USSR itself, a change of regime really occurred, in Russia, this didn’t happen, and those in power are in fact the same as those who were earlier.”

            That means, the former prosecutor says, that Russia has to find its own way out of the bloody mire of the Bolshevik past.