AFTER THE COLD WAR
Russia's government shamefully refuses to face up to the horrors of communism.
The Wall Street Journal
Sunday, May 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
When President Bush ascends the reviewing stand in Red Square tomorrow for ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, he may find that his presence is being used less to mark a historic anniversary than to rehabilitate the Soviet Union.
The anniversary has unleashed a wave of Soviet nostalgia. A report by the RIA press agency said that "all the veterans agree that the great love that the Soviet people had for their country and their belief in the righteousness of their cause helped the Soviet Union survive the worst war of the 20th century." Vladimir Putin, in a speech last year at the Victory Day ceremonies, said: "We were victorious in the most just war of the 20th century. May 9 is the pinnacle of our glory." More recently, in his state of the nation address on April 25, President Putin referred to the breakup of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."
This nostalgia is not harmless. Not only does it ignore the fact that the Soviet Union was just as terroristic as Nazi Germany, it also reflects what Hannah Arendt called "pervasive, public stupidity." This is the failure to understand that the truth about the past is not irrelevant--that it is, in fact, the best hope for a decent future. The re-Sovietization of Russia is possible because when the Soviet Union fell, the new Russian state did not break irrevocably with its communist heritage. To do this, it needed to define the communist regime as criminal and the Soviet period as illegitimate; open the archives, including the list of informers; and find all mass burial grounds and execution sites. None of this was done and the consequences are being felt today.
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There is still no legal evaluation of the Soviet regime: It has never been declared criminal and no official has ever been tried for crimes committed under communism. The result is that former communist leaders in Russia are viewed as leaders first and criminals second (if at all), no matter how heinous their actions. Russians, thus, frequently lack the conviction, intrinsic to free men, that an individual answers for his actions no matter what the external conditions.
Since the Soviet regime was not repudiated, the Russian government became the Soviet regime's legal successor. This has meant that millions of victims of repression were rehabilitated, usually posthumously, by being cleared of official charges--rather than have those charges voided as the product of a deranged system. The regime, therefore, continued to judge its victims, rather than the other way around.
In addition to not declaring the Soviet regime criminal, the new Russian government did nothing to reveal the identities of KGB informers. In March 1992, the Russian Supreme Soviet passed a law on investigative activities that declared the list of the millions of informers to be a state secret. One reason for the vote was believed to be that many of the deputies had themselves been KGB informers. The decision had serious consequences: It established a precedent for concealing truth about the past that was invoked as decisions were made on access to records in the KGB, Comintern and foreign ministry archives.
Most important, Russian authorities made no serious attempt to find and memorialize mass graves and execution sites. The victims of Stalin-era terror were executed in secret and Soviet leaders intended that the bodies never be found. Still, some sites have been discovered--usually the achievement of the Memorial social movement operating with little help from the outside.
In August 2002, after a five-year search, the execution grounds for the majority of the victims of the Great Terror in Leningrad were discovered by Memorial volunteers in a firing range near the village of Toksovo. It is estimated that the site holds 30,000 bodies, making it possibly the largest on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Neither the federal nor the local authorities have shown any interest in excavating the site and analyzing the remains, let alone memorializing the victims. Instead, they have cautioned the volunteers not to interfere with the operations of the firing range.
The result of official indifference is that the burial grounds and execution sites that stand in silent witness to the horrors of communism play almost no role in the moral life of the country. Without an effort to memorialize these horrors, the growing nostalgia for Soviet power is natural: Although communism was the moral nadir of modern Russian history, it was also the period when Russia was at the height of its power. Increasingly, however, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is taking frightening forms.
Statues of Stalin have begun appearing in cities, and in Orel the town council has written to Mr. Putin demanding that Stalin's "honor" be restored to the history books, his statue re-erected and his name given to streets and squares. In mid-April, Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov said Russia "should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague." And a group of leading political and cultural figures in St. Petersburg has called for the erection of a monument to Alexei Kuznetsov, who organized Leningrad's defenses during World War II. He was later shot in the postwar "Leningrad Affair" and is buried in the Levashovo Cemetery, along with many of Stalin's victims.
Before the war began, Kuznetsov was a key participant in Stalin's atrocities as a member of the extrajudicial "troika" that signed death sentences for the Leningrad Oblast during the terror. The troika operated in Leningrad from August 1937 to November 1938, issuing 40,000 death sentences--and from January to June 1938, Kuznetsov, as second secretary of the Oblast party committee, was a member.
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It is too late for President Bush to decline to go to Moscow as the presidents of Lithuania and Estonia have done, citing Russia's refusal to admit and apologize for crimes committed in the Baltics. Mr. Bush, nonetheless, would be doing a real service to history if, in addition to participating in the celebrations, he would also visit the Butovo firing range south of the city where the bodies of at least 20,000 victims of Stalin's Great Terror lie in mass graves. In contrast to the meticulous attention devoted to anything to do with World War II, Butovo is neglected. There is no museum or general memorial. The common graves are marked off with ropes. Until recently, the area was choked with weeds and used as a garbage dump. The number of visitors is minuscule--about 4,000 a year, mostly Orthodox believers and relatives of those buried there.
The Soviet Union did indeed achieve a great victory in defeating Nazi Germany. The cost was 27 million dead. The failure to put the victory in perspective and describe the true nature of the Stalinist regime, however, means that the May 9 events, in addition to a celebration of the victory, are also an exercise in propaganda that glorifies the Soviet system. As a result, the visiting heads of state risk endorsing with their presence a view of history that works against the interests of Russia's democratic future.
Mr. Satter, a Russian affairs specialist, is affiliated with the Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institute and Johns Hopkins.
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