Today, Vladimir Putin signed a law on criminal liability for “denial and approval of the genocide of the Soviet people” as well as “desecration of the graves of genocide victims.” Another repressive legislative act of counter-reality, an attempt to rewrite history and consolidate it at the level of the criminal code. The obvious is in another: the so-called “Soviet people” never existed. It was an artificial ideological construct created to erase national identities, destroy historical memory, and subordinate dozens of nationalities to a single imperial will. Under this banner, they did not unite — they assimilated. They did not protect, but destroyed.
The real history of the Soviet Union is not the history of a single “victim nation.” It is the history of mass crimes against different nations, each of which suffered its own genocide, its own tragedy, its own destruction. Ukrainians were subjected to the Holodomor—the targeted extermination of millions of peasants by starvation. The Baltic nations—Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians—were deported en masse to Siberia, destroying their elites. Belarusians were systematically Russified, displacing their language and identity. Kazakhs experienced a catastrophic famine that took away a significant part of the population. The nations of the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars—were forcibly and totally evicted from their land to the bare ground.
The Crimean Tatars were subjected to deportation, which actually became ethnic cleansing. Bashkirs, Tatars and other nationalities of the empire experienced repression, executions and suppression of any resistance. The Circassians even earlier became victims of imperial genocide, the consequences of which Russia still does not recognise. This is the truth. Not a fictional “genocide of the Soviet people”, but real crimes of the Soviet empire against the conquered nations. But modern Russia is not looking for the truth. It is building a parallel reality. In this reality, there are no occupations – there is “liberation”. There are no repressions – there is “protection of the state”. There are no genocides – there is “a single people who suffered together”.
Putin’s new law is not about memory. It is about the prohibition and erasure of memory and the criminalisation of historical truth. In conditions when there are thousands of political prisoners in Russia, when you can get a sentence for your word, when the Internet is censored and blocked, this law becomes another element of total control over the consciousness of Russians and the nations enslaved by Russia. But this is also evidence of Moscow’s weakness. The Kremlin is not just afraid of the truth – it is trying to punish. Because the truth destroys an empire much faster than any sanctions or weapons. And that is why today Russia punishes for the memory of crimes. But history has one stubborn property: it cannot be completely banned.
No matter how hard the Kremlin tries to create a new “official reality,” facts remain facts — and crimes remain crimes.
