A very vile story. In the Russian Federation, the memory of mass repressions is being erased

The Russian authorities are changing their attitude towards Soviet political repressions: the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation plans to review some decisions on the rehabilitation of their victims. In addition,  the Concept of Victims of Political Repressions has been thoroughly cleaned up –  on 20 June, references to the mass character of Soviet repressions, the provision on the need to perpetuate the memory of their victims, and much more were removed from it. The main goal of editing history is to emphasize that “the state is stronger than an individual, and anyone who does not agree with this is crazy or an enemy,”  human rights activists believe.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia has prepared a draft order, which has been published on the official portal of legal acts. The agency proposes to prohibit the “rehabilitation and acquittal of persons guilty of committing serious and especially serious crimes, war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity.” Documents on the cancellation of the decision on rehabilitation will be transferred to state bodies. This is explained as the intention “to prevent the acquittal of Nazi accomplices and traitors to the Motherland.”

Human rights activists note that the 1991 law on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression already prohibited the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes specified by the Prosecutor General’s Office. St. Petersburg deputy Boris Vishnevsky suggests that some cases may be reviewed for political reasons. “The cancellation of decisions on rehabilitation may affect not so much those who were rehabilitated unlawfully, but rather those who need to be declared guilty again, based on today’s situation. Including people with Ukrainian, Baltic and other “hostile” surnames,”  Vishnevsky wrote in a column for Novaya Gazeta.

During the years of Joseph Stalin and other leaders of the USSR, millions of people became victims of political repression. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of the repressed were rehabilitated. In recent years, many Russian cities have begun to remove memorial signs and plaques dedicated to the victims of repression.

On 20 June of this year, the Russian government amended the Concept of State Policy for Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of Political Repression. The authorities significantly edited the preamble of the document. They removed the statements that “Russia cannot fully become a state governed by the rule of law and take a leading role in the world community without perpetuating the memory of many millions of its citizens who became victims of political repression.” Also, now the concept says nothing about the persecution of representatives of religious denominations and representatives of the pre-revolutionary elite who remained in the country, forced collectivization and the famine associated with it, about mass repressions, during which “millions of people were deprived of life, became prisoners of the GULAG, were deprived of property and subjected to deportation.”

The section describing the rehabilitation process of victims of repression, including the number of those rehabilitated and the fact that the rehabilitation process has not yet been completed, has also been completely removed from the document. There is also no information about the decisions that recognized the repressions of the 1920s–1950s as illegal and the rights of all victims of political repression as subject to restoration. Data on the recognition of the fact of political repression in the pre-Stalin and post-Stalin eras has disappeared. Mentions of the mass character of Soviet repressions have also been removed from the Concept.

Radio Liberty spoke with one of the founders of the Memorial Society, human rights activist, historian and publicist Irina Shcherbakova about why the current Russian government edits history and removes important facts about the repressions:

– As for the desire to reconsider the decisions on the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet political repressions, this is a very vile story, because it is a reversal of history. The fact is that we at Memorial have talked quite a lot about the fact that during Khrushchev’s time, people guilty of organizing political repressions or political murders were rehabilitated. The most prominent figure was  Pavel Sudoplatov. He was arrested, served several years, was released and was rehabilitated. He was the organizer, literally the specific organizer of political murders, and he does not hide this in his memoirs. Of course, such a person could not be rehabilitated.

Further down the list are the prosecutors who headed the “prosecutor’s troikas” created for operations to repress “anti-Soviet elements” in 1937-38. This was quite a mass phenomenon. You and I understand that a whole layer of NKVD employees was repressed: first Stalin repressed Genrikh Yagoda’s subordinates, then Nikolai Yezhov. These were people who, perhaps, were subject to incorrectly formulated sentences because they were not Japanese spies and so on, but they were guilty of organizing mass repressions. Only some of them were not rehabilitated.

Although there were such attempts, and then, later, Lavrentiy Beria’s son fought for his rehabilitation, Yezhov’s adopted daughter fought for his rehabilitation, and so on. They had serious arguments: Beria’s son said that his father was not an English spy, and the charges against him were falsified. Abuse of office could have been applied to him, too, but, unfortunately, it was not formalized that way.

–  What do they want now and why is it necessary?

– This question kept coming up one way or another. This complicated story happened because Stalin then removed those responsible for these repressions. According to the rehabilitation law, those convicted under Article 58 were rehabilitated automatically. They also got attached to the memorial database, when out of 4 million people there were two, I think, Lithuanians, to whom Article 58 was applied, and before that, they had aided the Nazis, and it seems like this was factually proven. They found these two cases, and now they want to start reviewing the cases of all the resisters, who participated in the armed resistance to Soviet power. This definitely applies to the Baltic countries, where there was resistance, and also applies to Western Ukraine. Everything was done for this sake. How this will happen and how it will end is hard to say, it can make your hair stand on end with horror.

–  What could be the reason for the new round of revision of history?

– They are constantly inventing all sorts of revisions, just like Orwell. Firstly, there are several reasons for this. On the one hand, they are singling out from the history of World War II everything that concerns the so-called black or white spots of Soviet responsibility. Starting with the shameful pact between Stalin and Hitler, which was included in the new textbook as an achievement of Soviet diplomacy, because the war was postponed. The USSR entered the war, and after this pact, it divided most of Poland with Hitler and executed the Polish officers who were captured.

Around these 20 thousand Polish officers killed in Katyn (in fact, the execution was carried out in three places), some new stories are appearing again, and conferences are being held where they say that maybe, after all, it was the Germans who killed them, and not us. We will live to see them announce, based on newly discovered information, that after all, it was the Germans. The same thing is happening in Sandarmokh, where during the Great Terror people were shot en masse. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why Yuri Dmitriev was accused and imprisoned.

Among the victims of Sandarmokh, there were many Poles, and many Ukrainians – peasants, politicians, academics, writers, artists and priests. Polish and Ukrainian delegations were constantly coming there, and this irritated the authorities terribly. That is why a case was opened against Dmitriev. Biting off pieces of history and rewriting them is happening along different lines. I think that the case with cancelling the rehabilitation is an act of waging a propaganda war against Ukraine. They want to show our population again that the Soviet government was good, and the others are those who were always Nazis.

–  Not long ago it became clear that several reminders about the quality of repressions, including their mass character and the need to perpetuate the memory were removed from the concept “On the Memory of Victims of Political Repressions”. How do you assess this, and why is this being done now?

– As for the revision of this concept, it was already absolutely curtailed, there was almost nothing left in it from the grand memorial plan, only the actual perpetuation. Regarding the perpetuation, it was said that enough was enough, we have erected monuments, we will not erect anymore, we have erected enough. We will not exhume the graves, and we will not look for new ones. In general, a complete freeze on this perpetuation and an absolute rewriting of Soviet history, that’s all. The Russian government is trying to tell people that the state has always been stronger than the individual. A strong state has always been a blessing for Russia. Of course, there were individual rough edges, and you see – there are fewer and fewer of them, the mass character is already being removed from them, and numbers are no longer mentioned, so that’s it. But basically, we need to be proud of our past. Enough, we repented, repented to please the West, which dictated to us what kind of history we should have, that we should repent and admit what we had.

The only thing you should do is obey your native state. All those who do not approve of it and are outraged by its actions are either crazy or enemies, the “fifth column”. And so, that is what all this is being done for, – believes historian Irina Shcherbakova.