Hero of the genocide

“They’re beating our people!” the Russian State Duma panicked on May 23. Deputies were desperately excited about the fact that the trial of Hero of the Soviet Union Arnold Mary had begun in Estonia. “Stop the shameful trial of the hero of the Second World War!” says the appeal adopted by the Duma. “Estonia is trying to revise the results of World War II, and this cannot be allowed,” indignant former deputy and now Russia’s permanent representative to NATO Dmitry Rogozin. The trial is nothing more than “a trial, which is a logical continuation of this country’s policy of revising the results of the Second World War,” Nikolai Kovalev, a former KGB general and now the head of the Duma Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, echoes Rogozin.

A hero, our Soviet hero, is being tried, and sovereign-democratic Russia will not remain silent. They decided to name one of the streets in Gorno-Altaisk, where he once lived, after Arnold Mary; a high school in the village of Polonoe, Porkhovsky district, and a street in Porkhov, where he once fought the Nazis.

However, Arnold Mary is not being tried for participation in hostilities, so a review of the results of World War II is not expected at this trial. Arnold Mary is being tried for genocide, and not in wartime. On March 25, 1949, mass arrests took place in Estonia, more than 20 thousand people were interned - civilians, elderly people, children. Without investigation, without trial, without presenting any charges or evidence of any crimes, they were loaded into freight cars and taken to Siberia. Then these deportations began to be called “Stalinist”; hundreds of thousands of people of different nationalities suffered from them in the USSR. But no matter how guilty Stalin himself was of these deportations, his orders were carried out by very specific functionaries of the CPSU, NKVD employees, and army officers. None of them have yet answered for their crimes. No one suffered for their crimes. At one time they received government awards, ranks, titles, and military pensions. They demand honor, respect and benefits, consider themselves war heroes and celebrate May 9 as their personal holiday. They don’t particularly talk about how they fought with the civilian population, how they doomed innocent people to hunger and torment in the frosty Siberian settlements and endless Kazakh steppes.

One of these “heroes” was Arnold Mary. On that same March day in 1949, 251 people were detained on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa. The next day, all the detainees were taken to the port of Paldiski, and they shared the exiled fate of the rest of the deported Estonians. The organizer of the deportation from the island of Hiiumaa was Hero of the Soviet Union, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Estonian Komsomol, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia Arnold Meri.

Of the more than 20 thousand deported Estonians, about 3 thousand people died in Siberia. During the Khrushchev Thaw, as part of the debunking of the “cult of personality of Stalin,” the new Soviet leadership condemned the deportations, and the surviving deported Estonians were allowed to return home. Some residents of Hiiumaa also returned. However, there was no talk of bringing the perpetrators of those crimes to justice. Stalin's executioners did not have to worry about their lives and well-being - they retained all their privileges and benefits.

The situation changed radically after Estonia regained its independence in August 1991. The Security Police took over Arnold Mary's case. In August 2007, the Lääne District Prosecutor's Office of Estonia sent Meri's criminal case to court. He is accused of genocide of the Estonian people, which, as a crime against humanity, has no statute of limitations. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to life in prison. The trial began on May 20. Arnold Mary, who is already 88 years old, pleads not guilty. As almost always happens in such cases, he says that he was following orders and explains that he was only checking the lists of deportees.

The trial is taking place on the island of Hiiumaa, the same island whose residents Arnold Merhi helped deport to Siberia in 1949. The case is being heard in the hall of the House of Culture of the city of Kärdla. About 80 prosecution witnesses will testify against Mary. Apparently, the defendant faces a guilty verdict. However, it doesn't really matter whether Mary spends the rest of her life in a prison cell or not. The trial itself is important - as evidence that crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations; that Estonian justice cannot be confused by myths about the heroic past of the defendant; that Soviet Estonia, with Stalin’s deportations and honoring of executioners as national heroes, is a forever turned page of the past.

What about Russia? The hysterical reaction of officials and the embarrassed silence of the democratic public indicate, sadly, that today's Russia feels itself to be the rightful heir of the Soviet Union. Not only in the sense of debts and obligations under international treaties. The authorities and a significant part of society are sincerely worried about the insult to Soviet values, about the careful revision of Soviet history, about the persecution of the Hero of the Soviet Union just because he is a Soviet “hero”. We are still delirious about our Soviet past, worry about the defeats of the Soviet empire and are offended for the state when the crimes of the communist regime are pointed out to us. But in a good way one should say to “the city and the world”: “Russia is a new country and is not responsible for the crimes of Soviet times. Let the criminals be judged, let the heroes be rewarded. We are new, communism is behind us, democracy is ahead.”

But who would say that? Rogozin, Zyuganov, Putin, Medvedev? State Duma deputies? They walk forward along the road leading back. They are not on the same path with Estonia, well, just in the opposite direction. And the average person, tormented by the first and second TV channels, thinks with alarm: “Why do they want to imprison our Arnold Mary?” Even democrats, for the most part, remain modestly silent, fearing, it is true, that they will be branded as anti-patriots and enemies of the fatherland. What fatherland, Soviet?

It is high time for Russia to truly separate from the Soviet Union and become an independent state. Not on paper, not according to the Constitution, but in reality - internally, in consciousness, in traditions and memory, in the distinction between one’s own and someone else’s history, one’s own and others’ crimes, one’s future and someone else’s past.