With Stalin in the heart

“For a long time, the country was dominated by a regime of unlimited power based on violence of a narrow group of communist functionaries... The leadership structures of the CPSU were the initiators, and local structures were often the conductors of the policy of repression against millions of Soviet people, including deported peoples. This went on for decades."

This resolution , which legally recognized the regime of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)-CPSU and its “armed detachment” - the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-KGB - as criminal and illegitimate, was issued back in 1992 by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. This was the time when hidden archives were opened and queues of thousands lined up for Memorial exhibitions, when families, who for decades were afraid to speak out loud about their dispossessed grandfather, exiled grandmother or executed father, were able to restore the memory and good name of their loved ones, and recent informers and punishers were ashamed pronounce the ominous abbreviation of your place of work in polite society. It was a time when it was believed that Russia would recover and, despite the monstrous losses suffered under the communist regime, would return to the European path of development from which it was pushed in October 1917.

It was hardly possible to imagine that after some ten years, democratic Russia would find itself at the mercy of the same informers and punishers who timidly peeked out from behind the curtains in August 1991, expecting that thousands of Muscovites gathered on Lubyanka Square would not limit themselves to a monument to the executioner and will storm their building. That the melody of the “anthem of the Bolshevik Party”, written at the height of the Great Terror on Stalin’s personal order, will once again sound over the country (“And the fiery genius of Marx and Engels / Foresaw the coming sunrise of the commune / Lenin outlined the road to the commune / And the great Stalin is leading us along it” ). That the security officer who occupied the presidential office will declare in a televised address that the peaceful dissolution of the totalitarian empire and the liberation of dozens of peoples was “the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” (a century that knew terrible wars and revolutions, famine and genocide). That the speaker of parliament will call Stalin an “extraordinary” leader who allowed “excesses in domestic policy”, an officially approved history textbook will declare mass repressions “adequate to the tasks of modernization in conditions of resource shortages”, and the leader of the second largest parliamentary party will lay flowers at the grave of the tyrant guilty in the death of millions. That in the “Brief Biographies of Leaders” section on its official website, the country’s main intelligence service will draw an unbroken line of succession - from Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov and Beria to Putin, Patrushev and Bortnikov.

Then, in 1991, the winners were in the mood for forgiveness. Two voices calling for a trial of the communist regime and lustration of former punishers - Vladimir Bukovsky and Galina Starovoitova - were drowned out by a short-sighted conciliatory hum: “Why stir up the past... There is no need to rock the boat...”. So hundreds of cities and streets remained in our country bearing the names of the Bolshevik executioners, and the security officers, who destroyed the best representatives of the Russian people in the camps - the peasantry, the clergy, the creative intelligentsia - repainted themselves as “patriots” and “defenders of the fatherland” and returned to the leading roles in state.

There is nothing worse for society than moral relativism. There is nothing more dangerous for a country liberated from totalitarian oppression than a refusal to acknowledge and condemn past crimes. This always threatens relapse. This was precisely the meaning of Bukovsky and Starovoitova’s calls, and not at all about settling scores or a “witch hunt.” It was, neither more nor less, about the survival of the democratic Russian state. Today their correctness seems indisputable.

I wonder where Germany would be now if not for the denazification of the 1940s and 1950s? If Adolf-Hitler-Strasse and Herman-Goering-Allee remained in German cities, service in the NSDAP apparatus would be counted as work experience (as work in the structures of the CPSU is counted as civil service experience according to Vladimir Putin’s decree No. 1413 of December 17, 2002) , and would former Gestapo members be declared defenders of state interests?

Last week, the political committee of the Yabloko party, at the proposal of party founder Grigory Yavlinsky, adopted a document called “The Program for Overcoming Bolshevism, Stalinism and Nationalism in Political Practice and Public Consciousness.” This program proposes to give “a clear and unambiguous legal, political and moral assessment of the violent seizure of power committed by the Bolsheviks in 1917-1918, the nature and nature of the political regime they created and its subsequent activities” and equate to a criminal offense the justification and denial of “the fact of mass repressions , actions to destroy social groups and peoples,” and also states that “in today’s Russia there should be no organizations that are or call themselves the heirs of the CPSU(b)-CPSU and the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB.”

Unlike Sergei Shoigu’s ridiculous proposal to imprison him for denying the fact of the USSR’s victory in the Great Patriotic War (I have not met a single person who believes that Hitler won the war), Yabloko’s initiative is serious, relevant and extremely necessary for our society. All Russian democrats should join this initiative.

Our duty in this case is not political, but moral. This is a duty to the memory of millions of those arrested, shot, tortured, exiled, expelled. This is a duty to the peasants who died in cattle cars on the way to exile, to the “children of enemies of the people” thrown into special detention centers of the NKVD, to entire nations expelled thousands of kilometers from their homes, to monks and priests shot for their faith, to writers and scientists deprived of life, freedom and homeland.

No one will ever know how many of them there were in our country, victims of the Red Terror, the Great Terror, collectivization, famine, deportations, the fight against “pests,” “cosmopolitans” and “enemies of the people”: 12 million (data from the Russian “Memorial”), 20 million (International Fund for the Memory of Victims of Communism), 55 million (Alexander Solzhenitsyn called this figure)...

The historical rehabilitation of Stalinism and KGB crimes is the ideological basis, the source of a certain perverse “legitimacy” of the current regime. Russia has no chance of recovery as long as this false version of history remains plausible in the minds of a significant part of the population.

There is nothing more dangerous for a country that has experienced totalitarianism than a refusal to recognize and condemn the crimes of the past. Justification, silence and indifference are a sure way to repeat the tragedy.

The author is a historian, publicist, member of the federal political council of the Solidarity movement.