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Reconciliation with – or rehabilitation of – the Soviet past?

Nanci AdlerNIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The Netherlands

AbstractPost-Soviet Russia’s ambivalent efforts to confront its Stalinist past have generated heated discussion about what should be remembered. Official ambivalence is reflected in school history texts that emphasize Soviet achievements, in commissions that gate-keep archives and historical facts, and in monuments and commemorations. In consequence, the surviving victims of Stalinism are insufficiently acknowledged, let alone compensated. This tension forms the central focus of this article as it explores the individual, public, and official efforts in the aftermath of seven decades of state-sponsored repression to remember, represent and even rehabilitate the Stalinist past. The prevalence of the state-sponsored narrative over the victims’ counter-histories indicates the persistence of a post-Communist repression which is part cause and part effect of the failure/lack of transitional justice mechanisms.

KeywordsMemorial, rehabilitation, repression, Stalinism, transitional justice

Introduction

In Russia, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s popularity soared in nation-wide polls, reflecting the longing of many for the country’s former prestige and their previous sense of security.1 A sequence of measures, including the 2009 restoration of an ode to Stalin in a Moscow metro station and a state commission to guard against the ‘falsification of history to the detriment of Russia’s interests’, led Arsenii Roginskii, chairman of the organization Memorial, to argue that, ‘de-Stalinization is Russia's acutest problem at the moment’(Itar-TASS, 2009).

Political support for selective national amnesia is not new, but its timing may be critical because the generation of Gulag survivors is dwindling, and despite several attempts at de-Stalinization in the decades since they returned from the camps, there is still neither a state-supported national monument to Stalin’s victims, nor anything akin to a national commemorative effort. For former victims, the Gulag was the defining institution and experience of the USSR (Kotkin, 1996: 170). By contrast, the terror imposed by the state is marginalized in today’s official version of Russia’s history. When repressive regimes fall, successor governments aiming toward building civil society

Corresponding author:Nanci Adler, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Herengracht 380, 1016 CJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands Email: [email protected]

443889 MSS5310.1177/1750698012443889AdlerMemory Studies2012

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328 Memory Studies 5(3)

and the consolidation of democracy generally implement some institutionalized transitional justice measures. However, aside from token reparations, the post-Soviet Russian government has imple-mented none (Roginskii, 2011), so for the survivors, who represent millions of people terrorized during the Stalin era, there is little validation of their experience.

The process of fashioning a good future out of a ‘bad past’ can often require the creation of a ‘usable past’ for the national narrative (Bevernage, 2010; Goti, 2010; Gow, 2007). In post-Soviet Russia, there is an increasing trend to manage national and public memory by repressing the mem-ory of repression (Adler, 2005). The narratives of the state and the victims of state-sponsored repression often disagree about both accepted facts and their interpretation; sometimes they do not address the same evidence. The marginalization of the victims’ accounts not only affects national memory, but can cause the mechanisms of transitional justice to miscarry because it impedes the emergence of an inclusive post-repression narrative. Molly Andrews (2007: 161) has described the mission of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) thus: ‘to create a national narrative … and produce a framework for the whole country to understand and come to terms with the past’. She argues that the political agenda of the TRC affected the statement-givers and statement-takers, and in so doing shaped the stories that emerged. Despite its shortcomings, however, the South-African TRC did manage to forge a dialogue between official and personal narratives, and formulated an inclusive history. By contrast, Russia’s (current) official approach to the memory of Stalinism can be characterized by subverting Santayana’s oft-quoted admonition: those who do not want to be condemned by the past should remember their history from a positive perspective.

As in other societies with contested pasts, the reconstruction of the narrative of the Stalinist past is negotiated to facilitate meaning-making in the present (Hodgkin and Radstone, 2003: 1–20). Frequently, the narrative is far from being ‘shared’ (Barkan, 2009: 903, 911) and what it would take to achieve this goal is among the greatest challenges to historians and transitional justice practi-tioners alike. The account of selected events proffered by repressive and many post-repressive states is the official history that justifies their policies; the account of selected events proffered by victims of repression provides a counter-history to the state-sponsored narratives. In Russia, the prevalence of the state-sponsored narrative over the victims’ accounts indicates the persistence of a post-Communist repression that is part cause and part effect of the failure/lack of transitional justice mechanisms.

This article will address some of the most visible interacting, co-existing and conflicting trends of official, public and private efforts to reconcile with the legacy of seven decades of state- sponsored repression. In order to better understand how and why the victims’ narratives and the narrative of the state compete, we will explore the following issues: the scope of the terror and rehabilitations, commemoration, national memory and school textbooks, the reactions of victims and victim organizations to the forgetting and/or selective remembrance of the terror, Stalin’s renewed popularity, and Medvedev’s commission to guard against the ‘falsification of history’.

Scope of the terror

The post-Soviet opening of the archives re-opened the debate regarding the number of victims of repression. Since every single number signifies an individual victim, recognizing the vastness of the scope of the terror is fundamental to understanding the nature of Stalinism. The range of esti-mates is wide because the victims include those who were incarcerated in labor camps, starved by the state-sponsored famine, subjected to de-kulakization, deported and killed outright. Estimates on the scope of the terror range from a few million to well over twenty million victims. There is



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relative consensus that in the years 1930–56, 17–18 million were sentenced to detention in prisons, colonies and camps (Ellman, 2002; Khlevniuk, 2004: 78).

With regard to the number of Gulag returnees, there are few calculations (Zemskov, 1991; Iakovlev et al., 2000). However, using a rough approximation based on release figures in the after-math of Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, it is my estimate that well over 5 million victims survived to return to Soviet society in the 1950s (Adler, 2002: 30–34, 168–71). Those who did not survive the camps and did not have descendants, as a rule did not receive posthumous reha-bilitation because there were no relatives to apply for it, so there are also gaps in the rehabilitation statistics.

The 1991 Law on Rehabilitation paved the way for survivors who had missed the window of opportunity for exoneration during the Khrushchev and Gorbachev eras to apply for this status. During the Soviet era, rehabilitation had been granted in the spirit of a ‘conditional pardon’ (Adler, 2002: 178–86, 248–49). In the post-Soviet era, former victims have described a similar attitude on the part of the state, as they struggled to obtain paltry compensation and meager privileges (Adler, 2005: 1102–6). Later legislation, passed in 1996, enabled the children of ‘enemies of the people’, many of whom had spent their childhood in orphanages, to claim the status of ‘victim’, rather than merely ‘aggrieved’.2 Victim status rendered them eligible for rehabilitation. In the initial years, a few hundred thousand of these survivors applied for and received rehabilitation (Uzelac, 2001). To date, approximately 4.5 million victims of political repression have been rehabilitated and a few hundred thousand cases are still pending.3

Commemoration

In the repertoire of transitional justice mechanisms, the commemoration of victims is consid-ered one of the key elements of reconciliation with a repressive past, because such rituals acknowledge, if only obliquely, that injustices took place. Consequently, in a society commit-ted to affecting a transition, former holidays honoring the former regime can no longer be commemorated. Managing the national narrative on the Stalinist past while trying to salvage pride and promote unity has been a balancing act. In post-Soviet Russia such aspirations cre-ated a problem with 7 November, the ‘Day of the [October 1917] Revolution’, because it had always been a holiday as well as a day set aside for glorifying the Revolution and the leaders who were recognized as standard-bearers. On 7 November 1987, Gorbachev delivered a land-mark speech in which he mentioned ‘thousands’ of victims, thus opening the door a crack for those who wanted to investigate the real numbers. Ten years later, on 7 November 1997 – the 80th anniversary of the revolution – Yeltsin proposed that this day become the ‘Day of Agreement and Reconciliation’ (Rossiskaia gazeta, 10 November 1996). Yeltsin’s proposal never got off the ground, and was ‘disestablished’ by Putin in 2005. The Revolution Day holi-day, in its turn, was cancelled and replaced by a holiday on 4 November that marked Russia’s 1612 victory over Catholic Polish invaders. In the midst of these changing and shifting sym-bols and meanings, 26 percent of Russians polled on the 90th anniversary of what was for-merly Revolution Day thought that the Revolution ‘gave impetus to social and economic development’(Nowak, 2007). Even so, continued official commemoration of the ‘Day of the Revolution’ could have been politically delicate. So, too, was the ‘Day of Reconciliation’, because it was discordant with the state’s goal of de-emphasizing the repression of the Soviet past. The new November 4 ‘Day of National Unity’ holiday offered a deft solution with a new message. It propagated the image of a ‘strong paternalist state that defied external threats and united the nation’ (Nourzhanov, 2007).




On 30 October 2007, the Day of Victims of Political Repression, and the 70th anniversary of the year that mass reprisals and executions began in the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin took a symbolic step toward commemorating victims. In the past, Putin had commemorated the Day of Secret Service Workers (20 December) – even hosting his former cronies to the Kremlin – but now he was paying homage to their victims. On this occasion, Putin undertook the first top official visit to the Butovo artillery range, an area in the south of Moscow where an estimated 20,765 citizens were executed between August 1937 and October 1938 alone (Interfax, 2007a). This killing field was in operation from 1930 until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Many former victims considered Putin’s gesture too token. Gathering on that same day at the (unofficial) monument to victims of totalitarianism in front of the Lubianka (Secret Service head-quarters) in central Moscow, survivors railed against the fact that they still lived a ‘miserable’ existence (Golovkova, 2004). This crowd of approximately 1000 was made up primarily of the children of victims of Stalinist repression, now in their 70s and 80s. James Young has analyzed the meaning of public monuments (1993) while others (Bruce, 2010) have pointed to the way in which memorialized space interprets the past, which is particularly relevant when events are contested between different parties. The Moscow monument, a stone from the first labor camp under Lenin, was erected by Memorial, a victims’ organization not the state. To date, there is not a single official commemorative plaque in Moscow to victims of Stalinism.

Memorial actively advances a western European approach in its conviction that one of the fun-damental components of reconciliation is the official and public recognition of each individual who suffered. On the 2007 Day of Victims of Political Repression, Memorial read aloud lists of thousands of victims’ names. It hoped that society and the government would devote the same kind of attention to recalling and recording the remaining names of terror victims as they did to those who fell in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (Goble, 2007; Kishkovsky, 2007). That is very unlikely given the preferred narrative of the state and the ignorance of the general public linked to its prioritizing of other issues. Memorial has repeated the name-reading action every year since, but the ceremony is not attended by officials. In 2011, I was a participant-observer of this event; it attracted mostly the organization’s own constituency and only a few local news broadcasters.

Arsenii Roginskii, chairman of Memorial, expressed an even higher aspiration than recalling and recording names: ‘I think the government must call a crime a crime, present condolences and apologies to many people, and launch a program for remembrance of repression victims’(Interfax, 2007b). Such acts would require state admission of state culpability and that is not the national narrative promoted by the post-Soviet Russian government. For the time being, remembrance has been delegated to non-governmental organizations because the terror has been relegated to the recesses of official memory. Notably, though, on October 30, 2009 a potential sign of state atten-tion to this tacitly proscribed theme came from Dmitrii Medvedev, who asserted that the ‘memory of national tragedies is just as sacred as the memory of victories’. He added that there should be no justification under the guise of ‘historical necessity’ for those who ‘destroyed their people’.4 Stalin had already been an approved target under Khrushchev and later Gorbachev, so this was not uncharted territory. However, considering the recent rehabilitation of the dead leader’s image, we may view this as support for a new round of de-Stalinization, notwithstanding the fact that these statements came from a president whose administration also established a commission to monitor the historical narrative. Another noteworthy sign of a potential official shift is the current adminis-tration’s consideration of a commission on the ‘Perpetuation of the Memory of the Victims of the Totalitarian Regime and National Reconciliation’.5 There have also been promises to establish a state program to eliminate the vestiges of Stalinism – an enormous mandate. This goal, however perhaps far-fetched, has been lauded by civil society.



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Finally, the official efforts at acknowledging Soviet culpability for the 1940 Katyn massacre offer informative insight into the causes and effects of consistent ambivalence. In 1990 Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet Union was responsible for the murder of thousands of Polish officers in a forest near Smolensk. He then handed over lists of Polish prisoners of war (POWs) to the Polish government, and instigated investigations. This gesture of reconciliation was short lived – at the same time Gorbachev also initiated a campaign to look into the deaths of thousands of Red Army soldiers taken into captivity on Polish soil during the Soviet–Polish war of 1919–20. (Such appeasing mechanisms of dealing with victims on all sides are not uncommon to memory politics.)

Yeltsin continued the de-Stalinization trend, and in 1993 the Russian president laid a wreath as he asked forgiveness at the Warsaw monument to the victims of Katyn. In 2000, a Russian–Polish memorial gravesite – the Katyn memorial complex – was officially opened. However, by 2004 archives relating to the killings became re-classified. Memorial spent the next years bat-tling these restrictions in court and by the fall of 2010 there were prospects for progress.6 Moreover, in April of that year (70 years after the tragedy), Putin joined the Polish Prime Minister at a wreath-laying ceremony at the site of Katyn, and called the executions of the Polish POWs a ‘crime of totalitarianism’. Medvedev went a step further and publicly declared that Stalin and his leadership were the culprits. To date, there are several unresolved questions. Victims of Soviet terror are eligible for rehabilitation, however paltry the attendant privileges may be, but the Rehabilitation Law eludes the families of these victims, and the General Procuracy still refuses to name names of the individual perpetrators. Not surprisingly, in this environment of mixed messages and politicized history, a 2010 survey found that only 43 percent of those polled knew anything about Katyn, 19 percent considered the Soviets responsible, and 28 percent main-tained that the Nazis committed the crime; 53 percent were not sure who was responsible (Levada Tsentr, 2010).7

The Katyn Memorial complex, located on Russian territory near Smolensk, itself reflects the ambiguity in remembrance of this killing field. The Polish-sponsored wall of plaques, recording the name, birth and death of every individual Polish victim, stands in stark contrast to the single Russian plaque commemorating the unnamed Soviet victims the NKVD also murdered at this site.8 There are, however, signs that Soviet culpability at Katyn will gain more official and public recognition. When Andrzej Wajda’s powerful drama Katyn initially opened in Russian theaters in 2008, it more or less preached to the converted, as early audiences were civil society-based. Later, however, in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Polish plane crash, Katyn was elevated to the status of being aired on Russian state television. In a 2011 radio interview, the Russian Foreign Minister stated that Moscow was ready to consider rehabilitating the victims of Katyn. (‘Rehabilitation’ is the only state-sponsored transitional justice mechanism available to victims of Stalinist terror.) The irony inherent to this terminological mismatch did not escape one out-spoken television journalist, who concluded a broadcast with the following scathing comment:

That is to say, the Soviet leadership committed a crime of utmost gravity, and now we are saying that we are ready to consider the issue of the victims’ rehabilitation … perhaps they could have been rehabilitated long ago as people who were not guilty of anything, while those who ordered their execution … could have been declared criminals.9

That such public criticism was permissible is a vivid sign of an emerging civil society. Even so, the grudging approach to recognizing the victims of Stalinist repression attests to the persistence of repression, and arguably a totalitarian culture long after its formal demise.




The national narrative

Historical education might be considered as valuable a component to transitional justice as pre-serving the memory of the victims (Cole: 115). Accordingly, reforms in curricula are a useful indicator of authentic efforts to come to terms with a repressive past. The triumph of a politically expedient national history is demonstrated by the sanitized version of the Stalinist past, currently approved for history teaching in Russian high schools. Putin, who described the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’ (Eckel, 2005) in a nation-ally broadcast address in 2005, was an influential advocate of this narrative. Two years later, in a 2007 televised meeting with social studies teachers, he argued that Russia should not be made to feel guilty about the Great Purge of 1937, because ‘in other countries, even worse things happened’(Birch, 2007). Putin admitted that there were some ‘problematic pages’ in their history, but asked in the same breath what state had not had these (Aron, 2008). This stance is part conse-quence and part symptom of the fact that Russia made no substantial attempts to come to terms with the legacy of Soviet Communism.

The 2007 meeting was used to promote a new textbook commissioned by the presidential administration, entitled The Modern History of Russia, 1945–2006 (Filippov et al., 2007). The contents smacked of Soviet-era textbooks, complete with guidelines dictating how to perceive (and present) leaders: Stalin and Brezhnev were valorized, Gorbachev and Yeltsin disparaged and Putin glorified. Shortly after the conference, the Duma (Russian Parliament) introduced and quickly passed a new law authorizing the Ministry of Education to recommend which textbooks should be published and used in schools (in practice, not every teacher assigns the official textbooks, but the tendency is clear).

In consequence, educational materials were molded to reflect which way the political winds were blowing. In 2008, in an effort to promote patriotism among younger people, a new teach-ers’ manual entitled, The History of Russia 1900–1945, was officially approved for use in schools. Achieving such a goal through the use of history required considerable whitewashing. In the manual, teachers were instructed on how to address the period of Stalinist repressions. They were told to explain that ‘Stalin acted in a concrete historical situation, as a leader he acted entirely rationally – as the guardian of the system’. The text also acclaims his consistent efforts to reshape the country into an industrialized state. Since the scope of the repression does not quite fit into the concept of ‘rational governance’, the manual suggests working the num-bers a bit. For example, it recommends that ‘a formula could be used wherein only those who received death sentences and those who were executed would be counted’.10 These figures are significantly lower than the additional millions who languished and then died from disease and forced labor in the Gulag. Furthermore, a 2010 history of Russia, written by a prominent Moscow State University history professor, advances similar views (Barsenkov and Vdovin, 2010). So, despite the introduction of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago into the high school history curriculum, a subtext of this history lesson is that the political ethos is not yet ready to change.

Victims’ reactions to selective national memory

After Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, the Gulag and the Stalinist repression became tabooed themes for decades to come. Former victims were relegated to the status of silent witnesses until Gorbachev implemented his reformist policies in the late 1980s. In hindsight, this period marked the highpoint of the revelations on Stalinism. Two decades into the post-Soviet era former victims, or their



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surviving children, once again experienced what they perceived as the injustice of witnessing the official invalidation of their history.

Semën Vilenskii, head of the victims’ organization Vozvrashchenie (The Return), Kolyma sur-vivor, memoir publisher and the only member of the Rehabilitation Commission12 who had been a Stalin-era prisoner, was incensed about the fact that there had never been a moral condemnation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He believes that Russia would benefit from a ‘Nuremberg Trial without blood’.11 Those found guilty of these crimes against humanity could receive the maximum penalty, and then be pardoned.

The perpetrator issue was also addressed by Arsenii Roginskii – ex-prisoner and member of the Rehabilitation Commission as well. In a 2008 discussion on national memory, he asserted that identifying victims was only one step in dealing with the repression. A further step would require identifying their oppressors, still mostly unnamed. Roginskii called attention to this proscribed subject:

The memory of Stalinism in Russia is almost always the memory of victims. Victims, not crimes … Unlike the Nazis … we mainly killed our own people, and our consciousness refused to accept this fact. … This inability to assign evil is the main thing that prevents us from being able to embrace the memory of the terror properly.13

Stalinism and its victims occupy a lacuna in the nation’s image of itself. Nevertheless, many in the vanishing constituency of Gulag returnees, some of whom liken brutal camps such as Kolyma to ‘Auschwitz without ovens’14 remain determined to remember, to record and to publicize the crimes committed in the name of Soviet Communism.

Such efforts are received with great reluctance, because as the textbook recommendations and history commission attest, this discussion involves editing the nation’s image of itself. It is as much a political as it is a historical question. Perhaps unrelated to the state’s officious ambiguity with regard to the Stalinist past, on the eve of the first international conference on ‘Approaches to Stalinism’ in Moscow in December 2008, the Memorial office in St Petersburg was raided by masked federal security agents armed with rubber truncheons, who proceeded to confiscate the organization’s hard drive and numerous archival dossiers.15 The pretext was the St Petersburg Memorial’s alleged association with an extremist article in a local newspaper.

In the past, Irina Flige, chairman of the St Petersburg Memorial, had been outspoken in her assertion that the state glossed over the state-sponsored crimes of the terror, emphasizing instead its great accomplishments in modernization and its victory over the Nazis. This omission in the historical record led Memorial to draft an international appeal in 2008, in which they lamented that,

instead of a serious nationwide discussion about its Soviet past, the Soviet State patriotic myth with small changes is reviving. This myth views Russian history as a string of glorious and heroic achievements. (Memorial, 2008; see also Flige, 2007)

The voluminous materials that Memorial holds on the scope and nature of the terror provide an unwelcome addition to this image. Such messages have significantly more international than national resonance. The work of Memorial is internationally acclaimed, but nationally marginal-ized. Memorial had reason to believe that the St Petersburg raid, and similar such actions, are part of a concerted effort by the authorities to brand the organization as a dissident/extremist group and minimize the importance of its revelations.16 This would represent a politically retrogressive trend not seen since the Brezhnev era,17 but it may be unofficial policy.




Revelations regarding the crimes of the Stalinist past may not have been a major factor in facili-tating the collapse of the Soviet Union, because it resulted from many cumulative events (see Stephen Cohen’s discussion on the causal factors, 2009: Chapter 5), but we might assess the impor-tance of these disclosures from the value placed on constraining and controlling them by the poli-cies of the previous and present ruling party. The de-stabilizing, de-legitimizing potential of confronting an onerous past was recognized by Khrushchev and Brezhnev, later Gorbachev and Putin, and, sometimes, Medvedev. They were concerned about the risk of a de-Stalinization that might emerge uncontrollably from below, and tried to contain it by limiting rehabilitation to victim compensation, and other similar measures. Gorbachev suggested restricting Memorial to the regional level under regional Communist Party supervision, because he was apprehensive about the potential threat to the Party’s legitimacy of widespread revelations of state-sponsored repres-sion18 (Adler, 2002: 5–7). It was feared that once the discussion got out of the Communist Party’s hands it would be more difficult to contain the damage.

While the current Russian administration cannot get the historical genie back into the political bottle, they are attempting to shape it.19 They have, among others, imposed new limitations on archival access, even arresting or harassing researchers of Stalinist archives20 (Levy, 2008; Petrov, 2011) and, as we have seen, are skewing the historical narrative by authorizing textbooks that sani-tize the Stalinist past. They may be over-estimating the risk of the historical revelations to the sta-bility of the system, but their importance might be assessed from the efforts made to censor them.

Thus far, the discussion has centered on the products of the crime – the victims – not the crimi-nals who perpetrated it, much less the system that permitted it. An inclusive history of the repres-sion would seek disclosures instead of seeking to avoid them. Apparently, an accurate account of the victimizations under 70 years of Soviet rule cannot yet be integrated into Soviet history. Until it can be, this part of the past will continue to challenge the credibility of Russia’s present version of history and, to judge from their defensiveness, the stability of Russia’s present government. Memorial has suggested a course of action that goes beyond just integrating this tabooed segment of the past. They have asserted that the Russian state, ‘as judicial successor to the Soviet Union’ is obliged to condemn the Stalinist repressions,21 and many survivors demand the creation of a ‘fed-eral program’ to study the terror.22 At present, genuine official support for such an initiative appears unlikely. Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the work of historians and civil soci-ety actors who challenge the official narrative of present or past events has become more marginal-ized, and in some cases even dangerous.

The shadow of Stalin

In 1962, Evgenii Evtushenko’s acclaimed poem ‘The Heirs to Stalin’ celebrated the removal of Stalin’s body from the Lenin Mausoleum, but asked how Stalin was to be removed from Stalin’s heirs. This was a prescient question. In a 2005 survey, Russians were asked their opinion of Stalin and his role in the country’s history. Their response was quite positive. Stalin’s leadership was credited with the victorious outcome of the Great Patriotic War, and 32 percent of the respondents believed this overshadowed whatever defects he might have had or mistakes he may have made (Levada Tsentr, 2005). By 2008, another survey found that respondents viewed Stalin as one of the three ‘most eminent figures of all times’ (Levada Tsentr, 2008).

A fundamental reason why this discussion – and ‘Stalin’s ghost’– could rise again and again is because all of the official attempts to reckon with the Stalinist past were inconsistent. They were borne of ambivalence – an ambivalence that resonated both from the top down, and from the bot-tom up. A popular adage circulating in Russia in 1990 went: ‘It’s easy to talk about the future and



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the present, but the past keeps changing every day.’ Then and now, what we choose to remember about the past is always a selection of events, regularly informed (if not determined) by and tai-lored to present needs.

According to Sergei Kovalev, the only former dissident to rise to a high political position (Human Rights Commissioner under Yeltsin), these needs include the desire for a national identity and a national history, however mythologized. Kovalev has partially attributed the popularity of Putin (an ex-KGB colonel) to people’s nostalgic yearning for the Soviet past, complete with its symbols, emblems, and anthems (Kovalev, 2007).23 Chief among these resurrected symbols is Stalin himself, whose role in history has been fashioned to fit a mythologized narrative, as evi-denced in the new textbooks.

In 2009, furthering this trend, as noted above, the state undertook the management of the histori-cal narrative with the establishment by presidential decree of a ‘Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russian Federation Interests’. This decree was testimony to the increasing politicization of history in Russia. The commission was made up of state and public officials and historians, who were charged with looking at past events for misrepresented or manip-ulated facts that cast Russia in a negative light. Ever-vigilant Memorial chairman Roginskii expressed concern about the ‘struggle against the falsification of history’ becoming an ‘affair of the state’, because, he cautioned, the state cannot be the arbiter of the ‘truth’ (Goble, 2009). But the question of who should be that arbiter remains complex as attested by the experience of interna-tional criminal tribunals that are challenged by the persistence of incompatible and coexisting ‘truths’(Daly, 2008) based on different group perceptions, as well as different interpretations (Kostic, 2007: 33). In consequence, contending parties often enter and leave the court with ‘their own truths’ still intact (Gross, 2007: 8; Ketelaar, 2008). The moral credo of the South African TRC was that ‘the truth will set us free’. The discussion becomes complicated when we recognize the co-existence of different truths, some more implicit than others. Worth considering, but beyond the scope of the present article, is the fact that disconfirming evidence did not refute the idealistic claims of Communist loyalists who had endured the Gulag, because their claims rested on faith-based beliefs (Adler, 2012).

Conclusion and prospects

While integrating the story of the terror into the mainstream history of Russia seems like a rela-tively simple undertaking at the level of historical scholarship, at the political level, it is compli-cated by systemic obstacles. It requires a fundamental shift from a system of governance that devalues human rights, toward a democratic ethos that prioritizes them. As one historian observed, ‘attitudes toward the Soviet past are a matter of values [and beliefs, N.A.] much more than knowl-edge.’ (Khazanov, 2008). Russia has no historical democratic traditions for balancing individual rights with collective responsibilities; authoritarianism is the default political culture. The survival of civil society depends on both the survival of the state and the individuals it governs. At present, there are at least two competing narratives of the repression – the story of the victims and survi-vors, and the story of the repressive state’s survival (Adler, 2012: Epilogue). Each addresses differ-ent issues and endorses different priorities regarding means and ends. While recent mixed messages from the state indicate some ambivalent support for coming to terms with the onerous past, these narratives reflect deep-seated problems with reconciliation in post-Soviet Russia. Perhaps an inclu-sive history that analyzes, verifies, records, acknowledges and seeks to understand the competing narratives could facilitate the shift from dueling monologues to engaging dialogues, and move Russia beyond the post-Communist impasse it is challenged to address.




Notes

1. See Kavkavskii Uzël (2008); Seselkina (2007). 2. See Federalnyi zakon o vnesenii izmenii i dopolnenii v zakon Rossiskoi Federatsii (1995). 3. Semën Vilenskii, member of rehabilitation commission, interview, Moscow, 30 October 2011. 4. See Medvedev (2009). 5. See Council on Civil Society and Human Rights (2011). 6. See Gurianov (2010). 7. The Levada Center is the largest national polling agency (www.levada.ru). 8. Observations from my 2009 visit to the Katyn Memorial complex. NKVD is the Narodnyi Komissariat

Vnutrennikh Del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). 9. Vladimir Pozner V, Channel One TV, 24 October 2011.10. See Newsru.com (2008).11. Semën Vilenskii, interview, Moscow, 18 November 2003.12. Presidential Commission charged with examining questions on rehabilitation.13. See Roginskii (2008).14. One Kolyma inmate received a second eight-year term in 1946 for likening the Siberian outpost to

‘Auschwitz without ovens’, Georgii Demidov, in a letter to Varlam Shalamov, 27 July 1965 (Vilenskii, 1996: 8).

15. See Feraposhkin (2008).16. Conversation with Irina Flige and Arsenii Roginskii, Moscow, 7 December 2008.17. For a comment on latter-day dissidence, see Schmemann (2008).18. Zasedanie Politbiuro TsK KPSS, 24 November 1988, RGANI (Russian State Archive for Contemporary

History), f. 89, op. 42, d. 23, ll. 1–5 (Stenogram politbiuro Session).19. Ukaz no. 549, 15 May 2009.20. See Biurchiev (2010).21. See Dolgin (2009).22. Liliia Al’fredovna Turchenkova, victims’ organization representative, conference participant, ‘Stalinism

in the Provinces’, Smolensk, Russia, 11 October 2009.23. Another old symbol to newly emerge is the patriotic youth movement, embodied in such organizations

as ‘Nashi’ (‘Ours’, The Youth Democratic Anti-Fascist Movement), which is not altogether unlike the Soviet Komsomol (see www.nashi.su).

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issledovaniia 1.

Author biography

Nanci Adler is Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Amsterdam). She is author of Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag (Indiana University Press, 2012), The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (Transaction, 2002), Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement (Praeger, 1993), and numerous scholarly articles on the Gulag, political rehabilitations and the consequences of Stalinism. Her current research focuses on transitional justice and the legacy of Communism.



Monuments

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Transcript of Monuments