Russia has yet to recover from the trauma of the Stalin era. By Sergey Parkhomenko
Earlier this year the
Russian ministry of culture banned the satirical film The Death of Stalin, supposedly because it contained “information
whose dissemination is prohibited by law”. On Russian-language social media,
the withdrawal of the film’s screening licence was met with widespread laughter
and scorn: what sort of secrets could this movie possibly have disclosed? Could
it be that Stalin is indeed dead? – so went the irony. It looked ridiculous.
But back in December, there had been an ominous precursor: Alexander Bortnikov,
the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence services, told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta
government newspaper that Stalin-era repressions had been justified. He
mentioned the need to counter Trotsky’s networks, and plots that had “ties with
foreign secret services”. He also claimed that “mass-scale political repression” had
ended by 1938 – a blatant rewriting of history.
As Vladimir Putin
prepares for re-election on 18 March, Russia’s Soviet past has become a
constant object of manipulation by a regime that is for ever sending out mixed
messages. Prior to Bortnikov’s comments, Putin had
inaugurated the Wall of Grief in Moscow, a memorial dedicated to the
victims of repression. “This terrifying past cannot be deleted from national
memory,” Putin said. “These crimes cannot be justified by anything.” Meanwhile, new
monuments, banners and exhibits
honouring Joseph Stalin are sprouting up around the country,
and new posters and banners glorifying him have become commonplace, while
hundreds of Soviet-era representations of him have been left intact: busts and
bas-reliefs of the man, statues big and small, standing or on horseback. Twice
a year, on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death, admirers bring
piles of red carnations to Stalin’s grave on Red Square. You might think this
is what the remnants of Stalinist ideology look like: memorabilia and ceremony.
But there’s more to it than that.
Russian society is not
ignorant of the scale of the purges and crimes perpetrated under Stalin. When
Bornitkov spoke about millions of victims, those figures were nothing new for
most Russians. For decades, Soviet doctrine taught citizens that these events
were an unavoidable price to pay for the survival and development of the country.
Stalinism today in Russia isn’t
found in those monuments, flowers, or posters – nor is it in censorship or the
double-speak of high-level officials. Instead it is hidden in the minds of many
Russians, in how they perceive history, and how they relate to fundamental
values.
For most
Russians, those millions of victims are nothing but cold statistics. Few
people care to pore over the difficult and unpleasant questions. That’s because
an unprocessed, psychological trauma remains in our society. The state doesn’t
need to make any special effort to perpetuate this. All it needs to do is leave
people alone with that terrifying past, and make sure they aren’t helped in
trying to understand how it came about, or in coming to terms with unspoken
feelings of collective guilt. This is how a totalitarian mindset can reproduce
itself… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/07/russia-stalin-putin-guilt-victimssee also
EVGENIA LEZINA - The revival of ideology in Russia
