After Putin, Russia will need to reckon with its crimes
Without transparency and accountability, yesterday’s secret police become tomorrow’s rulers.
Last month, two very symbolic — and very telling — news stories came out of Russia in the space of a few days. On April 19, under the cover of darkness, the authorities in the Siberian city of Tomsk demolished the Stone of Grief, a memorial to the victims of Soviet political repression that had stood on one of the city’s central squares since the early 1990s in honor of the hundreds of thousands of people murdered in this region by the communist regime and its security services. According to eyewitnesses, the monument was destroyed by tractors using their buckets to tear it down.
On April 22, by a special presidential decree, Vladimir Putin named the academy of the FSB — Russia’s Federal Security Service and the main domestic successor to the KGB — after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the machine of state terror that, over the decades of Soviet rule, was responsible for killing millions of Russians and people from other nations subjugated by the Kremlin. As the reason for his move, Putin cited Dzerzhinsky’s “outstanding contribution to ensuring state security.”
There is, of course, nothing new in the Kremlin’s campaign to erase the memory of crimes the Soviet state had committed against its people — and to glorify their perpetrators and masterminds. One of Putin’s first actions in power in December 1999, even before he formally succeeded President Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, was to install a memorial plaque to Yuri Andropov, longtime head of the Soviet KGB, whose tenure had been marked by a relentless drive to eradicate dissent. Months later, Putin reinstated the Soviet-era national anthem that had once been personally picked by Joseph Stalin.
Earlier this year, the authorities closed down the Gulag History Museum in Moscow, Russia’s only permanent national exhibit commemorating the victims of Soviet-era repression — and just last month, Russia’s Supreme Court prohibited all activities of Memorial, the organization dedicated to preserving the memory of Soviet repression and of victims, designating it as an “extremist” entity.
Putin’s war on memory is hardly surprising. The inhabitants of today’s Kremlin consider themselves — proudly so — as the direct successors of Soviet security services, and any reminder of their heroes’ heinous crimes is naturally unwelcome. Moreover, these same crimes have long become a reality of the present-day Russian regime — from the murders of opposition leaders to mass imprisonment of those who disagree with the government to brutal expansionist wars aiming at re-creating outside “spheres of influence,” most notably and most tragically in Ukraine.
All of this is a painful reminder of the mistake committed by Russia’s democratic leadership after the fall of the Soviet regime. World history has shown beyond doubt that the trauma of totalitarian rule, especially if it lasts for decades, cannot be simply ignored. It must be dealt with and overcome in a concerted effort by the state and society. Different countries found different formats for doing this — from judicial tribunals in post-dictatorship Latin America to lustration procedures in postcommunist Eastern Europe to truth and reconciliation commissions in postapartheid South Africa — but the central tenets have always been the same: transparency and accountability. Crimes committed by past regimes were made public; the perpetrators of these crimes were held to account; and the ideologies and practices of the old systems were unequivocally condemned.
There were moves for something similar in Russia in the early 1990s. Vladimir Bukovsky, a writer and legendary Soviet-era dissident, advocated for a full opening of Communist Party and KGB archives. Galina Starovoitova, a prominent member of parliament, introduced a lustrations bill that would have barred former Communist Party officials and KGB operatives (including Putin) from positions of executive authority. Anatoly Kononov, a judge of Russia’s constitutional court, wrote a landmark legal opinion arguing for a full-fledged trial of the former Communist regime under international statutes relating to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against peace and humanity.
In the end, none of this happened. Post-Soviet inertia in the state bureaucracy proved stronger than public desire for change. “It will turn into a witch-hunt,” government officials shrugged at Bukovsky’s calls for accountability. “Then the witches will return and start hunting us,” he responded — and, of course, turned out to be right. When evil is not reflected upon, accounted for and publicly condemned, it will inevitably come back.
Much more than a reflection on the past, this is a crucial lesson for Russia’s future. Nothing (and no one) is forever, and it is only a question of time when Russia gets another chance to turn the page on this shameful period and launch democratic reforms. If this chance is to succeed, reforms must be accompanied by a robust process of transitional justice, and everyone, from Putin on down, responsible for committing crimes against our own people and the peoples of other countries must be held fully accountable. Instruments of this future accountability are already being created — from the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine to the recently launched international initiative for documenting human rights abuses in Russia itself.
We owe this not only to future generations of Russians but also to the rest of Europe and the entire rules-based international order. These witches must never, ever be allowed to return again.
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