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In 2013, throughout a televised question-and-answer session with Russian residents, Vladimir Putin took the chance to sentence Joseph Stalin’s persecution of tens of millions within the Soviet period. “We don’t have to return to the darkish interval of 1937,” he instructed viewers. “Stalinism is related to a character cult and mass violations of the legislation, with repression and camps. There’s nothing like this in Russia and, I hope, by no means shall be once more.”
Why, then, are the authorities revoking a number of the official rehabilitations of Stalin’s victims which have occurred, in matches and begins, since Nikita Khrushchev’s rule within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties? It dangers reopening painful wounds in society, and even tempting folks to attract comparisons between Putin and Stalin, at a time when the Russian president places a premium on nationwide unity within the struggle towards Ukraine.
In line with a draft order ready this month by Igor Krasnov, Russia’s chief prosecutor, the reversal of rehabilitations is restricted in scope. Supposedly, it solely impacts “Nazi collaborators” and “traitors to the motherland” deemed to have been wrongly rehabilitated after Stalin’s dying.
Amongst these classes are mentioned to be Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists in addition to Russian “bandit teams” that resisted Soviet rule. Clearly, the all-important context for Krasnov’s order is Putin’s assault on Ukrainian nationhood and his crackdown on dissent at house.
All the identical, the measure seems unusual. Rehabilitation of struggle criminals is already prohibited underneath Russian legislation. Maybe some miscreants have been mistakenly exonerated underneath Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev, throughout whose 1985-1991 rule the veil on Stalin’s crimes was lifted as by no means earlier than. However they’re absolutely few in quantity.
In a single sense, Krasnov’s order is mere propaganda geared toward discrediting Ukrainian id and opponents of Putin. However there’s extra to it than that. Simply as tens of millions of harmless Soviet residents have been imprisoned, exiled, despatched to labour camps and executed underneath Stalin, so the reversal of some rehabilitations dangers being an arbitrary course of in a rustic the place the judiciary is subordinate to the Kremlin’s wants.
In a 2018 Russian survey, greater than a 3rd of respondents mentioned that they had family members who had skilled repression underneath Stalin. How would they react in the event that they came upon that, in some circumstances, the authorities now judged their family members to have been illegally rehabilitated? We can’t be certain, however there’s a likelihood that it could stir a lot bitterness.
It may additionally revive recollections of the connection in fashionable Russian historical past between the rehabilitation course of and efforts to dismantle despotism. Underneath Khrushchev, and particularly Gorbachev, official openness about previous atrocities and the rehabilitation of harmless victims generated strain for broader liberalisation. The organisation that the majority successfully represented this push for democracy and honesty about historical past was the human rights group Memorial, which Putin shut down in 2021.
Conversely, even a partial reversal of rehabilitations would function a twin sign to the Russian folks. On one hand, it could underline the development in the direction of rising home political repression. On the opposite, it could spotlight Putin’s insatiable itch to put reminiscence of the Russian previous underneath official management and, because the scholar Jade McGlynn places it, to wrap the nation’s historical past in “disinformation, myths and false narratives”.
This shouldn’t be construed as an try by Putin to rehabilitate Stalin himself or to whitewash your complete Soviet legacy. For many of his rule, Putin has confined himself to praising some “good” elements of the Stalin period, above all of the victory over the Nazis, whereas distancing himself from the dictator’s mass repressions. However the evaluation of some rehabilitations is an indication that even this model of historical past could quickly be altered to swimsuit Putin’s functions.
tony.barber@ft.com