I’ll see your kidney stone
and raise you a 10lb baby
Janice Turner
Page 28
Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul
The absence of a historical reckoning with the evils of Stalinism has spawned a people who believe brutality works
Comment
rights organisation Memorial
recalled in 2019, the early reformers
leading Russia “lacked interest in
history; they were in a rush to build a
market economy. They didn’t see the
link between successful economic
reforms and the need for a vibrant
civil society.”
So when things got tough and folk
became nostalgic even for the bad
old days, Vladimir Putin was able,
gradually at first and then morecompletely, to end any attempt at a
mass understanding of Stalinism and
its brutalities. Stalin, meanwhile, was
being psychologically rehabilitated.
In December last year Sherbakova’s
Memorial organisation was shut
down by the Russian courts, but by
then polls were showing 71 per cent of
Russians saying they had a “positive
attitude” towards Stalin’s role in their
history. The head of the polling
organisation Levada wrote that Stalin
was seen as a severe leader “who
could create order in the country”.
Maybe a bit like you-know-who.
The young soldier sent to Ukraine
was never taught in school about the
Great Terror. It’s not on the
curriculum. But what he has almost
certainly absorbed, even if
subliminally, is the great national
lesson that brutality is simply
inevitable and that it works.going about the opposition. That was
unforgivable.”
Chuev asked Molotov about a case
where, sent a list of women
prisoners’ sentences for approval, he
had altered one of 10 years in prison
to being shot. “I was authorised to
have access to this list and to amend
it,” he told Chuev, “and so I did.”
What was the charge against her,
who was she, he was asked. “It’s of no
importance,” replied Molotov.
DeStalinisation led to no
reckoning. Only during the brief
period of perestroika and then after
the fall of the Berlin Wall did it look
as though there was a concerted
attempt to get Russians to come to
terms with their history. The
archives were opened, books were
published, museums established. But
as the historian Irina Sherbakova, a
founding member of the humanMolotov showed no repentance for his
role in deportations and mass murdersent to the gulags where many
perished.
And no one was tried. No one
imprisoned. The victims had no
redress and at best could expect
“rehabilitation”, very often
posthumously. Unlike the Nazi
leadership or its European
collaborators, there were no
Nurembergs, no cyanide suicides, no
long stretches in jail. Whereas mad
old Rudolf Hess ended his days in
Spandau prison in Berlin in 1987 aged
93, his Soviet counterpart, 96-year-
old Vyacheslav Molotov, succumbed
to pneumonia in a Moscow hospital a
year earlier. And his terrible colleague,
the “Iron Commissar” Lazar
Kaganovich, who in his declining
years liked to sit on a bench in the
park to chat to people, lasted till 1991.
Both had been intimately involved
in all of Stalin’s greatest acts of mass
murder. Both had helped shape and
administer the policies that caused
the Ukrainian famine. Molotov had
been in charge of the mass
deportation of kulaks, and both had
signed off on the murder of people
during the Great Terror.
One of the most chilling books I
have read is the 1993 translation of
Molotov Remembers, the edited
transcripts of 140 conversations he
had with a biographer, Felix Chuev,
in the 17 years before his death.
It is wrong to call the tone
“unrepentant”. Molotov did not feel
he had anything but inevitable
“mistakes” to be repentant for. What
he had done had been for the best
and, generally, had worked out well.
Chuev taxed him with the murders
of so many old comrades. Men like
Jan Rudzutak. “He never confessed
to anything about himself,” said
Molotov. “He was executed by firing
squad. A politburo member. I don’t
think he was a conscious member of
any faction but he was too easy-I
t was all western propaganda
that Russia was about to invade
Ukraine. It was all western
propaganda, once the invasion
had begun, to call it an “invasion”.
It was all western propaganda that
the ebbing Russian tide revealed the
summary killing and torture of
civilians and looting.
Yet for all our “propaganda” no
one has been more surprised than
the West. “Terrible things happen in
war”, of course. We have only to
think of the family in Kabul
obliterated last summer by an
American drone strike because they
had been mistaken for terrorists
planning an attack on the airport.
But even so there has been a
particular quality to the behaviour of
Russian troops in Ukraine. And also,
as far as we can tell from recordings
of intercepted conversations between
some of them and their relatives
back home, a casual brutality
towards all Ukrainians. It’s a
callousness that has extended to the
treatment of their own casualties,
with little effort made to rescue the
wounded or recover the dead. All
this has shocked us, and the question
that begs to be answered is: why are
they like this?
One answer is that they are
reacting to the continuous depiction
in Russia of Ukrainians as being
mostly “Nazis” — that is, (since this
is not an analytical term) folk devils.
Another is that the Russian army is
poorly NCOed, badly led, ill-
disciplined, resentful and made up of
recruits many of whom were
subjected to violent “hazing” after
joining. They arrive on the battlefield
already brutalised.
But there is something so cynical
about this brutality, whether it’s the
actions of the soldiers, the language
of the vox pops on Russian streets or
the threats from pundits on state-
sponsored current affairs shows. It’s
almost as if it comes from a place
where such actions are seen as
somehow inevitable, that always
man will be wolf to man.
I’m not arguing that such a belief
is intrinsic to Russians as people.
They want the same things as we do:
to be happy, for their children to
thrive, to become grandparents, to
have some say over their own lives,
to watch a good serial on TV and go
to Disneyland. But as Marx said, we
are weighed down and hemmed in
by our collective pasts, or rather,
what we imagine our pasts to be.
And the Russian past is centuries ofbrutality often dressed up for its
citizens as glory, as millions of eggs
necessarily broken to attain victory.
It is hard for us to imagine the
psychological impact of this, but the
background is that the Bolshevik era
was marked by an appalling level of
official murder and catastrophic
policies right up to the mid-Fifties,
for which no one was held to
account. Between 1930 and 1953 the
ruling elite of the Soviet Union
presided over the deportation of
several million kulaks, a famine in
Soviet Ukraine that killed up to four
million, the summary killing of up to
760,000 people, with 1.7 million moreNo one was tried for
the mass murders. The
victims had no redress
Most Russians now
have a positive attitude
towards Stalin’s role
David
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