Memory, a shield against terror
SOME RUSSIANS this week are commemorating the millions of their compatriots who perished in Joseph Stalin's purges, an era known in Russia as the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. These acts of remembrance signify far more than just a marking of the 70th anniversary of a national nightmare.
Some observances spring from the efforts of civic groups in Russia, and reflect a need to immunize the body politic against a recurrence of an old malady. There was also an official ceremony. This indicates, let us hope, that Russia's current leaders are at least aware of their obligation to protect against a revival of state terror against civilians.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Russia was not obliged to face the truth of its history in the same way Germans had to confront the crimes of the Third Reich after World War II. The Communist Party, in whose name Stalin's executioners murdered so many forebears of living Russians, remained the sole ruling party for another 38 years after Stalin died. In 1956, another party leader, Nikita Khrushchev, gave a secret speech acknowledging some of Stalin's crimes. But Khrushchev only skimmed the surface. And he was addressing party dignitaries, not the public.
And just as there was no radical change in political regimes after Stalin, there was nothing in Russia like the postwar Nuremberg tribunal. In those proceedings, Nazi crimes against humanity were documented dramatically, overwhelmingly, not only with fastidious bureaucratic records kept by German officials but also with newsreel footage.
So members of the Russian human rights group Memorial are meeting a still-unmet need. On Monday, they stood in Lubyanka Square before the headquarters of the old Soviet secret police, and took turns reciting names of people who had been executed - at a rate of a thousand a day - during the Great Terror. The victims had been workers, peasants, intellectuals, party members: all defined as class enemies or enemies of the state.
On Tuesday, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, attended a memorial service at another communist killing ground in the company of Patriarch Alexiy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin placed a wreath of flowers at a mass grave on a military training ground outside Moscow called Butovo, where tens of thousands had been shot by firing squads. Putin performed a service to his people by acknowledging that millions of their grandparents and great-grandparents had been "killed and sent to camps, shot and tortured." This can happen, he said, "when ostensibly attractive but empty ideas are put above fundamental values, values of human life, of rights and freedom."
Russians must hope that Putin and his successors will disavow in deeds as well as words the crimes that follow from an absolute subordination of the citizen to the state.
