The Return of the Soviet Union

When President Bush ascends the reviewing stand in Red Square on May 9 for ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, he may find that his presence is being used less to mark a historic anniversary than to rehabilitate the Soviet Union.

The anniversary has unleashed a wave of nostalgia for the Soviet Union. A report by the RIA press agency said, "all the veterans agree that the great love that the Soviet people had for their country and their belief in the righteousness of their cause helped the Soviet Union survive the worst war of the twentieth century." Russian President Vladimir Putin in a speech last year at the Victory Day ceremonies said, "We were victorious in the most just war of the twentieth century. May 9 is the pinnacle of our glory." In his state of the nation address, April 25, Putin referred to the breakup of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

This type of nostalgia, however, is not harmless. Not only does it ignore the fact that the Soviet Union was just as terroristic as Nazi Germany. It also reflects what Hannah Arendt referred to as a "pervasive, public stupidity." This is the failure to understand that the truth about the past is not irrelevant and, in fact, is the best hope for a decent future.

The re-sovietization of Russia is possible because when the Soviet Union fell, the new Russian state did not break irrevocably with its communist heritage. To do this, it needed to define the communist regime as criminal and the Soviet period as illegitimate, open the archives, including the list of informers and find and commemorate all mass burial grounds and execution sites. Unfortunately, none of this was done with consequences that are being felt today.

There is still no legal evaluation of the Soviet regime. The communist regime has never been declared criminal and no Soviet official has ever been tried for crimes committed under communism. The result is that former communist leaders in Russia are viewed as leaders first and criminals second (if at all), no matter how heinous their actions. Under these circumstances, Russians frequently lack the conviction, intrinsic to free men, that an individual answers for his actions no matter what the external conditions.

At the same time, because the Soviet regime was not repudiated, the Russian government became the Soviet regime’s legal successor. This has meant that millions of victims of repression were rehabilitated, usually posthumously, by being cleared of official charges rather than because those charges were the product of a deranged system. The regime therefore continued to judge its victims rather than the other way around.

In addition to not declaring the Soviet regime criminal, the new Russian government did nothing to reveal the identities of KGB informers. In March, 1992, the Russian Supreme Soviet passed a new law on investigative activities that declared the list of the millions of informers to be a state secret. One reason for the vote was believed to be that many of the deputies had themselves been KGB informers. The decision, however, had serious consequences. It established a precedent for concealing the truth about the past that was to become increasingly important as new decisions were made regarding access to vital records, for example, the KGB, Comintern and foreign ministry archives.

Perhaps most important, the Russian authorities made no serious attempt to find and memorialize the mass graves and execution sites that cover the country. The victims of Stalin era terror were executed in secret and the Soviet leaders intended that the bodies would never be found. Nonetheless, some sites have been discovered. This, however, has usually been the achievement of the Memorial social movement operating with little or no help from the outside.

In August 2002, after a five year search, the execution grounds for the majority of the victims of the Great Terror in Leningrad were discovered by Memorial in a firing range near the village of Toksovo. It is estimated that the site holds 30,000 bodies, making it possibly the largest on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Neither the federal nor the local authorities, however, have shown any interest in excavating the site and analyzing the remains let alone memorializing the victims. Instead, they have cautioned the volunteers from Memorial not to interfere with the operations of the firing range.

The result of the indifference of the authorities is that the burial grounds and execution sites that stand in silent witness to the horrors of Russian communism play almost no role in the moral and spiritual life of the country.

Without a concerted effort to memorialize the horrors of communist rule in Russia, the growing nostalgia for Soviet power is a natural tendency. Although communism was the moral nadir of modern Russian history it was also the period when Russia was at the height of its power.

Increasingly, however, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is taking frightening forms. Statues of Stalin have begun appearing in Russian cities and in Orel, the town council has written to Putin, demanding that Stalin’s "honor" be restored to the history books, his statue re-erected and his name given to streets and squares. In mid-April, the communist party leader, Gennady Zyuganov said Russia "should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague."

In another sign of the time, a group of leading political and cultural figures in St. Petersburg has called for the erection of a monument to Alexei Kuznetsov, a party official who organized Leningrad’s defenses during the Second World War. Kuznetsov was later shot in the postwar "Leningrad Affair" and he is buried in the Levashovo Cemetery along with many of Stalin’s other victims.

Before the war began, however, Kuznetsov himself was a key participant in Stalin’s atrocities as a member of the three man extrajudicial board or "troika" that signed death sentences for the Leningrad oblast during the terror. The troika operated in Leningrad from August, 1937 to November, 1938 issuing almost 40,000 death sentences and from January to June, 1938, Kuznetsov, as the second secretary of the oblast party committee, was a member.

It is too late to decline to go to Moscow as the presidents of Lithuania and Estonia have done, citing Russia’s refusal to admit and apologize for the crimes committed in the Baltics. In any case, for the U.S., such a move would be unjustified. Bush, nonetheless, would be doing a real service to history if, in addition to participating in the celebrations, he would also visit the Butovo firing range south of the city where the bodies of at least 20,000 victims of Stalin’s Great Terror lie in mass graves.

In contrast to the meticulous attention devoted to anything to do with the Second World War, Butovo is neglected. There is no museum or general memorial. The common graves are marked off with ropes. Until recently, the area was choked with weeds and used as a garbage dump. The number of visitors is miniscule, about 4,000 a year, mostly Orthodox believers and relatives of those buried there.

The Soviet Union did indeed achieve a great victory in defeating Nazi Germany. The cost was 27 million Soviet dead, including 8.6 million soldiers. The failure to put the victory in perspective and describe the true nature of the Stalinist regime, however, means that the May 9 events, in addition to a celebration of the victory are also an exercise in propaganda that glorifies the Soviet system. As a result, the visiting heads of state risk endorsing with their presence a view of history that works against the interests of Russia’s democratic future.

A visit by Bush to Butovo during the May 9 celebrations would help to redress this balance and by injecting an element of reality into the event emphasize that for the Western allies the goal of the war was not just the defeat of Germany but the eradication of totalitarianism, in 1945 and in the future as well.

David Satter, a senior fellow with Hudson Institute and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale).

"In Soviet times, we had security, we had stability. We could travel, at least within the Soviet sphere of influence. We took vacations at the seaside. We didn't have much money but nothing we could buy cost much money. Now we make little money but everything costs a lot, and we have no security. Travel? Forget it. Times were better in Soviet days."

Except for that post-midnight knock on the door. Notice that we can't hear the opposite point of view from those victims (because they were killed, duh!). I refer you to the above-mentioned mass grave with 30,000 bodies in it. None of them are claiming that life in the Soviet Union was better then than life in Russia now.

“That and the things listed below are the reasons I think the Communism still rules while flying under the flag of Democracy.”

To be fair, the Communists view Communism and Democracy as being one and the same. Let’s look, for example, at some of Vladimir Lenin’s speeches:

“...at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism — the proletariat — and enables it to crush, smash to smithereens, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine — the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy — and to substitute for it a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of the armed masses of workers who develop into a militia in which the entire population takes part.” —Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (http://www.marx.be/sites/default/files/documents/EN/texts/sr_and_sq.PDF)

“...the Social-Democrat’s [Communist’s] ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” — Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done?(https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm)

Note how many times Lenin has used “democratic”, “democracy”, or similar terms in describing their perceived views. I just view that as another indication of how democracy is bad. Heck, that’s not even counting Vladimir Lenin’s declaration that democracy is indispensable with socialism, or Karl Marx stating that democracy is the road to socialism for that matter.

GHW Bush may have meant well, but he really shouldn’t have tried to bring “democracy” to Russia, as they technically already HAD that system via Communism (certainly, they had the French Revolution style of democracy), and not in a good way. If anything, he would have been better off trying to help the Russians restore the Tsar.

Yes, I agree that the Left in the U. S. is incredibly misguided.

The LEFT is misguided when they think they are on a different page from modern Russia and its take on history. They're not.

Members of the Right are misguided when praising Putin for paying lip service to KGB-led Christianity. And allowing for Muslims to execute gays in his Chechen backyard is NOT an example of what I call "defending Christian values." (Among other things...and with Putin himself being divorced and single.)

Some things Putin does are okay. Other things he does are troublesome.

He is not a good man. He is not altruistic. Those who think he’s a fine upstanding person, are mistaken IMO.

I don’t think we need to insult him on the world stage. There is probably more to gain by having dialogue with him, than by ostracizing him.

I don’t trust him. Our leaders shouldn’t either, and they should be very leery of making deals with him.

He’s going to be around for quite some time, so we may have to make some deals, but I’d think long and hard about any negative connotations that could come from it, and be prepared for the worst.

Yes I’m not referring to what’s being done at the executive/diplomatic level. I leave dealmaking to the experts (like Trump) —> but I’m speaking in terms of how conservatives here on the the ground and even on these forums relate to what’s going on in Russia and other countries.

Not every movement towards freedom/democracy should be dismissed as a “Soros” effort (though he does taint or play a role quite a few.) and Putin is NOT our ally when it comes to saving Western Civilization. Far from it. He seeks to undermine and upend it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.