By Lyudmila Alexandrova, Itar-Tass World Service writer
Russia is remembering the victims of political repression, in particular, those who lost their lives in the years of Stalinist terror. In the meantime, the image of the tyrant as such still evokes much positive emotion in the Russian public mind.
Analysts believe this is a result of not only the people’s longing for iron hand rule, but also of the authorities’ lack of determination to restore historical justice.
The tragedy of the first half of the 20th century affected – in some way – nearly half of the population of what was then the USSR. Millions of citizens fell victim to massive political repression. Whole ethnic groups were resettled by force. Chechens, Ingushes, the Karachai people, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Kurds, Koreans, Buryats and others.
The exoneration of victims of political repression began in the USSR in 1954. Then the process was halted for sometime only to resume during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika period. In 1991 Russia adopted special law on the exoneration of victims of political repression.
According to the Prosecutor-General’s Office over the period the law has been in effect, over 600,000 cases have been reconsidered and 900,000 people, whose normal lives had been ruined or wasted, have been exonerated.
The precise figure of those repressed is unknown to this day.
The head of the Russian society Memorial, Arseny Roginsky, is quoted by NEWSru.com as saying that under the Russian law on exoneration about 12 million people can be regarded as victims of political repression in the territory of the former USSR.
Roginsky explained that 4.5 million to 5.2 million were arrested by the authorities, investigated and convicted. About seven million people were deported without any rulings by judicial or other authorities – peasant farmers during the collectivization period, repressed ethnic groups, deported in the post-war years, and others.
Human rights activists find it very worrisome that half a century after the mass reprisals and purges the figure of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin remains to be eyed with a sort of sympathy by many in Russian society.
“The trend of laundering the image of Stalin is a fact of life, and it is a very dangerous trend,” Roginsky said. He believes that Russian society has not developed the proper awareness of what the Stalinist repression was all about to this day.
Indeed, the popularity of the bloodthirsty tyrant 55 years after his death remains high. Senior citizens recall the Stalinist era with nostalgia, and many Russian youth tend to idealize him.
At the initiative of the state television and radio broadcasting company VGTRK several months ago launched a national project called Russia’ s Names. Historical Choice – 2008.
Lenin and Stalin topped the popularity lists at the first phase, which horrified the project’s brain-fathers. The Ekho Moskvy liberal radio station accused Stalin’s devotees of statistics rigging and declare its own, alternative contest only to discover that the tyrant of all times and peoples placed : second.
A Yuri Levada Center opinion poll discovered that the number of Stalin’ s supporters and critics was approximately the same. Thirty two percent agreed with the statement “whatever mistakes Stalin may be held responsible for, the people he led emerged the winner in the war against Nazi Germany, and this is the most important achievement of all.”
The personality of “the national leader and the teacher” is getting ever more mythologized. It is no longer ominous. On the contrary, it arouses plain human interest. The public at large wants to know what Stalin liked to see on his table for lunch, what type of ladies he preferred to court, what he did for recreation and what he eventually died of.
“True, this is a result of some sort of propaganda,” political scientist Olga Kryshtanovskaya told Itar-Tass. In her opinion, there are many highly-placed people for whom Stalin is a hero, but at the same time they understand that singing praise to him would not be very appropriate.”
“The aim of this propaganda is to separate everything good that there was in the Soviet era, from the bad things, such as repression,” she said.
“An overwhelming majority of the people who support Stalin just have no idea of what they are talking about,” historian Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former State Duma member told Itar-Tass.
The school manual called Russia’s History in 1900-1945 is a telling sign. The book, being readied for print, is to be used as the basic one for Russian school students. It stipulates that history teachers, while lecturing the audience on the period of Stalinist repression, should insist that Stalin was in a very specific historical situation, that he acted quite rationally as a manager – as a custodian of the system, as a firm supporter of converting the country into an industrialized society, run from one center, and as the leader of a country that in the near future would be plunged into a great war.
