A VOICE FROM THE PAST
By Richard Lourie

The Moscow Times
Oct 22 2007
Russia

Would Russia have benefited from a process of de-Sovietization like
the de-Nazification program that has apparently worked so well in
Germany? Why didn’t that happen? Is it too late?

A lot of ink has been spilled to demonstrate the similarities between
Nazism and communism, but the differences matter too. For one thing,
Nazism was over quickly, the 1,000-year Reich lasted less than 15. At
war’s end, the Nazi criminals were still young and their crimes
fresh. An executioner who was 30 at the apex of the Stalin’s terror in
1937 was in his 80s during the Gorbachev years and would be 100 today.

The worst crimes of the Soviet era were committed in the 36 years
between the 1917 Revolution and Stalin’s death in 1953. But the
Soviet Union had another 38 to go, some of them benign (Khrushchev,
Gorbachev), some nondescript (Andropov, Chernenko) and even the worst
of Brezhnev’s long reign was small potatoes. There was only one Nazism
— Hitler’s — but there were many varieties of Soviet communism.

The short duration of the Nazi era made its evil more intense. Though
it is difficult to measure degrees of evil past a certain point,
Stalin’s mass murders were probably not as bad as Hitler’s premeditated
genocide, which included the deaths of 1.5 million Jewish children.

Hitler’s path led to suicide — for himself and for Germany. In
it for the long haul, the Soviet Union always played it more
conservative. Stalin had the A-bomb for four years without rattling
that saber.

Finally, the Soviet Union was on the right side in World War II,
which was also the winning side. The crimes of victors are forgiven.

Some might argue that Russia did, in fact, undergo a sort of double
de-Sovietization — the de-Stalinization that occurred under Khrushchev
and the mass of revelations that surfaced in the glasnost years,
including all of the horrors from the murder of the royal family
to the use of psychiatric institutions to punish dissidents like
Bukovsky. They’d say that there’s a monument to the victims of the
secret police on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, a gulag museum in downtown
Moscow and readily available books and videos on the subject of
Communist crimes. De-Sovietization may have been done in slipshod
style, but it was done, and in any case, it’s too late to do much
more about it.

Another group, maybe as much as a quarter of the population, would
point out that the collapse of the Soviet Union was de-Sovietization
enough and that the problem with today’s Russia is that it isn’t Soviet
enough. If anything, they’d be in favor of a little re-Sovietization.

The crimes of the Soviet era were ordered by the Communist Party
and executed by its sword and shield — the KGB. The Communists lost
power, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and when the dust cleared,
the KGB were in power. As some of its members are fond of explaining,
this is, in fact, a good thing because the security services were
the only group organized enough to save the country from the abyss
of chaos. Not only that, the KGB had done much that was good in
the Soviet era (stealing the plans for the atomic bomb), and it
was itself the victim of Stalin’s crimes; recall how many officers,
not to mention KGB heads, perished in the purges.

But the past is rarely over and done with. Turkey’s fierce reaction
to the U.S. Congress classifying the World War I-era slaughter of
Armenians as genocide shows quite clearly what happens when ghosts
are not laid to rest. And Russia is still a haunted land.

Richard Lourie is the author of "Sakharov: A Biography" and "A Hatred
For Tulips."
From: Baghdasarian