Putin wages a war on memory and history in Russia, Ukraine

43 three months ago, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Russia announced that it was undertaking the rescission of the 1991 law on the rehabilitation of the victims of political repression. Translation, many of the hundreds of 1000s of men and women who had been arrested, tortured, shot or sentenced to monstrous terms in the gulag and later acquitted or rehabilitated, often posthumously, maybe in effect, retried to justify the original punishments. Ostensibly, the campaign is aimed at traitors of Motherland and Nazi accomplices during the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians called World War Two, but the enormous scope of the operation will almost certainly include other victims of Stalinist justice. Already, the pro Corona has hit the ground running by having reinstated the charges against 4000 people to most people outside Russia, the resentencing of deceased political prisoners would appear ludicrous, creepy, even eerie. Why go to all this trouble? Here’s why, sending 10s of 1000s of Russians to die or be maimed in the trenches of Ukraine requires justification and even more inspiration in his third presidential term, which started in 2012 Putin did come up with militarized patriotism as the key to his regime’s legitimacy after the economic progress and growth of incomes had petered out, but something else was needed, something more durable, more grandiose, prettier yet, unlike the Soviet Politburo’s communist paradise, Putin’s, Kremlin, is unable to construct a vision of the future beyond forever manning the ramparts in The defense of the motherland, allegedly besieged by NATO and Ukrainian so called Nazis. So Putin reacted back to the totalitarian Soviet Union as an ideal society, a mighty and benign superpower, feared and therefore respected all over the world, and, most importantly, a counterweight, moral as well as military, to America the Soviet past was to become Russia’s future. However, there was the rub, and that was the still lingering memory of the horrors that the Soviet regime perpetrated that memory had to be expunged, or at least muted. So when Putin initiated a so called referendum to amend the Constitution in order to become effectively president for life, he invented the article on the defense of historical truth. Two and a half years later, and four days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the authority shattered the memorial International, chaired by the Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov at its opening in 1989 the center was dedicated to researching and preserving the history of Stalinist terror. Other reminders of Stalinism were on the path to extirpation in the city of tier. Memorial boards were removed from the former in COVID headquarters, where 6295 Polish officers were shot in the basement, up to 300 men almost every night for a month and a half. Desecrated or obliterated were reminders of the executed in Vladimir and of the deportees who died in the Gulag in the Sverdlovsk region, per Irkutsk, petrozavoc and Yakutsk, a Russian newspaper called it an epidemic of destruction of memorials to the victims of Stalinist repression in almost two years after the invasion of Ukraine, Between February 2022 and November 2023, at least 22 such memorials disappeared along the way, vanished or vandalized throughout the country, with the passleny address or the last address, postcard size plaques on the facades of the apartment buildings bearing the names of. Those taken in the dead of the night and never returned in the meantime, there are 110 obelisks and statues of Stalin in 40 of Russia’s 49 regions. Only 9% of these memorials were inherited from the Soviet era, and almost half erected in the last 10 years, the sculptures are said to be privately funded, usually by a local communist, but it beggars belief to assume that anything to be allowed in public space without the Kremlin’s permission, but the tallest Stalin Memorial is being raised in the minds of the young. Thus 635,000 high school graduates of the class of 2024 learned Soviet history from the 2023 textbook, which a Russian commentator called the most stalinophilic item, published in the Soviet Union, or Russia since Stalin’s death in 1953 the textbook contains not a single bad or even critical word about one of the world’s greatest murders. The Bucha of millions is never culpable. His monstrous deeds are either omitted, explained away or copied straight faced from official Soviet narratives. For instance, the meat grinder of the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 in which millions were killed or sent to the Gulag, was attributed to the complicated international situation and the threat of a new world war. One of Stalin’s most egregious crimes was the arrest and deportation of entire peoples during and after World War Two for their alleged cooperation with the Nazi occupiers, while their fathers, brothers and husbands were still in the Soviet Army fighting Nazis an estimated 6 million members of 11 ethnic communities, among them, the Chechens, the English the Kalmyks, the Greeks and the Crimean Tatars, old men, women, children, nursing babies were shoved into cattle cars, often with no food or water, and dumped to sicken and starve in Central Asia, between 20 and 30% did not survive their deal. And what about the arrests and torment of the execution of dozens of members of the Jewish Anti Fascist committee, actors, poets, journalists, government officials between 1948 and 1952 according to the textbook, some of them had established connections to foreign Zionist organizations and were charged with espionage. Apparently, it’s left to the 11th graders to decide whether the charges were valid. I there was a consensus in the brilliant explosion of moral wisdom during the glastonist revolution between 1987 and 1991 that without settling scores with Stalin in his regime, which was described as the peak of inhumanity, immorality, contempt for the human beings and their dignity. Russia’s democratic future would be subverted, and the new free Russia impossible only perpetual, living and constantly renewed memory of the mass murder could become a reliable barrier against the restoration of the criminal regime. Well, Putin understands that as well. This is why his government is methodically reviving criminal charges against 1000s of people whom previous leaders had exonerated. Who controls the past controls the future? George Orwell wrote in 1984 who controls the present controls the past. A defeat in Ukraine would thwart Putin’s ability to erase reality, and would likely end his regime as well. But as long as he controls the present, his war on memory would. Broaden and deepen and.