These are the questions that many are struggling with today, not in an abstract sense but precisely when they consider recent experience. When they examine closely the 1990s, people want to understand: what did we miss? What mistakes were made that have allowed the Soviet Union to return? By far the most popular answer is that it’s because we didn’t instigate a purge of the old guard. When we look at today’s political situation you could argue that not carrying out a purge was a mistake. But I wouldn’t rush to this conclusion.
In such circumstances, a purge means removing the rights of the old elite. How widely this reaches can vary, both in terms of the people affected and the rights that are taken away from them. If we’re talking about Russia, then probably the most wide-ranging purge was carried out by the Bolsheviks after the revolution. They enacted repressive measures against millions of people who fell into the category of the so-called “privileged classes” of the old Russia (the gentry, members of the clergy, army officers, the kulaks and others). A significant percentage of them were repressed in various ways or even killed, while millions of others were denied the right to take part in various activities, professions were closed off to them, their children were deprived of the possibility to be educated and so on.
But this is an extreme example. After the velvet revolutions in Europe, velvet purges became fashionable. They were on a much smaller scale and a lot more gentle in terms of the pressure they put on the old elite. Whole social classes were no longer included among those who were purged. Now it was rather about individuals who directly cooperated with the regime or who occupied specific positions in the hierarchy. These could have been officials (in the first instance, of course, members of the law enforcement bodies or the special services), judges, secret agents and other similar categories. The lists of these people differed depending on the country, but the general principle was the same: a change from class-based repression to specific professional or political categories.
Naturally, in modern Russia you won’t find many people who would want to repeat “the red terror”. But in terms of milder restrictions, such as those applied in Eastern Europe or certain countries of the post-Soviet space, there tends to be a different opinion. A significant proportion of the liberally-minded intelligentsia today would welcome such an approach. People look to the past and say, “we didn’t do this in the 1990s – and look what happened!” But before answering the question as to whether or not this should be done, it would be sensible to ask whether in principle it would be possible to do this in Russia. And the answer to this question is not as simple as it may seem.
This so-called “mild purge” is principally aimed at breaking the automatic production chain of the nomenklatura – a somewhat closed circle of professional bureaucrats who amazingly manage to reinstate their positions inside any power set-up following a revolution. There are many examples of this; and they all show that – in the countries of the former USSR at least – no purge is going to solve this issue.
Let’s start with the Bolsheviks themselves. Already at the beginning of the 1920s, just three years after the revolution and the start of “the red terror”, Lenin was complaining to his colleagues that the Bolsheviks had been unable to solve the problem of clearing out the representatives of the old tsarist state apparatus. He moaned that they represented the majority of Soviet state officials; that the new state apparatus was even bigger than the old one had been; and that it was suffering from every kind of bureaucratic illness. To be fair it should be noted that in the end the Bolsheviks did manage to overcome the opposition of the old elites; but this was mainly by terror, rather than measures that could in a narrower sense of the word be described as “a purge”.
The most recent experience of purges in Ukraine can also hardly be called encouraging. Firstly, it turned out that efforts to use legal methods for purging were in practice tied in with massive and often insurmountable difficulties. Then, it turned out that once all those officials who needed to be removed had been purged, the new authorities found that they had no one available to fill key posts. It is this factor that runs through all of the unsuccessful attempts at carrying out purges across the whole post-Soviet space. This is in contrast to the relatively positive experience of this method in the countries of Eastern Europe.
Russia’s problem (and, indeed, that of many other post-Soviet states) is that the political class and the cultural layer within it is not very big. As a result, the “substitutes’ bench” for filling these posts in any future administration is very small. There simply isn’t anywhere we could find a large number of judges, procurators or police, let alone bankers, financial inspectors and so on. And the further you go, the more difficult it is, because the work of the state apparatus becomes ever more complicated, and the tasks allocated to it ever greater. In other words, carrying out purges is all well and good in theory, but it rarely works in practice. It even became an insoluble problem for the Bolsheviks, despite their conviction that any cook would be capable of running the country. It ended up with the cooks becoming the bosses, but under them it was basically the old specialists doing the work. In reality, we need to find a different solution rather than purges.
And there is a solution. It turns out that when placed in the most varied circumstances, the very same people are capable of showing completely different results. The task should be not to change the people, but the system that defines the limits of their behaviour. This task can be split into two separate areas: removing the “first disciples” from the system; and cutting out unacceptable social and political work practices.
As accumulated experience has shown, trying to suppress the rights of social and professional groups when there are not the people in society who could take their place simply makes the situation even more complicated. One way or another representatives of these groups still manage to worm their way into the new social structure, causing serious moral and political damage to society. A useful method here may be to take a more personalised approach, that would help at least for a time to exclude the more odious characters from the infrastructure. We are, of course, not including here those against whom there is clear evidence to bring legal charges in connection with particularly serious crimes. Such individuals must be brought before the courts, in accordance with the constitutional guarantees.
We’re talking here about people who are not suspected of carrying out particularly dangerous crimes, but who were key figures in facilitating the work of the criminal regime. People such as those who sponsored the regime; who distributed its propaganda; who were in charge of the crucial sections of the apparatus of repression. Bringing them all to justice would be costly, even if it were possible; but to allow them to continue with their political activity would be dangerous. One solution could be to apply specific and targetted sanctions, that are, in any case, fairer than carrying out purges simply based on professional or social grounds. Some sort of “internal Magnitsky Act” could be used, that would allow for the regime’s “first disciples” to be excluded from the social infrastructure, albeit for a period of time.