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In Russia, violence is the socially acknowledged norm, the way to solve problems and define relations, the way to act between the authorities and the people, between men and women, parents and children, teachers and pupils. This is precisely why we need to prevent violence from being automatic and anonymous – it should be called what it is, attributed and judged. Our society is growing up and is beginning to speak about violence. Not so long ago the flash mob ‘I’m not afraid to speak out’ appeared, when Russian women for the first time in their lives spoke about the sexual violence and humiliation they have suffered. Then there was the scandal of the elite School No. 57 in Moscow, when the names were revealed of the teachers who, over the course of many years, had been sleeping with their female pupils. And finally we had the fearless philosopher from Tomsk, Denis Karagodin, who, having spent four years digging in the archives of the KGB to find the names of those responsible for sentencing and shooting his great-grandfather in 1938, received all the names and established the name of each member of this criminal group who took part in the murder, from the driver of the car that went to pick him up when he was arrested, to the NKVD typists and all the way up to the People’s Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Yezhov, and Stalin himself. The names are declared, the chain of silence is broken and the Mafia omertà (code of silence) is removed from society.

The Russian culture of violence stands on two pillars: the right of the strong and the silence of the weak, and the second is no less important than the first. Remember how everyone pounced on the women who spoke out about rape and harassment: they themselves were the guilty ones! They shouldn’t have provoked their attackers! In the same way, for years a conspiracy of silence was woven around the prestigious Moscow school, for fear of spoiling the corporate etiquette of the capital’s intelligentsia. And even more important for understanding the complexes and fears of modern Russian society is ‘the silence of the lambs’ before the executioners, the lack of desire to raise and discuss the issue of the Stalinist terror. Immediately after Denis Karagodin’s posts on the Internet with the names of the killers, there followed replies saying that there was no need to stir up the past and rock the boat. The former Duma deputy, Alexander Khinshtein, who had links with the siloviki, wrote in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets that he had only good words for the NKVD forces and he poured criticism on those ‘who wish to divide our recent past into black and white’.[44] The journalist Natalya Osipova, writing in Izvestiya in a column under the typical title of ‘I fear justice’, also seemed to be afraid of disclosure, repeating the favourite thesis of the Russian propagandists of the postmodern era: everyone has their own truth, their own version of reality, their own list of who’s guilty and their own list of martyrs. She concluded that ‘a bad peace is better than a good civil war’.[45]

The call for forgiveness and reconciliation between the descendants of the executioners and their victims is a typical Russian way of solving a problem not by a law but by an agreement, taking away the responsibility for finding a judicial solution and moving it into the murky world of political expediency. Terror in Russia has been smeared in a sticky layer across society and across history in such a way that it appears that everyone has taken part in it and everyone is at one and the same time both guilty and not guilty. Karagodin translates the question into a straightforward judicial one: if the state killed people for its own diabolical quasi-legal reasons, then now it should answer for it before the law. From the amorphousness and subjectlessness of Russian life, he highlights the names of those who carried out or took part in the terror – and for this reason he is dangerous for the system, which rests on the anonymity of terror and the silence of the victims.

The guardians of the system understand only too well that once the names of the long-dead executioners start to be exposed, the living participants in terror will no longer be able to retain their anonymity – and suddenly ‘the Magnitsky list’ rises up in the public space and hits the ruling elite in a sensitive place (it is no coincidence that removing this list was one of the first demands made by Putin to Donald Trump’s administration). And then the European Parliament is calling for the acceptance of ‘the Dadin list’, with specific names included on it of people who are linked to the torture of the civil rights activist Ildar Dadin, in the correctional colony in Karelia; he’s managed to inform people about this via his lawyers. As is the case with the Stalinist executioners, simply rehabilitating the victim is insufficient: it is essential to specify the criminal act of a particular person responsible for the repression and, if possible, punish them for it. But, following this logic, risks start to appear on the horizon for the Russian authorities associated with the annexation of Crimea, and with the shooting down of MH17, and with the war in Eastern Ukraine, and with many other aspects of new Russian history, each of which is fraught with legal consequences for many officials, right up to the highest people in the state – exactly the same as Denis Karagodin did by showing that Joseph Stalin was a participant in the murder of his great-grandfather.

It is precisely by pulling on the thread of just one story about a peasant who was murdered by the Chekists in 1938 that can one gradually unravel the whole spider’s web of anonymity and lies; and that’s exactly why the state so fears the ‘Karagodin effect’, and has let loose on him its propaganda dogs. But Russia has no road into the future other than the legal one. The country has lived for too long under the shameful agreement between the victims and the executioners. The time has come to live according to the law and give a precise judicial assessment of the Stalinist terror and those who carried it out, and make justifying it a criminal offence – as justifying the Holocaust is now in most Western countries. Without this legal clarity regarding Stalinism in the past and the political terror taking place now in Russia, civil peace will be impossible, either with the current regime, or after it.

THE BATTLE AT THE RIVER ISET

There’s yet another battle for memory raging in Russia. This time in the firing line for the propaganda barrage is the Yeltsin Centre in Yekaterinburg, a memorial museum, complete with library and multimedia centre, dedicated to the first Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, who hailed from the region. Specifically, objections were raised to an eight-minute-long cartoon film about Russian history, which they show to visitors. Speaking out against it were the film director, Nikita Mikhalkov, and the Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky; and the Mufti of the North Caucasus, Ismail Berdiev, declared that the Centre should be ‘blown sky-high’.

The critics were answered by President Yeltsin’s widow, Naina, and the local leadership, the Governor of the Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yevgeny Kuivashev, and the Mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Royzman. Royzman replied to Medinsky and the Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, saying that the ministers ‘should be very careful about what they say’. It was they who, along with Vladimir Putin, opened the Centre in 2015, underlining the role of Russia’s first president.

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https://www.mk.ru/politics/2016/11/22/nenakazuemoe-proshloe-nuzhno-li-iskat-palachey-nkvd.html. The Unpunished Past: The NKVD Executioners Should be Sought Out (in Russian), 22 November 2016.

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https://iz.ru/news/646830. I Fear Justice (in Russian), 23 November 2016.