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Stalin-era Files Raided
By Charles Clover in Moscow

Published: December 26 2008 19:36 | Last updated: December 26 2008 19:36

One hundred thousand witnesses to the terror of Joseph Stalin's rule are
stored on 12 computer hard disks compiled by Memorial, a Russian human rights
group based in St Petersburg. Several terabytes of data include thousands of
hours of audio histories, digital versions of faded photographs, video evidence
of mass graves. With a few computer keystrokes, one could retrieve a faded
denunciation written by a son against a father, or hear a ghostly voice
reciting a forced confession or naming her "co-conspirators".

It is the most complete public record of one of the most terrifying periods
of modern human history, and mysteriously, it was also the target of a raid
by Russian police on Memorial's headquarters on December 4.

Irina Flige, director of Memorial's office, says the police raid was not an
accident or a case of mistaken identity. She believes that the work of her
organisation in exposing and publicising Stalin's crimes has become the target
of a government effort to whitewash the past and justify in theoretical terms
the continued existence of a strong authoritarian state. "It is a war over
memory," she says.

"The front line" between despotism and democracy in Russia, she adds, "runs
through the past".

St Petersburg police have still made no public statement on the Dec 4 raid.
At noon that day, nine policemen, including two wearing black face masks,
came to Memorial's headquarters and stayed six hours combing through the
office. Police said they were after information about an article that was published in an extremist newspaper, which Ms Flige says her organisation had nothing to do with. Police have not responded to requests to clarify their motives.

Ms Flige says the only thing the police were interested in was the
computers. "They knew what they were looking for," she says.

She says she has no proof that the raid was a deliberate attempt to
intimidate her organisation, only a series of coincidences: it happened the day
before a three-day conference in Moscow devoted to Stalin's memory, the first
ever in Russia, which was organised jointly by Memorial and the Yeltsin Fund, set up in memory of former president Boris Yeltsin.

It also coincided with an unprecedented public offensive against groups such
as hers by Kremlin-backed intellectuals who charge Memorial with distorting
Russia's history in order to undermine Russian patriotism. In the Dec 9 issue
of Russkiy Zhurnal magazine, Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin-backed political
scientist, attacked Memorial as "an unsuccessful attempt at political memory"
and complained that Russia was vulnerable to "foreign" conceptions of its
history.

"Russia, not having a memory policy, has become defenceless before
defamatory projections and aggressive phobias. Not having become a subject with
its own memory, Russian society stands before the threat of becoming an object of foreign projections," he said.

Russia's government has never officially undertaken the project of finding
the dead and marking the mass graves of Stalin's terror. At its height, in
1937-38, between 600,000 and 2m are estimated to have died. Unlike other
post-communist counties in Europe, which opened secret archives to all who
wanted to view them, Russia only sporadically allowed experts into the inner recesses of its secret police files.

Now, according to Ms Flige, whatever openness there was is being rolled
back, and the task of keeping the memory alive has fallen to private groups
such as hers.

"Memorial pioneered the history of the Stalinist repressions," says Orlando
Figes, a University of London historian who worked with Memorial to do the
research on his recent book The Whisperers, an account of the private lives of
several families during the years of Stalin's reign. "It's not so much the
loss of an archive, which is replaceable. Most of it is backed up. It's the
signal that it's sending out to intimidate Memorial, to intimidate the public.
Because they're dependent on people coming forward to volunteer their
stories."

Mr Figes said he believed the raid was meant to intimidate the organisation.
"It's a sign, not necessarily of a concerted campaign, but there are clear
signals coming from the top echelons of government that there is a new
official view of the Stalin era as something basically positive, and unofficial
memories that challenge this are seen as somehow ­unpatriotic."

Echoes of Stalinist rhetoric are still to be found every day in Russia, such
as on Dec 14, when the government announced it would seek to expand the
legal definition of treason. The next day, the daily Kommersant newspaper ran a
blisteringly ironic headline, announcing "Betrayal of the Motherland is
Everyone's Affair".

The article reported that the changes to the law could be construed in such
a way as to widen the definition of treason "to include anyone who criticises
the regime".

Critics charge that the Russian state under Vladimir Putin, the former
president – now prime minister, has begun to rehabilitate the dictator, as
part of its attempt to roll back democratic freedoms. A 40-part documentary film
released last year, for example, presents a whitewashed view of the Stalin era,
and a new teaching manual, by historian Aleksander Filipov, glosses over the
horrendous death toll of Stalin's reign and describes him as an "effective
manager" without whom Russia would not have won the second world war.

In a widely publicised meeting with history teachers last year, Mr Putin
made it clear that Russian history should be taught in a positive light. He
said Russia's history "did contain some problematic pages. But so did other
states' histories . . . We have fewer of them than other countries, and
they were less terrible than in other nations. We can't allow anyone to impose a
sense of guilt on us."

Describing how the battle over history intersects with the modern-day
confrontation over freedom and civil liberties in Russia, the authors Dmitri
Furman and Pavel Palazchenko wrote in the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta
recently, "The ideology of the strong state has constructed its own 'historical
narrative': Russian history is seen as a set of long periods of power and
stability under strong central authority, broken up by short periods of chaos,
after which the country is rebuilt by a strong regime."

Memorial's 12 hard drives are essential for any attempt to reject this
thesis, increasingly prevalent in government and intellectual circles in
Russia. Jana Howlett, who teaches history at Cambridge university in the UK,
participated in the Dec 5 conference on Stalin's memory. She said: "At the
conference there was a very real sense that what we were talking about was not just Stalin, what we were talking about is today, that the thirties are just around the corner again."

Millions killed

Joseph Stalin, one of history's most murderous dictators, ruled the Soviet
Union from 1922 until 1953. He oversaw the collectivisation of agriculture and
the mass industrialisation that brought huge gains in Soviet productivity,
but at an immense price in human suffering.

He executed millions in the Great Terror of the 1930s when the Communist
party was purged of "enemies of the people". The exact number of his victims
remains controversial but most historians give a consensus figure of at least
20m.

Stalin led his people to victory against Nazi Germany after which the Soviet
Union expanded its empire. Many elderly Russians look back to his rule with
nostalgia, as a time when the country was powerful and law and order
prevailed.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

_http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5cdcf46-d374-11dd-989e-000077b07658.html_
(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5cdcf46-d374-11dd-989e-000077b07658.html)

RUSSIAN TEACHERS STRUGGLE TO REMIND STUDENTS OF SOVIET-ERA CRIMES

Window on Eurasia, by Paul Goble, Vienna, Monday, December 1, 2008

VIENNA - At a time when Moscow education officials in deference to the Kremlin are whitewashing the Soviet past, some Russian teachers are doing all they can to ensure that their students learn the student about the crimes committed by Stalin and other communist leaders against the population.

Their efforts are highlighted in a recent book, entitled "School Lessons on 'the History of Political Repressions and Resistance to Unfreedom in the USSR" published last year in Moscow under the sponsorship of the Sakharov Museum and reviewed in the just-released December issue of Znamya" (magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2008/12/ko21.html).
As the reviewer Svyatoslava Kozhukova notes, this book, which attempts to stand up to the disturbing tendency of forgetting the crimes of the [Soviet] powers toward society," consists of a set of outlines of the best lectures on history, civics and literature prepared by teachers in various regions of the country.

This effort is important, Kozhukova continues, because "the historical memory of a society is not something as natural as the personal memory of an individual. It must be formed. And its content depends on who is doing that, how they are doing it, and what goals they are pursuing.

Building a democratic society in countries with an authoritarian past is impossible unless that society faces up to its past, she says. Unfortunately, as officials at the Sakharov Museum point out, "Russia lives without understanding what has taken," despite some progress in Khrushchev's, Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's time to do so.

"But more recently," Yury Samodurov, the museum's director says, "public interest in [this past] was again extinguished. [And] in the consciousness of society has been introduced the conviction that one should not 'blacken the historic past.'" That has prompted a group of concerned democratic activists, historians and teachers look for a way out.

Theirs is no easy task, Kozhukova argues in her review. "What and how must one tell children about Soviet realities so that future generations will not repeat the mistakes of the past? And how should they tell this at a time when outside the school, the child may encounter an opposing point of view?"

More specifically, "what should they do if a significant part of society is deprived of historical memory and considers Stalin a hero, and grandmothers with a failing mind recall the words 'Thank you Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood' and tell their grandchildren that the teacher is lying?"

The task is complicated, the compilers of the book say, because it is not only a question of fact but of methodology. Not only do children need to learn specific facts about the Soviet past, but they need to learn these facts in a way that does not reinforce the authoritarian patterns of the past.

That is, they need to acquire these facts not by taking down, memorizing and giving them back on tests – the classical authoritarian approach which has the effect of leading students to accept the idea that someone else will always tell them what the facts are – but by asking questions and by acquiring the information in that more open and democratic way.

In many respects, changing the way history is taught is an even bigger challenge than changing what is taught about it, the compilers say. And they acknowledge that so far, they have made less progress in this direction than many of them have hoped for. But the discussions in this volume provide some importance guidance in this respect as well.

I.G. Yakovenko of the Moscow Institute of Sociology in one of the book's chapter points out why this is so critical. Children need to learn that individuals bear responsibility for what happens to their societies, rather than always seeking to blame others, be they foreign governments or their own, for what happens.

They need to brought to an understanding, Yakovenko writs, that one cannot explain Stalinist crimes by reference to the organs of the state but must recognize the role millions of "simple people" played in denouncing their fellow citizens – people who are "just like those who consider Stalin a hero and the period of Stalinism in Russia the heroic past of the country."

But those like the compilers of this book who want an honest examination of the past face an uphill battle. As one of the authors notes, polls show that as Russians feel better of themselves and their situation, they show less and less interest in the past and prefer to stay with mythologized versions that have little in common with the facts.

Unfortunately, Kozhukova writes, if they remain in that situation, Russians and all the others who were victims of the communist past, will not be able to escape from it. And she points out that "the establishment of a free, civilized society in countries which have experienced a totalitarian regime is not the same thing as establishing such a society in principle."

Such societies must "overcome" the past by avoiding forgetfulness, by internalizing what happened and by committing themselves to avoiding any repetition. Those are steps that Germany has made, but it is a step that many Russians, with the encouragement of their own government, have not been willing to take.

And Kozhukova concludes that "the present-day growth of nationalism and authoritarianism in Russia are the results of a past that has not been dealt with" in the ways that the crimes of the Soviet era must be if the country is finally to escape from them and to ensure that they never happen again. -----------------------------------------------------------------

do not concern much that Stalin is the third because:
Firstly, it was possible to vote several times from one phone every day;
Secondly, people participated in voting were basically elders because the program went late and those who worked could not look it;
Thirdly,communists with peculiar to them fanatism simply voted many times;
Fourthly, the youth did not participate in it because they had too little interest in it;
Therefore it hardly could be considered as a public oppinion.