INTERNAL PREDICTOR OF THE USSR
"De-Stalinization": dead souls at work...
"About current moment", # 1 (97), January 2011
The continued coverage of the issues raised in the CM-3 (96) in December 2010.
12 October, the Secretary of the Union of Journalists of Russian Federation Mikhail Alexandrovich Fedotov (lawyer, "human rights activist", the Minister of Press and Information of the RF in 1992 and 1993) by the decree of the President of the RF was appointed to the positions of the Presidential Adviser and Chairman of the Presidential Council for assisting the development of Civil Society institutions and Human Rights.
The task of "de-Stalinization of public consciousness"[1], about which M.A. Fedotov spoke in one of his first interviews after appointment to the mentioned positions, was elevated by mass media to the rank of the main task M.A. Fedotov is going to solve. However, M.A. Fedotov himself in the interview to the radio station "Vesti FM" (http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=399432) refuted this view, naming modernization of the Russian society as the main task, "de-Stalinization of public consciousness" he put on the third place in the list of individual tasks, in which on the first place he put judicial reform, and on the second – protection of children. Nevertheless, mass media has firmly associated his name with the theme of "de-Stalinization" and with upcoming activities of the Presidential Council of Human Rights, which M.A. Fedotov has headed.
On December 21, 2010 the Grani.ru website reported:
“On November 25 Fedotov has declared that the first meeting of the Presidential Council on Human Rights in the new composition will be devoted to de-Stalinization. According to Fedotov, human rights activists will demand to completely open the Soviet archives and to carry out trial on totalitarianism. The meeting of the President Medvedev with the new composition of the Council is scheduled for mid-January.
According to Council member Sergei Karaganov, there will be no word "de-Stalinization" in the agenda of the January’s meeting, the subject is stated more broadly – about national reconciliation and the memory of the victims of the totalitarian regime. The broad theme was declared in order to not reduce everything to the Secretary General's cult of personality and to emphasize, that it is about overcoming the remnants of the past by the nation, explained Karaganov.
The Presidential Council and the Human Rights Centre "Memorial" has developed a draft of the Federal Program for the perpetuation of the memory of the victims of repression, consisting of the 4 blocks. The first – full declassification of the Soviet archives. It is proposed to remove the security classification from all the Soviet documents of the pre-perestroika period and to simplify the procedure of accessing departmental archives, investigative documents, archives of Cheka, State Political Directorate, All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks), encrypted telegrams, that came from places to the central office, personal files of citizens.
The second block relates to memorialization – searching camp burials, installation of monuments, creating full-scale museum exhibitions. The third block – the social protection of victims from reprisals. Them, according to the "Memorial", about 800 000 people – prisoners of camps and their children. By law they are entitled to monthly compensation, but now it is entrusted to regional authorities. Human rights activists offered to return prisoners the Federal guarantees of payments, and raise payments to the survived prisoners of camps (about 30 000 people) and allot to them natural benefits – for example, free medicine.
The fourth requirement of the Council is to give political and legal assessment of the crimes of totalitarianism. One option may be a Presidential decree with a clear list of crimes and stating the inadmissibility of glorification of stalinism[2].
The Council proposes also the trial of the regime's crimes. "We are talking not even about the crimes of specific people, — explained the member of the Council Sergei Krivenko. — It is necessary to evaluate from the legal point of view the block of regulatory documents: about collectivization, about Katyn, about big terror". The verdict on the facts of extermination of entire populations, according to the Council, should be made by the Supreme or Constitutional court.
In the government the project of the Presidential Council evaluate cautiously. "The history of the country must not be erased. One of our priorities — the struggle against attempts to distort history", said Prime Minister's Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov.
In 2009, in the Day of memory of victims of repression Dmitry Medvedev said, that justification of Stalinist repression under the guise of restoring historical justice is unacceptable. Medvedev noted that "no development of the country, none of its successes, ambitions can not be achieved at the cost of human grief and losses". "October 30 is the Day of remembrance of the millions of maimed destinies. About the people who were shot without trial and without investigation, about people sent to labour camps and exile, deprived of civil rights because of the "wrong" job or the notorious "social origin". The stigma of the enemies of the people and their supporters then laid down on entire families", — President said.
"It is impossible to imagine the scale of terror, from which suffered all the peoples of the country, — he added. — It peaked in 1937-1938. "The Volga river of people's grief", Alexander Solzhenitsyn was calling this endless "stream" of repressed at that time. During twenty years before the war entire stratums and classes of our people were exterminated. The cossacks class was virtually liquidated. The peasantry was "dispossessed" and drained. Intelligentsia, workers, and military were exposed to political persecution. Representatives of absolutely all religious confessions were exposed to persecution".
"We pay much attention to struggle against falsification of our history. And for some reason we often consider, that it is all only about the inadmissibility of revision of the results of the Great Patriotic War. But it is equally important to avoid under the guise of restoring historical justice the justification of those, who were exterminating own people", — Medvedev said" (http://grani.ru/Society/History/m.184701.html).
Those are the intentions for the future of the bourgeois-liberal public and statesmen. However, before turning to the consideration of the prospects of "de-Stalinization", which became the main ideological problem of state power in the post-Soviet Rusziony, refer to history and literature to understand the spirit of the policy: the imperial before 1917, Stalin's, rusziony’s of our days.
In Russian history there are two literary characters and one historical figure, whose sociological views, being powerful over one or another segments of the collective unconscious, had largely determined the events of the past and the prospects of Russia in XXI century. These are the Grand Inquisitor of F.M. Dostoyevsky, the Great Combinator of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov and the Pskov's Spaso-Eleazar monastery's monk Filofey (also spelled as Philotheos; years of life approximately: 1465-1542), the first ideologist of the doctrine "Moscow — the Third Rome".