By Grigory Yavlinsky, 15.08.2017
Grigory Yavlinsky web-site

Today it turns 80 years since the beginning of the Great Terror [unleashed by Joseph Stalin]. They say, why speaking about it again, because everything has already been said, and the present political topics are different. Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and even Vladimir Putin spoke of the reprisals. They said that it was “not good”. Laws on the rehabilitation of victims were adopted. The [memorial] Solovki Stone was installed near Lubyanka Square in Moscow [where the former NKVD-KGB, and the present FSB is located]. Maybe a monument to the victims of reprisals will be put somewhere in Moscow son… “Stop brooding on the past: the coup d’état of 1917, the terror of 1937, and the recent 1990s! We must look forward! “. But neither “looking forward” nor going forward will work without understanding one’s own history. One can only walk in circles, returning to a national catastrophe in one form or another. It is impossible to fix anything in the present without comprehending the events of the past and their due assessment as a factor determining today’s life. To correct it, one must understand: the Bolshevik system, which led the people to the greatest tragedy in its history, has not vanished. This system is our today’s reality in an updated, hybrid and somewhat mitigated form. And we live in it.

The complete version of the article by Grigory Yavlinsky with the documents is published in Russian here.

For two years, from 1936 to 1938, state security agencies arrested at least 1.7 million people, and at least 724.000 of whom were shot. Over 20.000 people were killed in a month. Almost all were killed without trial and investigation. [They were sentenced by] NKVD troikas and dvoikas (groups of three or two persons]. Over half of the command of the armed forces of the country were among the executed: marshals, commanders of armies, corps, divisions and brigades. Eight leading military leaders were shot in the night of 12 June, 1937, just in 40 minutes after the verdict. In total 32.000 servicemen from marshals to privates were repressed in 1937-1938.

It is senseless to speculate what was more terrible – these events or mass collectivization [when peasants were forced into kolvozs], accompanied by famine and repressive “dekulakisation” [elimination of the ‘kulaks’- the class of well-off peasants], or the use of chemical weapons against insurgent peasants, or mass executions in Crimea of ​​Russian officers who laid down their arms at the call of “new authorities” or murder of the Tzar family (including children) and thousands of nobility, merchants and bourgois families in the first years of the lawless Bolshevik rule. The terror of 1937 became known as the “Great Terror” not because the crimes of the Bolsheviks had been less bloody before that, but because it was a planned nationwide campaign that swept the whole country not sparing a single social group or a family. It was a policy of the state terror aimed at destroying millions of people, especially the brightest and most talented citizens of the country. The purpose of this policy was the conquest of the people and the inducement of unlimited fear for many decades further.

In total, during the period from 1917 to 1953 [i.e., Stalin’s period], Russia lost, according to historians, at least 26 million people due to the civil war, collectivization and continuous mass-scale terror (and that, apart from losses in the war of 1941-1945). In the Great Patriotic War [the USSR struggle against Hitler in 1941-1945], many, and probably more, people – 42 million dead has been often quoted now, – also because the Bolsheviks destroyed the most experienced and most competent army commanders on the eve of the war.

It is difficult even to imagine anything comparable in scale with this national tragedy.

But what is the attitude of the contemporary Russian government to this undeniable catastrophe of our country and our people ?

The essence of the government’s stance is the rejection of any historical assessments of what happened to the country over the past one hundred years. All this is in order to maintain peace and “social and political unity” around Putin, which ensures the continuation of the movement along a special path of imperial nationalism, anti-Westernism and national isolation based on direct support of the Bolsheviks and Stalinists from the [present] Communist Party. All this takes place at a complete negligence of the whole complex of issues related to the crimes of Bolshevism and Stalinism and massacres. On the contrary, the pro-government propaganda machine contributes to the justification and even rehabilitation of Stalinism.

It is believed that the rejection of clear and honest assessments of the most painful events of the 20th century is conditioned by the historical ignorance of the modern authorities and the unwillingness to disturb its own traumatised memory. Just a decade ago, it seemed to many people that the attempts of the authorities to silence the crimes of Bolshevism and Stalinism are explained by the fear of a sober look at one’s own history. However, political experience shows that the matter is different. It is becoming increasingly clear with each year that almost all the current and most painful problems of modern Russia are connected with a conscious and active follow-up to the policy of Bolshevism, rather than the “birthmarks” spontaneously appearing here and there.

Today, the successors of the Bolsheviks are in power in Russia, and their policies are nothing but modern Bolshevism. As a practical policy and ideology, modern Bolshevism of Putin is still partially, but increasingly reproducing the Stalinist system. Just consider the following:

● deliberate abandonment of the present Constitution and its transformation into an non-functioning screen by analogy with the Stalin Constitution of 1936;
● the use of the judiciary and the entire law enforcement system as punitive (politically motivated sentences on “orders”, recommendations and even hints of the first person of the state and its proxies);
● political assassinations;
● extrajudicial killings in a variety of forms:

reprisals against Crimian Tatars, when, since 2014, 43 people have been abducted on the peninsula; only 17 of them were found alive, 18 people were missing, 6 people were found killed;
● mass executions in Chechnya (reports were published at the beginning of this year that 27 people were shot in the republic);
● signing of state treaties that the [Russian] authorities were not going to execute (for example, the treaty on the border with Ukraine);
● selective enforcement of adopted laws;
● usurpation of power through falsified elections;
● arbitrary rule of special security services;
● widespread application of the principles “the end justifies any means” and “people are garbage”: the demonstrative indifference of the authorities to the number of casualties among the military sent officially or unofficially to the war zones. The Kremlin calls the latter “volunteers”, counting of the victims among them has not been conducted. Unnamed victims and unnamed graves in Chechnya, Donbass and Syria;
● arrests and real prison terms of cultural figures (Oleg Sentsov) and journalists (Alexander Sokolov, RBC) on trumped-up charges of terrorism and extremism;
● the growing confrontation with Europe and the world;
● material support for marginal, radical and pro-fascist, most unconstructive quasipolitical groups in European countries;
● imitation of a social agreement on non-disclosure of crimes, originating in October 1917, oblivion of the victims of those crimes if possible, continuation of the self-serving distortion of Russian history and the complete confusion of the good and evil in it;
● total lies and propaganda in all the state and non-state mass media, without exception.

Until recently, many people have been lulling themselves and others by the fact that the current system is different from the Bolshevik system by the lack of ideology. But now this gap is rapidly filling up: the country is being foisted on the ideology of imperial nationalism, militarism, reactionary protection and obscurantism and religiosity reduced to a political instrument.

Hiding behind the talk about the need for “national reconciliation”, Putin is not in a position to directly name the state terror and mass elimination of innocent citizens of his own country as an unconditional evil. But “reconciliation” without conviction is a direct justification of the evil, a true sign of conscious readiness to re-apply the Bolshevik criminal methods any time.

So, today’s Russian government and its policy represents a Bolshevik power, which has mastered only one lesson from the fall of the tzarist autocracy: one must hold onto the “throne” to the last moment. Putin has been trying to connect the unconnectable for this very reason: the autocracy, the Bolshevik coup and the terror, the Soviet chimera and modern Russia. The eclecticism of the royal coat of arms, the Soviet anthem and the democratic tricolour, gives birth to monsters not only in state symbols, but in real politics too.

Putin’s persistent attempts to maintain continuity with the system of Stalin’s Bolshevism, built on blood and where the state terror was a form of its existence, is one of the most important reasons for the endless state lies, lawlessness and violence in our country, the absence of mass entrepreneurship and an independent court, contempt for private property rights, and law and justice.

To get away from lawlessness and arbitrariness, it is necessary to conduct a comrehensive evaluation of the Bolshevik-Soviet practices and system in the most thorough way. This will require the establishment of a special public and legal body. Such a specially created official structure will be authorised to study the entire theory and practices of the Soviet state – from Vladimir Lenin to Makhail Gorbachev, consider from the legal and political point of view repressions and executions, and analyse the violations of treaties and agreements by the Soviet authorities. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation will participate in the work of this body. A particularly important task of the body will be a full and historically accurate assessment of the coup d’état of October 1917 and its consequences.

This work should result in drafting of a constitutional act, which, in my opinion, along with an assessment of the events of 1917, should include recognition of the unlawlessness of the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly [in January 1918] that led to the national tragedy, the evaluation of the decades of state terror and political reprisals as crimes committed by the Bolshevik power, absolute unacceptability of the use of terror, lies and violence in public policy, as well as a clearly expressed vector of the establishment and preservation of the historical succession with a thousand years of Russian history in its natural movement toward democratic legitimacy.

Today Russia, as one hundred years ago, needs a modern, viable state and modernised social relations. The real historical Russia is not the mythical Russia of the times either of Vladimir, the “viking”, or Ivan the Terrible, or the “sugar candies” of the colourful old man Rasputin, but the European state, which gained democratic legitimacy with all its history and is vitally in need of this democratic legitimacy. The first step towards creating a legitimate state that refuses to lie will be the lawful and legitimate change of today’s neo-Bolshevik power, the constitutional dismantling of the current hybrid Stalinist system of the country leadership. And this will happen inevitably!

These days, the authorities are setting up a memorial to the victims of Stalin’s reprisals in Moscow. It is said that when a monument to [writer] Fyodor Dostoevsky was erected back in the Soviet times, someone suggested to make an inscription on the pedestal “To Fyodor Mikhailovich – from the grateful demons”. (Ed.: an allusion to the political and social satire “Demons” by Dostoevsky, representing an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism.