The experience of overcoming

German President Joachim Gauck has made a sensational statement. Addressing the annual Russian-German Potsdam Meetings, he said: “Post-communist Russia would do good to make use of German experience in overcoming its Nazi past, analyze its own historical guilt, and repent.” Gauck believes that only admission of the truth and the feeling of shame and guilt allowed Germans to regain trust on the part of themselves and the neighboring peoples. “The collective identity of Germans also includes the awareness of their own guilt, which is having a beneficial and encouraging effect on the nation,” Deutsche Welle quotes him as saying.

The president said that nostalgia for the erstwhile imperial status and the obstacles the authorities are setting up to, among other things, the Memorial society are not conducive to overcoming the past. Gauck was admittedly “shocked” to learn that such historical figures as Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev are still popular in Russia. We, Ukrainians, must admit that this also shocks us.

The Russian ideologists of “de-Sovietization,” who were present at this forum – Professor Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of the Presidential Council for Civil Society Development and Human Rights, and Professor Sergei Karaganov, dean of the Moscow Higher School of Economics, – questioned the wisdom of the federal president’s call for repentance.

For example, Fedotov said that “all the nations that went through the horrors of totalitarianism should follow the path of renouncing the regime’s crimes rather than repent.” And Karaganov believes the German experience is unacceptable because “we are a country that was not defeated but won the war.”

Russia strongly opposed the German president’s proposal. For instance, State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin said: “The Soviet Union has never divided nations into first-rate and lowest-rate ones and, moreover, has never raised the question of wiping them out altogether.” But what about the fact that 11 and 48 peoples were subjected to total and partial deportation, respectively?

Many Russian newspapers have also taken a dim view of Gauck’s statement. Nezavisimaya gazeta carried on this occasion the article “Tactlessness at Bellevue Palace” and Moskovskiy komsomolets the article “Russia is not Germany, and It Has Nothing to Repent of.”

Yet some Russian mass media reacted differently to Gauck’s proposal. In particular, the Odintsovo-Info news portal (http://www.odintsovo.info) published the article “No Place for Repentance.” “The governing representatives of the remnants of a great power have ‘a pride of their own.’ Repentance is a preserve of strong and self-sufficient states, while in this case we can see nothing but a state inferiority complex,” the publication says.

As they put it, it’s better to see from outside. What is very instructive for many, including Russia, in this case is It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway, the latest book by the American journalist David Satter. As the article “A Nation that Admits No Guilt,” published in the weekly Sovershenno sekretno on May 27, 2013, says, it is a result of the journalist’s continuous and penetrating observation of life in Russia in the context of its political and intellectual history. (Satter worked in the Soviet Union as correspondent of The Financial Times in 1976-82 and of The Wall Street Journal in the years of perestroika and wrote the books Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union and Darkness at Dawn about the twilight of the Soviet empire and the making of today’s Russia.)

“Reconsidering the past is Russia’s vital necessity,” the abovementioned article notes. “The authorities first began to combat historical falsifications and then called for a single schoolbook in history, in which there will be no contradictions or ‘distortions.’ They are sure that Russia’s history is right, and it is all kinds of maligners and Russophobes who keep distorting it. But history cannot be right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant, glorious or ignominious. It is what it is. And it is wrong to think that history remained behind in the past and has nothing to do with the present. As a character of Faulkner’s play Requiem for a Nun says, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ The US journalist’s new book proves this again.”

Satter believes that, “Russia as a country has not been willing to face the full truth about Communism. Some insist that the scale of its crimes has been exaggerated or that they were a product of necessity in a unique historical situation. Some say that there were comparable crimes in the West. Many argue that the Soviet system had redeeming features, that it brought literacy to millions of people and modernized the country. In fact the failure to condemn Communism unreservedly – as Nazism was condemned in Germany – is now taken for granted in Russia.”

“During the period from 1929 to 1953, eighteen million persons passed through the Soviet labor camp system,” he continues. “The artificial famine of 1932-33 took seven million. Nearly a million persons were shot during the Great Terror of 1937-38. In all, the number of persons who died in peacetime as a result of the actions of the Communist authorities is estimated at 20 million. If one considers the demographic impact on three generations (1917-53), it can be estimated that the total population loss – those killed and those who were never born – comes to 100 million persons. Despite this, there is no will in Russia to understand the moral significance of what took place.”

THE PROBLEM OF THE SOVIET STATE’S GUILT REMAINS UNSOLVED

Indeed, it is quite a phenomenon, but it is important to fathom it, and Satter tries to find its cause. He notes that “Russia has neither a national monument to the victims of Communist terror nor a national museum. However, in his view, besides the lack of a national monument, there has been a failure to punish the guilty. Instead, the Soviet Union’s most leaders, particularly Stalin, have been tacitly rehabilitated.”

According to Satter, “in this situation, there has been no genuine act of repentance on the part of the Russian government directed toward the millions who suffered under Communism. The rehabilitation process consisted of the government removing the guilt of those who were falsely convicted. The state reserved the right to judge; it was not judged. Insofar as Russia is the legal heir to the Soviet Union, it left the question of the Soviet state’s guilt unresolved. [German philosopher Karl] Jaspers argued that only a nation that acknowledges its guilt can overcome the spiritual disaster wrought by totalitarianism.”

It is noteworthy that many Russians agree with the American writer. For example, a reader nicknamed Timur points out: “History and conscience will not loosen their grip on the country and the people until the latter really appraise their past and the tendencies that brought them to this past… This past will be simply repeating as long as we are trying to eschew the pain of reappraising it… We are always feverish, we are marking time instead of moving forward, we are in trouble even under the most favorable circumstances and with untold wealth at hand… This is all caused by unwillingness to learn the lesson, which has gradually turned into inability to be aware of and realistically assess our actions and vices…”

Of the same opinion is the reader nicked BEG: “It’s hard to examine a face close by, it is sometimes much better to see it at a distance. David Satter managed to see what we ourselves find difficult to notice. All the observations are right – most Russians are treating their history the way the author describes. I fully agree with his conclusions.”

And what looks very strange here is the attempt of the well-known German political scientist Alexander Rahr to explain why Russia does not need to repent. In the article “Russia Will Be Another Europe” published in the St. Petersburg journal Nevskoye vremya, Rahr writes: “What Russia needs is not repentance but rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinism – only then there will be a reconciliation between the descendants of executioners and the descendants of their victims. Russia needs an inoculation against totalitarianism so that it never comes again.”

It is easy to pronounce the word “inoculation” when one must answer why Russia, which had every chance to become a free democratic country, is today in a historical impasse, when, as Titus Livius wrote about imperial Rome, “we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.”

And, moreover, still stranger is Rahr’s claim that the modern-day EU is the heir to the Western Roman Empire, while Russia is a spiritual daughter of the Byzantine Empire. This only shows that he does not know the history of Kyivan Rus’ and the true origins of Russia. But this is the topic of a different discussion.

As for repentance, many Russian progressive businesspeople, who consider themselves liberals, might have long followed the example of German companies that pay out compensation for slave labor in Nazi Germany. What stands in the way of, say, the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, general manager and chairman of the board of directors of Norilsk Nickel since June 2001? It would be right to recall that Ukraine marked last May the 60th anniversary of the Norilsk uprising, which was an example of nonviolent resistance to the totalitarian system. Ukrainians accounted for almost 70 percent of those who rose up. It would be a good idea if Prokhorov, who positions himself as a liberal and follower of the European style of behavior, offered at least partial compensation to the still living participants of that uprising, giving them some money for medicines…

COMMENTARIES

Barbara OERTEL, journalist, Die Tageszeitung, Berlin:

“Repentance is of paramount importance. For it is about the past of not only Russia, but of the entire post-Soviet space. Some civil society groups tried to do something in this field in the 1990s. But we have seen a totally different development – closure of archives, hushing-up, etc. – since Putin came to power. If Russia wants to be part of Europe in a broad sense of the word, this will be impossible until Russia admits its guilt for the totalitarian past not only in Ukraine, but also in Moldova and Belarus.

“Unless this problem is solved, we will not move an inch. On the contrary, this will mean Russia’s regress rather than progress.”

Karmo TÜÜR, political scientist, Tartu University, Estonia:

“On the one hand, everybody must admit their sins, and Russia has committed lots of them. But, on the other, this sharply contradicts the current Russian national idea. It is typical of not only Russia: every state needs two myths, legends, of their own – a great sorrow and a great victory. These myths sometimes merge into one and sometimes go apart. In the case of Russia, they merge into one through the prism of World War Two or the Great Patriotic War, as they call it. And as this victory is closely connected with Soviet symbols and system, the communist regime, and leaders of that era, any negative comment on the communist regime and the Soviet Union is the detriment of the national idea. Therefore, Russia is incapable of repenting. In an ideal world, it is possible to distinguish between the regime’s crimes and the victory. But Russia seems to be unable now to discriminate between the two things.”

Atis KLIMOVICS, journalist, newspaper Diena, Latvia:

“There is a need in this kind of repentance, but it is impossible without reconsidering what happened in reality. Speaking of today’s Russia, such repentance is impossible. The point is that history is being distorted and the view of it is changing. It is planned in Russia to introduce a common schoolbook in history, in which case any repentance will be out of the question. I do not think Russia will be able to build a normal future unless it repents of and reconsiders all the ghosts of the Stalin and Lenin eras. This will bring relief not only to the Ukrainians and the Poles, but also to the Russians themselves.

“We are aware of there being only one recipe for repentance. This can only be done in such an imperfect system as democracy. This occurred in Germany, in a different political system. For this reason, repentance depends on society alone, and this will only occur if society begins to change.”

The Day’s FACT FILE

Joachim Gauck has been Federal President of Germany since March 23, 2012. In 1998 he helped publish The Black Book of Communism in Germany by writing an additional chapter on East Germany. In 2008, together with Czech ex-president Vaclav Havel, he was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism. In 2010 he signed the Declaration on Crimes of Communism. These documents contain a call to condemn communism, spread knowledge of the crimes of communist regimes, and punish those involved in these crimes. The Prague Declaration also carried an idea to establish the European Day of

Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, which was eventually approved by the European Parliament on April 2, 2009.