19 - Self-Inflicted Genocide and State- and Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Russia

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In his book The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Adam Hochschild writes that ‘what makes the Stalin period so riveting…is the vastness of the suffering, the strange spectacle of self-inflicted genocide.’ How societies can cope with memories of vast suffering is a question all transitional justice scholars at least implicitly ask, regardless of the particular case they study, along with how to reconcile those memories with the goals of democratic state-building. But Russia's post-communist transition is increasingly anomalous and poses a challenge to this way of thinking. The country is set apart by two alarming and simultaneous trends – authoritarian consolidation and the positive reframing of Soviet history, including the apparent rehabilitation of the dictator Stalin. Indeed, as these words are written, Moscow City Hall has decided to hang posters bearing Stalin's image throughout the city to help celebrate Victory Day – and Stalin's role in defeating the Nazis – on 9 May 2010. What is so distinct about Russians’ historical suffering that such trends have been able to develop?

Hochschild's qualification about Russians’ suffering – the idea of self-inflicted genocide – may provide the answer. Genocide, although a contested concept, assumes a clear demarcation between the victimised group and the génocidaires, who are clearly Other. How, then, could Russians have committed genocide against themselves? The key is their history of mass collaboration with the Soviet system. In practical terms, this was the case for all nationalities living in the Soviet Union, as individual survival required cooperation with the authorities. But Russians experienced a unique ideological form of collaboration, as their national identity became the most closely aligned with the Soviet identity upon which the criminal system was based.

In this chapter, I assess the implications of self-inflicted genocide for post- Soviet Russian approaches to the past and explore the relationship between these approaches and broader processes of state and nation-building. After periods of both democratisation and authoritarian consolidation, ‘transition’ in Russia has resulted not in liberal democracy but in a stable hybrid regime type. Furthermore, shifts from open confrontation with the past during glasnost to ‘forgetting’ during the 1990s have now given way to the kind of positive reframing described above, suggesting a lack of linearity in Russian memory construction in addition to its political transition.