The confiscated memory: Dmitriev and Slavina, two stories of ordinary injustice in Putin’s Russia

6 October 20204 years babelfish

I have long wanted to write about Yuri Dmitriev. His is not a simple story of abuse of power and summary justice in Vladimir Putin's Russia, but a symbol of the eternal tension between the common man and authority, which has always blown like an icy wind on the immense esplanades of the country until it becomes tragedy. collective in the Soviet experience. Dmitriev, an orphan, father of a family and a historian by passion, comes out of a story by Chekhov to dig into the frowning eyebrows of a former KGB agent who has set himself the mission of restoring national pride buried in the rubble of communism, using selective control of the past as a counterfeit tonic. Individual aspirations, search for truth, shared memory, power: the future of today's Russia is played out between these four often opposite poles. Yuri Dmitriev belongs to the top three. Vladimir Putin in fourth.

After years of research, in 1997 Dmitriev, together with colleagues from the Memorial foundation (which has been collecting, cataloging and protecting evidence of Soviet repression since the late 1980s), discovers an immense forest in the northwestern region of Karelia. mass grave with the remains of 9,000 victims of the Stalinist terror. These are the golden years of Russian historiography after the fall of the regime, those in which the archives are opened and with them the possibility of shedding light on the tragedies of the communist period. The locality, known as Sandarmokh, became the scene of mass executions between October 1937 and December 1938: 3,500 inhabitants of Karelia, 4,500 deportees working on the construction of the Baltic canal and 1,111 prisoners in the concentration camp of Solovki, one of the most inhospitable and isolated camps, defined by Solgenitsin as “the mother of the Gulag”. The latter group corresponds to the quota of executables requested by the NKVD from the head of the penitentiary center, according to the directives of the Party which, as in a five-year plan of death, assigns the objectives to be achieved to the various territories. The condemned are made to kneel in front of a mass grave and finished with a gunshot to the back of the head, the same method that will be used two years later in the Katyn Forest against thousands of Polish officers. A trademark of Stalinism.

Dmitriev's work recently converged in a book, “Sandarmokh. Place of memory ” , in which an identity is returned to at least 5,000 people killed in that extermination camp and those responsible for the executions are identified. On December 13, 2016, Yuri Dmitriev was arrested for the first time on charges of child pornography. On his computer, photos of his then 11-year-old adopted daughter were found, judged by the police to be "compromising" but actually taken to monitor his growth on the advice of doctors. Spends 13 months in prison before being acquitted. Two months later, we are in June 2018, the second arrest arrives on charges of having sexually abused the girl he had not seen for two years. The trial is based on the only testimony of her grandmother, who had abandoned her in an orphanage before being adopted by the Dmitriev family. In July comes the sentence of three and a half years, almost entirely served in preventive custody. But the authorities are not there, Yuri Dmitriev cannot get out of jail. They appeal to the Supreme Court of Karelia which, a few days ago, decided to lock him up for another ten years in a maximum security penal colony: Dmitriev is 64 years old, a life sentence.

The fury and persecution against a clearly innocent man, whose only fault was to shed light on the recent history of his country, are the logical consequence of the legal squeeze against NGOs decided by Putin in 2012, the infamous law that gives he then associates them with the category of "foreign agents". Under this legislation, both the Memorial foundation and the Sakharov Center have been sanctioned several times over the years. But there is more. After a decade in which the work of historians on the Gulag and in general on the repressions of the Soviet period is essentially ignored, during the second part of Putin's presidential term (starting from 2010) the state decides to assume the role of interpreter of official history , passing from a passive attitude of non-collaboration to an active one of overlapping and intimidation towards independent researchers. Access to archives is limited, surveillance increased, justice used as a weapon against non-homologated voices, those that question the national discourse promoted by the center, in which even the totalitarian past must be re-read in a positive key if functional to the objectives of development and consolidation of the "Russian homeland". For this reason, one of the amendments to the Constitution recently approved by referendum (art. 67) literally assigns to the State and not to historians the task of "ensuring the protection of historical truth"; for this reason in 2016, while the accusations against Dmitriev are being fabricated, the government decides to send a team of soldiers to Sandarmokh with the task of exhuming the remains of some corpses, in order to prove that in reality they were not victims of Stalinism but of Red Army personnel killed by Finnish soldiers during the 1939-40 conflict.

The manipulation and removal of the past in function of the political interests of the present precisely defines the Putin regime and the new Russian nationalism. From the Gulag to the Second World War, there is no historical context that the government does not undertake to adapt to current circumstances and conveniences. The reasons are profound and deserve a separate study: certainly the substantial continuity between Soviet and Russian institutions plays a role in this fossilization of memory (at the time of the dissolution of the USSR the nature of the regime changes but the supporting structures of the system serve as platform for newcomers) and the absence of a real collective exercise of analysis, judgment and reconciliation on the totalitarian period. The revenge of the state against Dmitriev is an unequivocal sign of this bad conscience which, moreover, indicates a qualitative leap in the Kremlin's strategy: the passage from the phase of pushed propaganda to that of open repression.

Last May 150 cultural personalities signed an open letter to the court where the trial was taking place, declaring their support for the historian against "the unjust accusations against him". In his final speech to the court (which I highly recommend reading in full ), Dmitriev explains his concept of patriotism, which cannot be limited to the military parades of May 9 in honor of the fallen in the Great Patriotic War but must also include the memory of the victims of that internal war that the Soviet state waged against its citizens: "I try to recover their names because only memory can make a person really such". Make known the names of Yuri Dmitriev and Sandarmokh.

I also want to write about Irina Slavina, journalist, from Nizhny Novgorod, a charming town on the Volga River, in the center of European Russia. At six in the morning on Thursday 1 October, the police and various special security forces arrive at her home to search her. They seek evidence of his activities with the opposition group that refers to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch now in exile after a long judicial persecution. It is not the first time that the authorities have targeted her for her work on the news site and for participating in some protests. This time, however, Irina can't take it anymore. The day after yet another humiliation, in the afternoon, he writes a last message on Facebook : “Blame the Russian Federation for my death”. Then he leaves the house and goes to sit on a bench in front of the local section of the Ministry of the Interior, among three bronze statues dedicated to the police. And it sets itself on fire. A passerby tries to get closer to put out the flames but she kicks him away. He wants to die and he wants to do so, in a bonfire, an unmistakable symbol of protest and dignity. There's a one-minute video that captures her agony and it's a heartbreaking sequence. The fire quickly envelops it, lifts it up, throws it to the ground and crumpled it up, like a disintegrating sheet of paper. Irina Slavina was the mother of a teenager who, a few hours after the events, shows up at the scene of the suicide with a warning sign: "While my mother was burning, you remained silent". That bench in Nizhny Novgorod is now full of bouquets of flowers. But the name of Irina Slavina is doomed to oblivion. Memory in 21st century Russia has been confiscated by the state.

The post Confiscated memory: Dmitriev and Slavina, two stories of ordinary injustice in Putin's Russia appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-memoria-confiscata-dmitriev-e-slavina-due-storie-di-ordinaria-ingiustizia-nella-russia-di-putin/ on Tue, 06 Oct 2020 03:43:00 +0000.