The Return of the Tyrant

27/05/2025

Sergei Lebedev

(The essay in Russian is attached at the end)

In December, a monument to Stalin was unveiled in Russia’s Vologda, the city where Varlam Shalamov, prisoner and Virgil of the Soviet Gulag.

The bronze Generalissimo stands at full height, putting his hand behind the cuff of his overcoat, and smiles into his mustache. The sculpture is located on the territory of the house-museum “Vologda Exile”, where political exile Dzhugashvili lived in 1911-12. As it was calculated in “Verstka” publication, it was the fifth monument to Stalin to be erected in the past year, the fifth out of nearly 120 that exist in Russia.

Local Governor Filimonov laid flowers at a monument to the victims of political repression on the same day, and then attended the unveiling of a monument to their murderer, “the greatest figure,” in his words, “whose memory must be cherished, honored and passed on to posterity.”

The monument of the victims of political repressions in Vologda. Photo: https://vologdatourinfo.ru/objects/pamyatnik-zhert

It would seem to be political schizophrenia: it is impossible to both memorialize the victims and honor the perpetrator. Either-or. And yet it’s happening. This is not yet a total erasure of the memory of those destroyed by the Soviet state and its crimes, but it is already a conscious, macabre mockery of this memory, its desecration and trampling. And Stalin in this sense is the sign that the mocker puts on the object that he wants to desecrate, that is, symbolically destroy, deprive of protection and meaning: like the swastika inscribed on the wall of the synagogue.

The inevitable justification for terror

Russia still has laws recognizing the fact of Soviet mass political repressions and, accordingly, giving millions of people the legal status of “victims”. There are monuments and memorials, memorials at the sites of mass graves. Vladimir Putin, who unleashed a criminal war against Ukraine, accompanied by an extreme increase in political persecution inside Russia, while talking about Stalinist repression, speaks in 2023: “It’s most important for us that nothing like this ever happens again in the history of our country, because all of this as a whole has done enormous, irreparable damage to our people and to our state.”

Today it is obvious that these are hypocritical lies and crocodile tears of a mass murderer who has revived – with a slightly modified legal rhetoric – the Soviet, Stalinist system of strict criminalization of dissent, fabrication of criminal cases, provocation and denunciation. And the logic of the “development” of this system is in direct conflict with the preservation of the memory of the crimes of the Soviet state, even in the reduced form in which this memory is memorialized in Russia

The more the flywheel of modern political repression spins, the less desirable for Putin’s state will be the very possibility of comparison with the crimes of the Soviet state. In order to explain today’s draconian measures, it is inevitable that we will have to justify, diminish, whitewash the Soviet terror as well – to prove that violence is justified, that the authorities cannot make mistakes.

The closer Manichean picture of the world will be to the Soviet, built on the understanding of the West as an existential threat, on the existence of traitors, “fifth column” and agents of the West in Russian society, on the prohibition of ideas and thoughts qualified as anti-Russian or anti-state, the stronger will be the temptation to return validity to the past “accusations” so that the current ones will sound more confident.

In part, this position has already been voiced by Valery Fadeyev, head of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, who has suggested that one of the oldest monuments to victims of repression, the Solovetsky Stone, a granite boulder from the Solovetsky Archipelago, where one of the first and most notorious Gulag camps was located, erected there in 1990 by Memorial activists, be removed from Lubyanka Square, away from the main building of the VChK-OGPU-NKVD-KGB-FSB. The stone was laid precisely on Lubyanka, whose name has become a noun as a sign of evil and lawlessness, under the windows of the Chekist headquarters, as a reminder of this evil. “It’s sort of a rebuke to those people who sit in the building on Lubyanka,” Fadeyev said, suggesting that it would be advisable to move the boulder somewhere else so that it would not spoil the view of sensitive state security officers. But the point is that in today’s Russia any memory of Soviet crimes will be a reproach to the “people in the building at Lubyanka” and to the state as a whole, because they are doing the same things as their predecessors: waging a war of aggression against their neighbors, eradicating resistance in the occupied territories, suppressing free thought and political deviation.

Lubyanka, Moscow. 2019. Photo by T. Danilecki

The infrastructure of this memory, however limited it may be, created over decades, cannot be completely uprooted and destroyed overnight, unless one resorts to very radical methods of direct prohibition. But the first stage of the struggle against it has already been effectively completed: all alternatives and all organizations independent of the state that were its guardians, primarily the Memorial Society, have been destroyed inside the country. Even the activity of the state Gulag Museum in Moscow has been suspended since November 14, allegedly because of fire safety problems. In January, Moscow’s Department of Culture fired the museum’s longtime director, Roman Romanov – in fact, for refusing to censor an exhibition about the city’s history at the Museum of Moscow, part of which was prepared by his staff. It is reported that the entire section “Repressions”, which told about the persecution of Muscovites in the years of Stalin’s terror, was removed from the exhibition.

The Russian state as a whole has restored, except for the Internet projects beyond its control, which are not geographically bound, a formal, administrative monopoly on the public memorialization of Soviet repressions. The era that began in the late eighties, in which alternative public projects, museums, archives, and the uncontrolled design of places of memory were possible as a phenomenon, is over. If anything is still left and functioning, they are relics of a bygone time. And the question is what the state will do with them.

A memorial for Varlam Shalamov on the wall of the Gulag Museum in Moscow. 2019. Photo by T. Danilecki.

The devaluation of memory: how it began

The first, perhaps, will be the reformatting of the Perm 36 museum, a former penal labor colony where political prisoners, including many prominent Ukrainian dissidents such as Levko Lukyanenko, Mykhailo Horyn, Yevgen Sverstyuk, Ivan Svetlichnyy, and others, including the poet Vasil Stus, who died in prison there, and Valery Marchenko, who died in a Leningrad prison hospital. A unique, one-of-a-kind exhibit in Russia, Perm-36 told the story of the crimes of the late Soviet period, implicitly through the personalities of the prisoners, including the history of the suppression of national independence movements. In 2014, there was an administrative takeover of the museum, which lost its public status and became a state institution. Back then, in 2014, Perm Communists protested against the museum, claiming that it “glorifies the Banderites.” The exhibit was eventually neutered and the semantic emphasis shifted to an earlier historical period.

A mailbox on the fence of the Perm 36 museum, which today which today is involved in collecting ‘humanitarian aid for fellow countrymen – volunteers’, i.e. for Russian soldiers participating in the invasion war against Ukraine.

Today, in addition to exhibitions and excursions, the museum collects “humanitarian aid to fellow countrymen – volunteers”, i.e. Russian soldiers participating in the invasion war against Ukraine, which cannot be called anything other than a conscious mockery of the memory of Ukrainian freedom fighters.

2014, the year of Russia’s war against Ukraine, was a decisive year in the fate of another unique place of memory, initially developed as a public initiative – the Sandarmokh execution ground in Karelia, found in 1997 by Gulag researcher Yuri Dmitriev and his colleagues from St. Petersburg’s “Memorial”. In Sandarmokh during the Great Terror, prominent figures of Ukrainian culture were executed, who later went down in history as the “Executed Renaissance”, and this “Ukrainian accent” in the aggregate memorial ensemble was a characteristic feature of the place. Speaking at a memorial ceremony in August 2014, the day the shootings began, Yuri Dmitriev directly accused the Russian authorities of aggression against Ukraine. As a result, speeches were effectively censored the following year, and in 2016 Yuri Dmitriev himself was arrested on falsified charges. The state, through trusted historians and proxy structures like the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO), has made consistent attempts to change the narrative about Sandarmoh, to “blur” it, to present Sandarmoh as a place where Soviet prisoners of war were shot by Finnish troops during World War II. In the same year, 2014, the historical and educational society Memorial was recognized as a “foreign agent,” thus triggering a legal mechanism that eventually led to its final liquidation in 2021, shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Yuri Dmitriev speaking in the Sandarmokh execution ground. Wikimedia Commons, lic. CC BY-SA 3.0, Autor: Visem

Today in Russia, the war against unwanted memory is waged as if still with hindsight, not always publicly. In former regions of political exile, commemorative signs dedicated, for example, to exiled Poles and Lithuanians are disappearing (both Poland and Lithuania take an extremely tough stance against the Russian war of invasion and support Ukraine in its efforts to defend its independence). The signs are exactly disappearing, there are no regulations, court decisions, propaganda campaigns; this is not yet an official policy announced from a high rostrum, but a sinister Chekist game with the fates of the deceased, buried in the Russian soil not of their own free will and who have therefore become hostages to be played on. But it is also a vector, a prediction of the future.

At the same time, Russian cities are undergoing the unannounced destruction of plaques from the “Last Address” project, another independent initiative that (similar to the German “Stumbling Stones” project) involves the installation of memorial signs on houses that were literally the last addresses of people arrested during the Great Terror. More than 1,500 plaques have been installed, and dozens have already been stolen or vandalized by unknown assailants, this epidemic of disappearances began at the same time as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A separate example is the Katyn memorial complex, the place where Polish prisoners of war were shot in the spring of 1940, which has been reformatted against the backdrop of deteriorating Russian-Polish relations: the new museum infrastructure and expositions are designed to “inscribe” the summary execution into Russian-Polish history as an element of mutual cruelty and an episode of mutual historical accounts. The museum itself has become a platform for propaganda activities: it hosts exhibitions glorifying the Red Army as the liberator of Europe, lectures for future officers of the Rosgvardia (taking part in the war against Ukraine) on “the military history of Russia from the Russian-Polish war of 1632-1634, and the Polish flag has been removed from the memorial. Alas, the Mednoye memorial complex has undergone a similar metamorphosis, where, while retaining its basic meaning, exhibitions devoted to the “liberating” role of the USSR in World War II are also held and admission of teenagers to the “Young Army”, a state youth movement under EU sanctions for war propaganda, is organized.

Katyn memorial complex, 2012. Photo by T. Danilecki.

Again, this is not yet dismantling unwanted memory entirely. It is an attempt to change the contextualization, to reduce the significance, the tragic nature of the commemorated event, to trivialize it. Or the attempt to rudely impose meanings and functions not peculiar to the place , to make it an absurd part of the rituals of state propaganda, and to redraw its meaning precisely through absurdization, postmodern grotesque. In the program of both complexes, the activities corresponding to their intent are still preserved; they are diluted, but not completely pushed out. What is happening is the same mockery, devaluation of memory, its desacralization, profanation, the first stage on the gradual road to annihilation.

The war on memory: the future

In my opinion, the future of this Russian war on unwanted memory can be seen in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. The Russian state is not hiding there. Monuments to the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 are officially demolished, while officially the civil-military administrations are renaming streets and returning them to their Soviet names or assigning them new ones: for example, in Melitopol there are streets of Catherine the Great (who enslaved the Ukrainian peasantry and destroyed Ukraine’s political independence) and Vladimir Lenin (who did everything for the conquest of Ukraine by the Red Army during the Civil War). This is justified by the need to combat the “hostile” Ukrainian historical narrative, actions on foreign territory, and is explained by the emergency regime of governance, which simplifies procedural aspects.

However, while this comparison may seem a stretch, it brings to mind the experience of what happened to the Russian military occupation administration in Chechnya after the Second Chechen War. Law enforcement officers from all over Russia were sent to Chechnya, which at that time had become a lawless zone, a “black hole” of law, where torture, kidnappings and massacres were practiced on a massive scale. And subsequently, the inhuman practices learned there began to spread, to spill out throughout Russia. Something similar could happen in the case of Russian occupation of part of Ukraine. The methods of fighting the past, learned there, can be later transferred to the territory of the Russian Federation.

In any case, the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation has already proposed to organize (on a permanent basis) the monitoring and review of decisions on the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions. This proposal directly follows from the amendments made in June to the Russian Concept of Commemorating Victims of Political Repression and is politically connected to Russia’s war against Ukraine, as it concerns, in particular, the revision of decisions regarding “participants of underground nationalist formations”, i.e., including members of the OUN-UPA who resisted the Soviet system (the non-existent OUN and UPA are nevertheless recognized as “extremist organizations and banned in the Russian Federation).

The more Russia conflicts with the West, the more the role of weaponization of history will increase in its foreign and domestic policy. In this sense, the designation of Memorial as a “foreign agent,” which was then used to defeat the organization, is not accidental at all. It is important for the authorities to show that recognizing responsibility for Soviet crimes is, in fact, an alien, imposed, and self-serving topic used by the conventional West. The Russian state is unlikely to risk overnight turning the entire memory policy 180 degrees and declaring Soviet repressions never happened or justified; after all, in 2017, on the eightieth anniversary of the Great Terror, Putin personally unveiled the corresponding monument on Sakharov Avenue.

The attack on the past is and will be conducted differently: through the monopolization of discourse, already achieved, and the parallel return of Soviet symbols and practices, through shocking contrast, through deliberate incompatibility. The creeping return of monuments to Stalin, as I mentioned, destroys the meaning of monuments to the victims of repression and creates the effect of systemic ethical corrosion.

This is not a situation of confusion, contradiction, paradox, when two discourses that exclude each other are suddenly declared equally valuable and able to coexist. It is precisely a situation of attack, of assault, where the gradually returning glorification of executioners and murderers aims to devalue and erase the memory of the victims.

After all, the memory of the former victims directly and clearly denounces today’s rulers, today’s state security officers engaged in political terror, and there is no sustainable formula for coexistence. Yes, they can coexist at a certain period, but only in a dynamic, in conflict. But they can’t get along.

And the day is not far off when Russia will move to broadly normalize Soviet state violence. This has already happened in relation to Ukraine: under the banner of the new fight against “Ukrainian nationalism”, the suppression of Ukrainian independence during the Civil War, the destruction of the peasantry and cultural elites, the punitive operations against the national underground after World War II, the mass deportations of the same period, and the recent campaigns against Ukrainian dissidents have been de facto “rehabilitated”.

This will happen inside Russia as well, simply because the justification of today’s repressions must necessarily have a historical component. Otherwise, it’s too unpleasant a comparison.

In 2022, after the full-scale invasion had already begun, a monument to the Chekists was unveiled in Magadan on the territory of the regional department of the FSB with the inscription “employees of the security bodies of the territory”. This is Kolyma, this is the former DalLag, the worst, most deadly of all Soviet camps. A place of grief, a place of horror, a place of pain. A place where a monument to the Chekists could never, under any circumstances be erected; it is something like the monument to the SS in Auschwitz.

But it stands. Yes, for now, behind the fence of a departmental building, kind of not on public land.

But it stands,-a sign of fall, a sign of moral disaster.

The Russian state is not only killing the living by attacking Ukraine. It mocks the dead, the dead of the Gulag lying in the frozen Kolya soil, erecting a monument to the guards, the camp guards, the operatives whose hands are covered in blood, thus giving a sign to the operatives and guards of today: do not hesitate, follow orders, do evil, fabricate cases; there will be no retribution and revenge. No one will accuse you of anything. Neither the living nor the dead.

Sergey Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981. His parents were geologists. Following in their footsteps, Lebedev spent eight seasons as a field worker on geological expeditions, starting at the age of 15. Since 2010, he has written five novels devoted to the theme of the hidden Soviet past and the impact of Stalinist repression, persecution and their consequences on the contemporary life of Russians. His latest novel, The White Lady, shows the dark forces driving Putin’s Russia today. Lebedev’s books have been translated into 22 languages, and he has been a finalist for major literary awards. He has lived in Germany since 2018. He speaks out unequivocally and openly against Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Translated by Wieńczysław Czułowski.