O Gulag de Putin: Yuri Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag, Victim of Putin’s Repression - Olivier Rolin (NYRBooks)

Putin teria um novo Gulag, se pudesse. Mas tem os seus equivalentes: o Novichok substituiu os antigos fuzilamentos sumários.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Yuri Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag, Victim of Putin’s Repression

Olivier Rolin

The New York Times, October 7, 2020

Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

Gulag researcher and rights activist Yuri Dmitriev following his first trial, in which charges of child pornography were dismissed, Petrozavodsk, Russia, April 5, 2018

Western democracies have expressed concern and outrage, at least verbally, over the Novichok poisoning of Alexei Navalny—and this is clearly right and necessary. But much less attention is being paid to the case of Yuri Dmitriev, a tenacious researcher and activist who campaigned to create a memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror in Karelia, a province in Russia’s far northwest, bordering Finland. He has just been condemned on appeal by the Supreme Court of Karelia to thirteen years in a prison camp with a harsh regime.

The hearing was held in camera, with neither him nor his lawyer present. For this man of sixty-four, this is practically equivalent to a death sentence, the judicially sanctioned equivalent of a drop of nerve agent.

After an initial charge of child pornography was dismissed, Yuri Dmitriev was convicted of sexually assaulting his adoptive daughter. These defamatory charges appear to be the latest fabrication of a legal system in thrall to the FSB—a contemporary equivalent, here, of the nonsensical slander of “Hitlerian Trotskyism” that drove the Great Terror trials. It is these same charges, probably freighted with a notion of Western moral decadence in the twisted imagination of Russian police officers, that were brought in 2015 against the former director of the Alliance Française in Irkutsk, Yoann Barbereau.

I met Yuri Dmitriev twice: the first time in May 2012, when I was planning the shooting of a documentary on the library of the Solovki Islands labor camp, the first gulag of the Soviet system; and the second in December 2013, when I was researching my book Le Météorologue (Stalin’s Meteorologist, 2017), on the life, deportation, and death of one of the innumerable victims murdered by Stalin’s secret police organizations, OGPU and NKVD.

Semyon A. Maisterman via The Dimitriev Affair

Dmitriev working with remains at Derevyakenko, Karelia, 2008

In both cases, Dmitriev’s help was invaluable to me. He was not a typical historian. At the time of our first meeting, he was living amid rusting gantries, bent pipes, and machine carcasses, in a shack in the middle of a disused industrial zone on the outskirts of Petrozavodsk—sadly, a very Russian landscape. Emaciated and bearded, with a gray ponytail, he appeared a cross between a Holy Fool and a veteran pirate—again, very Russian. He told me how he had found his vocation as a researcher—a word that can be understood in several senses: in archives, but also on the ground, in the cemetery-forests of Karelia.

In 1989, he told me, a mechanical digger had unearthed some bones by chance. Since no one, no authority, was prepared to take on the task of burying with dignity those remains, which he recognized as being of the victims of what is known there as “the repression” (repressia), he undertook to do so himself. Dmitriev’s father had then revealed to him that his own father, Yuri’s grandfather, had been shot in 1938.

“Then,” Dmitriev told me, “I wanted to find out about the fate of those people.” After several years’ digging in the FSB archive, he published The Karelian Lists of Remembrance in 2002, which, at the time, contained notes on 15,000 victims of the Terror.

“I was not allowed to photocopy. I brought a dictaphone to record the names and then I wrote them out at home,” he said. “For four or five years, I went to bed with one word in my head: rastrelian—shot. Then, I and two fellow researchers from the Memorial association, Irina Flighe and Veniamin Ioffe (and my dog Witch), discovered the Sandarmokh mass burial ground: hundreds of graves in the forest near Medvejegorsk, more than 7,000 so-called enemies of the people killed there with a bullet through the base of the skull at the end of the 1930s.”

Among them, in fact, was my meteorologist. On a rock at the entrance to this woodland burial ground is this simple Cyrillic inscription: ЛЮДИ,  НЕ УБИВАЙТЕ ДРУГ ДРУГА (People, do not kill one another). No call for revenge, or for putting history on trial; only an appeal to a higher law.

Friedemann Kohler/picture alliance via Getty Images

Memorials to the victims of Stalin’s Terror at Krasny Bor, Karelia, 2018; the remains of more than a thousand people shot between 1937 and 1938 at this NKVD killing field were identified by Dmitriev, using KGB archival records

Not content to persecute and dishonor the man who discovered Sandarmokh, the Russian authorities are now trying to repeat the same lie the Soviet authorities told about Katyn, the forest in Poland where NKVD troops executed some 22,000 Poles, virtually the country’s entire officer corps and intelligentsia—an atrocity that for decades they blamed on the Nazis. Stalin’s heirs today claim that the dead lying there in Karelia were not victims of the Terror but Soviet prisoners of war executed during the Finnish occupation of the region at the beginning of World War II. Historical revisionism, under Putin, knows no bounds.

I am neither a historian nor a specialist on Russia; what I write comes from the conviction that this country, for which I have a fondness, in spite of all, can only be free if it confronts its past—and to do this, it needs courageous mavericks like Yuri Dmitriev. And I write from the more personal conviction that he is a brave and upright man, one whom Western governments should be proud to support.

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This article was translated from the French by Ros Schwartz. For further information about Yuri Dmitriev, visit The Dmitriev Affair.

October 7, 2020, 7:00 am

O czarismo constitucional do autocrata Putin - Anastasia Edel (NYRBooks)

Putin’s Constitutional Tsarism

Anastasia Edel

The New York Review of Books, 11/07/2020

On July 1, after “recovering,” by decree, from the coronavirus pandemic, Russia held a vote on a package of constitutional amendments. Introduced by Vladimir Putin back in January and expanded by the State Duma over the following months, the 206 changes are touted as protecting Russia’s sovereignty, defending Russian history, and boosting Russians’ economic well-being. The amendments also nullify the previous presidential terms of Vladimir Putin, allowing him to run again for the presidency when his current, fourth term expires—in effect, extending his twenty-year grip on power indefinitely. “Russia’s strength,” explained the chairman of the Duma when talking about amendments, “is not oil and gas, but Vladimir Putin.”

Though results weren’t formally in until July 2, the triumphal outcome of the referendum was never in doubt: Russian bookstores were already selling copies of “the new Constitution,” as if it were a fait accompli from the middle of June. Even as early as March, Ella Pamfilova, the head of the Central Election Commission, declared amendments as “already legitimate” and lauded President Putin’s effort to solicit “non-required” popular assent—a concept Pamfilova apparently disdained, judging by her smirk as she uttered the phrase.

When asked about the legitimacy of “packet” (or wholesale) voting, as opposed to voting on each individual amendment, Pamfilova compared Russia’s constitutional referendum with a prix fixe restaurant meal. If you didn’t like the beet salad but did like the borscht or the cutlets, she offered, you’d need to decide whether to turn down the whole dinner or simply skip the salad and enjoy the borscht and the cutlets. In other words, there would be no à la carte choice: if you don’t like the amendment that makes veiled threats against anyone considered to be undermining Russia’s “territorial integrity,” then you don’t get to vote on the measure guaranteeing indexed pensions either. It’s all or nothing.

Pamfilova’s cynicism is entirely explicable: in Russia, the constitution has rarely been a covenant of good governance between the state and the people. Rather, it is a tool to enshrine imposed order and provide a legal pretext for cracking down on dissent. Even a cursory look at Russia’s history suggests that if “they”—which is the way Russians routinely refer to the authorities—are reaching for the constitution, bad things are afoot.

The first Russian constitution was a reaction of Tsar Nicholas II to the bloody 1905 revolution that shook the Romanov autocracy to the core, throwing its very survival into doubt. The Constitution of 1906 established the State Duma, or parliament, and granted civil liberties, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly. Those promises were quickly undone by a wave of repressions that filled the prisons and sent thousands to the scaffold, often without trial. As for the Duma, Nicholas could dissolve it at will, which he did twice, weeding out opposition groups and restoring himself as Russia’s absolute ruler until the overthrow of monarchy in March of 1917.

None of the subsequent, Soviet-era constitutions amounted to much more than propaganda tools that portrayed the totalitarian, one-party state they served as the “state of the people.” All presided over gross civil rights abuses of the very people whose interests they claimed to protect.

Take Lenin’s “revolutionary” constitution that proclaimed “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as Russia’s new political order. Enacted amid the raging civil war, it described the Bolshevik seizure of power as an expression of popular will; it thus legitimized the nationalization of private property and billed the new state’s authority as “not limited by any laws.” Six days later, on July 16, 1918, the deposed Tsar Nicholas was murdered, along with his family, inaugurating a wave of mass repression known as the Red Terror.

Or take Stalin’s constitution of 1936, which declared successful construction of the socialist state. Having promised full civil rights to all, including remnants of the “eliminated” exploiter classes, this constitution in fact coincided with the beginning of the Great Terror, which claimed millions of lives, among them countless numbers of workers and peasants whose interests the constitution ostensibly advanced. But Stalin was nothing if not thorough: the legal grounds for that murderous campaign—the designation “enemies of the people”—was inscribed in Article 132 of that document.

Not as deadly in per-capita death sentences, Brezhnev’s constitutional project was nevertheless another exercise in empty rhetoric. Proclaiming the arrival of the advanced phase of socialism, marked by “broader democracy” and “peaceful cooperation,” the Constitution of 1977, with which I would grow up, turned out to be a prelude to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and further suppression of dissidents. Under that banner of “advanced socialism,” Brezhnev’s regime swelled the ranks of “politicals” in prisons and psychiatric hospitals and of “refuseniks,” as citizens who were denied permission to emigrate were known (the family of my future husband fell into that category). For the rest, “broader democracy” came with shortages of everything and compulsory voting in “free elections” that had just one name on the ballot. “In USSR,” as I copied dutifully into my school social science notebook, “all power belongs to the people.”

The 1993 Yeltsin Constitution, written atop the ruins of totalitarian USSR, formally did away with the Soviet system of government and rearranged Russia as a super-presidential republic. It abandoned censorship, declared freedom of conscience and of movement, and reinstated citizens’ right to private property. In a serious departure from the previous constitutional projects, Yeltsin’s actually upheld the civil rights it promised. The right to private property may have translated into immense riches for some and nothing but privatized tiny Soviet-era apartments for the rest, but the last decade of the last century may have been the freest Russians ever experienced. Alas, the constitution itself was adopted only after President Yeltsin had ordered tanks to shell the building of his recalcitrant parliament, arrested members of the opposition, and then disbanded the parliament altogether, seriously undermining the democratic intent of the constitution.

It was that 1993 constitution that Vladimir Putin used as the basis of building his “power vertical,” the centralized, top-down model of government by which loyalists are appointed to important judicial, legislative, and executive positions. In 2008, when it was time for Putin to depart because of the then-existing constitution’s term limits, he simply switched seats with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, who then pushed through constitutional amendments in the State Duma that modified the duration and limit of presidential terms, allowing Putin eventually to run for presidency again. The scheme caused widespread popular protests—and led to a crackdown on independent media and opposition. In 2018, four years after Russia annexed Crimea “to protect interests of ethnic Russians,” Putin was elected for another, now six-year presidential term by one of those same “overwhelming” majorities with which Russians who can recall the Soviet era are so familiar.

Now, the past two decades of Putin’s rule—marked by the reinstatement of censorship, the systematic persecution of political opponents, and “hybrid wars” against “enemies” across ideological spectrum—has been retroactively legitimized by the refashioned constitution. The rewrite not only offers Putin a path to lifetime rule by “nullifying” his previous terms, but also grants him personal immunity when, or if, he ever quits the political arena. The new constitution neutralizes all decisions of international courts, the opposition’s last resort in contesting domestic sentences, by giving precedence to Russian law over international treaties and obligations, and offers additional avenues to criminalize deficiencies of patriotism as defined by the state, with offenses such as “diminishing the significance of the people’s heroism in defending the Fatherland.”

As for freedom of conscience, marriage is constitutionally defined as the union between a man and a woman, while Russians are described en masse as a “state-forming people,” loyal to the “memory of ancestors,” who endowed them with “faith in God” and unspecified “ideals.” Just as was the case with the Stalin’s constitution, the rearing of children is now a priority of the state, which aims to see them raised in the spirit of “patriotism” and “civic engagement.”

All that is wrapped into a hodgepodge of “social” amendments, most of which already exist in various decrees and federal laws. These include mandates for a minimum wage (about $170 dollars a month); annual adjustments of the state pension; accessible health care; and stable economic growth, achieved through a partnership of “solidarity” between the people and the state. Those amendments looked great in the advertisements that flooded Russia’s otherwise barren media space in a bid to boost the referendum turnout and distract attention from Putin’s proposed lifetime rule and the new punitive measures.

Russia being a strongman’s domain, Vladimir Putin could have achieved his goals, as he always has, simply by pulling on the various levers of his power vertical. There is no organized resistance to the current order; the country is stable and the military is loyal. Why engage in this lengthy political spectacle of rewriting the Constitution?

The answer may lie in Putin’s ambition: only a truly great leader, by his reckoning, can succeed in enshrining his personal whims as the “law of the land.” As a president who has built his legacy around restoring Russia’s strength, Putin sees himself as the “defender of Fatherland,” a nebulous category in his constitution that could be applied to anyone from World War II veterans, whose memory he has usurped, to the “defenders of socialism” from the state security organs of the Stalin’s era, also hailed as heroes. Propped up by the God he has now plugged into the Constitution, Putin wants to reign supreme over his vast domain, a father to a “nation of victors,” a tsar in all but the name.

Yet, if history offers any lessons, this attempt at greatness will last no longer than the false covenants and official statues every autocracy erects, for they fail in their fundamental goal: improving the lives of the people. The legacy of Stalin and Lenin is not a socialist empire but the graves of millions, murdered and tortured in its prisons. The legacy of Brezhnev is not “advanced socialism” but Chernobyl.

Putin is more likely to be remembered not as the “Father” of “Great Russia,” but as the ex-KGB apparatchik who squandered the promise of perestroika for a hollow, “post-truth” regime held together by cynicism and corruption. Just like his predecessors, he succeeded in pushing through his “beet salad” constitution, but one day Russians may decide they want something else on the menu.