Political repressions of the Soviet era in the party historical politics of modern Russia.

Timshina Ekaterina Leonidovna PhD in History Associate professor, Department of Linguistics for State Administration Personnel, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation 119571, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Prospekt Vernadskogo, 82 str.1 k.timshina@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The first ideas for studying the own memory of large communities were proposed by M. Halbwaks in the early 1940s in the unfinished work "Collective and Historical Memory" ^[1], but the real dawn of this direction falls already in the last third of the XX century, when the works of J. Le Goff, P. Hutton, P. Nora, A. Assman and P. Bourdieu, the methodological and practical foundations for studying the phenomenon of historical memory were laid. In our country, this direction of historiography began to develop actively after the collapse of the USSR and the focus of attention of most researchers (A. I. Miller, G. A. Bordyugov, O. I. Malinova, N. E. Koposov ^[2-7]) turned out to be the problems of developing state historical policy in the Russian Federation and Eastern European countries. The activity of political parties as actors of historical politics often remained on the periphery of the attention of researchers.

The subject of this article is a comparative analysis of the perception in the narratives of modern parties of Russia of the policy of Stalinist repression, as well as, taking into account the direction of development of historical politics in Eastern Europe, and in the broader context of the state's struggle against dissent in the Soviet era. The article examines the views of political parties that participated in the federal election campaigns of 2016 and 2021 as the most popular and active among voters. Although not all parties participating in the election race have formed their perception of historical events, this is especially true for associations with narrow-profile programs, for example, the Greens, the Green Alternative, the Russian Party of Pensioners for Social Justice.

After the collapse of the socialist bloc in Europe, its former member countries faced the problems of finding their own identity and constructing a new historical policy in the post-Soviet world. If the center of the Russian version of the state policy of memory, after certain searches, turned out to be patriotism, primarily based on the feat of the people during the Great Patriotic War, then at the head of the narratives of many post-Soviet states, according to A. I. Miller, were "the sufferings of their own nation" ^{[8, p. 224]}, as a result of various repressions and harassment by totalitarian regimes. At the beginning of the XXI century. in the countries of Eastern Europe (including the Baltic States), the history of the Soviet era found itself in the center of fierce discussions, while the state actively and aggressively intervened, imposing its interpretation of the collective past (especially characteristic of Poland), including with the help of special regulatory representations of the past organizations (Institutes of National Memory) and prohibitive laws. The main directions of the new historical policy were the decommunization and equalization of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism in terms of the level of harm done.

If in Russia historical policy was subordinated, first of all, to the interests of domestic policy, then in Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic States it was focused on solving foreign policy problems – the USSR and the Russian Federation were responsible for any problematic situations of the Soviet past (and sometimes post-Soviet). Rooting in the collective consciousness of its own citizens, and in the future through the EU institutions and in the European public consciousness, the image of Russia as an "eternal enemy" would give grounds for putting forward and substantiating foreign policy claims. The aggressive historical policy used to reinforce its foreign policy ambitions has been called the "wars of memory".

After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation, like the countries of Eastern Europe, found itself in an identification vacuum, facing the need to develop its own symbolic and historical policies, different from the communist ones, and to form a complex of supporting narratives. Initially, the historical policy of late Perestroika was continued, when criticism and denial of the Soviet past became the focus of attention. Such a memory policy was unrelated in nature, pursuing momentary goals. The state power in the 1990s did not form a holistic view of its perception of history, limiting itself to criticism of the USSR, it did not try to build historical continuity either with the time of the empire or with the short history of post-February democracy, and weakly addressed the narratives of these periods. One of the main pillars for criticism of the Soviet past was Stalin's repressions and, in general, the persecution of dissident citizens by the communist regime. In the conditions of the acute confrontation between the presidential power and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which reached its apogee in the 1996 elections, such a historical policy had a certain tactical success, but in the long term it aggravated the ideological split in society.

The turn in the historical policy of the state occurred during the first presidential term of V. V. Putin. Now the state recognized all periods of history as equally significant, which was emphasized by the change in the symbolic sphere through the return of a number of bright Soviet symbols to official circulation. The main task of the state policy of memory was to achieve social harmony within the country. The emphasis of power propaganda focuses on the positive achievements of the past, while any historical events that could cause public controversy were relegated to the background or were not mentioned. On all potentially controversial topics, which can include Stalin's repressions, state elites sought to avoid explicit formulation of their own position, in extreme cases, either streamlined or ambiguous formulations were used, for example, at the state level they managed to practically not "notice" even such a significant event as the centenary of the two revolutions of 1917. The absence of an explicit position of the authorities on a number of key historical events allowed political parties to create their own set of narratives that have significant differences, both from the state perception of history and from the established historiography.

The use of the past that is exceptionally convenient for political use for state purposes has led to the absence of a clear historical policy on a number of complex issues, which has become one of the reasons for the passive position of the authorities in the "memory wars". The Russian authorities, focused on internal consensus, missed their beginning, and in the future reacted reactively and situationally only to individual attacks, mainly in the framework of discussions about the Great Patriotic War. The Ukrainian crisis, as well as a few years before Poland's attempts to blame the USSR for the outbreak of World War II, stirred up and activated the Russian memory policy for a while, but in general it has not undergone radical changes, the main principle remains the avoidance of acute historical topics within the country. If the post-Soviet countries built the house of their historical politics on the foundation of suffering from the crimes of communism, then in Russia there was a gradual decrease in the official discourse of reflections on the excesses of the Soviet era. However, this was not a policy of denial, the state authorities did not make a radical break with the established commemorative practices: the Memorial Day of Victims of Political Repression established in 1991 was preserved, memorial rallies were held, memorial sites were preserved (Solovetsky Stone in Moscow, Katyn, Sandarmokh, Perm-36 and many others). Despite the active introduction of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War into the state historical policy as the central event and the myth of the foundation of modern Russian society, the image of the commander-in-chief in the war, I. V. Stalin, was never fixed in the victorious pantheon, and he is practically not mentioned in commemorative ceremonies, which once again emphasizes the priority for the authorities to avoid any discussion, and not in defining or planting an opinion convenient for her.

The ambiguity and uncertainty of the state's position also affected the "party of power" of United Russia. On the one hand, the representatives of the party condemned the crimes committed by the state authorities of the Soviet era, mainly it was about the Stalin era, on the other hand, they tried to emphasize the achievements of that period, balancing the first statement. The topic of repression was raised most often and critically in the speeches of the party leader D. A. Medvedev. In 2009, while serving as President of Russia, in a video message on the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression, he noted that "one can still hear that these numerous victims were justified by some higher state goals. I am convinced that no development of the country, no successes, ambitions can be achieved at the cost of human grief and losses. Nothing can be placed above the value of human life" ^[9]. The President pointed out the need to preserve the memory not only of glorious victories, but also of tragedies, including through the creation of museums and the preservation of memorial sites. It should be noted that even in such a critical speech there is a reservation that "Stalin's crimes cannot detract from the exploits of the people who won the Great Patriotic War. He made our country a mighty industrial power. He raised our industry, science, and culture to the world level" ^[9], i.e. in the speech, all violations of the law are associated with the personality of one person (Stalin), and positive achievements are attributed to the people, the President did not formulate an attitude to the ideology of that time and the Communist Party. In 2012, at commemorative events in Perm, D. A. Medvedev expressed similar assessments: the leaders of the Soviet state of the Stalin era deserve "the harshest assessment", defined their policy as a "grave crime", "war with their own people", but noted that crimes should not "cross out the glorious pages of the history of our Fatherland of the Soviet period" ^[10].

Other party leaders demonstrated a similar attitude, which has hardly changed over time, although the frequency of mentions of the need to open new museums and places of memory is gradually decreasing. In 2017, Acting Secretary of the General Council of the party A. A. Turchak repeated the thesis that crimes against one's own people cannot be justified if a number of significant successes were achieved during this period ^[11]. Even in one of the most positive articles on the leader of the peoples on the party's website about the personality of Stalin, authored by A.V. Isaev (Deputy Secretary of the General Council of United Russia), who listed many state achievements achieved thanks to the Soviet leader, the invariable statement remains that "crimes committed by the power headed by Stalin are not they have excuses and cannot be forgotten or amnestied "beyond the statute of limitations" ^[12].

Thus, the attitude declared by the party leaders to Stalin's repressions practically did not change either with time or under the pressure of external conjuncture. The only influence of the "memory wars" can be considered the appearance and development in later articles and statements of the statement that even crimes against the people committed by the Stalinist leadership do not give the right to equate the Soviet regime with Nazism. This thesis can be considered a response to the historical policy of Eastern European countries. The harshest statements on this issue relate to 2021 and belong to the leader of the United Russia election list, Sergey Lavrov: "attacks on Stalin as the main villain, lumping together everything he did in the pre–war period, during, after the war - this is also part of the same attack on our the past, on the results of the Second World War" ^[13].

The main opponent of United Russia is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which has taken the opposite position with regard to repression. In assessing the personality of I. V. Stalin, the Communist Party had to develop its own approaches, markedly different from Soviet narratives. In contrast to the liberal criticism of the 1990s, the Communists formed their own attitude to the personality and politics of the Soviet leader, significantly idealizing and mythologizing his image. In the journalism of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the time of Stalin's rule is described as the best time in Russian history, I. V. Stalin appears as an ideal leader, whose theoretical and practical experience is also suitable for modern Russia, a "power builder", a "great statesman", a collector of the "family of peoples", a leader "restoring the Russian spiritual and state tradition" ^[14]. In such a situation, the representatives of the Communist Party faced the task of finding a detailed answer to political opponents on the issue most vulnerable to the mythologeme built by the party, how the "golden age" coincided with the era of the "great terror".

The party's program highlighted the section "History Lessons", in which the Communist Party presented its position on key events in the country's history in the twentieth century. The document mentions repressions only in passing, they are defined "as violations of the socialist legality of the 30s and 40s, which were strongly condemned by the party" ^[15]. Analysis of the KPRF website shows that the party rarely uses the term "repression" itself, which is well-established in historiography, relative to the Stalinist period, half of the cases of using the word relate to the current political situation and is used in the context of descriptions of the persecution of modern communist activists. When using the term in the context of the Stalin era, the word "repression" is either used in quotation marks, or with the phrase "so-called", which emphasizes the skeptical attitude of communists to the official version of events. The Communist Party develops criticism of the image of Stalinist repressions in the public space in several directions. The Party considers the thesis of Stalin's personal responsibility to be untenable, shifting responsibility to the heads of state security agencies who exceeded their powers and were punished for it. "He [Stalin] not only did not incline to excesses those whose duty it was to ensure law and order in the country, but also harshly asked them for unreasonable "zeal" that cost the lives or freedom of the innocent" ^[14]. Another area of controversy was criticism of the assertion of the omnipotence and unlimited power of repressive bodies: "the very fact that the top officials of the state security themselves eventually came to trial for their misdeeds leaves no stone unturned from the claims of anti-Soviet propaganda that the state security in Stalin's times was beyond the control of the law and society and did what they wanted" ^[14].

A large layer of narratives of the Communist Party is also devoted to criticism of opponents, in terms of statements about the number of repressed. The party is outraged by accusations of persecution of tens of millions of people: Communist Party leader G. A. Zyuganov, in his works, referring to the works of historian V. N. Zemskov, claims about 800 thousand executed and about 4 million convicted under political articles, most of whom were guilty ^[14]. Due to the shift in the chronological framework of the reign of I. V. Stalin (the leader of the Communist Party transfers his coming to power to 1922, without using the periodization adopted in historiography with the allocation of the stage of intra-party struggle, during which the country was governed collectively), as a result, the impression is formed from the articles that after the establishment of the rule of I. V. Stalin, the volume of those punished for "counter-revolutionary crimes" are decreasing: for 1922 and 1923, the lowest figures of political convicts for the period 1921-1953 are indicated.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation questions the thesis that mostly innocent people were persecuted on far-fetched pretexts. G. A. Zyuganov does not deny the possibility of erroneous conviction, but explains it by necessity: "Of course, there were innocent people among a large number of prisoners. But in this pre-war, military and post-war periods, in an unprecedented struggle, Stalin had no choice but to pursue a tough policy aimed at strengthening order and discipline, firmly and decisively to stop all actions that undermine the state" ^{[16, p. 53]}. The need for repression, as follows from the materials of the publications of the Communist Party, stemmed not only from the need to strengthen the country before a major war, but also to prevent global catastrophic events, for example, a new civil war due to the speeches of local party leaders ^[17], or a coup d'etat (the party considers the existence of a conspiracy among the military command proven event ^[18-19]).

The reasons for the condemnation of Stalin's policy at the XX Party Congress, according to modern communists, were the personal ambitions of N. S. Khrushchev to establish his power in the party and conceal his own violations of party discipline ^[20]. If the historical policy of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is aimed at explaining the need for certain repressions in the 1930s and fighting opponents who "exaggerate" their volumes, then after Stalin's death, the activities of party control and security bodies are assessed by the party as weak and insufficient, which explains the coming to power of "violators of party discipline", "degenerates" and "renegades", who destroyed the USSR.

From similar positions, the problem of repression in the Soviet Union and the second Communist Party is considered by the "Communists of Russia", who used the mythologized image of I. V. Stalin much more actively than the Communist Party in the election campaigns of recent years – for example, the party's proposals on key issues are referred to in the programs as "Stalinist strikes". On the party's website, the topic of repression is practically not mentioned, but during the election campaign, party leader M. A. Suraykin spoke about it: "putting society and the preservation of the country at the forefront, we have to make some tough decisions," that is, like the Communist Party, the policy of repression is explained by the need to prevent catastrophic consequences, excesses at the same time They are not denied, but they are explained by the complexity of the functioning of a large state system and the personal shortcomings of individual employees, as an example, the possibility of arbitrariness on the part of individual corrupt police officers is also given in modern Russia ^[21]. If the Communist Party of the Russian Federation focuses on explaining the causes of repression and reducing the number of convicts, then the "Communists of Russia" believe that it is impossible to focus only on the Stalinist period. According to the party, significant and larger-scale repressions took place under tsarism (usually refers to the reign of Nicholas II) and "only a comprehensive analysis will help society to find mutual understanding and move further in the development of the state, bypassing the terrible practices of political struggle of past eras" ^[22]. At the same time, informing the public about executions and exiles was supposed to prevent the romanticized image of Nicholas II from taking root in society; to assess the true scale of repression under the tsarist regime, the "Communists of Russia" appealed to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation ^[23].

The leader of the LDPR in many speeches outside the election campaigns sharply negatively assessed the role of I. V. Stalin, including for the policy of unjustified repression. V. V. Zhirinovsky mentioned that his family members suffered from Stalinism, which formed his "burning hatred of the Stalin era" ^[24]. However, in the official documents of the party, the position of the LDPR on issues of repression is stated more accurately, which is explained by the fact that among the supporters of V. V. Zhirinovsky, the number of those who positively assess the activities of I. V. Stalin exceeded the percentage of support among supporters of other parties, including among fans of the Communist Party ^[25].

The LDPR's election programs repeatedly mention the "genocide of the Russian people", but the party did not disclose in them what events it refers to as genocide. Only the 2011 program indicated the chronological framework of the genocide – "1918-1924" ^[26], which excludes Stalin's repressions from consideration and actually reduces the time of the genocide to the Civil War and its consequences. The LDPR has also attempted to legislate its own vision of history – it has repeatedly submitted proposals to the State Duma for the adoption of a separate law aimed at protecting against "encroachments on the historical memory of Russians" – one of such draft laws, initiated shortly after the 2016 elections, introduced, if adopted, articles in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, providing for a prison sentence or fine for "justifying the genocide of Russians." The explanatory note to the draft law makes it possible to better understand which events the party refers to as genocide. The list contains Austrian camps from the First World War, Nazi crimes, the politics of post-Soviet states, the conflict on the territory of Ukraine, but violations of the rule of law in the USSR are mentioned more carefully, for example, Stalin's repressions are not directly indicated. The party considers the events of genocide to include the violent creation of national republics and the radicalization of the population to the detriment of the Russian people, but in some publications it was mentioned that they also include the red (Bolshevik) terror, but the meaning of this term and the chronological framework of terror were not detailed.

As part of the creation of a memory infrastructure that supports the historical views of the party, the LDPR, in addition to traditional methods, proposed using relatively new ones. In the Western world, the status of museum space has undergone a rather radical revision in recent decades. The emotional side of the exposition, its ability to evoke empathy and a sensual response from the visitor, gained more importance than the detached scientific representativeness. Thanks to this, museums become an important resource of historical politics, which is formed not only by professional historians, but also by political figures who offer their own versions of emotional memory. Examples of such an approach to museum organization are institutions dedicated to the study of collective traumas of society – museums of Holocaust victims in Western Europe, museums of Soviet occupation in Eastern Europe, the Museum of the Holodomor-genocide in Ukraine, which had a significant impact on the formation of national identity and collective memory. Russian Russian Democratic Party has advocated the creation of the "Institute of the Russian Holocaust of the XX century" within the framework of "perpetuating the memory of the genocide of Russians" ^[26], which will be responsible for the investigation, study and museification of crimes against the Russian people.

The narratives of the patriotic party "Motherland" show support for I. V. Stalin, who strengthened the state, brought it to a new level, won the hardest war, carried out the modernization of the country. In terms of repression and violations of the rule of law, Rodina is inclined to justify them, considering them insignificant (except for a relatively short peak in 1936-1938), explicable by the requirements of the historical moment necessary to strengthen the state, while, like representatives of the Communist Party, they denied Stalin's own guilt in the events: "The bulk of the victims of 36-38 years on conscience Stalin's enemies, not him at all. And the notorious lists that Stalin allegedly signed are either (partially) a fake, or a consequence of the very political circumstances that entangle any more or less major politician" ^[28]. In the further development of the state, according to the party, it was the weakening of the security agencies that became one of the reasons for the collapse of the country.

Just Russia, led by S. M. Mironov, consistently condemned Stalin's "ruthless policy towards its own people." The party leader mentioned that in the martyrology of the victims there are also his ancestors: his grandfather, a wealthy peasant, was shot in 1937 as a fist. According to Fair Russia, such crimes cannot be explained or justified by any state interests. "Such events should not be forgotten. The history of oblivion does not forgive. <...> This is a warning to those who are trying today to return to those hard times when people were persecuted, tortured, exiled and shot for simply wanting to live with dignity and honesty ^[29].

Despite the active condemnation of the crimes of Stalinism, the just, as well as their colleagues from United Russia, opposed its identity with Nazism, pointing out the impossibility of equalizing the two totalitarian regimes.^[30]

In 2021, on the eve of the election campaign to the State Duma of the Russian Federation, three political associations merged to form a single party "Just Russia – Patriots of Russia – For Truth". A change in the composition of the party could lead to a change in its historical policy towards Stalin's repressions, since the leader of the movement "For Truth" Zakhar Prilepin repeatedly demonstrated his pro-Stalin views, spoke out for the need to erect monuments to the Soviet leader. 2021 was marked by a short dispute between the leaders of the party on the issue of Stalin's commemoration, but the discussion did not develop into a split, and the new party remained in the position of "Just Russia" on the issue of attitude to repression. One of the reasons for maintaining the policy was that in the elections the candidates from the "Fair Russia" showed generally better results than the representatives of the "For the Truth".

The liberal part of the political spectrum, represented by the RODP Yabloko and the People's Freedom Party (PARNAS), strongly condemns the repressive policy of the USSR, while, unlike their opponents, they criticize not only the Stalinist policy of repression, but also the subsequent struggle against dissent in the USSR and partially find its features in modern Russia. For example, PARNAS consolidated in its political program the statement that "the metastases of the criminal Stalinist regime continue to haunt our present and future" ^[31].

The deputy chairman of PARNAS, historian A.B. Zubov, defined the activities of the Bolsheviks as "state terrorism". "The Red Terror in 1918-21, the Holodomor in 1932-33, the Great Terror in 1937-38, the new terror and the Holodomor from 1946 until Stalin's death. Several tens of millions of people have been killed or died prematurely from hunger, disease and overwork during this time" ^[32]. The crimes of the authorities, according to Parnas, did not end with the death of Stalin, which makes the views of the party related to the historical politics of Eastern Europe, but continued, albeit to a lesser extent, until 1989, when "the people miraculously gained freedom." A. B. Zubov believes that the complex of repressive actions cannot be explained by modernization, nor the need to create an industry, believing that the goal was "solely to intimidate people for several generations to come," i.e., "terrorism by the state."

The Yabloko Party approached the issue of repression from similar positions. At the 2016 federal elections, the Yablochniki presented their vision of historical politics. They defined I. V. Stalin as "the general ideologue and supreme organizer of terror", and "terrorist acts of this period should be equated with crimes against humanity" ^[33]. Unlike other parties, Yabloko equates the crimes of the communist regime and fascism: "The fundamental feature of Bolshevism, as well as other totalitarian ideology of the XX century, fascism, is the denial of morality, following the principle of "the end justifies the means", denial of the value of an individual human life and justification of any number of victims in the present by building an ideal society in the future" ^[33].

The historical policy proposed by the RODP "Yabloko" shows the influence of the methods used by the political leadership of the countries of Eastern Europe and the former republics of the USSR in the formation of a new space of collective memory – this is the idea of creating special institutions for the study of crimes of the communist regime; changing the school system with an emphasis on teaching democratic practices and the history of the dissident movement; lustration and criminal prosecution of people publicly justifying repressions, etc., Yabloko stressed that until the modern government condemns the crimes of Stalinism and breaks all ties with the totalitarian past, it will have no future, it will face archaization and a dead end of development.

Political repression remains one of the most traumatic events in Russian history of the past century. Of course, a number of events (the Revolution, the Great Patriotic War and the collapse of the USSR) are more significant for the formation of modern society, however, in addition to the events of 1917, there is a fairly pronounced state policy.

 In relation to political repression and other human rights violations in the USSR, Russia's leading political parties used different approaches. The following groups can be distinguished:

– parties justifying repression (Communist Party, "Motherland", "Communists of Russia") – organizations that believe that the violation of the rule of law by the state apparatus was permissible for the sake of some higher goals (modernization of the country, prevention of civil war, combating the threat of conspiracy) or largely exaggerated or falsified to denigrate the achievements of the Soviet social system;

– parties that condemned the repression (LDPR, Yabloko, PARNAS, Just Russia, United Russia). This group of parties is heterogeneous, in terms of the degree of conviction and the chronological framework of violations of the law. If United Russia and Just Russia condemned the repressions, but recognize the existence of significant achievements in the Soviet period, which, although they do not justify violations of the law, do not allow this time to be considered unambiguously negative, their criticism is limited exclusively to the Stalinist period, then PARNAS and Yabloko consider violations in a broader chronology from the arrival of to the power of the Bolsheviks until the late perestroika.

The parliamentary parties (United Russia, Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party) believe that the "Stalin's mistakes and crimes" have already been assessed and there is no need for further measures to "de-Stalinize", including with the participation of any foreign or supranational structures, as these parties consider categorically unacceptable comparison, and even more so the equalization characteristic of some Eastern European countries, Stalinist totalitarianism and German Nazism in any official documents or definitions. Yabloko and PARNAS consider incomplete measures to condemn and study the crimes committed, and insist on additional legislative and organizational measures, focusing on the experience of post-Soviet countries.

Despite attempts to reformat collective memory after the collapse of the USSR and the formal rejection of historical narratives of the Soviet era, they continue to influence modern political processes. The "memory wars", although they caused some activation of historical politics for an external audience, did not lead to the formation of a unified view. The discussions initiated during Perestroika remain central to the historical politics of the parties, and if we turn to the topic of Stalin's repressions, then partly during the Khrushchev Thaw, while the discourse retains mainly an internal character. This fact in the development of historical politics is alarming, since in the few decades that have passed since the collapse of the USSR, there have actually been no modifications of the topics of discussion. For the formation of a nation's identity, it is important to have a common collective perception of one's own history, including its tragic pages. In Russia, as can be seen from the discourse of political parties, there has been a conservation of disputes of the transition period. The goal of Russian state policy – to glue a divided society through the rejection of any historical discussions has achieved success, but by definition it could not lead to the achievement of a global goal – the creation of a unified national identity. The development by political parties of their own historical policy on the most difficult issues, its development and public broadcasting are a good sign, it can push the state to intensify its own policy of remembering the tragic events of history.