Rehabilitating the future

In mid-November, Runet denizens began showering praise on a 34-year-old Tomsk resident, Denis Karagodin, who has conducted a successful personal investigation into the identities of the killers of his great-grandfather, a victim of Stalin’s repressions.

Denis Karagodin has many Runet supporters:

“Denis Karagodin is a hero, simple as that.”

“Denis Karagodin ought to receive every single humanitarian award in Russia.”

“Denis Karagodin – what an immense human being!!! He’s triumphed over the system and forced it to disgorge the names of his great-granddad’s executioners.”

Karagodin himself – who bears a strong resemblance to his great-grandfather – points out that, while his personal investigation took four years to complete, his family have been trying to discover the truth about the fate of Stepan Karagodin ever since the day of the latter’s arrest: 1 December 1937.

The chain of individuals complicit in Stepan Karagodin’s murder comprises around twenty people, from Stalin and members of the Politburo down to the crime’s physical perpetrators. Establishing the identities of the latter proved particularly difficult, but his great-grandson’s personal tenacity, coupled with the fact that the FSB is obliged to release more documentation to relatives of repression victims than to professional historians, has enabled him to overcome even this toughest of hurdles.

The investigation over, the granddaughter of one of the murderers made contact with Denis Karagodin and asked for his forgiveness (as it turned out, her great-grandfather had himself fallen victim to repression): “Nothing will change in our society unless we lay bare the whole truth,” she wrote. “It’s no accident we’ve got Stalinists crawling out of the woodwork again – you just can’t get your head around it.” Karagodin responded by offering the woman “a hand of reconciliation” and expressing gratitude for her courage.

Karagodin has always wanted the guilt of his great-grandfather’s killers to be confirmed in court – something he has never regarded as a mere pipe-dream, whatever sceptics might say. A formal public condemnation of Stalin and his repressions remains vitally important for Russia. After all, the Communist Party won 13.34% of the vote in September’s legislative elections, enjoying the support of over 7 million people. And a vote for the Communists is, by extension, often also a vote for Stalinism; many Russians continue to subscribe to views similar to that expressed by Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the party: “Stalin is the greatest, most powerful […] statesman of the last century. We mustn’t analyse his reign through the narrow prism of the tragic and terrible year of 1937.”

The current regime, for its part, evinces an idiosyncratic and ambivalent attitude to Stalin. On the one hand, the Kremlin is prepared to label him a tyrant; on the other, it regards him as the legitimate leader of a sovereign state. Education Minister Olga Vasilyeva, for example, has both denounced Stalin’s tyranny and praised him for reviving state patriotism – all in the course of a single interview.

Explicitly extolling Stalin may not, of course, always be expedient for officials, but, as political analyst Georgy Bovt makes clear, the process of glorifying the most shameful chapter of Russian history has long since taken on a life of its own – no formal state involvement required: “Overly frank perestroika-era analyses of Stalin’s repressions have come to be seen as attempts to besmirch the glorious past. Memorial museums are being set up in honour of Gulag staff members, while the films they’re making about NKVD operatives cannot in any way be called objective. And the ultimate purpose of all these initiatives is to glorify and romanticise the agencies of the regime.”

Not every Russian citizen supports Karagodin’s efforts, witness some of the comments on the site of state news agency RIA Novosti:

Krivoshein.AlNi “So they’ve branded all NKVD staff criminals, is that it? Are they seeking out personally guilty individuals so they can denounce them today, along with their descendants?  […] These foreign agents are gonna go a long way.”

patriot52 “How much dirt and lies are these nitpickers trying to pour on our country … this Memorial lot’s just a bunch of misfits and outcasts.”

The debunking of Stalin’s personality cult may have served to bridle the regime’s external brutality, but it failed to alter its mendacious and cynical essence. During the period when victims of repression were being actively rehabilitated, the KGB’s regional branch in Tomsk (which is where Stepan Karagodin met his end) was still headed by ex-NKVD officers who’d played a direct role in the Stalinist terror. When attempts were made to obtain these people’s testimony, they just shrugged and said that, “the political situation of the time meant that we had to engage in the falsification of investigative cases.” And when certain investigators demanded the dismissal of the former NKVD operatives, they were themselves ostracised “for demonising old Chekist personnel.”

During the course of his investigation, Denis Karagodin discovered that cause of death certificates were forged after the victims of repression had been rehabilitated. Some were certified as having succumbed to pneumonia, others as dying from a brain haemorrhage. In other words, the system never so much as entertained the possibility of sincere repentance; even without Stalin on the throne, it valued esprit de corps over anything else.

Yet there is something the Kremlin is perhaps failing to take into account when it chooses to gloss over whatever it finds inconvenient. In the Stalin era, the general populace simply had no means of resistance… at their disposal (save, of course, for their sheer determination to survive, or at least to die with dignity). In the information era, however, the state is by no means a priori stronger than its citizenry; today, practically anyone can fling down the gauntlet to the system, or secure an important local victory. Karagodin’s triumph is testament to precisely that. Which gives us all cause for hope.