Putin casts his net over Stalin’s exonerated victims

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In 2013, during a televised question-and-answer session with Russian citizens, Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to condemn Joseph Stalin’s persecution of millions in the Soviet era. “We do not need to go back to the dark period of 1937,” he told viewers. “Stalinism is associated with a personality cult and mass violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like this in Russia and, I hope, never will be again.”

Why, then, are the authorities revoking some of the official rehabilitations of Stalin’s victims that have occurred, in fits and starts, since Nikita Khrushchev’s rule in the 1950s and 1960s? It risks reopening painful wounds in society, and even tempting people to draw comparisons between Putin and Stalin, at a time when the Russian president puts a premium on national unity in the war against Ukraine.

According to a draft order prepared this month by Igor Krasnov, Russia’s chief prosecutor, the reversal of rehabilitations is limited in scope. Supposedly, it only affects “Nazi collaborators” and “traitors to the motherland” deemed to have been wrongly rehabilitated after Stalin’s death.

Among these categories are said to be Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists as well as Russian “bandit groups” that resisted Soviet rule. Clearly, the all-important context for Krasnov’s order is Putin’s assault on Ukrainian nationhood and his crackdown on dissent at home.

All the same, the measure looks strange. Rehabilitation of war criminals is already prohibited under Russian law. Perhaps some miscreants were mistakenly exonerated under Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev, during whose 1985-1991 rule the veil on Stalin’s crimes was lifted as never before. But they are surely few in number.

In one sense, Krasnov’s order is mere propaganda aimed at discrediting Ukrainian identity and opponents of Putin. But there is more to it than that. Just as millions of innocent Soviet citizens were imprisoned, exiled, sent to labour camps and executed under Stalin, so the reversal of some rehabilitations risks being an arbitrary process in a country where the judiciary is subordinate to the Kremlin’s needs.

In a 2018 Russian survey, more than a third of respondents said they had relatives who had experienced repression under Stalin. How would they react if they found out that, in some cases, the authorities now judged their relatives to have been illegally rehabilitated? We cannot be sure, but there is a chance that it would stir much bitterness.

It might also revive memories of the connection in modern Russian history between the rehabilitation process and efforts to dismantle despotism. Under Khrushchev, and especially Gorbachev, official openness about past atrocities and the rehabilitation of innocent victims generated pressure for broader liberalisation. The organisation that most effectively represented this push for democracy and honesty about history was the human rights group Memorial, which Putin shut down in 2021.

Conversely, even a partial reversal of rehabilitations would serve as a dual signal to the Russian people. On one hand, it would underline the trend towards increasing domestic political repression. On the other, it would highlight Putin’s insatiable itch to place memory of the Russian past under official control and, as the scholar Jade McGlynn puts it, to wrap the nation’s history in “disinformation, myths and false narratives”.

This should not be construed as an attempt by Putin to rehabilitate Stalin himself or to whitewash the entire Soviet legacy. For most of his rule, Putin has confined himself to praising some “good” aspects of the Stalin era, above all the victory over the Nazis, while distancing himself from the dictator’s mass repressions. But the review of some rehabilitations is a sign that even this version of history may soon be altered to suit Putin’s purposes.

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