To justify his crimes, Putin is working hard to rewrite history

The closure of the human rights organization "Memorial" was the culmination of an unseen year of repression since the days of the Soviet Union, the past of which the Russian president has been trying to distort and purge.

Anyone who tries to present Stalin's terrorist documents as collaborators with the Nazis is aiming for only one place

Guy Elster

01/01/2022

Saturday, 01 January 2022, 09:26

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Delete the opposition.

Putin at a press conference to summarize the year, last week (Photo: AP)

During the crucial hearing this week in the case of the human rights organization Memorial, the government prosecutor grounded Vladimir Putin's Russia narrative. "International Memorial focused almost entirely on the distortion of historical memory, especially in relation to the Great Patriotic War (World War II)," prosecutor Alexei Zakhfirov claimed, blaming the organization that documented Soviet crimes and human rights violations in modern Russia for creating a false representation that the Soviet Union was a state.

Russia's Supreme Court, or more properly Vladimir Putin's court, accepted the prosecution's request and ordered the closure of the organization that emerged in the late Soviet Union, in the days when thought censorship seemed to be replaced by ideological openness and recognition of victims of the Soviet regime. Memorial, already labeled a "foreign agent" in 2016, has had little chance of surviving the current climate in Russia, which is in the midst of the widest repression since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The political opposition no longer exists.

Its senior officials, led by Alexei Navalny, were imprisoned or went into exile.

The public is not allowed to demonstrate due to various restrictions, some of which are excused in the corona plague, and the election campaigns are a pre-determined show that evokes mostly indifference among the citizens.

And having gained full control of the present, Putin is focusing on rewriting the past in order to justify future acts and crimes inside and outside Russia.

Putin-style justice.

A policeman at the gates of the Supreme Court during the hearing on the closure of "Memorial", this week (Photo: AP)

The Soviet Union and its disintegration shaped Putin's personality and perception. As a KGB officer stationed in East Germany in the late 1980s, he saw up close the degeneration of the Soviet empire and the tearing of the homeland - as he sees it - into pieces of state. As a supplement to income in the days of the economic crisis that characterized post-Soviet Russia. For him, it was a personal, professional and national humiliation.

"We became a completely different country. And what has been built for more than a thousand years has been largely lost, "Putin said in a special program to mark three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union. On his conception that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the greatest "geopolitical disaster" of the 20th century.

The distortion of the annals of the Soviet Union is in Putin's mind.

The textbooks in the schools glorify the achievements of the Red Army in stopping the Nazis at the gates of Moscow and Stalingrad, but whitewashing and obscuring the mass executions in the days of Stalin's "Great Terror," the heavy famine and poverty, and the "Big Brother" rule.

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Orwellian brainwashing

In Putin's Russia, the death penalty does not exist in the rulebook - only mysterious assassinations of dissidents - and supermarket shelves are not empty of food, but the country is everywhere. Surveillance cameras are scattered everywhere, sites of rights organizations are shut down galore and American technology companies are fined tens of millions of dollars for "banned content." Russia is also working to establish an independent Internet network, which will allow it to disconnect from the global network when needed. Such a need may arise in the outbreak of a confrontation with the West or the beginning of a protest that will concern the Kremlin.

The Orwellian brainwashing that Putin is sending to Russian citizens describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as "historic Russia," due to the loss of territories inhabited by Russian-speaking populations. In practice, those former Soviet republics did not wait long to liberate Moscow excellently from the moment the Doge DoctrineNave - the use of military force in the face of resistance within the Warsaw Pact companies - was dropped in the days of Mikhail Gorbachev.

In Putin's day, this doctrine was revived, with some changes and updates depending on the spirit of the times. He refused to accept Russia's defeat in Chechnya in the first days after the break - up of the Soviet Union, under his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and launched another war to re - establish Russia's rule in the Muslim republic located far north in the North Caucasus. Human rights groups that tried to document the severe violations perpetrated by Russian forces fighting Islamist separatists were persecuted, and journalists and activists covering what was happening began to pay a price.

Putin did not content himself with maintaining Russia's internal stability and territorial integrity, and began punishing neighboring countries that sought to move closer to the West and disengage from Moscow's influence. Georgia lost control of two separatist provinces bordering Russia in a brief war in 2008, from which it has yet to recover, and Ukraine the Crimean peninsula and parts of the eastern part of the country in 2014.

Support signs at Memorial offices in Moscow after the organization closes this week (Photo: Reuters)

Western sanctions may have hampered Russia in eastern Ukraine, but they have not changed Putin's foundations on which he bases his strategy.

NATO's proliferation to the east, which is an outgrowth of Russian aggression, is presented by it as a threat to Russia and therefore it must respond accordingly - and God forbid.

This does not mean that a new attack on Ukraine is a fait accompli.

The United States and Europe have made it clear to Russia that it will pay a heavy economic price, and an open war that could claim many casualties is not part of Putin's tactics, which favor the use of proxy forces and cyber-espionage against rival countries to undermine Western democracies.

Russia had already done a similar exercise in the spring, concentrating tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine's borders and causing great concern in the West, only to temporarily withdraw following a summit meeting between Putin and US President Joe Biden in Geneva in June.

Relations between the powers have continued to deteriorate since then, and in an effort, perhaps last, to prevent a military clash in Eastern Europe, Russian, American and European representatives will meet in about two weeks.

For this to happen, one of the parties will have to get off the tree and greatly weaken its image.

Putin would prefer to avoid overt invasion.

Concentration of Russian forces in the Crimea last week (Photo: Reuters)

Russia is demanding that NATO pledge not to add any more former Soviet republics to its ranks, while the alliance insists this is an impossible condition for it. The parties may find compromises, but even if security talks between Moscow and the West lead to short-term understandings, Putin will continue to believe that Ukraine is an artificial country, a territory plundered by Mother Russia, and to ignite this mindset in his recruited media.

"In order to invent a new history, one must erase the old, which Putin paints with his thick black brush. Past crimes must be presented as necessary, even beneficial, before they are copied, "wrote Gary Kasparov, the great chess player and one of Putin's most prominent critics in the United States.

Kiev is begging Washington and European capitals to accept Ukraine into the ranks of NATO, but Western leaders are reluctant to fulfill the promise made to it many years ago. The ground for a "historic repair" he plans to make.In his view, war is peace, oppression is freedom and human rights organizations are foreign agents threatening the peace of the nation.

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