There is, perhaps,
a fault of Russian society in the face of the long period of the Soviet regime
where millions of crimes were carried out, this is an idea that arises after listening to the Italian historian
Bruno Groppo
, who is a doctor in Political Science from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris and senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.
The years of Stalin's Great Terror and the different periods of a system that lasted from 1917 to 1991 required
the complicity of a large part of society
and, possibly therein lies one of the reasons that prevent this country from critically analyzing its past. .
Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) attends the Victory Day military parade on Red Square in Moscow, Russia, 09 May 2022. The Victory Day military parade is held annually to commemorate the victory of the Union Soviet over Nazi Germany in World War II.
(Germany, Russia, Moscow) EFE/EPA/MIKHAIL METZEL / KREMLIN POOL / SPUTNIK MANDATORY CREDIT
Today it is known, thanks to the work of
a new generation of historians and the opening of the State archives
, that in the USSR the persecution did not only target Bolshevik cadres:
elimination strategies dealt with everyone who did not adapted to the imposed political logic
and led to the fact that officials of the repressive regime ended up being detained or assassinated in the camps.
Many of these episodes, which also created a revolutionary epic, are recounted by Bruno Groppo as a sequence of images willing to demonstrate the confidence and persistence of this
professor from the University of Padua and Panthéon Sorbonne who lives in Paris
and arrived in Buenos Aires. Aires invited by the Franco-Argentine Center of the UBA, in the reconstruction of the events.
His knowledge of Russian and Soviet history (the two terms are not equivalent, there is a contradiction in them, a dispute within the Russian idiosyncrasy that Groppo has been able to study) worked
within the framework of the seminar he gave at CEDINCI
as the tools of an interpretation applied to the current war that Russia unleashed on Ukraine.
During the interview with
Ñ
, Groppo explains how the characterizations of the past are effective to the extent that they achieve a synthesis that materializes in the elaboration of an immediate political identity, attentive to the most urgent social forms.
Bruno Groppo portrayed for Ñ by Maxi Failla.
–You point out that there are many difficulties in Russia to review its history in relation to the Soviet period, but Vladimir Putin makes use of the memory of that period when he refers to the triumph over Nazism during World War II and the place of power that the USSR had.
–For the Russians, the end of the Soviet Union is a period of enormous disorientation because the reference points that worked until then lose value.
It was somewhat contradictory because they freed themselves from the communist system, which many considered oppressive, but suddenly they lost an empire
They lost their dominant position within that empire and felt humiliated by the defeat in the Cold War and the loss of great power status.
When Vladimir Putin came to power in the year 2000, he set out to reconstruct Russian identity and placed himself in an absolutely nationalist and neo-imperial perspective.
He recovers elements of the Soviet past, such as the victory in World War II, industrialization, the conquest of space, and vindicates some pre-revolutionary aspects such as the way in which the tsars enlarged the empire.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, attends a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier following the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, on May 9, 2021. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)
– What relationship do you find between these uses of memory and oblivion and the decision to start the war in Ukraine?
–Putin has been involved in memory politics since the beginning of his term, but without respect for historical truth.
The current war was prepared by Putin with justifications that seek to prove that Ukraine never existed
, that it was a creation of the Bolsheviks.
For Ukrainians, the foundation of their identity lies in the great famine of 1932/33 that killed between 5 and 6 million and which Ukrainians call the
holodomor
(Ukrainian for starvation).
They consider this to be a genocide by Stalin against the Ukrainian people.
In the Ukraine, Stalin will never be popular
.
Putin's goal is a refoundation of Russian identity on a neo-imperial basis, which implies a relationship of superiority with respect to Ukraine and Belarus.
To this we must add the link with the Orthodox Church, which once again has the same role it had with the tsars, a very close alliance with political leaders, as seen today with the Patriarch's position regarding the war. from Ukraine.
-In Spain, until today work on historical memory is difficult, but the confrontation between families continues to be the same as in 1936, the time of the start of the Civil War, which implies that there is a generational transmission and that there is no forgot. Does something similar happen in Russia?
–The fear of the State that was created in the 1930s, at the time of Stalinist terror, is in the subconscious of society and is transmitted, although not explicitly, from one generation to another and this explains the paralysis of the majority. of the Russians today, in relation to the war.
In Russia, there are mass graves, the same as in Spain, but they are of a size that has no comparison.
.
In the last years of Perestroika (1985-1991), thanks to the work of the Memorial organization that was dissolved by Putin before the start of the war in Ukraine, they discovered a mass grave in the south of Moscow containing 20,000 bodies and, thanks When the files were opened, the identity of these people could be known because there were lists of executions (which had to receive the approval of the hierarchs and after which it was obligatory to report that they had actually been executed).
The operation of the repressive bureaucracy means that there are many documents that were inaccessible during the Soviet period and that are now known.
But the state did not take any initiative in this regard, just as it did not take any initiative to preserve the Soviet concentration camps.
We can visit part of the Nazi concentration camps and this allows us to concretize memory.
The Gulag was, above all, a system of forced labor.
If one looks now for the traces of the Gulag in Russia, one finds practically nothing,
but the traces are everywhere: in Moscow, many buildings were built by prisoners of the Gulag, but this has not been recognized by the State, which, on the contrary, persecuted, in recent times, historians who have been interested in these issues.
– Does the characterization of the victim that arises both in Western Europe against Nazism and in Eastern Europe in relation to the Soviet regime generate a weak idea of memory?
-In order to impose his system, Stalin faced a very strong resistance.
Russia was a country with almost 80 percent peasants in 1928. The forced collectivization was a real war against the peasants, who resisted a great deal and not only peacefully but also with arms.
They killed their animals so as not to hand them over to the
sovkhos
(state fringes).
There was a very strong resistance
, particularly in the Ukraine, which was a territory of small agricultural property and this explains the ferocity of what happened with the famine that was used to definitively defeat the Ukrainian peasants.
Thus,
while in the same period that millions were starving, Russia was exporting large units of wheat to earn foreign exchange.
.
Those people did not give up without a fight.
At the end of the Second War, in the territories occupied by the USSR, forms of armed resistance, of guerrilla, were maintained, for example in the Baltic countries, in the west of the Ukraine and practically this war lasted until the death of Stalin in 1953. This is explained very well by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in
Gulag Archipelago
(1973).
After 1975, these resistance militants started coming to the Gulag and this changed things a lot there because these people were willing to fight.
The spies, in the fields, began to die in large numbers and these groups could hardly be infiltrated.
People wait for a bus to arrive in kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)
– Is there anything left of that memory of the resistance today?
–Here we must think about the transmission of memory.
What you evoked from Spain, the remaining Republicans there were terribly marginalized, they had a difficult life, but they were able to pass on their memory within their families.
In Russia, terror prevented this type of transmission.
The State imposed silence, those who left the Gulag had to sign a document saying that they were not going to talk about what they had experienced in the camp.
Passing that memory on to their children was dangerous and many families decided not to speak so that their children would grow up without problems
and could adapt to Soviet loneliness.
This aspect has been analyzed by the English historian Orlando Figes, who published an oral history book called
Those Who Whisper.
(2009) because everything that referred to the repression was spoken in a low voice so that the neighbors, within the community department, would not listen and could denounce it.
ESSENTIAL
Bruno Groppo portrayed for Ñ by Maxi Failla.
Bruno Groppo
Italy.
Historian.
PhD in Political Science from the Paris Institute of Political Studies and senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.
He is a member of the Center d'histoire sociale du XXe siècle (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and a member of the board of directors of the Friends of the BDIC and of the scientific committee of the journal
Les Cahiers Amérique latine Histoire et Mémoire
.
He has been a professor at the University of Padua and a visiting professor at numerous European and Latin American universities.
His main research fields are the comparative history of social and political movements;
the history and historiography of European social democracy and communism;
the Italian and German exiles;
the political uses of the past;
and the memories of the dictatorships.
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