In August 1991 my father felled an previous birch. An enormous birch that appeared prone to fall onto our dacha. As soon as, the birch had shielded us from the fierce solar on sizzling summer time days. Later it turned a continuing hazard. I don’t know whether or not my father in contrast the rotten birch with the Soviet Union. Maybe he couldn’t enable himself to make such a heretical comparability, even in 1991.
Day after day he climbed to dizzying heights and labored up there, hidden within the leaves. Generally I heard his highly effective voice coming from far-off: ‘Look out! Coming down!’
Then he would decrease a sawn-off a part of the tree on a rope. I needed to roll the log to at least one aspect and examine the rope for frayed fibres. Metre by metre I let the heavy rope slide by my fingers. What a rope it was! I’d by no means seen one prefer it earlier than. The inexperienced fibres had been intertwined with copper wire that gleamed within the solar and made the rope appear like a snake.
Everybody within the dacha settlement knew that my father owned this rope, and folks usually got here spherical to borrow it. It doesn’t matter what you held on that rope, it by no means broke. ‘Good high quality’, my father mentioned. ‘Superb high quality, they don’t make issues like this anymore’. He was proper. Sturdy issues had been uncommon within the Soviet Union.
For that purpose, the rope had a magical high quality for me. The place did it come from? What wizards had left it behind with us? How a lot did my dad and mom or grandparents pay for it? For that indestructible rope, that appeared a lot like a wierd snake?
However I by no means requested. It was an unwritten household rule. You’re informed what you’re informed. Anything should stay within the shadows. I by no means questioned the rule. It was simply the way it was.
The birch was gone. The Soviet Union was gone. However the rope remained – like an unbreakable bond between two instances. A throughline, a golden thread, Ariadne’s thread. Or shackles. Damnation made manifest. It was solely a lot later that I understood the true that means of the rope.
My grandmother, who owned our dacha, had been married twice. My grandfather Grigoriy, my mom’s father, an officer within the Purple Military, died of his battle wounds within the sixties. My grandmother’s second husband, Aleksandr, died after I was six months previous. Each had been like phantoms, ghosts, portraits on the wall, minor characters in household conversations.
However there was additionally an inheritance. A precious inheritance. In my grandmother’s Moscow residence was a chocolate field labelled ‘Best Choice’. Inside, there have been no candies. Simply the best number of the Soviet Union’s highest decorations. An Order of Lenin. Two Orders of the Purple Star. Orders of the Purple Banner, additionally two. And numerous medals, like cash, like fish scales. The open field shone like treasure: gold, silver, ruby crimson. It was heavy. It had an irresistible attract: symbols of energy, symbols of a nation’s greatness. I used to be entranced each time. Or bewitched. A query of perspective.
When no one was wanting, I might take the Purple Star and maintain it in opposition to my shirt in entrance of the mirror. I imagined myself standing in a row subsequent to the heroes who had fought in opposition to fascists, imperialists and different enemies of my homeland. An extended-serving normal would then name out my title and award me the Purple Star, a duplicate of the Kremlin stars… It was like a patriotic orgasm, a waking dream, an exquisite mirage that I by no means grew bored with seeing.
No one had informed me so, however I used to be completely positive that the orders had belonged to Grandfather Grigoriy. He was a captain, had fought at Stalingrad and had been one of many first to cross the Dnieper within the Soviet offensive in 1943. He had been badly wounded 3 times… and Grandfather Alexsandr? A no one, a good-for-nothing. In different phrases, a civilian. No images in uniform, no battle tales that I used to be conscious of… his worldly items, which had been left on the dacha, consisted of the hampers he took mushroom-picking, bamboo fishing rods, a small fishing stool, a straw hat, a linen jacket… A silly, boring civilian. It was no coincidence that so little was mentioned about him within the household.
Throughout my childhood I believed we had been a very regular household. Regular within the Soviet sense: no recollections of the time earlier than the Revolution, no kinfolk overseas, no household tree, no historical past… As if we had come into being with the Soviet Union. A hundred percent Soviet, all our possessions Soviet, all our recollections Soviet.
I knew that each my grandmothers had been born earlier than the Revolution, in 1908 and 1909. However I paid no consideration to the years between their births and the Revolution. They had been insubstantial, a time earlier than the start of time, the opposite aspect of the horizon, unreal. An empty, meaningless previous, that might not and ought to not have something to do with me.
However in 1993, two years after the departure of the communists, my different grandmother (all the time cautious, all the time enjoying it protected), allow us to learn her handwritten memoir. We did have a household tree. We had a historical past earlier than the Revolution. We had misplaced kinfolk overseas, together with some with German and Polish roots. We weren’t, the truth is, a hundred percent Soviet. We had been a remnant, a scrap, a splinter of a giant household that had not survived the civil battle, the Stalin period and the Second World Warfare. It was a miracle. And a catastrophe. A mass grave as an alternative of a previous. A lifeless previous that might by no means be revived.
However I attempted to revive it. I searched in archives for the lacking individuals. Looked for destroyed church buildings, manors and household properties. Plunged into the shadowy land of loss, the land of utter injustice. That was the paternal aspect of the household. On the maternal aspect, as a counterweight, as an indication of the potential for justice, stood Grandfather Grigoriy. And on the scales of future lay a chocolate field stuffed with weighty, righteous, honourable battle medals.
I discovered a letter amongst some information belonging to a relative of my grandmother. The spouse of a person who had been arrested and murdered in September 1937 had written to the KGB in 1957. She mentioned that two days after her husband’s arrest, one of many NKVD brokers who had arrested him had moved into her husband’s room. As she wrote in 1957, twenty years later: ‘When he opens the door, I generally see a few of my husband’s belongings, which imply quite a bit to me as mementoes of him.’
Her husband was later rehabilitated resulting from ‘an absence of incriminating proof’. Meaning the one who arrested him was responsible. However she didn’t dare demand justice. She continued to reside next-door to the offender. She requested (nearly an act of bravery) for these mementoes, which had been so valuable to her, to be returned. She knew that justice was completely unattainable. That was only a reality of nature. And she or he lived with it.
It was as if I had been hit. Why, I requested myself, do I too lack any thirst for justice? Why is there no moral ignition change, no spark to ignite a want for revenge, no plea for divine judgement? I bear in mind those that had been killed, I cherish their reminiscence – however I too don’t dare demand revenge for his or her deaths. It’s no coincidence that I see ghosts, however I don’t crave revenge like Hamlet.
At some point I went into my grandmother’s former condo. I wished to know when and why Grandfather Grigoriy had been honoured. Someplace there needed to be an officer’s identification card recording the rationale for every of his awards. It turned out that the paperwork had been rigorously hidden. Why, I questioned, would my grandmother have hidden them earlier than her dying? However I discovered them. Two officer’s playing cards, not only one. My second grandfather, Aleksandr, the uninteresting civilian, additionally had one. The ‘awards’ web page in Grandfather Grigoriy’s card was utterly empty. There have to be some mistake, I believed. Possibly he had been issued a brand new card and the army commissariat forgot to fill out the web page.
No. All of the orders and medals belonged to Grandfather Aleksandr. He was no civilian. He was a secret service agent. A colonel within the political police. He had served within the VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB. He had been awarded the Order of Lenin, the Purple Star and the Purple Banner in 1937, the 12 months of the Nice Purge.
After this discovery I requested my father if he knew the reality. He did.
He knew the reality and but he had welcomed my second grandfather into our residence, shared a desk and meals with him, drunk vodka and celebrated my delivery with him. The final son of a destroyed household and a profession destroyer sitting on the similar desk.
Why, I requested, did you not inform me? I believed, replied Father, that it was an pointless burden for you. You didn’t need to share it. And abruptly, with out me asking, he informed the story of the inexperienced rope. Grandfather Aleksandr had damaged his silence at some point when he was utterly drunk. Possibly he wished to boast, perhaps he wished to instil concern.
In 1920 he had been drafted into the particular drive accountable for requisitioning grain through the civil battle. They had been so brutal that the farmers revolted. The rebels fought bravely and tirelessly; not all that way back, they’d been troopers within the First World Warfare. And so they had one thing else to assist them. An icon of the Mom of God. A revered previous icon that folks within the space believed had a particular energy. The farmers noticed her as a protectress who gave them power of their wrestle in opposition to the godless.
The Purple Military’s command employees determined that the icon needed to be destroyed. Then the revolt would lose its energy. The commander requested for volunteers. The primary time, no one stepped ahead. The ranks of the particular forces included brutal thugs and sadists, and but… The Mom of God. The. Mom. Of. God. The commander requested once more, this time extra insistently. My second grandfather stepped ahead. He noticed an opportunity to differentiate himself. Two equally younger comrades adopted him.
Collectively they discovered the icon and, beneath the eyes of the distraught farmers, fired a volley of gunshots at it. They sank what was left of it in a deep properly. And the rope that had been used to hold the massive, heavy icon within the church… My second grandfather took it with him. By no means throw an excellent factor away. It’ll are available helpful once more a while in life. The inexperienced rope, inexperienced with interwoven copper wire, which as a toddler I believed was a magical object.
The rope that was not allowed for use. The rope that belonged to the assassin of the Mom of God. The rope that bodily certain me to him. Like an umbilical wire.
The impunity of state criminals. What does it include? Concern? Disgrace? A way of loyalty? The sensation that one way or the other everyone seems to be responsible?
The crimes of the Soviet Union have gone just about unpunished. One purpose for that is civil society’s constant deal with commemorating the victims, somewhat than restoring justice or punishing the perpetrators. However reminiscence doesn’t create justice. Lists of victims don’t punish the murderers.
The commonest, shortest rationalization is that we’ve no proper to evaluate. Or, because the playwright Griboyedev put it, А судьи кто? Who’re the judges? This appears to be an ethically thought-about place. On nearer inspection, nevertheless, it seems to be a sort of ethical paralysis, a renunciation of any efficient morality.
Impunity results in extra impunity. And so it turns into the norm. Within the thirty years and extra because the finish of the Soviet Union, Russia has dedicated new state crimes and began new colonial wars. Astonishingly, the Kremlin regime’s opponents have by no means made a requirement for justice a core a part of their agenda. The opposition spoke at first about corruption, civil liberties, stolen votes. However not about blood, ethnic cleaning, the widespread use of torture and Chechen lives destroyed. For my part this is similar ethical paralysis, a acutely aware or unconscious reluctance to confront the state immediately in its function as assassin – a futile try and tame the man-eating wolf.
Even now, within the fifth 12 months of Russia’s full-scale battle on Ukraine, within the fifth 12 months of this battle of extermination, I don’t get the impression that the Russian opposition in exile is actually conscious of the magnitude and urgency of the query of restoring justice. That it understands that the query have to be addressed within the clearest attainable phrases.
Some say we first have to get to the purpose the place we will confront the query. We have to be practical, they are saying. We thereby unwittingly lay the foundations for the following deal, a pact with the satan. We hope that the following evildoers will no less than be a bit higher and extra humane. We proceed to glorify dissidents and new political prisoners, making a smokescreen behind which to cover our lack of clear political will. The need to struggle for justice for Ukraine, to punish Russian battle crimes – regardless of what number of a long time we’ve to attend.
We refuse to see or acknowledge this helplessness. An ethical helplessness that could be a results of a life lived beneath Russian imperial authoritarianism. An ethical helplessness that paralyses us. And binds us to the perpetrators. Like an infinite inexperienced rope. Inexperienced with woven copper wire.
That is the textual content of a speech given in Dresden on 26 March 2026 on the opening of the annual convention of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde, titled ‘Authoritarianism and violence on japanese Europe’.
