BEING RUSSIAN MEANS NEVER SAYING SORRY

Even today, Russians are incapable of grief or atonement for

Stalin's crimes. Anne McElvoy says the failure to face

the past bodes ill for the future

SVETLANA PETERS, née Stalin, is 70 years old and still on the run from the past. These days she lives in a sheltered housing block in a secluded West Country village. She fled there to reassert her anonymity after journalists unearthed her last year liv- ing in a home for impoverished elderly women in north London. The other resi- dents were not sad to see her go. 'Barking mad, she was,' said one former neighbour. `Paranoid, cruel, bad-tempered. What do you expect with a father like that?'

The consequences of his tyranny seep through the generations like a bloodstain through flimsy bandages. To this day, the dictator's descen- dants sustain poisonous feuds, allege mutual betrayals and financial skul- duggery. Stalin ordered the poison- ing of one brother-in-law and the execution of another, as well as imprisoning two sisters-in-law and jailing and exiling a niece, so there are also vicious rows —conducted by letter, since the tribe cannot bear to meet one another — about who denounced whom and for what, 60 years ago.

A Daily Mail reporter who man- aged to elicit a short, bad-tempered interview with Svetlana recently was startled when her subject turned unprompted on an innocent stranger in the cafe and screamed, 'Yes? What is it you want? Do you need something?' This image haunts me because the gesture, in its mixture or terror and aggression, was so utterly Russian. Rude, paranoid outburst remains a verbal national character- istic of that country. Svetlana Stalin is such a depressing spectacle not because of the ghoulish interest we feel in a tyrant's offspring, but because her barely sup- pressed hysteria, evasions and preternatu- ral anxieties are so widely shared by her compatriots. A decade after the first pale shoots of glasnost and perestroika emerged, Russians remain — far more than they know — Stalin's children.

One of the paradoxes of the tumultuous period of reform through which Russia is living is that its capacity for self-examina- tion has dwindled in inverse proportion to the pace of economic and political changes taking place. The process of breaking cul- tural and institutional ties with the dictator, begun tentatively under Nikita Khrushchev and dramatically expanded under Mikhail Gorbachev, was abruptly truncated by the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

Boris Yeltsin has many brave decisions to his credit, but confronting the Stalinist past was never one of them. His writings and speeches make scant reference to the after-effects of Communism or to his own responsibility (as a former Party func- tionary) for having sustained the ideology he now rejects. His Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin (America's preferred candi- date to succeed in the Kremlin), goes a step further, saying that he is 'proud to have been a Communist'. Being a Russian politician means never having to say you're sorry, or even explain by what process you moved from the beliefs you held then to those you hold now.

Does this matter? I suspect that it does, if only for the reason that sweeping changes entirely unaccompanied by intro- spection are more prone to reversal or mutation than those which are simply insti- gated from the top down and without encouraging reflection — the same way the Communists governed. The post-war Ger- man variant of Vetgangenheitsbeweiltigung or 'conquering the past' was troublesome, not least because it was questionable whether the image of conquest was the right one to apply to a past in which militarism and the desire to subju- gate had run disastrously out of con- trol. But at least it acknowledged that the present could not be healthy unless society made the effort to understand and atone for the past.

Despite the stress the Orthodox Church places on atonement, apolo- gy has played little role in Russian public life since the collapse of Communism. There is no public recognition of guilt such as that implanted in post-war Germany by the Nuremberg trials and the Allied re-education programme and absorbed and expanded by German intellectuals thereafter. When I moved to live in Moscow from Berlin, I was struck by the complete lack of acknowledgement of Stalin's tyranny and its human toll. To this day, the visitor will search long and hard for a museum which tells the A story of the purges and imprison- ments, and the few which do present these events as an afterthought to sections dealing with the heroic war effort.

In the West, we must share the blame for this. Intent on defeating one genocidal maniac with the help of another, we hid from ourselves the truth about Stalin and in so doing shored up Russia's grand, destructive self-deception. Until very recently, it was common to hear Western- ers argue that Stalin's crimes were excus- able in a way that Hitler's were not because they were committed in order to change the world for the better. Naivety about Soviet Communism and jovial attachment to its iconography in the form of military memorabilia and hammer-and-sickle logos (back this year as a retro-chic fashion accessory) are still considered acceptable in polite society, whereas ignorance of the real nature of the Third Reich and a pen- chant for swastika T-shirts are not.

Amongst cleverer people, this collusion manifests itself in a tendency to underesti- mate the extent to which the Communist Party represented the living soul of the Leninist enterprise, further brutalised by Stalin. In a bizarre defence of the old CPSU in the Times last week, Anatole Kaletsky argued that Yeltsin's key mistake in implementing reforms had been the attempted banning of the Communist Party — 'the equivalent, in a British context, to sacking the entire civil service, abolishing all local government, removing the senior judiciary and . . . decapitating the senior management of every large company in the country'.

But during the year that the ban was in force no meaningful changes resulted in the machinery of state. I cannot think of a single civil servant, government official (other than those employed as party offi- cials), let alone manager who lost his job because the Party was banned. The main function of suspension of the Party was to prevent it organising resistance to reforms from its bases in the factories and to drain it of its mass membership. Without this period, this highly conservative mass organ- isation would have remained a force strong enough to knock Yeltsin's early, truly radi- cal measures off course. The fact that the constitutional court restored it to legitima- cy at the beginning of 1993 and the subse- quent freeing of those who led the 1991 coup attempt indicate that the judiciary under Yeltsin was far from supine.

We are now faced with the possibility of what Tony Blair would call New Commu- nism: Gennady Zyuganov becoming the next elected president of Russia. Mr Yeltsin routinely warns of the dire conse- quences of allowing a 'red wheel' to crush the country if his Communist challenger emerges victorious in the June vote. But Mr Zyuganov holds a steady lead in the opinion polls The only reason the West is not (yet) in more of a panic about this is that he, like Mr Blair, is urbane and eco- nomically realistic by the standards of many of his followers. It is at least some small relief that he no longer heads the old party whose tentacles penetrated every area of public life. Still, too many of the old structures remain intact for the comfort of a young democracy facing the partial return of old masters. A few weeks ago in Moscow, I was invited to a dinner party by a young intel- lectual. The host's elderly uncle, Kolya, had travelled from St Petersburg for the occasion. As a blokadnik — someone who had survived the Wehrmacht's 600-day siege of the city during the war, he is enti- tled to cheaper rail fares and had taken his place in the long queue of shabby, elderly people with various concessionary entitle- ments in the ticket hall. A man of similar age joined the queue. They fell to talking about the war and Kolya asked where he had spent it. 'In the North,' replied the man. As used in Russian, 'the North' means the Gulag. 'How awful,' said my friend's uncle. 'What did they send you there for?' The man was outraged. 'No one sent me anywhere,' he said. 'I was a guard in one of the camps up there. That's why I get cheap tickets. I don't much like Yeltsin, but at least he looks after people like me who served their country.'

A country in which veterans of war share the state's formalised esteem with those who kept the brutal order of the camps may have democratic elections, a free mar- ket and press, but its soul can be neither properly democratic nor properly free. This is also the view of Nadezhda Levitskaya, a former helper of Alexander Solzhenitsyn who chairs a small group of Muscovites devoted to raising funds for memorials to those who perished in the camps and pro- ducing educational material about Stalin's purges for use in schools. 'It is not easy,' she says. 'We asked parliament and the various government departments to give us support. All the politicians, whatever their parties, said "Sony — that:s a vote-loser. Why stir up the past?" ' The group approached schools with material photo- copied at home, using the same makeshift contraptions with which some of its mem- bers had once made samizdat copies of Gulag Archipelago and Cancer Ward. The head teachers refused to touch them, wor- ried about upsetting parents with too robust a criticism of Stalin's practices.

The underlying reason for Russia's fail- ure to examine the past is that when it comes to Hitler and Stalin an equation of evils has never been accepted. Many other- wise well-educated Russians I have met think that the Holocaust claimed more vic- tims than Stalin's purges. In its 50th year of nominal democracy and openness to the West, Russia's formal attitude to Hitler is that his worst crime was to attack the Sovi- et Union. Public events like last year's vic- tory parade, marking the end of the war, radiated confusion. The style • of the com- memoration — tanks thundering down the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, vast memorials and portraits of Marshal Zhukov in the shop windows — was such that if Stalin's unquiet ghost had happened to be passing by, it would have been reassured that nothing much had changed in the Motherland apart from the replacement of the hammer-and- sickle flag with a red, white and blue one.

I remember Larissa Vasilveya, author of a grim account of the lives of Soviet lead- ers' wives, telling me shortly after Yeltsin took power that the very walls of the Krem- lin were imbued with the totalitarian instincts of Lenin and Stalin and that the very act of living there would drain him of democratising will. At the time, this seemed unduly alarmist and superstitious.

Looking now at the dreadful cronies with whom the Russian leader has surrounded himself, one is uncomfortably reminded of the late Joseph Brodsky's meditation on the post-Stalin Soviet political elite in his essay 'On Tyranny': .

There is something haunting about these bland, grey,undistinguished faces: they look like everyone else, which gives them an almost underground air. They are as similar as blades of grass.

No question about it — you could put Yeltsin's present government and advisers on the May Day platforms of yore and not detect a change in the physiognomy of power.

Apart from some indigestible epics, the atrocities have been neglected by the state film and television industries. Thankfully, one remarkable film has finally emerged to prise the lid off Russia's repressed emo- tions in this regard. Nikita Mikhailkov's Burnt by the Sun is the only film about Stal- inism at which I have seen a Russian audi- ence cry. Like Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, it rescues the brutality, fear and horror of tyranny from the realm of the abstract and historical, demonstrating how the most destructive of dictators can work with the basic material of petty human ambition and weakness.

`When I watched this film,' a Moscow psychologist told me, 'I understood for the first time how tempting it must have been to betray people during the purges. Under Stalin, the state enabled people to indulge their worst fantasies of annihilating people they envied or felt inferior to with just a phone call or a letter.' She is right. Con- trary to popular belief, Stalinism did not only centralise power, it gave ordinary peo- ple the power of life and death over others like themselves. 'What really frightens me', said my friend, 'is that I listen to fantasies like that from people I counsel again and again. If such power were to be restored here tomorrow, I know that it would be widely used.'