Evidence Against Memorial Delayed
By Sean at 17 December, 2008, 11:21 am
Since the raid on Memorial is hitting more and more English language news outlets, the most recent being in the Chicago Tribune, I figured it was time to give an update to the story.
Since the raid on Memorial’s St. Petersburg’s office on 4 December there have been a few developments, but none that illuminates the real reason why police confiscated the NGO’s archival materials and financial records. The raid has gotten a lot of international attention. Orlando Figes, whose recent book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia is mostly based on interviews and materials collected by Memorial, has written a petition to President Medvedev. So far the petition has been signed by many well known American and European scholars.* In addition, the US State Department expressed concern about the raid and called for Russian authorities “to ensure the speedy and safe return of all seized equipment and archival material.” For a comprehensive description of the seized materials, see Tatiana Kosinova’s “Eleven Hard Disks” at Open Democracy.net’s Russia page.
The Russian authorities provided some hope that Memorial’s materials would be returned. On 12 December, Memorial’s director Irina Flige reported that she was promised that the materials would be returned on Monday. They weren’t and no call from the investigators as to when they will be returned remains unknown.
The one promise that authorities did keep was that Memorial’s petition to the court would be heard on 17 December. It was and a few interesting developments came out of it. Memorial still has not been provided with any evidence or really an really a believable explanation as to why its office was raided. The official reason is that Memorial is connected with an anti-Semitic article published by Novyi Peterburg, which is under investigation for extremism. Memorial has repeatedly denied any connection to the article, its author or the newspaper.
What the Wednesday’s hearing did reveal is that the case’s head investigator Mikhail Kalganov did not prepare the materials so the court could verify the legality of the raid. His excuse? He didn’t have enough time. The court gave him some more. His new deadline is 22 December.
In a statement to the press, Memorial’s lawyer Ivan Pavlov said, “The court gave him another chance and scheduled a hearing on 22 December to give him time. In our view, the court has no basis to grant this. He has a chance and I hope that the investigator understands that the postponement of the hearing and the granting of additional time for preparations is offer of good will from the court.” Then Pavlov dropped this bomb: “Moreover, according to our facts, a formal inquiry is preparing materials of all criminal cases for transfer to the General Prosecutor so it could analyze the legality of the search and also other investigative actions which were conducted by Kalganov in relation to this criminal case.”
Does this mean that there is an investigation of the investigator in the works? Stay tuned . . .
Update
* The American Historical Association has also submitted an appeal to the Russian government urging the immediate return of Memorial’s materials.
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Comments
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Well if US SD expressed concern – the raid was a right thing to do. Thanks guys at US SD for clarification
the US State Department expressed concern about the raid and called for Russian authorities
Well if US SD expressed concern – the raid was a right thing to do. Thanks guys at US SD for clarification
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Right on, Ivanov.
At the same token, the Russian government expresses concern that millions of Americans seem to be unable to think independently (for themselves).
… by the same token, I mean
Does anybody else find this turning everything into a conversation about the US annoying?
The only annoying is regular, endless concern of US SD about someone else business
It shouldn’t be any surprise that ivanov would seek to turn any discussion regarding a potentially illegal raid of an NGO in Russia towards another topic.
Oh wait, I forgot – Russian police did it, so it can’t be illegal. It must be entirely justified. After all, there is a rumor this NGO screened a film that is banned, so this NGO must have deserved the raid and confiscation of all materials. They had it coming.
And somehow this is about how AMERICANS can’t think for themselves?
Does anybody else find this turning everything into a conversation about the US annoying?
The only annoying is regular, endless concern of US SD about someone else business
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Indeed, I don’t see anything wrong in comparing the two situation (Russia and USA). I find a few American citizens/dwellers who (for whatever reason) are very concerned by what is going on in Russia. Their presentation of the events in Russia is both patronizing and biased. It’s always one dimensional and always in the direction that the Russian government mistreats the “opposition” and or its people.
I think it is a good idea to compare what is going on in Russia with how things are done in the “most democratic country, with the most powerful economy in the world” – that is USA.
I think Ivanov does the right thing. If things are so bad in Russia let us see how they are in the USA. Maybe the Russian government and its people should learn from the USA.
Turning everything into a conversation about the US is a good way of avoiding or deflecting the issue posted about (in this case the raid on Memorial and the confiscated material.)
This is a blog on Russia, there are plenty of hard hitting blogs about the US. I would certainly find it childish if in a blog about the US every time I bring up a perfidy of the US government someone would reply with: “but look at what Russia (or Iran, or whatever) did!”
I would certainly find it childish if in a blog about the US every time I bring up a perfidy of the US government someone would reply with: “but look at what Russia (or Iran, or whatever) did!”
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But that’s exactly what CNN (for example) does. All new about foreign countries are invariably – negative!
Let then consider things in parallel. For example, here is an article about “AvtoVAZ” having to stop its assembly line before February 2:
http://www.izvestia.ru/news/news194608?print
Here is another article published by CNN, about Chrysler having to shut down its production:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/17/autos/chrysler_shutdown/index.htm?postversion=2008121722
Why aren’t these news identical? Whatever problem Russia may have, USA has the same (or worse) problems. Welcome to reality!
“Does anybody else find this turning everything into a conversation about the US annoying?”
I am starting to find it kind of endearing. It warms my heart to know that those adorable fellows, Ivanov and Dmitry, care so very much about US, that they can’t help but provide constructive criticism every chance they get. Plus, if they didn’t, the comment section would only have a 1/5 of the comments, and we would miss out on all those great blog posts on Dmitry’s site, that he has labored so hard to bring to our attention.
Molodetz young men, for without you, the comments section might stay on topic, and who would want that sort of hell, really.
Perhaps Sean can open “Sean Amerikan Blog” so some people can express their concerns about Amerika in a proper venue.
the comments section might stay on topic
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… and the topic is “Russia has no democracy”?
“I would certainly find it childish if in a blog about the US every time I bring up a perfidy of the US government someone would reply with: “but look at what Russia (or Iran, or whatever) did!”
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But that’s exactly what CNN (for example) does. All new about foreign countries are invariably – negative!”
CNN reports plenty of negative news about the US. Anyway, I don’t have cable TV and don’t watch CNN. More importantly, though, blogs are not CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews or whatever. We were talking about blogs such as Sean’s blog. Apples and oranges.
The other Stalin thread has become too long, so I’m switching this to here. Not totally off topic since it deals with much of what Memorial tries to do. On The Nation I found an article by Stephen Cohen on the topic of remembering Stalin’s repressions. It was published a few months ago. Here is the link:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080915/cohen
On the way Putin is dealing with the Stalinist legacy, Cohen is much more forgiving than I am. He pretty much gives him a pass. My guess is that in that respect Sean and Chris are in general agreement with Cohen. Anyway, here is how Cohen ends his article:
“The contradiction in Putin’s behavior reflects Russia’s still profound division over the Stalinist experience. Eventually, the new Medvedev-Putin leadership will also have to confront it, one way or another, for at least three reasons. First, though few Gulag returnees are still alive, Russia remains a country significantly populated by descendants of Stalin’s victims, at least 27 percent of the nation according to a recent survey. Second, as the fifty-five years since the dictator’s death have repeatedly demonstrated, there is no statute of political limitations for historical crimes of that magnitude. And
third, despite Russia’s outward stability today, there is little popular or elite consensus about the nation’s present or future, partly because there is so little about its Stalinist past. In all these respects, the saga of the victims is not over.”
If you read the article, Sean, what did you think of it? Also, have you met Stephen Cohen? At least I know that both Cohen and J. Arch Getty wrote their share about the Stalin era. (I also know that J. Arch Getty gives a considerably lower number of victims than what’s usually given. Even his numbers are high, though.) I talked briefly to Cohen a couple of times in Moscow, but I’m sure he never got my name. At the time (I believe it was 91 or 92) he was doing some sort of work with Yegor Ligachev. That was when Ligachev was already out, but still had some influence and was hoping for some sort of a come back. Yeah, ancient times.
I hadn’t see Cohen’s article. Thanks, Kolya. I’ve never met Cohen personally, but of course know his work. I know Arch very well, as you probably know. In fact he’s coming over for dinner on Saturday.
On whether the issue of Cohen giving Putin a pass on Stalinism, well I would ask what you would want him to say? I guess he could have made an emphatic statement denouncing Putin, as many have, but I think that would have betrayed the entire point of his article: That 50 years after de-stalinization, Stalin and Stalinism are still controversial issues in Russian historical memory.
As as we all know, historical memory changes with the present. So after a decade or so (in the 1990s) of denouncing everything Stalin, including the creation of a whole host of myths (somewhat based on the Russian translation of Conquest’s Great Terror), the tide is going somewhat the other way. My suspicion is that this shift has nothing to do with Stalin as such, but with how many Russians feel about Russia in the present. So instead of saying “Stalin is evil” like in the 1990s, many Russians are now saying “yes Stalin was bad but . . .” As Cohen says there is little consensus about Stalin.
Now where I disagree with Cohen is that the “saga of victims” is where the issue lies. What I would suggest, and have several times on this blog, is that a historical reckoning with Stalin and Stalinism must go beyond victims. Stalinism in my view was a very complex and contradictory system and if we want to understand it both as history and as memory, I don’t think reducing it to terror and gulag, victims and perpetrators, will take us very far. Sure, one can take a moral position, like you have, and that is fine, but for me to simply say that Stalin was Evil begs the response, “Okay yes, but now what?” In fact, in my intellectual attempts to understand Stalinism (and Nazism btw) I don’t use the word Evil at all because it obscures more than it explains. In fact, I would go so far to say that calling Stalin and even Hitler evil is immoral because it fails to explain and even absolves the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who actively implemented their policies.
So for me understanding Stalin doesn’t be even begin with Stalin as a person. It begins with the anonymous person in some factory or backwater village who denounced his neighbor knowing full well what their fate would be and then soon after becomes a victim himself/herself. For me, it is the historical agency of this doubled figure-i.e. the lowly ordinary, perpetrator/victim–is what makes Stalinism so difficult to come to terms with. Namely, I call for a microhistory of Stalinism. Or, a history of Stalinism without Stalin.
“He pretty much gives him a pass.”
I’m not sure what that means. Whether the Stalin era (or any other era) was good or bad depends on your criteria and what point in time you are judging it from. From the POV of the average person living in that era in the USSR, he was probably pretty good. From the POV of an average somebody living in the USSR in 1945, he was probably extremely good. From the point of view of one of his multitudinous victims, he was very very very bad. There is no contradiction between these judgments, because everybody has a different experience, because everybody has a different life. Cf. blind men and an elephant.
The reason somebody like Hitler is (almost) universally despised is because he was bad for everybody. If he had won the war, established a Reich unifying all of Europe under an ethnically homogeneous and therefore conflict-poor population (due to genocide of the rest), and as a result 100 or so years afterward there was a peaceful and prosperous German Europe, I bet both my testicles that lots and lots of people would be claiming that “yes what happened to the Jews and Slavs was horrible, but without it Europe would not have progressed to this point.” This is exactly what many Americans do with respect to 19th-century American history.
I’ll try to be brief. I view things differently from the way you guys, Sean & Chris, do. After G.W. Bush we often snicker at the word “evildoers,” but it’s entirely appropriate to say that Hitler and Stalin were great evildoers. They were despicable human beings. Does that mean that we should stop right there? Of course not! Nobody is suggesting not to try to understand both Hitler and Stalin, and also to understand what made Nazi and Stalinist society tick. I know that to understand Nazism and Stalinism requires a certain degree of detachment, at least while one is doing the research and the analysis. While in that frame of mind a good researcher neither condones nor condemns. The same applies to the researcher studying small-cell lung cancer. To understand, of course, does not mean to condone.
If he had won the war, established a Reich unifying all of Europe under an ethnically homogeneous and therefore conflict-poor population (due to genocide of the rest), and as a result 100 or so years afterward there was a peaceful and prosperous German Europe, I bet both my testicles that lots and lots of people would be claiming that “yes what happened to the Jews and Slavs was horrible, but without it Europe would not have progressed to this point.”
Without risking my testicles, this is what I always thought whenever I read the complaints of various liberals that wrote “In Germany after the fall of the Nazis swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia were outlawed, but in Russia, where Communism killed more people, the hammer and sickle are still everywhere, the Stalinist national anthem was reinstated etc.” that I would read editorials in the Moscow Times and elsewhere. Nazi Germany never got a chance to legitimize itself the way the USSR and US did after the genocide. If Hitler had stayed at home and killed people instead of antagonizing his neighbors and starting wars, history would look back on him differently and probably wouldn’t be as harsh.