Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression October 30

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Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression is a memorable day celebrated in the Russian Federation annually on October 30. Every year, with the advent of this day, we remember the inhabitants of Russia and the USSR that preceded it, who were subjected to causeless political persecution. Not only the citizens themselves suffered from them, but also their families, because children were left without one of their parents, and the family was left without a breadwinner.

Story

Holding a memorable day on October 30 is associated with reading the memory of the mass hunger strike of prisoners in the camps. It began on October 30, 1974 in Mordovia. The prisoners went on this hunger strike to protest the terrible and inhumane treatment of political prisoners in camps and prison cells.

The main reason for the huge number of citizens repressed for political reasons is, first of all, the totalitarian regime of power that took place in the USSR. According to available information, almost 5 million people were subject to political repression between 1921 and 1953.

At the end of its existence, the Soviet government admitted its past mistakes and tried to take concrete steps to rehabilitate repressed citizens. Thus, in 1989, a special declaration was adopted, which officially recognized as illegal the actions of forced relocation to which some nationalities had previously been subjected.

After the fall of the USSR, the Russian government continued work in this direction. In 1992, a special commission was created under the President of the Russian Federation, responsible for the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.

According to the reports of this commission, by 2021 it was possible to rehabilitate almost 4 million people who were subjected to illegal political persecution.

In 2015, the country’s policy concept related to perpetuating the memory of victims of political repression was approved at the level of the country’s prime minister.

How were the repressions legally formalized?

Certificate of execution of the death sentence of the NKVD troika against the Russian scientist and theologian Pavel Florensky. Reproduction ITAR-TASS

There were several options. Firstly, some of the repressed were shot or imprisoned after the opening of a criminal case, investigation and trial. Basically, they were charged under Article 58 of the USSR Criminal Code (this article included many points, from treason to anti-Soviet agitation). At the same time, in the 20s and even in the early 30s, all legal formalities were often observed - an investigation was carried out, then there was a trial with debate between the defense and the prosecution - the verdict was simply a foregone conclusion. In the 1930s, especially starting from 1937, the judicial procedure turned into a fiction, since torture and other illegal methods of pressure were used during the investigation. That is why, at trial, the accused admitted their guilt en masse.

Secondly, starting from 1937, along with ordinary judicial proceedings, a simplified procedure began to operate, when there were no judicial debates at all, the presence of the accused was not required, and sentences were passed by the so-called Special Meeting, in other words, the “troika”, literally behind 10-15 minutes.

Thirdly, some of the victims were repressed administratively, without any investigation or trial at all - the same “dispossessed”, the same exiled peoples. The same often applied to family members of those convicted under Article 58. The official abbreviation CHSIR (member of the family of a traitor to the motherland) was in use. At the same time, personal accusations were not brought against specific people, and their exile was motivated by political expediency.

But in addition, sometimes repressions did not have any legal formalization at all; in fact, they were lynchings - starting from the shooting in 1917 of a demonstration in defense of the Constituent Assembly and ending with the events of 1962 in Novocherkassk, where a workers’ demonstration protesting against rising prices for food was shot. food.

Traditions

The modern leadership of the country actively continues to work to rehabilitate victims of political repression, as well as to perpetuate the memory of those who could not survive it.

In 1990, there was a monument to the victims of political repression in Moscow, and now this place (near the Solovetsky Stone) is the main gathering place for those who honor the memory of those killed by repression. Every year, relatives and friends of the victims gather here and lay flowers at the monument. Also here, wreath-laying ceremonies are held from the top leadership of the country - the President, the Government, the leadership of Moscow and the Moscow region, in addition - from various public organizations involved in the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.

How many people were repressed?

Photo by Vladimir Eshtokin

This is a complex question to which historians still do not have an exact answer. The numbers are very different - from 1 to 60 million. There are two problems here - firstly, the inaccessibility of many archives, and secondly, the discrepancy in calculation methods. After all, even based on open archival data, one can draw different conclusions. Archival data is not only folders with criminal cases against specific people, but also, for example, departmental reports on food supplies for camps and prisons, statistics of births and deaths, records in cemetery offices about burials, and so on and so forth. Historians try to take into account as many different sources as possible, but the data sometimes disagree with each other. The reasons are different - accounting errors, deliberate fraud, and the loss of many important documents.

There is also a very controversial question - how many people were not just repressed, but how many were physically destroyed and did not return home? How to count? Only those sentenced to death? Or, on top of that, those who died in custody? If we count the dead, then we need to understand the causes of death: they could be caused by unbearable conditions (hunger, cold, beatings, overwork), or they could also be natural (death from old age, death from chronic diseases that began long before the arrest). Death certificates (which were not even always preserved in the criminal case) most often included “acute heart failure,” but in reality it could have been anything.

In addition, although any historian should be impartial, as a scientist should be, in reality each researcher has his own ideological and political preferences, and therefore the historian may consider some data more reliable, and some less. Complete objectivity is an ideal to which we should strive, but which has not yet been achieved by any historian. Therefore, when faced with any specific estimates, you should be careful. What if the author, wittingly or unwittingly, overstates or understates the numbers?

But to understand the scale of the repressions, it is enough to give this example of discrepancies in numbers. According to church historians 130 thousand clergy were arrested in 1937-38 . According to historians committed to communist ideology , in 1937-38 the number of arrested clergy was much smaller - only about 47 thousand . Let's not argue about who is more right. Let's do a thought experiment: imagine that now, in our time, 47 thousand railway workers are arrested in Russia throughout the year. What will happen to our transport system? And if 47 thousand doctors are arrested in a year, will domestic medicine even survive? What if 47 thousand priests are arrested? However, we don’t even have that many of them now. In general, even if we focus on the minimum estimates, it is easy to see that the repressions have become a social disaster.

And for their moral assessment, the specific numbers of victims are completely unimportant. Whether it’s a million or a hundred million or a hundred thousand, it’s still a tragedy, it’s still a crime.

“MAKING MONEY FROM GRANDPA”

Would you like to know who killed (God forbid) your relative? Many will answer – of course! One of these is Tomsk resident Denis Karagodin . He found in the archives those who repressed his great-grandfather. On his website, Denis calls specific NKVD employees executioners and murderers. And now their relatives are outraged and demand that the truth-teller be imprisoned under the article “Slander.” The Investigative Committee has already begun an investigation...

A whole group of people filed an application demanding that a case be opened against the “fighter for justice.” Among them is Mechislav Prokofiev:

“Karagodin makes money from his grandfather,” says Prokofiev. — On every page of his website there is a big yellow “Support” button, that is, pay money. He is not interested in historical truth, he is interested in denigrating our history. Besides, he has a very interesting great-grandfather. Under the leadership of a Japanese general, he took part in the capture of Bolshevik Blagoveshchensk, and then was seen in two more uprisings. I don’t think he was that innocent, because we all know that Japan had a very large network of agents, both in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Vorsobin, KP columnist:

— You filed a complaint about libel. Do you think that the documents that Karagodin obtained were falsified?

Prokofiev:

- No, I don’t claim that.

Vorsobin:

— Karagodin’s great-grandfather has been rehabilitated by the state. Therefore - innocent. And since these people committed the murder of an innocent person, what kind of slander is this?

Prokofiev:

“The slander lies in the fact that people’s guilt has not been proven.” Not a single document says that specific employees of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs are murderers. They were not convicted.

The work of prisoners in Ozerlag. Photo: TASS Photo Chronicle

OCG NKVD

Denis Karagodin himself, who is trying to convict those who shot his relative, stubbornly avoids interviews, but when asked why he considers not only those who carried out the sentence, but also everyone involved in the case, murderers, he still answered :

— For clarity, I will give a rough but intelligible analogy. A gang in town N decides to kill five random people wearing white T-shirts. White T-shirts are the differentiating factor in this case. In the 1930s, for example, this was social origin. A plan is being drawn up. Each gang member has his own role: someone gives orders, someone physically kills, someone gets rid of the bodies, someone provides the murder with all the necessary logistics - he transports the bandits in a car, prints orders, delivers them to the recipients... The guilt of the defendants The list is different, but their participation or complicity in the murder is irrefutable.

What do they say now about political repression?

Photo by Vladimir Eshtokin

In modern Russia there is no consensus on this topic. Moreover, social polarization is manifested in attitudes towards it. Various political and ideological forces use the memory of repression in their political interests, but ordinary people, not politicians, can perceive it very differently.

Some people are convinced that political repression is a shameful page in our country’s history, that it is a monstrous crime against humanity, and therefore we must always remember those repressed. Sometimes this position is simplistic, all victims of repression are declared equally sinless righteous, and the blame for them is placed not only on the Soviet government, but also on the modern Russian government as the legal successor of the Soviet one. Any attempts to figure out how many were actually repressed are a priori declared to be a justification of Stalinism and condemned from a moral standpoint.

Others question the very fact of repression, arguing that all these “so-called victims” are really guilty of the crimes attributed to them, that they really harmed, blew up, plotted terrorist attacks, and so on. This extremely naive position is refuted by the fact that the fact of repression was recognized even under Stalin - then it was called “excesses” and in the late 30s almost the entire leadership of the NKVD was condemned for these “excesses”. The moral deficiency of such views is equally obvious: people are so eager to wishful thinking that they are ready, without any evidence, to slander millions of victims.

Still others admit that there were repressions, they agree that those who suffered from them were innocent, but they perceive all this completely calmly: they say, it could not have been otherwise. Repression, it seems to them, was necessary for the industrialization of the country and for the creation of a combat-ready army. Without repression it would not have been possible to win the Great Patriotic War. Such a pragmatic position, regardless of how much it corresponds to historical facts, is also morally flawed: the state is declared to be the highest value, in comparison with which the life of each individual person is worthless, and anyone can and should be destroyed for the sake of the highest state interests. Here, by the way, one can draw a parallel with the ancient pagans, who made human sacrifices to their gods, being one hundred percent sure that this would serve the good of the tribe, people, and city. Now this seems fanatic to us, but the motivation was exactly the same as that of modern pragmatists.

One can, of course, understand where such motivation comes from. The USSR positioned itself as a society of social justice - and indeed, in many respects, especially in the late Soviet period, there was social justice. Our society is socially much less fair - plus now any injustice instantly becomes known to everyone. Therefore, in search of justice, people turn their gaze to the past - naturally, idealizing that era. This means that they psychologically strive to justify the dark things that happened then, including the repressions. Recognition and condemnation of repression (especially declared from above) among such people is coupled with approval of current injustices. One can demonstrate in every possible way the naivety of such a position, but until social justice is restored, this position will be reproduced again and again.

How should Christians perceive political repression?

Icon of the New Russian Martyrs

Among Orthodox Christians, unfortunately, there is also no unity on this issue. There are believers (including churchgoers, sometimes even in the priesthood) who either consider all those repressed guilty and unworthy of pity, or justify their suffering by the benefit of the state. Moreover, sometimes - thank God, not very often! — you can also hear the opinion that the repressions were a blessing for the repressed themselves. After all, what happened to them happened according to God’s Providence, and God will not do anything bad to a person. This means, say such Christians, that these people had to suffer in order to be cleansed of heavy sins and to be spiritually reborn. Indeed, there are many examples of such spiritual revival. As the poet Alexander Solodovnikov, who went through the camp, wrote, “The grille is rusty, thank you! //Thank you, bayonet blade! // Such freedom could only be given to me // by long centuries.”

In fact, this is a dangerous spiritual substitution. Yes, suffering can sometimes save the human soul, but it does not at all follow from this that suffering in itself is good. And even more so, it does not follow from this that the executioners are righteous. As we know from the Gospel, King Herod, wanting to find and destroy the baby Jesus, ordered the preventive killing of all the babies in Bethlehem and the surrounding area. These babies are canonized by the Church, but their killer Herod is not. Sin remains sin, evil remains evil, a criminal remains a criminal even if the long-term consequences of his crime are wonderful. In addition, it is one thing to talk about the benefits of suffering from personal experience, and quite another to say this about other people. Only God knows whether this or that test will turn out for good or for bad for a particular person, and we have no right to judge this. But this is what we can and what we should do - if we consider ourselves Christians! - this is to keep God's commandments. Where there is not a word about the fact that for the sake of the public good you can kill innocent people.

Repressive policy of the USSR after 1953

Although after Stalin's death the scale of repressions decreased significantly, and the state set a course for mass rehabilitation, anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda were still punishable by criminal liability. Until the mid-1960s, virtually any open display of political dissent resulted in arrest. Some dissidents were declared socially dangerous and mentally ill, subjecting them to forced psychiatric treatment under this pretext. Others were sentenced to deportation from the country or exile, and were also deprived of Soviet citizenship.

The following were used to persecute dissidents:

1. Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1926 (and similar articles of the Criminal Code of the Union republics) on liability for “counter-revolutionary agitation,” which provided for imprisonment for up to 10 years.

2. Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1960 (and similar articles of the Criminal Code of the Union Republics) “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”, which provided for up to 7 years of imprisonment or 5 years of exile.

3. Article 90-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (and similar articles of the Criminal Code of the Union Republics) “Dissemination of deliberately false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system,” which provided for imprisonment for up to 3 years or 2 years of correctional labor.

4. Article 142 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (and similar articles of the Criminal Code of the Union Republics) “Violation of laws on the separation of church from state and school from church,” which introduced liability for violation of relevant laws by imprisonment for up to 3 years; as well as Article 227 “On the creation of a group causing harm to the health of citizens,” which punishes the organizers of such groups under religious pretexts with imprisonment for up to 5 years.

5. Article 209 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (and similar articles of the Criminal Code of the Union Republics) “Systematic vagrancy or begging. In accordance with the decree “On strengthening the fight against persons (loafers, parasites, parasites) ...” of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, persons “avoid socially useful work” and “lead an antisocial lifestyle” were also subject to liability under this article. This wording allowed Article 209 to be used to criminally prosecute dissidents. An example of such practice is the case of Joseph Brodsky.