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  • Legal but Criminal:The Failure of the "Russian Nuremberg" and the Paradoxes of Post-Soviet Memory
  • Sergey Toymentsev (bio)

In post-Soviet studies there has been a consistent tendency to look at the contemporary political and cultural situation in Russia in terms of the failure of democratic revolution as well as the rise of authoritarianism. On account of this tendency, nostalgia for the Soviet past has become one of the most popular topics in current research. Thus, for example, many shows and films and a lot of popular music thrive on the nostalgic veneration of the Soviet era.1 The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, despite its common association with an older generation of retired workers, is increasingly becoming popular among young people.2 According to a nationwide poll of the country's most celebrated Russians conducted by the state television channel, Rossiia 1, in 2008, Stalin was voted Russia's third most popular historical figure. Furthermore, in October 2009, a Russian court held a hearing in a libel case brought by Stalin's grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili over a newspaper story published in Novaya gazeta that said Stalin had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens. The libel case was dismissed, of course, yet the very fact of its occurrence is highly symptomatic of the overall grotesqueness of the current state of the collective memory of the Soviet legacy. There are, however, certain positive signs, such as President Medvedev's appointment of Mikhail Fedotov in October 2010 as a presidential adviser and the chairman of the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation.3 Fedotov in turn proposed the de-Stalinization of the public conscience as the most urgent issue to work on in the council.

Russia's nostalgic clinging to the "Soviet Golden Age," associated primarily with its imperial politics commanding international respect and the state's protection of each and every citizen, is commonly explained by [End Page 296] its extremely difficult transition to a market economy that resulted in a drastic impoverishment of the population as well as an unprecedented rise in criminal activity. Yet the emphasis on an economic explanation of Soviet nostalgia obfuscates the fact that the old regime has never been properly tried. Despite the commonplace comparison between Stalinism and Nazism (or the gulag and Auschwitz), the former never had its own Nuremberg and therefore has never been officially declared "criminal." Secret archives have only been partially declassified and only for a short period of time, just as the lustration bill proposed by Galina Staravoitova in 1992 has never been seriously discussed. This has allowed former Communists to continue to hold key government posts.

Unlike in Eastern Europe, where the transition to democracy was accompanied by a legally framed decommunization (although not without its own difficulties and contradictions), in Russia post-Communist nostalgia is largely rooted in a legal inability to put the old regime on trial.4 While the 1992 trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation could be considered as such an ambitious attempt, a trial that was first lauded as "the trial of the century" and compared to the Nuremberg trial, it was later condemned as a "bureaucratic farce" that failed to acknowledge the "collective trauma of the past."5 Even though "Russian society seemed to expect . . . from the Constitutional Court a Russian Nuremberg process with a resulting decommunization (similar to the German denazification)," the 1992 CPSU trial turned out to be everything that the Nuremberg trial was not, since after the president's banning of the CPSU, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was established as its prime successor, thanks to the court's final decision.6 Given that this trial has remained the only judicial proceeding in Russia with regard to its Soviet past and therefore served as a historical and political "barrier between the new beginning and the old tyranny," its outcome has had a constitutive and continuous influence on how Soviet history is remembered.7 Partly televised live and extensively covered by the press, the CPSU trial, which began on 6 July 1992 and lasted for almost five months, produced an impressive archive—five solid...

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