Straflosigkeit produziert Straflosigkeit

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Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak here today. I will be speaking about “Life in Authoritarianism.” I have lived in two such systems: the Soviet and the Russian.

I am a writer, not a scientist. I experience history through my writing, which has very personal sources. There is a connection that firmly links these two authoritarianisms:

The impunity of state criminals.
Those who commit crimes in state service.

... In August 1991, my father cut down an old birch tree. A huge birch that threatened to fall onto our dacha. Once, the birch was a canopy against the scorching sun on hot summer days. Later, it became a constant danger. I don’t know if he compared the rotten birch to the Soviet Union. Perhaps he couldn't allow himself such a heretical comparison in 1991.

Day by day, he climbed to dizzying heights and worked there, hidden in the foliage. Sometimes I heard his strong but distant voice: Watch out! Let go a bit! Then he would lower a sawn-off part of the tree on a rope. I had to roll the log aside and check the rope for frayed fibers. Meter by meter, I let the heavy rope slide through my fingers. What a rope it was! I had never seen such a rope before. The fibers were green, with woven copper wire that gleamed in the sun, making the rope look like a snake.

Everyone in the dacha settlement knew that my father owned such a rope; someone would always come by to borrow it. No matter what was hung from this rope, it wouldn't break. “Good quality,” my father would say. “Very good quality, such things aren’t made anymore.” He was right. In the Soviet Union, solid things were scarce.

Therefore, the rope was a kind of magic for me. Where did it come from? What magician left it with us? What did my parents or grandparents pay for it? For this indestructible rope that so resembled a bizarre snake?

But I never asked. That was an unwritten family rule. What is told is told. What isn't, must remain in the shadows. I never questioned this rule. It was simply how it was.

The birch was gone. The Soviet Union was gone. But the rope remained—like an unbreakable bond between times. A red thread, a guide, an Ariadne's thread. Or shackles. Damnation made tangible. I only understood the true meaning of the rope much later.

My grandmother, who owned our dacha, was married twice. My grandfather Grigory, my mother’s father, a Red Army officer, had died in the sixties from his war wounds. My grandmother’s second husband, Alexander, died when I was six months old. The two were like phantoms, ghosts, portraits on the wall, side characters in family conversations. However, there was also an inheritance. A precious inheritance. In my grandmother’s Moscow apartment, there was a chocolate box, Finest Selection. And inside... no chocolates. But: a finest selection. The highest orders of the Soviet Union. A Lenin Order. Two “Order of the Red Star.” “Order of the Red Banner.” Also two. And countless medals – like coins, like fish scales. The open box gleamed like a treasure: in gold, silver, and ruby red. It was heavy. It exerted an irresistible attraction – symbols of power, symbols of state grandeur. Every time I was enchanted. Or hexed. A matter of perspective.

When no one was watching, I would take the “Order of the Red Star” and hold it against my shirt in front of the mirror. I imagined myself standing in line with the heroes who fought against fascists, imperialists, or other enemies of my homeland, and a seasoned general would call my name, awarding me the “Order of the Red Star,” a replica of the Kremlin stars... It was like a patriotic orgasm, a waking dream, a wonderful mirage that I wanted to see again and again. No one had told me, but I was absolutely sure that the orders belonged to Grandfather Grigory. He was a captain, had fought in Stalingrad, and was among the first to cross the Dnieper during the Soviet offensive in 1943. He was severely wounded three times... And Grandfather Alexander? A zero, a good-for-nothing. In short, a civilian. No photos in uniform, no war history I knew of... His belongings left at the dacha: the baskets he went mushroom picking with, bamboo fishing rods, a fishing stool, a straw hat, a linen jacket... A stupid, uninteresting civilian. It is no coincidence that so little was spoken about him in the family.

In my childhood, I thought we were a perfectly normal family. Normal in the Soviet sense: no memories of the pre-revolution era, no relatives abroad, no family tree, no history... As if we were born with the Soviet Union. One hundred percent Soviet, all objects Soviet, all memories Soviet. I already knew that both my grandmothers were born before the revolution. In 1908 and 1909. But I didn't consider the years between their birth and the revolution. They were something unreal, a time before the beginning of time, beyond the horizon, non-existent. An empty, meaningless past that could not and should not be connected to me. But in 1993, two years after the communists left (always be careful, always play it safe), my second grandmother, who never came to the dacha, allowed us to read her handwritten memoirs. We did have a family tree. We had a history before the revolution. We had lost relatives abroad, including those with German and Polish roots. We were not one hundred percent Soviet at all. We were a remnant, a scrap, a splinter of a large family that had not survived the civil war, the Stalin era, and the Second World War. That was a miracle. And a catastrophe. A mass grave instead of a past. A dead past. One that cannot be brought back to life.

But I tried to bring it back to life. I searched archives for those who were missing. I looked for destroyed churches, manor houses, and family homes. I delved into the shadowy land of loss, into the land of total injustice. That was the paternal line of the family. On the maternal side, as a counterweight, as a sign of possible justice, stood Grandfather Grigory. And on the scales of fate, in a chocolate box, lay the heavy, just, honorable war orders.

In a court file, I found a letter. The wife of a man arrested and murdered in September 1937 wrote to the KGB in 1957. She recounted that two days after her husband’s arrest, one of the NKVD agents who had apprehended him moved into her husband’s room. And, she writes in 1957, twenty years later: “When he opens the door, I sometimes see some of my husband’s things that are very dear to me as memories.” Her husband was rehabilitated due to “lack of corpus delicti.” This means that the one who arrested him is guilty. But she does not dare to demand justice. She continues to live door-to-door with the perpetrator. She asks (almost a courageous act) to have these mementos, which are so precious to her, returned. She knows that justice is absolutely impossible. That is a natural state of affairs. And with that, she lives.

This struck me like a blow. Why, I asked myself, do I also lack any urge for justice? Why is there no ethical spark, no flicker that ignites a desire for revenge, no plea for divine judgment? I preserve the memory of the murdered, I care for memories – but I too do not dare to demand retribution for the deeds. I don't see ghosts by chance, but I do not thirst for revenge like Hamlet. One day I went to my grandmother's apartment. I wanted to know when and for what Grandfather Grigory had been decorated. Somewhere his officer's ID must be, which notes the reason for each award. It turned out that the documents were carefully hidden. Why, I wondered, would my grandmother have hidden them before her death? But I found them. Two officer’s IDs, not just one. My second grandfather, Alexander, the uninteresting civilian, also had one. In Grandfather Grigory's ID, the “Awards” page was completely blank. This must be a mistake, I thought. Perhaps a new ID was issued and the military registration office forgot to fill in the page. No. All the orders and medals belonged to Grandfather Alexander. He was not a civilian. He was a secret service agent. A colonel of the political police. He had served in the VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB. The Order of Lenin, the “Order of the Red Star,” and the “Order of the Red Banner” were awarded to him in 1937, the year of the Great Terror.

After this discovery, I asked my father if he knew the truth. He knew it.

He knew it and yet received my second grandfather in our house, shared table and food with him, drank vodka with him, and celebrated my birth with him. The last son of the destroyed family – and a professional destroyer at one table.

Why, I asked, didn’t you tell me? I thought, my father replied, that it would be an unnecessary burden for you. You don't have to carry it. And suddenly, without me asking him, he told the story of the green rope. Grandfather Alexander had broken his silence. On a day when he was dead drunk. Perhaps he wanted to boast, perhaps to spread fear.

In 1920, he was drafted into the special troops who requisitioned grain from peasants during the civil war. They acted so brutally that the peasants revolted. The rebels fought bravely and tirelessly; they had been soldiers in World War I not too long ago. Something else helped them. An icon of the Mother of God. A revered old icon that, as the people of the area believed, had a special power. The rebellious peasants saw in it a protector who gave them strength in their fight against the godless.

The command staff of the Reds decided: the icon must be destroyed. Then the rebellion would also lose its strength. The commander looked for volunteers. But the first time, no one stepped forward. In the special troops, there were brutal thugs, sadists, and yet... Mother of God. Mo-ther of God. The commander asked again, now with emphasis. Then my second grandfather stepped forward. He saw an opportunity to distinguish himself. Two equally young comrades followed him.

Together, they found the icon and, under the eyes of the shocked peasants, fired volleys from their rifles at it. They sank the remains into a deep well. And the rope, on which the heavy, large icon had hung in the church... My second grandfather took the rope with him. A good thing should not be thrown away. It will be useful to you in life. The green rope, green with woven copper wire, which I as a child had considered a magical object.

The rope that was not to be used. The rope that belonged to the murderer of the Mother of God. The rope that physically connected me to him. Like an umbilical cord.

The impunity of state criminals.
What is it made of? Of fear? Of shame? Of a feeling of connection? The feeling that everyone somehow bears guilt?

The crimes of the Soviet Union remained virtually unpunished. This was due, among other things, to the fact that civil society consistently focused on commemorating the victims rather than on restoring justice and punishing the perpetrators. But memory does not create justice. Lists of victims are not punishment for murderers.

The most common, shortest explanation I have heard: We have no right to judge. Or, as Griboedov put it: А судьи кто? Who is to judge here? This appears to be an ethically considered stance. Upon closer inspection, however, it reveals itself as moral paralysis, a renunciation of any effective morality.

Impunity leads to further impunity. Thus, it becomes the norm. In the more than thirty years since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has committed new state crimes and started new colonial wars. Surprisingly, opponents of the Kremlin regime have never made the demand for justice a firm part of their agenda. The opposition spoke primarily of corruption, of civil liberties, of stolen votes. But not of blood, ethnic cleansing, mass torture, and the destroyed lives of Chechens. In my opinion, this is the same moral paralysis, a conscious or unconscious refusal to directly confront the state in its role as a murderer – a vain attempt to tame the man-eating wolf.

Even now, in the fifth year of Russia’s open war against Ukraine, in the fifth year of this war of annihilation, I do not have the impression that the Russian opposition in exile is truly aware of the scope and urgency of the question of restoring justice. That they do not realize that this question must be posed in all its sharpness. Some may say that one must first reach a point where one can deal with this question. One should, they say, remain realistic. With this, we unconsciously prepare ourselves for the next deal, for a pact with evil. We hope that the next perpetrators will at least be a little kinder and more humane. We heroize dissidents and new political prisoners as usual and hide behind this veil of fog the fact that we have no clear political will to fight for justice for Ukraine, for the punishment of Russian war crimes – no matter how many decades we have to wait. We do not want to see and acknowledge this helplessness. A moral helplessness that is a result of living in Russian imperial authoritarianism. A moral helplessness that paralyzes us. And connects us to the perpetrator. Like an endless green rope. Green with woven copper wire.

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