'Monstrations' take aim at Putin's regime

Dire Straits former front man Mark Knopfler has cancelled his June gigs in Moscow and St Petersburg. With good reason.

“Given the crackdown by Russian authorities on groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, I have regretfully decided to cancel my upcoming concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg,” he says on his website.

Knopfler’s boycott strengthens opposition to the continuing crackdown on opposition to the rule of President Vladimir Putin, which began last year. Putin’s authoritarian regime is being increasingly compared to that of Joseph Stalin by critics. Next week, opposition leader Alexey Navalny is due to go on trial on concocted corruption charges.

The most notorious protesters to be jailed are the Pussy Riot girl band, who were found guilty of “hooliganism” after a performance praying for deliverance from Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral back in February 2012.

Their trial provoked a worldwide storm of protest supported by Madonna, Sting, Patti Smith, Paul McCartney and many others, but two Pussy Riot members remain incarcerated.

Corrective Labour Camp No.28 in the Perm region in the Urals mountains, where 24-year-old band member Maria Alyokhina is serving her two-year sentence, has broken the law  by holding her in solitary confinement for over 90 days. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, is being overworked in another prison while she awaits her parole appeal on April 26.

Knopfler’s support will hearten the hundreds of protesters who gathered yesterday in central Moscow, holding up placards with the faces of jailed activists and calling for the “freeing of hostages” and an end to Putin’s regime.

A former opposition deputy, Gennady Gudkov, said that the rally was for all political prisoners in Russia. Gudkov said there were “dozens and even hundreds” of political prisoners. A bigger protest is planned for May, the anniversary of repression in the run-up to Putin’s re-election.

Up to 2,000 organisations have been targeted with inspections and searches in connection with the NGO law. Organisations raided include the respected Memorial group, which was founded in the late 1980s to document the crimes of the Stalin period and beyond.  

The new law says non-governmental groups (NGOs) linked to politics must register as "foreign agents" – an accusation which was scrawled on the walls of Memorial’s offices.

Before the crackdown, Memorial released a CD documenting the 44,500 people whose death was personally authorised by Joseph Stalin. Facsimiles showing Stalin's initials (which appear on 357 lists) scribbled in bright red pencil were published by Moscow News online last week

“For any normal person, this proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Stalin knew,” said Memorial’s project director Yan Rachinsky,” said. Memorial also provided arrest shots for "La Grande Terreur," an album of arrest shots from the archives of Memorial and the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

The scale of artistic protest against the regime is extraordinary, according to Russian art curators. It includes activist Artyom Loskutov from Novosibirsk.

“The police did a lot to promote him as well,” writes Dmitry Sukhodolsky.

Special agents who usually deal with terrorists and the Russian mafia turned up on his doorstep and searched his apartment. They “found” a few grams of marijuana.  Loskutov was eventually made to pay a fine, became a star on the Internet and moved his “Monstrations” to Moscow.  

The “Monstration” is a parody of Soviet-style parades, where workers from different factories plodded through the streets “voluntarily” on holidays, bearing placards and slogans.

“The return of this Soviet-era practice in the early 2000s prompted Loskutov’s ‘Monstration’ – an annual carnival where young people rid themselves of negative energy by taking these ‘grown-up’ traditions to absurd lengths, says Sukhodolsky

“Siberian police were extremely irritated by these brightly dressed throngs of youth brandishing placards with statements like: “MAMA, FORGIVE ME, I PROMISE I’LL VACUUM!”; “PIGS ARE PEOPLE TOO!”; “KEEP YOUR CITY CLEAN, EAT A PIGEON A DAY!”

Parodying such slogans goes deeper than a joke just as Putin proposes to re-introduce Stalin’s award for the “hero of Socialist Labour”. Toppling the Putin regime needs more than cultural boycotts of course. But pricking the bubble of the system's rhetoric is a great start.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

The battle for truth about Stalingrad

As Russia marks the 70^th anniversary of the Red Army’s decisive victory over Hitler’s armies in the battle for Stalingrad, there are those in Russia who want to use the occasion to rehabilitate the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd by Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 during his moves to depose Stalin from the cult status that prevailed until the tyrant’s death in 1953.

But last week local deputies supported by Stalinist Communist Party of the Russian Federation secretary Gennady Zyuganov succeeded in re-naming the city Stalingrad for the duration of the festivities and for six days every year.

His party is campaigning for a permanent re-naming, cashing in on a wave of nostalgia, which includes buses painted with heroic Stalin portraits – much to the anger of anti-Stalinists in Russia and around the world.

Over the weekend, survivors mourned their dead and reflected on one of the harshest of battles ever fought. The total of some two million estimated dead, missing or wounded during the titanic five-month struggle defies the imagination.

The 480,000 on the Soviet side – twice as many as the Germans - includes 13,500 troops who were shot by their own side. Around 40,000 civilians died, largely because Stalin refused to evacuate the city on the eve of the battle.

The Soviet Union faced 165 German divisions on the Eastern front and the fighting dwarfed that in the West as the Red Army inflicted 75% of all German casualties. Some 27 million Soviet lives, including at least 11 million troops, were lost.

British history Max Hastings, amongst others, has noted that Western leaders, including many officers, “were happy that the USSR should have the bleeding and the dying that otherwise the British would have had”.

The re-naming issue raises the hotly-contested question – even at this historical distance - of Stalin’s true role in the World War II and in the battle of Stalingrad itself.

Some in the West have depicted Soviet victory largely as an accident of geography – i.e. the vast distances and bitter winters of Russia. But as the opening up of Soviet archives since 1986-7, and the testimony of eye witnesses recorded by historians like Antony Beevor and Jochen Hellbeck continues to reveal that truth was more complex and contradictory.

Until Marshal Grigory Zhukov’s army turned back German forces outside Moscow in 1941 – in what many consider the geo-political turning point of the war - German forces had seemed unstoppable. But as the Zhukov’s uncensored memoirs revealed, now the basis of a 2012 book by Geoffrey Roberts, Zhukov had to confront Stalin and his henchmen on repeated occasions.

Far from Stalin from being the great strategic genius behind the war, his orders (eerily similar to Hitler’s) never to retreat – led again and again to massive and unnecessary casualties. For example, over 700,000 troops were lost around Kiev when they were denied time to withdraw. 

In his book on World War II, Beevor says the Red Army had been “caught completely unprepared” by the invasion in June 1941. This is not surprising considering the murder of the flower of the Red Army officer corps in 1937, and Stalin’s utterly disastrous pact with Hitler which led to his disbelief that Germany would ever invade. Some 100 indications of Hitler’s intent were ignored by the Kremlin.

Militarily, victory at Stalingrad was secured through the vast Operation Uranus, the brain-child of the Soviet High command, in particular Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky. Shortly before the battle, the role of political commissars – in effect Stalin’s spies – in the army was scrapped and the officer corps seized the initiative.

They developed a sophisticated plan in which Stalin – unlike Hitler – deferred to his generals. Their plan to encircle Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army was in fact based on the “deep operations” strategy of the executed Marshall Tukhachevksky.

So victory was achieved despite Stalin and not because of his great “leadership” and through use of the resources that had been developed since the Russian Revolution of 1917. The world owes a huge debt to the people of Russia and the former Soviet Union, so the battle over their history is also all of our concern.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

A meeting of minds in Tehran and Moscow

During the continuing street protests in Iran, in the wake of the disputed re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, protesters have been heard shouting “Down with Russia”. This is not as strange as it seems. In fact, as the show trials get under way in Tehran, the slogan carries more historical significance than the marchers may know.

The Russian government was the first to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his “victory” in the 12 June elections. So denouncing Moscow makes sense. And the marchers also wanted to distinguish themselves from the usual “Down with America” slogans of state-orchestrated demonstrations in support of the regime.

Many of those on trial in Tehran have apparently “confessed” to "acting against national security" and "conspiring with foreign powers to stage a velvet revolution". Opposition leaders have denounced the torturing of those arrested and the staging of a mass trial where the defendants have few if any legal rights.

The historical connection with Russia, of course, is the most infamous show trials of modern times, which were held in Moscow between 1936-8. The principal leaders of the 1917 Revolution similarly “confessed” to working with and for “foreign powers” and were executed. Senior generals in the Red Army were tried in secret and also shot.

Only a half a century later, in 1988, during the perestroika and glasnost period inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev, were the Old Bolsheviks officially rehabilitated. However, Russian is once more rewriting its history to present the Stalinist period, including the notorious trials, in a more “favourable light”.

On 19 June, Russia’s largest online history resource at www.hrono.info was shut down by the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg. Founder Vyacheslav Rumyantsev said the closure followed after an article criticised the city’s governor for cutting an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

In December, police in St Petersburg raided the human rights organisation Memorial, removing much of the material used by Orland Figes in The Whisperers, his book on family life under Stalin. It included interviews with gulag victims, photos and personal testimonies.

The attack on the website comes in the wake of the publication of school textbooks that now portray Stalin not as a mass murderer but as a great national leader and an "efficient manager" who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward Soviet Union. In May, president Dmitry Medvedev announced he was setting up a new body to counter the "falsification of history", which, naturally, actually means the opposite.

The commission will be dominated by members of Russia's FSB intelligence service rather than professional historians. Its first job is to counter interprations of the 70th anniversary of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, under which Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up Europe, with Moscow annexing the Baltics and two-thirds of Poland.

As a taster of the “new history” to come, this month Russia's defence ministry posted a lengthy article on its website claiming that Poland provoked the Second World War! The article said Poland refused to yield to Germany's "modest" ultimatum demands in 1939 for a land corridor to East Prussia and Gdansk. The ministry withdrew it after Poland protested to Russia's ambassador in Warsaw.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a former vice-president arrested for protesting against Ahmadinejad, reportedly testified in Tehran that now he understood that the vote was "clean" and that allegations of fraud in the election were "a lie". No doubt there is quiet approval for all this in the Kremlin, where the rehabilitation of Stalin is proceeding apace, in a country where anti-government demonstrations are usually banned and where investigative journalists are gunned down.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The real price of art

This week Russian oligarchs like Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich will have yet another opportunity to spend astronomic sums of money buying art. In May alone, Abramovich spent a total of £60.2 million on two paintings – one by Lucien Freud, the other by Francis Bacon. Sotheby’s auction house is holding a three-day auction of paintings by top Russian artists, including all-time favourite Marc Chagall, and noted modernist Natalia Goncharova, many of them from the period leading up to the October 1917 revolution.

Apparently the previous, long-term owners of these works could no longer afford the insurance premiums as the price of art rises at unprecedented rates, which is why they are now on the market. A Sotheby’s spokeswoman said that prices have gone from £20,000 a few years ago to between £200,000 to £500,000 in just a few years. Russian art offers a superb status symbol for the new class of billionaires who preen at the top of Russian society, as well as sending their children to Britain’s top public schools. In addition, art has come to be seen as safe investment at a time when property prices have become unstable, and the global economy lurches into deeper crisis.

Over the weekend, Abramovich berthed his £152 million yacht on the city centre riverside in St Petersburg so he could join politicians and super-rich oil and mineral company executives meeting at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. He will have heard Russia’s new president Dimitry Medvedev, who was inaugurated last month, warn that the world might be in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In a speech aimed at impressing Russian nationalists, Medvedev said his country could play an ever bigger role in the global economy. What he really meant was that it would be on Russia’s terms. For example, BP’s giant Russian venture, TNK-BP, which pumps a quarter of the company’s oil, failed to reach a hoped-for deal at the St Petersburg summit. The Kremlin prevented an agreement being reached so it could satisfy nationalist pipe-dreams of making Russia into a modern super-power by insisting that non-Russian operators would be excluded. With the price of a barrel of oil soaring by $11 in one day’s trading at the end of last week, Russia’s manoeuvres are bound to increase global tensions and instability.

Significantly, the man who oversaw Russia’s transition to a capitalist economy, Anatoly Chubais, told the gathering that the Russian state could not function properly unless there was a political opposition. Chubais’ remarks were clearly a criticism of the oppressive regime set up by Medvedev’s predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Under Putin, open political opposition was virtually silenced, with many journalists and rights campaigners assassinated or jailed. Virtually all the media is under government control. Forlorn hopes that Medvedev would be different from Putin are rapidly being dashed. In fact, Medvedev is a puppet president. Before he left office, Putin switched all key powers away from the Kremlin to the office of prime minister, which he now occupies.

From within the country itself, voices are being raised against the wealth-crazed autocrats who preside over the chasm between the super rich and poor. In particular, Russia’s recent history has come back to haunt its leaders. Many were angered by Putin’s statement that no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about the Great Terror. A teacher's manual published during his presidency suggested that Stalin's actions were justified by the need to modernise the economy.

Last week, former Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev called for a national museum-memorial to honour the victims of Stalin’s repressions. Gorbachev and 25 others, including poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, signed a statement announcing the initiative, saying that "the current and future generations need memory and knowledge of the repressions of the Stalin regime" which had left few families untouched. Russia’s present leaders are, however, much more interested in the price of oil – and works of art – than anything remotely connected with democracy and historical truth.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

Putin rehabilitates Stalin

There are few families in Russia today untouched by the horrors of the Stalin period. Nearly everyone has a story to tell about a relative who suffered in the forced collectivisation and the purges that consumed up to 20 million people. So when Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB man who is now president of Russia, sanctions a rewriting of history that eulogises Stalin and glosses over his regime’s crimes, it amounts to a warning to opponents of today’s Kremlin. Several critics of Putin’s government have met with untimely deaths, including the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Only yesterday, a member of an opposition group led by the former chess champion Garry Kasparov was released from a psychiatric clinic after being held against her will for 46 days. Larisa Arap, 48, was forcibly taken to hospital in Murmansk after exposing alleged abuse of children in a local psychiatric hospital.

New laws give the Putin government sweeping powers over the content of school textbooks and a series of “patriotic” history books are set to be unveiled in the new school year. A handbook for teachers calls Stalin a "contradictory" figure, and states that while some people consider him evil, others recognise him as a "hero" for his role in the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War) and his territorial expansion. Stalin is described as “the most successful leader of the USSR". The book skates over the purges, declaring: “Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite." Putin himself admitted that "problematic pages in our history exist" but "we have less than some countries”. He compared the Great Terror of 1937, when 700,000 people were murdered in a purge by Stalin's secret police, to the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

This sickening reverence for Stalin because he allegedly made the country strong is a complete travesty of history and an insult to all those who died or suffered at the hands of his regime. In fact, the Stalinists left the Soviet Union at the mercy of Nazi Germany and their policies added to the build-up of World War II. The cream of the Red Army was purged in 1937 and a non-aggression pact struck with Hitler lulled the USSR into a false sense of security. When Nazi Germany invaded in June 1941, no one was more surprised than Stalin to the extent that he refused to believe the reports and prevented border troops from opening fire until it was too late. "In the official state view of history, the main event of the 20th century is the victory in the Second World War," said Boris Dubin, an expert at the Levada Centre think tank and polling agency. "The Holocaust is hardly taught at all in Russia, nor is the history of the gulag system. The rehabilitation of Stalin is connected to the emphasis on the war victory."

Far from being a great “war leader”, Stalin was compelled to hand control over military affairs to generals like Zhukov because of political paralysis in the Kremlin. In the end, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany in spite of and not because of Stalin’s “leadership”. Putin is building his own authoritarian state, this time based on the capitalist oligarchs that now own Russia as a result of the counter-revolution of the early 1990s. But thanks to the perestroika and glasnost period of the Gorbachev period, the truth about the Stalinist regime is available to the Russian people. Putin’s attempt to rewrite the last 90 years of his country’s turbulent history to suit himself is, like the Stalinist regime itself, doomed to failure.

Paul Feldman, communications editor
A World to Win