Moscow (AsiaNews) – In his book *Against the Genocide of the Soviet People*, historian Konstantin Pakhaluk analyses this increasingly pervasive propaganda concept promoted by the Putin regime, the denial of which is now considered a criminal offence.
The publishing house Historian Expertise has published the book dedicated to this historical and ideological concept, which Pakhaluk regards as a manifestation of victim-centred nationalism – a nationalism based on resentment and the conviction that “we are the victims” – used in these times of war to justify its own aggression and crimes.
He believes that the image of Nazism as an absolute evil, borrowed from the West, is becoming the basis of a specific ‘culture of erasure’, which even goes so far as to undermine the memory of the victims of Stalinist repression.
The ‘genocide of the Soviet people’, as a verbal formula, a propaganda cliché and a commemorative concept, has undergone a rapid evolution over the last seven to eight years.
It emerged in the late 2010s, and was subsequently taken under the wing of the presidential administration and promoted by the media. In 2020, the first court hearing in the Novgorod region recognised the executions near the village of Žestjanaja Gorka as ‘genocide’; a year earlier, researchers had excavated the burial site, uncovering over 500 skeletal remains.
Shortly afterwards, Vladimir Medinsky, presidential adviser and president of the Russian Military Historical Society, publicly stated at the ‘Lessons of Nuremberg’ forum that, since the USSR had been accused of complicity in the outbreak of the Second World War, the Russian state had to demonstrate that the Soviet people had been its main victims. In 2021, commemorative events were held for the first time, with the establishment of a new date: 19 April, which became the Day of the Genocide of the Soviet People.
The decision to criminalise denial appears to be the final stage of this propaganda campaign, a particularly significant development given that the ‘genocide of the Soviet people’ has found no real support amongst specialists in Nazi crimes, either as a concept or as an analytical tool.
In Russia, a number of experts are quietly voicing criticism, including historians collaborating on the ‘No Statute of Limitations’ project. Pakhaluk’s criticism is motivated not so much by the concept of ‘genocide’ itself, as by the notorious notion of the ‘Soviet people’ and, even more so, by the obsession of the Russian authorities, certain officials and propagandists, with transforming the memory of the victims of Nazi crimes not only into a tool of political propaganda, but also into a justification for the crimes and mistakes of the Stalinist system, for the aggression against Ukraine and for the ‘cult of Victory’. This amounts to a model in which the victories and sufferings of past peoples are appropriated by their descendants.
In this way, the ‘Soviet people’ is transformed into an imperialist construct, legitimising the right of Russian officials to seize (under the pretext of ‘returning’) foreign territories, asserting a false moral superiority (‘ ‘we are the victors’ or, more moderately, ‘we are the heirs to Victory’) and trivialising the tragedy of the true victims of Nazism.
And the issue does not concern only Jews or people with disabilities, whose unique experiences had already been trivialised and exploited during the Soviet era to assert a ‘community of suffering’; in the absence of substantiated research into how the Nazis treated Russians, or into how many villages were completely or partially destroyed by the occupiers in Russia, every statement by Maria Zakharova and various propagandists offers fresh examples of blatant ignorance.
The Russian authorities love to talk about history, because it allows them to “fill the semantic void in the information space and avoid a substantive discussion of the ongoing war”, says Pakhaluk. A striking example is Putin’s interview with the American television presenter Tucker Carlson, when, when asked about the reasons for the attack, he launched into a 40-minute history lesson. Victim-centred nationalism is founded precisely on the perception of oneself as a victim, forced to fight enemies to ensure ‘eternal security’ and, consequently, to ignore one’s own crimes.
