Memorial was founded so that the truth could finally be told, says Russian Germanist and historian Irina Scherbakova, one of the founders of the human rights group, which is now banned in Russia. "We demanded that the mass crimes be dealt with legally and politically in order to make democratization possible. But they didn't want to listen to us," is her bitter conclusion. "Because there was no reappraisal, there was no break with the past."
This interview first appeared on September 24th. We'll republish it after Memorial wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
ntv.de: Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, there has been constant speculation as to whether Putin will be deposed. Do you think that is a realistic scenario?
Irina Scherbakova: No, not at the moment. Putin has long worked to protect his power. I don't think everyone around him agrees with the war or is happy with the way it went. But certainly there are no efforts to depose him. Still, it's clear that the Force isn't as compelling as it was a few years ago. The clearer it becomes that Russia cannot win this war, the more Putin's power will crumble. But when does that happen and in what way? I think there is still a very long way to go.
A group of local politicians from St. Petersburg and Moscow have called for Putin's ouster. Do they represent more than a small minority?
These are very brave people who deserve admiration. And this minority is not that small. It is difficult to determine how many there are. In the Russian social networks there are always discussions about the extent to which one can believe the polls, including those of the independent Levada Center. At the beginning of the war, Putin's spokesman Peskov said that probably a good 20 percent of Russians disagreed with the attack on Ukraine. In view of this huge country, that would not be small, it would be several million people. Nevertheless, it is difficult for them to articulate themselves. The machinery of violence that Putin has built to quell dissent is very powerful.
However, I believe that the mood will become increasingly somber when Putin has no successes, when Russia is increasingly isolated, when the economic crisis hits. Russia is facing a serious political, economic and military crisis. Now in the situation of the Ukrainian offensive, when Putin decided to mobilize after all, this is already having a clearly negative effect. Actually, it's a suicidal decision.
If you hear the propagandists on Russian television, then it could also be the other way around: that failure in the war leads to the Putin regime becoming even more radical.
What we have been seeing in the Russian media for a few weeks is hysteria. That sounds very different from the first months of the war. In general, the propagandistic line is: we are practically alone, all of Europe is fighting against us, the "collective West", actually it is a fight against NATO. This is how the failures are explained. The propagandists draw the conclusion that in this war all means must be used - all! Nothing should be spared. These propagandists ultimately call for total war. At the same time, bloggers and the so-called front-line correspondents have criticized the course of the war and the leadership of the army - but not Putin. There is talk of a stab in the back and of betrayal and that Russia now has to get weapons from North Korea. That sounds like panic to me.
Is it true that Putin fears that he will be held accountable in some way after losing power?
I don't think he's thinking about losing in any way, just what tactical options he has left. Putin employs a very dangerous, often cunning, mostly situational tactic. It is clear that the Kremlin is dissatisfied with the course of the war, perhaps angry. But Putin has become too alienated from the real world to think of any consequences for himself. He believes he is completely unattainable. No historical examples will convince him that this could be a mistake.
Are there any other centers of power in Russia?
no Everything has been done over the past twenty years to establish a vertical of power. Regional forces were disempowered or made subject to them. A bureaucratic machine has been set up that is corrupt and dependent on power. The independent media are all banned, and any form of reporting on corruption and abuse of power is illegal. In this sense, the rich are increasingly dependent on power. And one must not forget that private capital has been increasingly nationalized for years. The huge corporations like Gazprom or Rosneft belong to the state - in reality, state capitalism rules in Russia. Everything has grown together with the state. It would take a very, very deep crisis to destroy that.
There have been these strange deaths of high-ranking managers for the past few months. I don't know whether these people knew too much or whether they should be prevented from migrating to the West. But this prevents new centers of power from emerging.
Is there a common ideology of the political elite in Russia?
Unlike the Soviet Union, there is no fixed ideological framework in Putin's Russia, no closed system binding believers to the state or party. Of course, people close to Putin present themselves as staunch patriots, and some, like Medvedev, get really hysterical about it. But they are all just power people: people who have enriched themselves enormously and are dependent on Putin's state. They are closely related. When a member tried to become independent, it usually ended badly for him.
There are no unifying beliefs?
The West is always trying to unravel the philosophical underpinnings of Putinism. Then figures like Dugin are quoted with his fascistic, aggressive and completely insane ideas. But for Putin's real power, such ideas play no role at all. What is there is a traditionalist, almost archaic notion of Russia's former greatness that needs to be regained. The ideological construct behind it is a poisonous mixture. In Shakespeare's "Macbeth" there is a scene where the witches mix a potion. They throw all sorts of things into their cauldron, poison and dirt. This is how the composition of the worldview of the Russian leadership has to be imagined: a poisonous mixture of ideas from the 19th century, from Russian orthodoxy, combined with fascist-like elements from the 1920s and 1930s. The slogans of the propagandists therefore sound almost like literal quotations from fascism: "Putin is Russia, without Putin there is no Russia" or "one state, one victory, one president". Such parallels are not intentional, they come out of their mouths by themselves, so to speak.
The real aim of this poison mixture is subordination to the state. These people are not concerned with the country, the people or the people, even if their slogans sometimes suggest that. It's always about the state, and about Putin as the embodiment of that state.
You are one of the founders of Memorial, and the name already says what it is about: you wanted to remember the past, to initiate a confrontation with Stalinism. What does it change if people don't know the history of their country?
When perestroika, the transformation, began in the 1980s, it was about changing a system created by Stalin. The price of building this system was enormous, Stalin was responsible for millions of deaths. Everyone knew that, and older citizens even remembered the Great Terror. But we wanted it to be spoken about openly, that the truth would finally be told, even if it would be terrible. At the same time, everyday life in Russia in the 1990s was very hard for many people. At that time the new elites emerged - selfish, greedy and anti-social. All this led to the fact that many Russians lost faith in the democratic path and did not want to remember it either.
At that time we demanded a legal and political investigation of the mass crimes in order to make democratization possible. But they didn't want to listen to us. Even from the liberal corner it was said that this was only the past, one had to look to the future, the market economy would fix it. Because there was no reappraisal, there was also no break with the past. It's a tragedy. Russia is in the shackles of its past.
What is the view of Stalin in today's Russia? What kind of image of Stalin is Putin propagating?
When Putin came to power, he initially just repeated what was always said in the 1990s: yes, there was crime and terror, that is unforgivable, we must commemorate the victims. But it was clear that it was all about the victims and not the perpetrators. The perpetrators were not exposed, they were not charged or convicted. And the more it became clear that the main task was to build an authoritarian state, the more Stalin was put in a positive light, because Stalin was the main symbol of a strong state, and victory in the Great Patriotic War was attributed to his leadership - the great myth that he created himself.
Is Putin's view of history a similar mixture to his other world view?
Putin's treatment of history is similar to that of his ideological poison: he takes what he pleases. Everything that has to do with Bolshevism, with internationalism, the world revolution or with the revolution in general is thrown out. For him, Russian history is a straight line of strong men from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin. It's so flexible it's postmodern. Take Peter the Great. At the end of the 1990s he was a role model - at that time the great Russia that fell in 1917 was to be restored. Then he was considered a Westerner who chose a wrong path for Russia. Now Peter the Great is back as the tsar who reclaimed territories that were said to have always been Russian. What Putin says about Russian history or about Ukraine is a crude mixture of myths and assumptions at such a low level. It would be laughable if it wasn't hammered into people's heads by the propaganda.
Don't the Russians realize that Stalin is responsible for the deaths of millions of people?
You know that - on the one hand. On the other hand, it has been spread for years that all this is allegedly not true, that it is all myths, that we do not know the whole truth - the usual. It's a battle of myths versus facts. And myths are hard to fight.
Memorial International was classified as a "foreign agent" as of 2016.
Our human rights center was declared a "foreign agent" back in 2014. That was part of a long evolution to muzzle us. This also included high penalties that were intended to suffocate us. We responded with solidarity campaigns: people collected money so that we could pay the fines. In December 2021, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation finally liquidated Memorial International. We were crushed because our view of the past is very different from that proclaimed by this state.
What kind of repression have you personally experienced in the past year?
It's not worth mentioning when you consider how many people were arrested and sentenced to draconian sentences during that period. There have been defamatory TV programs against me since 2016 - we are foreign agents, participants in the history contest that I ran in Memorial were intimidated, we were sprayed with some chemicals on the street, paid hooligans stormed Memorial's premises, there were constant charges against us, at demonstrations we were chased apart, my husband was arrested and twice had to spend a night at the police station. In a normal life, that would be horrible. But that was the usual way of life in recent years.
Putin appeared in the Bundestag in 2001 and spoke about "that no one can ever take Russia back to the past". Did German politicians fool themselves when it came to Russia?
Yes, she tried to deceive herself. Our role as critics within Russia was very thankless. We have repeatedly had visits from German politicians, with whom we have spoken absolutely openly from the beginning - since 2001. We have tried to show that all democratic achievements are being dismantled, which one has to take seriously. But political and economic interests seemed to outweigh human rights and civil society. This looking away, these alliances have made it easier for Putin to expand his power in Russia. It has also reinforced Putin's belief that the West is always about economic interests and profit - and that in the end he can get away with anything.
As a Russian in Germany, how do you follow the debate about arms deliveries to Ukraine?
I belong to what is essentially a pacifist generation. We are children of fathers who were in the war themselves, we have seen the marks war leaves. My father was a war invalid, I saw his nearly shot hands every day. And that was just the physical damage. It was obvious that many of his friends had experienced terrible things when they were 18 or 19 years old. We knew, of course, that this had been an existential war. Germany had to be defeated. Nevertheless, our lesson from this was: never again war. If we now see that the only option is for Ukraine to win - also for Russia - then that is a tragic experience.
But?
Putin has trampled on the European peace order. The invocation of peace expresses the fear of understanding what is happening in Ukraine. I now live in Weimar. Stepping out onto the street here, it's hard to imagine what's happening in Ukraine at this moment. When everything seems so far away, it's easy to say that peace must be made quickly. But such a claim is based on an incredible delusion.
I know some of the people who signed those two open letters urging Ukraine to enter into a ceasefire, and I know they think they have good reasons. But that is hiding from the truth; an attempt to restore the perfect world. Like little children who put their hands over their eyes and say: You don't see me. At least I hope it is, and not the result of manipulation by Putin's propaganda.
Putin is said to be ill. What would happen if he suddenly died?
That's difficult to predict. For the majority of people in Russia, he is still the symbol of this state and power. We have already spoken about the fact that there is no other center of power. Maybe there would still be a successor that jumps like the devil out of the box. But against the background of a military defeat in Ukraine, every successor will have to distance himself a little from Putin. In my view, a process of liberalization could then begin.
On the other hand, one must not forget: Russian society has been decomposed by lies and propaganda. She will need strength and patience to judge herself. That would be a very difficult process, so populist slogans may prevail, reinvigorating old victim myths and blaming others. The disenfranchisement of the regions is also geopolitically dangerous. In a crisis without a center of power, the country could collapse.
Navalny says: I'm not your leader, act yourself! Is this realistic?
The call to action is actually a call to organize. I don't know if I'll live to see it, but I really hope so. There are volunteers who help political prisoners, there is solidarity among lawyers and lawyers, there are networks despite everything, even if all of this is very dangerous in Russia. We have now seen again how young people in particular in Russia took to the streets to protest against mobilization and against the war, despite the risk of being beaten up and arrested. But it is difficult to predict when the mood will really change.
Hubertus Volmer spoke to Irina Scherbakova
