Today's the 58th anniversary of the death of Stalin. I always think of the painting by Komar and Melamid of the couple jumping for joy in their grim Soviet apartment.
This is likely among the best things I've written on this subject (or any) -- the woman described in this true story is my mother-in-law. There's much more that's interesting to the story -- but it will have to wait until the translation is done. (Regrettably, the bylines were stripped out of those (Un)Civil Societies stories I did when they moved to a new CMS and archived old reports, but it is my piece.)
58 years -- and yet there has never been a Nuremberg like process as there was for the Holocaust. To be sure, there has been "rehabilitation" and even a kind of small financial compensation under Yeltsin -- but we know what that's worth. I'll never forget the long-time political prisoner Boris Pustintsev who founded the NGO group Citizen's Watch in St. Petersburg. He protested the Soviet-led invasion of Hungary in 1956 with a group of other students and was sentenced to five years in the GULAG.
Later, he got his modest compensation -- and it was just enough for him to buy his wife a washing machine. Reflecting on the Kremlin's message, he quipped that he should have sat another five years, then maybe his wife could have gotten the dryer, too.
What happened later to Boris in 1992 -- a horrible beating that severely injured him -- after he protested about the "KGB-ization" of his city council (Vladimir Puting was on his way to power) -- is one of the numerous pieces of evidence -- only increasing -- of the continued shadow of Stalin and the legacy of the Great Terror in the hands of essentially the same organization that launched it -- the NKVD later renamed the KGB. Rehabilitation or compensation -- that's not the same thing as prosecution of the crimes against humanity that occurred, as a matter of principle. It's dealing with each individual case, one at a time...
Memory -- how it fades! and how hard it is to keep up, especially when it was traumatic.
Perhaps that explains why RFE/RL has no story today on the front page about the anniversary -- well, it's not a round number like the 50th was in 2003.
But the lack of a sturdy grasp of history and what it really means to be on the "wrong side of it" explains how you can get this sort of humour on the Facebook parody page:
John McCain to Lithuania: And one last thing I forgot to mention. That leader of Belarus is a brutal little tyrant! You wait, he'll find he's on the wrong side of history!
Democratic Party: You mean like you discovered in the last presidential election?
Lithuania: Plz move this convo elsewhere. We've had enough experience being on the wrong side of history, thx.
Ugh.
It's just not funny. In fact, it's awful. In several ways.
Now, don't get me wrong. I realize this whole Facebook parody has its charms, although some weeks I feel it's really gone past the sell-by date.
And this is where RFE/RL younger cub reporters, I suppose, can earn their spurs and proove to those haters that they really are independent of the U.S. government and can even parody our leaders -- something you can't do in Belarus (and I'm not sure what the tolerance for it is in Lithuania, for that matter).
But again -- ugh. Why?
Because losing an election isn't anything bad. It's not "getting on the wrong side of history". Not like being a discredited tyrant, certainly! There isn't some sort of "shame" in losing an election because we live in a democratic society, it has fair rules, it is not quite the winner-takes-all sometimes portrayed (we have foreign and civil services that remain in place in each government) -- and there is still dignity in that person who ran and lost -- especially if he is a senator.
There isn't anything to mock in Sen. McCain, in my view. He's a very good and decent man. He's always gone to bat for Belarus and other less popular causes of human rights that I think some congressmen can't even find on a map. I remember meeting him in person once at a reception organized by IRI, and he was attentive and kind to the Belarusian democrats that I had brought to Washington for meetings.
I personally didn't vote for him for various reasons, but on some subjects I am a "McCain Democrat". I don't think there's anything about this Republican that is on the wrong side of history as an individual figure, given his impressive career, even though I realize the left will ridicule any Republican and there is all kinds of tendentious stuff about him out there on the youtubes about supposedly "inciting hate" by "associating Obama with terrorism" -- blah blah. Sorry. Call me when you've gone to bat for Belarus -- and Libya and a lot of other situations, and then we'll talk.
Yet the "comedy writer" at RFE/RL who thought it was funny that McCain was somehow on "the wrong side of history" merely because he lost elections (!) is the kind of person who thinks in the modern Wired State terms, not of representative democracy and pluralism and at least two parties and fair elections, but of "my tribe winning at any cost". That's what that snark is about, really.
As for there being anything inappropriate about McCain lecturing Lithuania -- hey, sorry, but we all know how problematic the president of Lithuania was when she appeared to tell people to vote for Lukashenka because that was a vote for stability. It took a lot of talking over that patch by the president herself and the foreign minister and others -- and I'm not sure how Lithuania is ultimately going to do with the OSCE chairmanship and dealing with Belarus -- they've said the right things, the foreign minister made the right sort of statements recently at a CSCE hearing, but still...the EU as a whole has not done the right thing by Belarus -- it should be boycotting its oil and pressuring Russia.
And as for indicating Lithuania itself has "been on the wrong side of history" -- oh, please. Are we digging at the Nazi past of a Baltic state again like the Russians endlessly do? With way more of an obsession that the situation requires? Like the years under Soviet occupation and the slaughter and imprisonment of Lithuanians under Communism can't count? Sorry, won't play. Not today.
If you wanted to poke fun at McCain -- and perhaps for some he cuts a risible figure -- to be poking fun about this -- as if Belarus is a trivial subject and Lukashenka is somehow on par with McCain in "both being on the wrong side of history" -- well, it's the sort of moral equivalence that of course I always rail against in the world.
I definitely don't have a problem with parody -- again. For example in this same episode, there is Obama guiltily asking Mubarak in a post if he could take the "Made in the USA" off the teargas cannisters used against demonstrators. That's the sort of thing that does indeed cry out for parody -- we were definitely on the wrong side of history when we shipped tear gas to a tyrant to control his people.
But that's what Lukashenka does -- and does far worse than any American leader -- and with our friends and colleagues in jail now.
It's the sort of tone-deaf thing I expect now coming out of RFE/RL, when I see Anonymous on the front page.
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