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Communist Crimes

23.03.2009

Presented at the International Conference „On Crimes of Communism"
Organized by Pro Patria Union and Jarl Hjalmarsson Foundation
Tallinn, June 14, 2000

Totalitarian ideologies and vices that Communism, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy have in common:
1. Collective aims, preferences and rights have priority over the rights and interests of an individual. Among these vices are the concepts of collective guilt, collective responsibility and collective punishment
2. Totalitarian ideologies regard violence as an unavoidable, legitimate and effective method, as the preferred method.

The democratic sense of justice allows organizations like the Communist Party of the USSR or the NSDAP to be banned and their ideologies to be declared criminal. But the Nuremberg Tribunal, which declared the ideology and activities of the NSDAP to be criminal, refused automatically to condemn each individual member of this party. Even Nazi leaders were declared to be criminals only after trials in court which individualized their guilt. Only this kind of approach corresponds to the democratic sense of justice which rejects the idea of collective responsibility.

I think that the term „criminal group" is the perfect description of the elite of the CPSU. Even more, I agree with those who find communist ideology, at least its Soviet version, to be criminal, or in any case, dangerous to society. I am sorry that the Constitutional Court of Russia did not have the courage and the will to pass a condemning judgment on the Communist Party and to ban the activities of this party and its successors. But I am categorically against any kind of hunt for communists just because they belonged to this organization.

Mass deportations from the Baltic States? There is no doubt that, using modern terminology, these acts were crimes against humanity.

There is no justification for the deportations. Social benefits and even social security are not higher values than human rights. The vast and brutal suppression of human rights undermines social security much more seriously and causes much more perceivable damage than one or another minority can cause to society by its presumed disloyalty.

Some people talk about historical guilt of some nations toward others. By the way, I do not deny such guilt. I am deeply convinced that the Russian nation carries a heavy and unredeemable load of guilt toward the Baltic nations - Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.
Of course, the events of 1939-41 were the fruit of an agreement between four bandits of whom one poisoned himself in a bunker in Berlin, the second was hung in Nuremberg, and the other two unfortunately escaped the gallows.
But my nation was the executer of this crime. Some did it enthusiastically, others with resignation.
The crimes of communists and Nazis can and must be talked about. But until Germans, regular people, who did not belong to the SS, and did not participate in any crimes, understood that they carry part of the blame for Oswieciem, Nazism was not completely defeated.
And until we, Russians, acknowledge loudly and clearly our national, I repeat, national guilt for the crimes of communism, including the occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, deportations and shootings, and the cruel suppression of the national fight for freedom in the post-war years - until then communism is not completely defeated. By this I mean communist ideology.
Unfortunately, it seems that my standpoint will not be popular in Russia anytime soon.

In my country, even people who feel hostility towards communism, still mainly consider themselves victims of the communist regime, and in no way co-authors of these crimes. This lack of guilt not only prevents Russia's reconciliation with the Baltic States but is also an insuperable obstacle for the development of democracy in Russia.

I have said many times, and I am ready to repeat again, that the difference between Russia and Germany is that the Germans, becoming conscious of their past, were astounded by what they had done, whereas the Russians were astounded by what had been done to them. The consequences of this difference are clearly visible. So, an awareness of historical guilt is to me familiar and understandable. I personally felt guilt before Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians quite a long time ago.

I have one further comment: there are no nations which have absolutely no guilt before other nations. And each nation, if it studies its past honestly and bravely, will find reasons for national regret. We can reach two different conclusions from this statement. Solzhenitsyn states that the reciprocal guilt of nations is reduced and erased reciprocally. I definitely do not agree with this. I do not think that the attacks of Lithuanian princes on Mozhaisk and Moscow lessen the historical guilt of Russians for occupying the Baltic States in 1940 in any way. On the contrary - presenting historical claims against each other is discouraging and immoral. Actually the historical guilt of a nation is expressed mainly by feeling ashamed of itself. Deep and intense historical change is necessary for the nation itself, not for its neighbours. In other words, historical guilt is what the nation blames itself for, and not the accusations made by others.

If we use Karl Jasper's terminology, the talk is about political, moral and metaphysical guilt. This mix-up is not accidental because criminal guilt is individual and the only mechanism that mankind knows for determining guilt and administering punishment is a court solution. And I, unlike many of my compatriots, welcome the court trials which are held in the Baltic states that concern the officials of the occupying regime who were involved in certain crimes. I am only sorry that the Russian legal system, instead of providing the Baltic states with legal aid, remains passive. Which is, indeed, equal to hiding the facts.
I am certain that as we are speaking about crimes against humanity, it is not possible to apply statutes of limitation here, and if the crimes are verified, we can only talk of having mercy on the old criminals who have one foot in the grave already. But first the court has to reach a just decision about when a crime is named a crime. Of course, this affects just as much the tools of Nazis in the Baltic States who were involved in crimes under the German occupation.
But these trials have nothing in common with the attempts to justify violations of human rights by invoking the historical guilt of the victims before other nations. Historical guilt cannot be submitted to human judgment and thus it cannot be the justification for limiting anybody's rights.
I tried to prove that not only violent deportations but also legal discrimination on the grounds of belonging to a certain group fall into the category of a drastic violation of human rights. These are all essentially steps on the same staircase which leads to an abyss where at the bottom is genocide.

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