Karaganov comments on Katyn and Stalinist past

On 22 July the prominent Russian politics and foreign affairs analyst Sergei Karaganov published an article in the official Russian newspaper Rossiiskaia gazeta titled ‘The Russian Katyn’, in which he called upon Russia to ‘find within herself the strength to admit that the whole of Russia is one big Katyn, strewn with the mostly nameless graves of millions of the regime’s victims’.

Karaganov welcomed the fact that ‘The country has finally completely and unreservedly recognised Katyn, has displayed nobility and sympathy for Polish grief’, and that both the Russian president and the Russian prime minister had condemned Stalinism in the course of the past year. But he argued that much remains to be done in order to overcome the legacy of the twentieth century, and said that the failure to do so was 'one of the main roots of our problems’.

He called for the country to be ‘strewn with monuments to the victims of Soviet Stalinism’, and for crosses or other monuments to the victims of Stalinism to be erected alongside monuments to fallen soldiers.

He also suggested that young people be mobilised for this task:

‘not new Komsomols or Pioneers' organisations, but a truly patriotic youth movement, which would seek out the names of these fellow citizens of ours and return them to us, so that they might be etched into these obelisks. This could also become a movement uniting the peoples of the former USSR. Uniting us with our former forced fellows of the socialist camp. After all the regime destroyed the best people from all peoples – Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Estonians, Tatars, Jews, Hungarians, Poles and Czechs. Everyone could be found amongst the butchers too.’

The article can be read here

Responding in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Polish journalist Wacław Radziwinowicz commented that the article was surprising given Karaganov’s assertion two years earlier that ‘The Poles simply have a Katyn complex. They must cure themselves of it on their own'.

Radziwinowicz cited Karaganov as having said: ‘We admit that Stalin murdered [them], Putin even apologised for this, though I don’t completely understand why. Unofficially we apologised long ago. We don’t want, however, to do this publicly, because you’ll immediately start to demand compensation. We don’t need that. All in all we can also demand compensation for the fact that the Poles once entered Moscow together with Napoleon. Earlier they did that too, but after all there’s no point in considering this.’

Radziwinowicz notes that for Karaganov, Katyn would now appear to have ceased to be a ‘Polish complex’, and has instead become an important symbol and a metaphor for the fates of the Russian people and Russia.

The article can be read here