FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN – «After all this time we still underestimate Putin, there is something in his logic that escapes us. But, deep down, who among us would ever have believed in this war?
As in the 1920s of a century ago, Berlin is the city of Russian refugees. Then they were called Vladimir Nabokov or Marina Cvetaeva – the Russians of Charlottenburg who fled the October Revolution, who left an indelible memory in the Capital. Today they are thousands, as then a cultured, free, and dispersed generation: it is the Russia that with Gorbachev believed it could become Europe. Irina Scherbakova she is one of them, in 2022 she won the Nobel Peace Prize with Memorialthe most important Russian organization for human rights. Historian and writer, she is, with Oleg Orlov, its most famous member.
Memorial has been unearthing the memory of Stalinism since the 1990s, collecting the names of at least 3.5 million victims of the gulags and terror. A familiar lexicon, the silent and buried history of Russia – before Putin closed them in December 2021, this time for good. “We saved what we could,” he explains, “and now we have a network in 17 countries outside Russia.”
The meeting is in a café on Kollwitzplatz (“They found me a home here, it’s very difficult in Berlin”), the wide, tree-lined streets where trendy kids meet for Sunday brunch, and every other day too. She’ll have a fruit salad with yogurt, but then agrees to share the chocolate cake (“I had warned about the portions…”), she looks like one of those people who manage to survive on little. She presents herself as she does in the photo: black bob, black clothes and a necklace, this time red, to soften the ensemble: at 75 it’s a practical, recognizable look, magnetic in its own way. She has just won the Hemingway Prize in Italy, in Lignano Sabbiadoro, which she is about to go and collect (“How strange! Hemingway was the first American writer that was read in the USSR, my father and I discovered him almost at the same time, a literary critic who fought in Ukraine and remained a war invalid forever. I dedicate it to him”). Her family, as large as “Italians can understand and Germans less so,” is scattered to the four winds. “We have Jewish origins, even though we lost all contact with the religion, and even the language, at the beginning of the twentieth century.” But when they had to leave Russia – “and I never wanted to do that” – Israel became a refuge. She and her husband, a former nuclear physicist, obtained passports in a week. “Then the unimaginable horror arrived there too”. Since then she has lived like this: a bit of commuting, her husband helping the large tribe of her sister’s family, without the male soldiers called up to arms in Israel. She in Berlin, where one daughter teaches; the other daughter and other grandchildren in New York. “It’s immigration,” she says. And she feels a bit nostalgic.
Latest news on the war in Ukraine, live
Do you ever hear from Yulia Navalnaya? She also lives in Berlin.
“We know each other, of course. She and Aleksey Navalny have come to the Memorial in Moscow a few times. I have deep respect for her courage. Navalny is a martyr, a modern martyr. We hoped he would become our Mandela.”
But?
“Let’s put it this way: the activity of the Navalny Foundation, useful, courageous, praiseworthy, in my opinion is not without some problems. We should first understand, here in Europe, who the million Russians are who left Russia because of the war in Ukraine: 80-90% are graduates, have good salaries, want to pay taxes. But they can’t. Europe keeps them in the limbo of “refugees””.
Instead?
“Politically, it’s wrong. The EU should help them, use them politically. They can explain who Putin is. Instead, they are imprisoned in bureaucracy.”
What don’t you share about Team Navalny?
“They are betting everything on corruption. It is true that it is a huge problem. But I, as a historian, believe that it is too narrow a perspective, partial. The Navalnians are making a film in three parts, it is called The Traitors. They start from the Nineties, they put everyone in that basket. Now, it is true that there was a colossal assault on resources. But in this way they lose a crucial fact: that the Nineties were also hope, a sincere attempt to make democracy work.”
Why did Gorbachev fail? Historian Vladislav Zubok, in an acclaimed and somewhat revisionist book, The collapseargues that by dismantling the structures of the state, Gorbachev inadvertently doomed the USSR.
«Ah, Gorbachev. You could say he was hesitant, he was afraid, he had the old party patterns in his head. However, in a history made of black and white, I think we lose sight of the white too much. He truly believed in what he said: in “a common European home”. And that’s where he wanted to take Russia».
He could not make it.
“No. But there was no imperial war. Some minor conflicts, but we did not suffer the fate of Yugoslavia. We should be grateful to him, the Germans first and foremost. Because we do not know how much the situation would have gotten out of hand with someone else in his place. He remains the symbol of a Russia that wanted to be democratic, and now that he is dead, this is recognized, at least by those who aspired to it. Even about Putin, although he remained silent, it was clear that he did not support the direction in which he was taking the country.”
She writes that there were signs of Putin’s true intentions from the very beginning.
“A man with that history, with those acquaintances, a man of the KGB – with what he meant in Russia – should not have become president. In fact, he immediately brought the men of St. Petersburg with him.”
As if a Gestapo officer had become president in post-war Germany?
“Worse. Because democracy had been imposed on post-war Germany.”
What signs were there right away?
“I recently reread what I wrote in the 1990s. I was like Cassandra, who tells the truth and no one listens to her. We at Memorial were collective Cassandras. The return to the Soviet era came early: red flag for the army; Soviet anthem; propaganda; rehabilitation of Stalin; progressive limitation of speech; brutal war in Chechnya.”
In your opinion, is Russia returning to Stalinism?
“No, I wouldn’t say that. Putin’s authoritarianism is postmodern, it has a mixed form like a chimera: the head of a lion, the body of a goat, the tail of a snake. An authoritarianism that is becoming a dictatorship.”
A fascist dictatorship?
“I don’t know if he’s already fascist. It’s different. Two great traits distinguish Putinism from Stalinism: Stalin, and also Mussolini, even Hitler who had incorporated certain socialist ideas, looked to the future, they wanted to create the new man. Putin only looks to the past, but to a history that doesn’t exist and is of his own invention.”
And the other?
“Stalin had party cadres, he built a gigantic machine of power where anyone knew how to climb the hierarchy. Just like Hitler. Putin’s, on the other hand, is a criminal system where there is only one principle: personal loyalty. It’s the mafia: this is at the heart of his power. And in fact now they are putting their own sons in: Patrushev, Khadirov, even Putin’s daughter has reappeared. But it is easier to destroy a system, with structures, than the personal mafia.”
Do you think he could use the nuke?
“Never in the Soviet years was the nuclear threat so exposed. The crises, like the one in Cuba, were underground, and in public there was talk of peace. Now Putin’s men say on TV that Warsaw can be incinerated in 2 minutes. It would obviously be a suicidal gesture. But I no longer rule it out one hundred percent.”
Where is Russia’s hope?
“I haven’t seen her for many years. I try to do my part, as best I can. Am I a pessimist or an optimist? You know that old joke: the pessimist says ‘it’s never been this bad’, the optimist replies ‘it could be worse’.”
WHO IS’
THE LIFE
Irina Lazarevna Scherbakowa, born in Moscow in 1949, is 75 years old. A historian and writer, she is a scholar of the modern history of her country. Born into a family of communist Jews, at university in addition to history she studied German and obtained a doctorate in 1972. She then took up the work of a translator of works of fiction.
THE RACE
During the 70s he began to interview some witnesses of Stalinism and since 1991 he has had access to the archives of the KGB, the Soviet spy service. He then interviewed some survivors of the gulag.
MEMORIAL
In 1988, she was one of the founding members of the Memorial association, the most important organization denouncing the crimes of the Soviet regime. In 2022, she received the Nobel Peace Prize with other members. At the end of 2021, the Russian Supreme Court ordered Memorial to cease its activities.
