ANALYSIS: Building on the bones of Stalin's victims (11/18/01)

ANALYSIS

Building on the bones of Stalin's victims

by Jan Maksymiuk
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

For the past seven weeks, Belarusian opposition groups and non-governmental organizations have been protesting against the government-ordered reconstruction of the Miensk beltway near a wooded area called Kuropaty, where the Stalin-era NKVD conducted mass executions and burials of "enemies of the people."

The protesters fear that the expanding beltway will cut into and destroy a significant part of the Kuropaty burial ground, which is on the list of Belarus's historical and cultural heritage memorials.

On November 8, the authorities sent riot police and bulldozers to tear down a tent camp set up near Kuropaty by young people from the Youth Front and Zubr groups. The police used truncheons and tear gas to deal with protesters, while the bulldozers and road construction workers smashed crosses erected along the beltway by defenders of the memorial site.

"The regime that destroys crosses is Satanists, not Christians," one opposition activist commented on the police action. "We are not listening to you - we are deaf and mute," was the retort from a baton-wielding policeman to an RFE/RL correspondent's question about what the policeman was doing at Kuropaty.

Small protest rallies by opposition activists took place at Kuropaty in succeeding days, but the road reconstruction work proceeded under police protection. It seems that the defenders of the Kuropaty memorial will likely fail to elicit a wider social response to their cause.

Courts in Miensk, which are extremely efficient in dealing with anti-regime protests and demonstrations, have already begun handing down fines to the Kuropaty defenders arrested on November 8.

The Belarusian public learned the grisly truth about Kuropaty in mid-1988, when archeologist Zyanon Paznyak published an article in the Miensk-based literary weekly Litaratura i Mastatstva (Literature and Art) about what he discovered during his excavations at Kuropaty. According to Mr. Paznyak, the Stalin-era NKVD executed and buried some 220,000 to 250,000 people there, mainly in 1937-1941 - the peak period of the Stalin terror in the Soviet Union.

Mr. Paznyak's publication, which was actually the first significant fruit of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost in Belarus' public life, sent shock waves throughout the country. A non-governmental organization devoted to the documentation of crimes in the Stalin era was launched in the wake of that shock, while Mr. Paznyak formed and headed the Belarusian Popular Front, the country's first opposition group.

In 1989, under the pressure of public opinion, the Belarusian government created a commission to probe Mr. Paznyak's findings. The commission confirmed that the Kuropaty graves contain the remains of NKVD victims, but said that their number is significantly lower than Mr. Paznyak's estimate and stands at some 30,000. Kuropaty was officially declared a memorial site, but the government took no further steps to honor the victims or their burial place. However, the government passed a resolution in 1993 to bypass the Kuropaty site while modernizing the Miensk beltway in the future.

The political situation in Belarus changed radically after Alyaksandr Lukashenka was elected the country's president in 1994. For many apologists of the Soviet system, Mr. Lukashenka's assiduous drive to revive the Soviet Union served as a good opportunity to repair the image of the Stalin regime, which had bean dealt a heavy blow during the Gorbachev period and after the break-up of the USSR.

Another official commission "found out" that the number of the people buried at Kuropaty stands at "a mere" 7,000. Furthermore, the commission concluded that it is virtually impossible to establish who is buried at Kuropaty: victims of the Stalin terror or of the Nazi genocide.

Many opposition activists in Belarus would argue that the government's decision last year to expand the Miensk beltway into the Kuropaty memorial site is the logical continuation of the Lukashenka regime's policy, which glorifies Soviet-era achievements and whitewashes Soviet-era crimes. It should be noted that such a policy has scored considerable successes in Belarus.

Even if the October Revolution anniversaries or other Soviet-era occasions are now celebrated by only a handful of gloomy and embittered Communists, one should not overlook the fact that the numbers of those opposing the Lukashenka policy of forced re-Sovietization are not impressively larger.

On one hand, the Kuropaty case doubtless highlights the weakness of civil society in a country that is generally believed to be the most heavily Sovietized and Russianized of all the former Soviet republics. But on the other hand, it suggests that in such post-Soviet societies as Belarus it is necessary to study one's own history as well as build democracy.

It is hard to imagine that such a decision to build a road on the bones of Stalin-era victims could be made, for example, by the Ukrainian government. Leaving aside the question of whether Ukraine is more democratic than Belarus, one should note that Ukraine has already advanced in promoting historical knowledge beyond the stage where "historical experts" could freely present black as white and vice-versa. This seems to be an unambiguous achievement of Ukraine's nation-building, even if, as some argue, Ukraine has so far failed on all other counts.

As for Belarus, most people there still remain "deaf and mute" with regard not only to political appeals from the world's democracies but also to more basic calls connected with their national and historic identity. The task of imparting a sense of distinct national identity to the Belarusians is no less important than that of putting Belarus onto the path of democratic development.

In fact, these two tasks are interrelated and should be pursued simultaneously by all those desiring to see Belarus' future in the democratic part of the world.

Jan Maksymiuk is the Belarus, Ukraine and Poland specialist on the staff of RFE/RL Newsline.

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