The Battle for the Anti Soviet Kebab House

Challenging national myths may be brave, worthy, and even necessary. But it is an inherently unpopular past time, and the journalist, human rights activist and veteran Soviet-era dissident Alexander Podrabinek has had first hand experience of that in the past few weeks.

The trouble started when Vladimir Dolgikh, the chief of the Moscow Veterans Committee, complained to the Oleg Mitvol, prefect of of Moscow’s northern administrative district, about the Anti Soviet Kebab House.

The owner’s intention was certainly not malicious. The restaurant stands opposite the Soviet Hotel on Leningradsky Prospect in Northern Moscow, making the “Anti” epithet a nice play on words. But when the owners put up their sign after renovations this summer, Dolgikh complained that the pun was “inappropriate.” The offending banner was duly dismantled on September 18.

Even in a different country that might have seemed like political correctness gone mad. But for some in Russia the removal of the sign signified something far more sinister.

Podrabinek has his reasons to despise nostalgia for the Soviet Union. He did two stints in Siberian labor camps, first in the 1970s for “slandering the Soviet system” after he publicized research on the use of psychiatry against dissidents, and again in the early 1980s for publishing articles in the foreign press and distributing samizdat literature. In short, he is one of those “veterans of the struggle against the Soviet regime” who are particularly dismayed by what they see as the creeping rehabilitation of Soviet history.

So for him the renaming of the kebab house was not a trivial matter. It smacked of censorship and a  spineless willingness on the part of the authorities to cave into nostalgia for a criminal regime. Worst of all, it demonstrated the use of the Second World War to silence criticism of the Soviet Union.

He set out these thoughts in the online magazine Yezhednevny Zhurnal (you can read a decent English translation here) on September 21. The Soviet Union, he reminds the veterans, was not simply a land of political commissars and triumph, but also of “peasant revolts, victims of collectivization and the Great Famine, hundreds of thousands of innocent people shot in secret police cellars, and millions of people who suffered in labor camps to the tune of the hideous Soviet national anthem.”

Now, despite the recent trend for venerating all-things Soviet, and notwithstanding Mitvol’s bizarre concession to Dolgikh’s complaint, recognizing and condemning the faults of that regime is not (yet) taboo in Russia. If he’d left it there, Podrabinek would not have attracted half the opprobrium that he did. Attacking Second World War veterans, on the other hand, is unforgivable. And that is exactly what he did

The particular cause of Podrabinek’s anger seems to have been Dolgikh himself, a war-time political commissar who later rose to become a member of the Politburo. For Podrabinkek that makes him “a member of the group of Communist criminals who tried to ruin our country and who then happily escaped justice.” But he did not confine his assault to Dolgikh. In attacking the flawed memory of the Soviet Union, Podrabinek explicitly attacked the veterans themselves.

“You merely think that you have privatized patriotism, love for Russia and care for its future. It only seems to you that your rest is well-deserved and honorable.  It merely appears to you that you are respected by everyone. You were made to think so a long time ago, but your time has run out. Your motherland is not Russia. Your motherland is the Soviet Union. You are Soviet veterans, and, thank God, your country disappeared 18 years ago,” he told the veterans. “You are so concerned about the ‘Anti Soviet’ name, because you were probably the wardens in those labor camps and prisons, the commissars in those anti-retreat units, the butchers on those execution fields.”

Provocative is not the word. To understand how scandalous that is, consider that even observing that victims of the Soviet regime and veterans of the struggle against it are practically ignored, while veterans of the struggle against Nazism are lionized, is to tread on thin ice. It is absolutely true, as Podrabinek writes, that “no squares or streets have been named in [dissidents'] honor,” and that, unlike war veterans,  survivors of Soviet repression receive little or no support from the state. But to suggest there is something unjust in this – that, perhaps, dissidents are equally deserving of the country’s respect – could be taken to imply that there is some kind of equality between the evils they fought. And a formidable part of Russian public opinion – backed up time and again by none other than Vladimir Putin – is extremely sensitive to even the slightest  hint of an equation of Communism and Nazism.

Attacking the very institution of respect for veterans, and by extension Russia’s victory in the Second World War, and accusing them of nothing less than murder, is is not just insulting to the old men. It is nothing less than an attack on how Russia sees itself. It is, in the view of many, practically treason.

Hence the vilification in the press, threats of legal and action and even worse that followed. The pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi have decided to picket Podrabinek’s house until he apologizes or leaves the country. One representative of the youth group told the Interfax news agency that if he doesn’t doesn’t apologize to the veterans, “it will be more comfortable for him somewhere in Estonia, where the policy of the state coincides with his beloved pro-Nazi views.”

Podrabinek himself has gone into hiding, not because of Nashi, whose campaign he dismissed as   “propaganda stunt,” but because of “serious people with serious intentions.” In his last blog entry, posted on September 28, he wrote that “a decision has been taken at a sufficiently high level to settle with me in any way…the campaign of ‘popular anger,’ so heavily inflated in the last week, should serve as a cover for the planned reprisals.” Nothing has been heard from him since.

You don’t have to like Russia’s current government, or be nostalgic for the Soviet Union, to be proud of its record in the Second World War. And the venom of Podrabinek’s article alienated even critics of the what he calls “our criminal government.” But whatever you feel about his tone, one has to admit that he is contributing – however offensively – to a serious debate: how to reconcile pride in Soviet achievements, and above all the victory over Nazi Germany, with condemnation of the horror of the regime that presided over it. That bit of mental gymnastics is further complicated by patriotic touchiness about criticism from other countries – especially the Baltic States – about Russia’s role in the war.

The debate permeates Russian society. At the highest level it informs foreign and domestic policy decisions and can even fuel diplomatic crises. Elsewhere it turns into rows about kebab shops. And no matter how much effort Nashi and others might put into forcing an apology from the truculent dissident, it is not going to make the problem go away.