The Responsibility of the Victims

There are many reasons why almost nobody has the same reaction to the memory of Nazism as to that of the genocidal Soviet regime. Here is a good discussion of some of them. One crucial reason is never mentioned, though, and that’s the contribution of the victims to fashioning the discourse on their abusers.

Victims of the Holocaust made very sure that no human being with any shred of decency would feel that flirting with Nazism is cute. They spoke, wrote, created art, researched, recorded the memories of the survivors, and will continue doing so through their physical, intellectual and spiritual heirs for a long time to come.

Victims of the Soviet terror, on the other hand, are not interested, en masse, in remembering their dead or keeping their stories alive. Nobody ever talks about the relatives killed by the regime, the fear they experienced, the persecution they witnessed. The Soviet times are prettified and commercialized in a way that has managed to convince the younger generation that Stalinism was super cool and it’s a pity that great era had to end. 

For as long as victims continue to praise their victimizers and refuse to do the hard work of remembering and grieving, nobody else will take their suffering seriously. Remember that woman whose athlete boyfriend beat her up on camera and who then decided it would be a great idea to marry the creep? It’s not like one is going to chase after her, telling her she’s been victimized. If the woman likes to be dragged around like a sack of potatoes, that’s all there is to it. The post-Soviet people are like that woman. They are so dedicated to making the Soviet era look cute that you can’t blame the rest of the world for taking them at their word.