Legal but Criminal:

Abstract

In post-Soviet studies there has been a consistent tendency to look at the contemporary political and cultural situation in Russia in terms of the failure of democratic revolution as well as the rise of authoritarianism. On account of this tendency, nostalgia for the Soviet past has become one of the most popular topics in current research. Thus, for example, many shows and films and a lot of popular music thrive on the nostalgic veneration of the Soviet era.1 The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, despite its common association with an older generation of retired workers, is increasingly becoming popular among young people.2 According to a nationwide poll of the country’s most celebrated Russians conducted by the state television channel, Rossiia 1, in 2008, Stalin was voted Russia’s third most popular historical figure. Furthermore, in October 2009, a Russian court held a hearing in a libel case brought by Stalin’s grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili over a newspaper story published in Novaya gazeta that said Stalin had ordered the killings of Soviet citizens. The libel case was dismissed, of course, yet the very fact of its occurrence is highly symptomatic of the overall grotesqueness of the current state of the collective memory of the Soviet legacy. There are, however, certain positive signs, such as President Medvedev’s appointment of Mikhail Fedotov in October 2010 as a presidential adviser and the chairman of the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation.3 Fedotov in turn proposed the de-Stalinization of the public conscience as the most urgent issue to work on in the council. Russia’s nostalgic clinging to the “Soviet Golden Age,” associated primarily with its imperial politics commanding international respect and the state’s protection of each and every citizen, is commonly explained by