Dr. Margaret Comer is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Her research focuses on the heritage and memorialization of mass repression, including the Holocaust and Soviet repression; grievability and memory; and heritage site portrayals of perpetration, victimhood, and bystanding.
This post summarizes her recent article, “Portraying Perpetration, Victimhood, and Implication at Sites of Soviet Repression in Moscow,” which appeared in the Slavic and East European Journal in Fall 2023.
Analyzing memorial sites related to Soviet repression in Moscow, Russia, we can see that the Russian state’s failure to reckon with this legacy has strengthened memory discourses that are being used to justify the current war of aggression in Ukraine. Although NGOs and individuals have attempted to publicize more complex, intertwined stories of perpetration, standing by, and victimhood, government persecution hampers these efforts.
An official refusal to acknowledge the shifting subjectivity that defined many Soviet citizens’ experience of repression is particularly harmful. As successive waves of repression broke over society, people who had previously perpetrated atrocities often became victims of these newer campaigns. It is frequently difficult to assign a static identity or subject position, as victim, bystander, or perpetrator, to an individual person.
Michael Rothberg’s “implicated subject” is a figure that has experienced intertwined perpetration and victimhood, whether through direct experiences and actions during atrocity or through experiencing beneficial or detrimental legacies of past injustice. Rothberg envisions a subject whose experiences stem from two or more oppressive regimes. Yet during periods of Soviet repression, many individuals perpetrated crimes or stood by on behalf of the same regime under which they later became victims.
Looking at memorials to victims of Soviet repression in and around Moscow, Russia, we can see how various people and groups are identified as holding these subject positions in different ways. By carefully studying these interpretations, we can better understand how these memorial choices reinforce or undermine concepts like universal human rights, transitional justice, and societal reckoning with systemic violence.
Between 1937 and 1941, NKVD operatives shot and buried approximately 10,000 people at Kommunarka, a southern suburb of Moscow. The victims included many high-profile Soviet political figures. Since the 1990s, various people have placed memorial stones or placards there to commemorate specific individuals or groups killed there.
In 2018, memorial boards bearing the name of every victim known to be buried at Kommunarka were installed with the assistance of the NGO International Memorial. The list of victims, compiled by Memorial, included Genrikh Yagoda, leader of the NKVD before he was himself executed in 1938 by that same organization.
Some observers asked how Yagoda could possibly be included among the victims, since he was the epitome of a perpetrator. However, Memorial’s Jan Rachinsky explained that, if the NGO deemed one person too guilty to be a victim, they would have to try to make that decision for every person, which is impossible based on available evidence.
The “Last Address” NGO has faced similar issues. The project’s plaques are somewhat similar to German artist Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine project in that each individual victim is commemorated at the “last address” where they lived before being arrested. The Russian project’s motto, “One name, one life, one sign,” highlights the emphasis on restoring individual identity and dignity to each victim.
Some “Last Address” plaques have also been criticized for honoring, as victims, individuals who had previously perpetrated terror. For example, there exists a plaque commemorating Ieronim Uborevich, a purged Red Army commander who had earlier cruelly stamped out a 1920s peasant uprising. As in the case of Yagoda, some memory activists thought that having perpetrated acts of Soviet terror negated later victimization.
At Kommunarka and in some “Last Address” plaques, people are memorialized whom we could deem “implicated victims,” following Rothberg’s “implicated subject.” These individuals complicate simplistic models of perpetrators and victims in mass repression, instead highlighting how complex and shifting circumstances lead individuals, at different times, to perpetrate, stand by, or become victims of a single authoritarian regime.
Meanwhile, in Moscow’s GULAG History Museum, established in 2001 as an independent project but later subsumed under the authority of the Moscow Department of Culture, rank-and-file perpetration during Soviet repression was simply not addressed. Victims’ experiences were presented via exhibits that included personal items made in gulag camps and a video display that showed biographical information and photographs of Great Terror victims. Text panels with Politburo members’ photos demonstrated how many shooting lists each had signed. The victim groups selected for special attention included the wives and children of arrested Party members and noted writers like Boris Pasternak.
Museum staff insisted that proving Stalin’s guilt was necessary, since many visitors still believe that Stalin was manipulated and would have stopped the terror had he known it was occurring. The victims showcased in the museum are either “guilty” only of being related to arrestees, or are vaunted cultural figures. There is no reflection on the pernicious nature of authoritarianism, which makes individuals complicit in their neighbors’ and their own suffering.
This reluctance to address the complex mix of actions, motivations, and consequences is not surprising from a state-supported museum. Russia has increasingly sought to rehabilitate Stalin’s image in connection with Soviet “victory over fascism” in the Second World War. It is detrimental enough that this stance often necessitates amnesia about Soviet terror, especially about its institutional legacies. Worse still, the Kremlin has now heavily instrumentalized the discourse of “fighting fascism” to justify the Russian war in Ukraine.
In Lubyanka Square, official silence about these inheritances and independent attempts to illuminate them meet. The Lubyanka building itself, former Cheka, NKVD, and KGB headquarters, is not commemorated as a site of violence. However, a memorial stone dedicated to the victims of Soviet repression, brought from the Solovetsky Islands and placed by Memorial in 1990, directly confronts the Lubyanka’s façade.
For many years, Memorial also organized the “Return of Names,” an event held on October 30, during which members of the public lined up to read the names and biographical data of individual victims. Since Memorial was legally liquidated in 2022, supporters have met, often at sites related to Soviet or socialist repression, around the world to read names; these gatherings are recorded or livestreamed.
Memorial’s digital mapping project, “It’s Right Here,” is also still active. In the face of official silence and erasure of repression’s tangible traces, the project documents sites of killing, imprisonment, forced labor, and other aspects of government terror across Moscow. Going beyond victim experiences, some entries document the lives of people like Lev Wlodzimirski, who both held leadership roles in state security and was arrested and shot in 1953 (though his motivations remain unexplored).
All four of these projects emphasize remembering victims as individuals, not as an anonymous mass. This position could be termed “private” grievability (Judith Butler, with my interpretation). But Russia has inherited braided legacies of perpetration and victimhood, a situation that is much more difficult to face on an institutional level.
There is no room for these discussions in state-funded history or memory initiatives, let alone a discussion of how a lack of reckoning has emboldened state organs to continue systemically authoritarian practices at home and abroad. Pressure on NGOs that present a different perspective from that promoted by the state eliminates opportunities for people to contemplate the complex, poisonous nature of authoritarian societies, in which most people alternately benefit from, collaborate with, perpetrate crimes on behalf of, and become victims of the same regime. No one is safe, and everyone ends up implicated, if not directly harmed.
Consideration of the “implicated victim” could potentially be helpful in post-authoritarian societies around the world. Instead of relying on simplistic binaries, it would be useful to specifically analyze what motivates a person, at different times, to choose different actions and how these decisions impact them and the people around them for generations. Without these difficult explorations, as the case of contemporary Russia demonstrates, it is easy to draw lessons from this past that foster violence and war instead of justice and reconciliation.
