When Red Is Not Dead: What a refusal to face the Communist past does to Russia.

"All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque."

-Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

Were the Soviet era a currency, it would be possible to chart its appreciation in Russia over recent years. Despite a decade of post- Communist government, a number of economic reforms, a burgeoning consumer class, and a president who speaks publicly about democracy and the "dictatorship of law," the past has remarkable cachet in Russia today.

In a speech last December, Vladimir Putin marked the ten-year anniversary of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, in which he had spent his entire professional life. He recalled "the most vivid pages of the history of Russia's special services," and said that Russians "should, without shame, be proud of this history, be proud of the heroes and their achievements."

Soon after this, the FSB issued its 2002 calendar featuring a large photograph of Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin's murderous henchman and father of the Soviet secret service, was removed from the square in August 1991. But the calendar depicts the square as it used to be, with Dzerzhinsky as its centerpiece.

The previous summer, Putin had paid a visit to the northern Russian town of Solovki, location of a venerable Orthodox monastery, but whose place in history was forever changed when the Bolsheviks designated it the first Gulag town. Putin praised the rich history of the Orthodox Church-but had no words for the political prisoners who suffered and died in the prison camps there.

On another occasion, the Russian president put an end to the debate over whether Lenin's body should be removed from its place of honor in Red Square. To do so, he said, would be to tell Russians that they "had worshiped false values."

None of these things would seem out of place for most Russians. Quite the contrary. A youngster coming of age in today's Russia could be excused for thinking the last century a relatively auspicious time. The Soviet anthem remains, with new lyrics, and Stalin's likeness adorns souvenirs peddled in street markets. Just beyond Lenin's painstakingly preserved corpse lie the Communist Party's best, brightest, and most brutal: Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, and the others.

One prominent history text taught at the prestigious Moscow State University reads as though composed in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It makes only passing references to the Gulag archipelago in which millions perished between 1917 and the mid 1950s, and no mention of the 1940 Katyn massacre of Polish officers (or of the American lend-lease program, which sustained the USSR). Soviet crackdowns in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are portrayed, as they were during Soviet times, as joint operations by Warsaw Pact countries to preserve the integrity of the socialist system.

If the Communists were so horrible, as our youngster might occasionally have gleaned from his elders, wouldn't the world's moral authorities be demanding an accounting of the past? What about, at a minimum, a round of apologies? The Pope apologized for the Crusades. Bill Clinton apologized for the African slave trade, among other things. More poignantly, Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski went to the Polish town of Jedwabne in July 2001 and apologized for the massacre of some 1,500 Jewish residents there by other Poles sixty years before.

None of the post-Communist countries in Europe has had a full accounting of the past, but there have at least been steps in that direction, in stark contrast to Russia. Poland has attempted to try Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Czech Republic has held a number of trials of former Communist officials and, like the former East Germany, has moved to open the files of its dreaded secret service to the public. Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, gave an address recently at the opening ceremony for a controversial new museum in Budapest called the "House of Terror," which graphically depicts the country's fascist and Communist pasts side by side.

The countries mentioned above have emerged into stable, market-based democracies whose economies have attracted foreign investment at much higher levels per capita than Russia. They are NATO members and future members of the European Union. They can be called friends of America.

For an even more revealing study in contrasts, consider the (alleged) other end of the ideological spectrum-countries that experienced fascist or, as it is often obtusely labeled, right-wing dictatorship in the last century. During the Cold War, conservatives used to speak of distinctions between totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Right- wing dictatorships did not go in for the kind of mass brain-washing (and certainly not the level of mass murder) of their left-wing counterparts. They did not seek to cordon off a country's history from the "revolution" on, as did the Communists. In other words, their populations were knocked down, but civil society was not knocked out.

While much has been written of the excesses of Franco, Pinochet, and others, it is rarely noted that their regimes had their roots in reactionary, anti-Communist movements. Spain, Chile, Taiwan, Korea, and other countries faced a choice between a greater and a lesser evil. Those who chose the lesser evil-rejecting Communism-are better off today. In 1973, Chile was an economic basketcase; it is now far and away Latin America's strongest economy and one of its more functional democracies. Much the same story can be told of Spain, Portugal, and Taiwan. And, of course, nearly 40,000 American soldiers lost their lives to keep South Korea, now an engine of growth in Asia, from starvation and repression. These too are America's friends.

The point of reflecting on these distinctions long after most ideocracies of Left and Right have disappeared is that they tell us something important about how countries emerge from a debased past to become what we might call normal. At different paces, and occasionally with detours, countries such as South Korea all took the same path, down which a defeated Germany was marched initially by World War II's victors but which she then trod on her own. It's a distinction with a big difference.

Consider: It is illegal in Germany today to deny that the Holocaust took place. Indeed, it is illegal in America to discriminate on the basis of race or creed. And yet Russia's leaders aren't apologizing for the past; some are even celebrating it. Thanks to a thorough military defeat and the Nuremberg trials, the postwar German government spent half a century in atonement. The post-Soviet Russian government, whose ranks include many former Communists, is a direct descendant of the Soviet regime, which got off lightly after 70 years of repression. There is thus no sense of obligation toward the victims of the Communist era, which lasted nearly six times longer than the Nazi terror.

The irony was laid bare recently when a military court in Siberia upheld the conviction of Adm. Kolchak, an anti-Bolshevik commander who was executed by the Communists in 1920. Kolchak, the court decided, could not be rehabilitated because he was guilty of crimes against humanity. However defensible that decision, it is a reflection of Russia's Alice-in-Wonderland notion of justice that while crimes against humanity are confirmed in the case of an anti-Bolshevik military man, not a single Communist has been tried in post-Soviet Russia for atrocities committed under Communism.

The closest thing to a reckoning with the past in Russia is the presidential rehabilitation commission set up during the last years of the Soviet Union and expanded under Yeltsin. The commission is nearing the end of its work, having "rehabilitated" 4.5 million people-those whose names were blackened by the Communists-with several hundred thousand cases remaining to be investigated. But the man who heads the commission, Aleksandr Yakovlev, is gloomy about its impact. "The official history still remembers Stalin as the great commander-in-chief who defeated Hitler," he told the Times of London in March. "No one wants to face the fact that he killed 30 million of his own people, most of whom disappeared without a trace. No one has apologized for what they did, and most people do not seem to care whether we confront this chapter in our history or not." Yakovlev, a former Politburo member, is a rare Russian official who favored banning the Communist Party, burying Lenin, and holding public hearings to try those guilty of the worst atrocities in the Communist period.

Why are Communist crimes seemingly forgiven, not least by the victims? Speaking on the occasion of Czech National Day, October 28, President Vaclav Havel noted the sluggish pace of investigations and trials of former Communists and the lack of public interest, and proffered an answer: "[I]n one way or another, the majority of our population, though under blatant and rather cleverly applied pressure, cooperated with the regime, or at least tolerated it." He cautioned that "a sub- conscious feeling of a certain measure of involvement, or of participation in guilt, may lead to a weakening of the need to see the former regime and its representatives judged." Punctilious in destroying opponents and skilled at making accomplices of the rest of society, Soviet leaders made the logistical and emotional task of an ex post facto accounting extremely difficult.

If there was any time that Russia might have wriggled free of the past, it was the heady days after the failed putsch of August 1991, when the shutters on Soviet totalitarianism were thrown open. Few Russians knew before then that, in 1954, 45,000 Soviet citizens were deliberately exposed to radiation from a bomb that was twice as powerful as that dropped on Hiroshima. Many had not heard about June 1962, when the people's government sent troops and police to Novocherkassk to fire on crowds of striking workers protesting a steep rise in the prices of meat and butter. Through the scholarly efforts of Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov and others, Lenin and other Soviet heroes were demythologized and demolished. Of course, the further one was from Moscow and a handful of other hubs, the less the exposure. Still, the flood of revelations, combined with a general desire among the public for change, created a small opening, which turned out to be short- lived.

Yeltsin banned the Communist Party, seized Party assets, and shut down newspapers and magazines that had opposed the government in the brief 1991 putsch. In November 1992, Russia's nascent Constitutional Court only partly upheld Yeltsin's ban on the Party, paving the way for the Party's revival. The court's deliberations centered not on the Party's past crimes-this was no Nuremberg-but, in an apt foreshadowing of the "privatization" scam that was to follow, on how the Party's considerable assets might be put to better use.

The old nomenklatura had effectively transformed itself into the new oligarchy, which relied heavily for protection, intelligence, and influence (as did the government itself) on the KGB-FSB fraternity that would have much to answer for should the past be exposed. Why jeopardize Casino Russia, with so much in the jackpot?

Yeltsin didn't press his case in the court of public opinion, which may anyhow have been unresponsive. After nearly a century of being deprived of moral choice, the Russian people were too poor, tired, suspicious, obedient, and disillusioned to demand otherwise. Communism, as Hannah Arendt predicted, had laid waste to morality. "Totalitarian terror," wrote Arendt, "achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal."

Russia veered off the rails at about this time. Today the country resembles a divorce heading off to Vegas for a quickie wedding before the ink is dry on the divorce papers. Somehow the vows of fidelity to the new bride strike us as less than believable. Of course, a number of years of faithful marriage might lay to rest such doubts. But so far Russia has been anything but a faithful partner of democracy.

The curtailments of press freedom and the equally unabashed exploitation of Russia's judiciary to pursue political objectives suggest Russia's heart remains elsewhere. The war in Chechnya would not be possible in a truly democratic society. There are many other signs of dysfunction, from the expansion of the security services and the pervasiveness of bureaucratic corruption to interference in electoral processes. But the dissolution of serious political opposition-perhaps the most remarkable difference in Russia between a decade ago and now- is a dead giveaway.

"Ya Putinoid"-or "I am Putin's cyborg"-admitted Arkady Murashev, one of the brightest of the anti-Communist leaders who came to the fore during the waning Gorbachev days. There are many "Putinoids" among the young reformers who offered so much hope ten years ago. Most have been either compromised through their use of power for personal enrichment, as in the case of Anatoly Chubais, or co-opted by the Kremlin's insistence that there is no credible alternative. Russia has no effective opposition.

When past crimes are treated with impunity and the potentates of the old system become the chief beneficiaries of the new, it is little wonder that Russians today haven't found what Arendt called their "moral person." Far from seeing justice done, Russians have learned that dishonesty, even crime, pays. High-profile FSB prosecutions on dubious charges of "espionage" don't provoke a reaction in part because such tactics are more familiar than the democratic rights being violated. There has been the barest of responses to the seizure by government appendages of independent television stations, further debasing Russia's politicized judiciary in the process.

Because so much of the past is a blur, most Russians have forgotten Stalin's brutal mass deportations of the Chechen people in the 1940s; so they cannot sympathize with the anger and fear Chechens feel toward Russian hegemons. Instead, they regard the Chechens in much the way the Serbs-equally misguided about history-viewed the Kosovar Albanians: as a subhuman species that needed to be dealt with harshly. Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow and an indefatigable human-rights campaigner in her own right, put it perfectly: "The inertia of falsehood is stronger even than the inertia of fear."

In early March, a number of distinguished Russians, led by Bonner, signed a declaration to the nation, calling Russia a "controlled democracy" and warning of dire consequences if Russia isn't put back on track. "One should not be deceived: Putin's policy is not a new stage of liberal reform but the liquidation of such reforms," they wrote. "The reforms of the '80s and '90s envisaged the creation of a pluralist and humane society, a legitimate state-with a free press, independent courts, just legislation, and multiparty democracy. Instead of this we see the systematic creation of a centralized police state, and the planned destruction of freedom."

If it is at least obvious why a Russian elite, its closets bursting with skeletons, doesn't want the door opened, it is far less obvious why in this era of truth commissions, war-crimes tribunals, and crusading magistrates the rest of the world has shown so little interest. Put differently, how is it that the human-rights community that pursued the prosecution of Augusto Pinochet (and have in their sights Ariel Sharon and Henry Kissinger) have found little room on their agenda for a discussion of Communist-era crimes? And what explains the shrugs at Russia's fetishistic approach to the Soviet era? Could it be that we have merely forgotten that some 30 million perished in the Soviet Union during those years, or that Communists around the world produced some 80 million or more dead bodies last century?

Perhaps it is that most in the West have never known these things as truths rather than statistics. Despite a much greater death toll and a much longer period of mass misery, Communist ideology was never freighted with the same connotations of evil as its 20th-century twin, fascism. That two anti-democratic, collectivist, and totalitarian movements would come to be seen as diametrical opposites is one of the great confusions of 20th-century political thought. And yet the implication of this intellectual muddle for our time can't be gainsaid. That the new Left still religiously fingers this old chestnut was apparent in the zeal with which it supported Pinochet's extradition to Spain. Few appreciated the following irony: The aging former East German dictator, Erich Honecker, received sanctuary in democratic, prosperous Chile, while Pinochet, the man who saved Chile from East Germany's fate, was incarcerated on the orders of a judge from Spain, another country once under sustained pressure from Communists.

One of the Big Lies of the last century-Communism as a fundamentally benign force that fell into the hands of evil men-has great staying power. Anti-globalization demonstrators carry posters of Che Guevara and Mao. Koreans demonstrate against the presence of American troops, ignorant or unimpressed that that presence symbolizes sacrifice in the name of freedom. Professors in Western universities manage still to separate Communist theory from its horrific applications. Thousands of Hungarians protested against their new House of Terror museum, appalled that Communism and fascism could be given equal treatment or that the former in particular could be described as a terror. In a world that has rediscovered the realpolitik value of values, such things ought to set off alarm bells, certainly among conservatives, who can be proud of having recognized the Communist system for what it was.

And yet conservatives are painfully conscious of not being seen to be old-fashioned, stuck in a Cold War mindset. Moreover, most have moved- rightly-to identify Iraq, Iran, and a few other rogue states as the main threat to America. Russia's helpfulness so far, and the absence of a threat from Russia, has led the United States to view Moscow more positively than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Russia is friendly, or at least reasonably cooperative. Putin may not be Hamilton, but he's not Stalin. The stay-awake-at-night threats these days lie elsewhere.

Putin offered his support after September 11, exuded reasonableness over the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, describes the stationing of American forces in Central Asia as "not a tragedy," and shrugs at the enlargement of NATO. All of these are welcome departures from the bravado foreign policy of the Yeltsin era. And yet it's important to put these departures into perspective. A cold calculation of strength and interest at this stage makes it unreasonable for Russia to behave otherwise.

Putin-like most of today's political class in Russia-is a conservative, though not in the sense Americans understand that word. His aim is to guard and strengthen what is traditional to the Russian sphere: state power and collective interests over individual rights. But to do this, as Gorbachev only partly recognized, reforms are necessary; for the state as the Soviets left it was weak, atomized, and poor. A degree of democracy and economic liberalization is not only consistent with Russian conservatism, it is demanded by it. This is good for America, and everything possible should be done to ensure that Russia remains onside. But that is not the same as inferring from Russia's friendliness a shared worldview. Nor, given Russia's shaky democratic moorings, is it wise to count on the continuation of such conviviality.

The past century has taught us nothing if not that countries that undertake some process of atonement for a bloody past are able to move beyond it, while those that seek to hide the past become hostage to it. A Russia that skates over its history is not only unlikely to become the stable, prosperous, democratic state of Western hopes; with its moral rudder broken, it cannot reliably serve as an American partner or ally, or a force for stability in its region or in the world. That verdict-not the authors'; history's-on a nuclear power spanning eleven time zones ought to sit uncomfortably with Western leaders.

"The defense of democracy today is a struggle not simply for the possibility of a deserving future for Russia but for the very salvation of the country from a new revolutionary convulsion and disintegration," warn Bonner and her fellows. The terrorist threat has exposed the fatal conceit of a policy that views a correlation of interests as a reliable stand-in for shared values. The nature of states is influenced by their pasts. Down the road, somewhere, the sanitized version of the Communist past will be used to deadly effect, as indeed it already is in Chechnya.