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Deportation of Thousands Under Stalin Remains a Divisive Issue in Baltic
Nation
WORLD NEWS SECTION, Washington Post Foreign Service
Washington Post, Washington, D.C., October 2, 2002, Page A11
RIGA, Latvia -- In the decade since Latvia became independent, the
headlines often have trumpeted what would be considered old news in other
countries. Lately, 1949 has become a hot topic again as Latvians debate the
actions of Nikolai Larionov.
The 81-year-old retiree, a one-time agent of the Soviet secret police, is
on trial for genocide, accused by Latvian prosecutors of helping organize
the 1949 deportation of more than 500 Latvians to Siberia. Many were women
and children. More than 60 died.
Larionov's case is the most recent in a string of such prosecutions since
the Soviet Union's collapse allowed Latvia and the two other Baltic
countries, Lithuania and Estonia, to regain the freedom lost during World
War II. In recent years, nothing has proved more divisive than such trials
in a country where rifts run deep between those who suffered under Joseph
Stalin's regime and those who participated in it.
In a place where the ghosts of the 20th century still loom large in the
21st, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 is mentioned in interviews almost
as frequently as the latest economic indicators, and no political issue has
as much resonance today as what happened in 1949. Across the three Baltic
countries, the memory of the 140,000 families Stalin deported to Siberia
during and after World War II has been zealously resurrected.
"Of course it's relevant," said Larionov's attorney, Alexander Ogurtsovs.
"Even today, almost every family in Latvia was repressed in some way. It's
hard to find anyone here whose relatives weren't connected with repression
or repressed."
The Latvian government takes the position that it is not prosecuting the
Soviet system, just going after individuals accused of wrongdoing, such as
Larionov.
"This is not about collective responsibility, this is about individuals,"
said State Secretary Maris Riekstins, the top professional diplomat in the
Latvian Foreign Ministry. "This is not about collective responsibility of
Russians as a nation."
But for Russia, and the more than 700,000 ethnic Russians still living
here, it's pure revenge.
In Moscow, hardly a week goes by without the Foreign Ministry denouncing
Latvia for cases like Larionov's, while here in the Latvian capital, ethnic
Russians see an effort to score political advantage.
"We should have long ago put a full stop to this historical settling of
accounts and look to the future," said Ksenia Zagorovska, editor in chief of
Chas, a Russian-language daily. Like other Russians here, she believes such
trials are a matter of politics. "It's a useful thing for those parties who
are interested in fanning disputes between ethnic communities," she said.
Top Russian officials reinforce that idea.
Larionov's trial is a "psychological persecution" of "an elderly, sick
man," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov recently. In pursuing
Larionov, "the Latvian judicial system is once again demonstrating to the
whole civilized world its disregard for the principles of universal
international documents," he added, according to the Interfax news agency.
Latvians should be doing less to go after Soviet-era crimes and more to
address their own history of collaborating with Nazi Germany, Malakhov
continued. "If Latvia is truly interested in building an image of a
democratic country and a good neighbor with Russia, instead of squaring
accounts with fighters against fascism, its authorities should seriously get
down to business and look for former Nazi criminals."
Listening to such statements, Latvian officials like Riekstins see a
rear-guard effort to needle, pester and generally annoy a former colony the
Russians can no longer subjugate. The Latvians point out that it was only in
the late 1980s, as the Baltic independence movement was gaining steam, that
the Kremlin belatedly announced it had discovered the existence of the
secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which divided Europe between Hitler and
Stalin and placed the three Baltic countries squarely in Stalin's territory.
Officially, as Riekstins noted recently, the Russian Foreign Ministry
considers the absorption of Latvia into the Soviet Union a matter of free
will, citing the "invitation" from the Soviet-installed puppet government,
while the Latvian government calls it an "illegal occupation."
Russia, he and others noted, is never interested in discussing
deportations like those being prosecuted in the Larionov case. In its own
post-Soviet decade, Russia has not gone through a legal process of
accounting for the crimes of the Stalin era. There has never been a
Nuremberg-type prosecution of those responsible for the labor camps and the
mass killings, and most Russians say they prefer to look ahead rather than
back at the murders of a previous government.
Latvia has its share of current concerns to tackle: dismal Soviet-era
hospitals; poor rural areas untouched by a decade of the Baltic "economic
miracle" so evident in this prosperous capital; corruption so rampant that
Transparency International, which monitors the problem, recently ranked
Latvia as the second-most corrupt country of those hoping to join the
European Union.
But here and in the other Baltic states, the arguments over history
continue. In the Larionov case, which was scheduled to resume yesterday in a
courtroom just outside Riga after lengthy delays caused by the defendant's
health, Latvian prosecutors are litigating anew one of the most painful
episodes of their Soviet past: the mass deportations, starting on March 25,
1949, that took place as part of Stalin's order to forcibly impose
collectivization of agriculture on the Baltics.
Altogether, 42,133 people were deported from Latvia, accused of being
kulaks, or rich peasants, along with thousands more from the other Baltic
countries. In total, 94,799 people from the Baltics were sent to labor camps
in Siberia in just a few days.
Larionov, an officer in the State Security Ministry at the time, allegedly
was responsible for 500 of the deportations. He does not deny taking part in
what Russians still call the "repressions." The issue for him and his legal
team is whether he should now be held accountable for following orders -- a
debate familiar from decades of Nazi war crimes trials.
"It's a mistake to prosecute him," said his attorney, Ogurtsovs. "The
whole system participated. They shouldn't hold responsible only those people
at low levels. This is wrong. A typist might have had a stronger impact on
somebody's life than these people."
Talk about the Larionov case quickly turns to a detailed discussion of
Communist bureaucratic practices. The recounting serves as a reminder of how
huge an apparatus participated in the massive gulag prison system, which
sent millions of Soviet citizens to their deaths.
As a bureaucrat in the secret police, Ogurtsovs argued, Larionov came into
the deportation process long after it had been ordained. He was handed a
list with 500 names on it, his attorney said, and told to check each one to
determine whether the individual belonged on it. People were removed from
the list only if it could be proved that they had served in the Red Army or
had been decorated by the Soviet Union.
"He did not make decisions, with the exception of one thing -- to decide
whether a person had reasons for not being deported," Ogurtsovs said.
"Clearly, he indirectly participated in it, but his participation was less
than the driver of the truck or train that took them away, for example."
For Ogurtsovs, an ethnic Latvian who has represented a long list of
accused Stalin-era killers in the decade since Latvian independence, the
matter seems clear. "I'm Latvian, but our nation has got its negative sides,
especially vengefulness," he said. In this trial, he said, and all the
others, "the goal is to make enemies out of those who used to be heroes."
To view the entire article, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29986-2002Oct1.html
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