Russian Opposition, Russians’ Crimes, and Guilt
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny marches down Tverskaya Street in Moscow, March 26, 2017. Photo: Evgeny Feldman
One day after their release, on August 2, 2024, three of Russia’s most courageous and exemplary dissidents, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin and Andrei Pivovarov, held a press conference in Bonn that was often deemed disastrous by commentators. Many felt that they had cast a shadow over the cause they were defending.
The trouble was all the greater for the Ukrainians and all those who appreciated them in the West, as they had not been accustomed to such remarks and as they were not in line with those made previously. Before his arrest, Ilya Yashin had denounced the crimes committed by Russia in Bucha and was jailed for speaking out. Vladimir Kara-Murza had also been eloquent in his condemnation of Russian crimes in Ukraine, Syria and Chechnya, and considered the war against Kyiv to be criminal in its own right. Some of them have since this conference implicitly retracted their statements and, albeit indirectly, acknowledged their fault.
The fact remains that this press conference was improvised and ill-prepared. It understandingly reflected a need to speak out after more than two years’ detention in conditions that amounted to torture. Oleg Orlov, released at the same time, had the wisdom to wait before speaking. They hadn’t taken the time to find out anything about the Russian mass crimes committed since their imprisonment. Certain silences and, above all, the plea for the lifting of sanctions aimed at the Russian people (they endorsed those targeting the regime’s personalities and Kara-Murza has been even very active before his arrest in promoting Magnitsky sanctions), created a profound disturbance, not only in Ukraine. I could see that this turmoil remained despite the welcome subsequent corrections, notably when Kara-Murza clarified that he was asking for more Western aid to Ukraine and Yashin that it was unacceptable to cede a piece of Ukrainian territory to Russia. But we need to understand why these necessary and welcome clarifications were not always convincing.
So let’s be clear: personalities like Vladimir Kara-Murza, a friend I’ve long defended, including here, and for whose release I’ve pleaded many times publicly on television and social networks, or Ilya Yashin, want Putin’s defeat and Ukraine’s victory. With others I also nominated him for Nobel Peace Prize. They are not nationalists, unlike Alexei Navalny, who was murdered by order of the Kremlin—and whom I also defended, because he was a man and because his courage commanded respect. They have no problem with the obligation to try Russian criminals. Their institutional proposals are designed to weaken Russia’s central power. I saw for myself that some members of Navalny’s team showed no compassion, even minimal, towards the Ukrainians; this is not their case. Vladimir’s wife, Evgenia Kara-Murza, has often demonstrated this by calling for Russia’s defeat in Ukraine. They will also have no trouble demanding that, if Russia ever becomes democratic, textbooks and museums should extensively retrace the endless crimes of Stalin and subsequent leaders, and then Putin. They do not seek to crush the truth. We must therefore do them justice on this as on everything else. Yes, there was a mistake, but it is not unforgivable.
However, I can’t shake off a deep sense of unease that needs to be explained. This discomfort is partly moral, but it is above all political. To overstate the case, most dissidents fail to acknowledge the end of Russian patriotism and, ultimately, of Russia itself. They continue to cultivate a certain kind of national idea when they should be turning away from it—and breaking with the very idea of Russia. They do not look to Ukraine, not because they are unaware of the absolute monstrosity of the crimes committed, but because they refuse to think of Russia on the horizon of the irreparable. They hate Putin, but they continue to look to Russia as if they considered its survival to be the main problem, not the survival of Ukraine. Ukraine seems a secondary issue to them. They are unwitting victims of a Russian obsession—as if a German resister to Hitler had only expressed concern about the future fate of Germany, without his or her soul being invaded by the reality of the Holocaust.
In short, while they could have addressed the Ukrainians first, their discourse remains focused on the Russians. But they are careful not to let them hear what they don’t want to hear. They always try to stroke them in the right direction. While they advocate “reconciliation”—admittedly deferred until much later—with the Ukrainian people, they begin by giving them the opposite signal. They hope for a forgiveness that they do not articulate.
I think it’s essential to understand certain of their remaining biases.
On Russian guilt
The debate about collective guilt is not new. It gave rise to lengthy quarrels in Germany and elsewhere after the defeat of the Nazis. I devoted long pages to it in Notre Guerre (Our War), because I believe it to be a founding debate. In a recent interview, Vladimir Kara-Murza felt that we should speak of “collective responsibility” on the part of the Russians, but not of collective guilt. He feared that imputing guilt to an entire national group would dispense with consideration of the guilt of Putin and his henchmen, or at least mitigate it.
I fear that the truth will force us to take a different approach. It also seems to me that the decades-long work that the Russians must do on their own history will lead us to retain the concept of collective guilt, as with the Germans during Nazism. I’d also prefer the term “collective irresponsibility”, since irresponsibility is itself a form of guilt.
So let’s start with the facts. In all the regions that the Russians have occupied and sometimes still hold under their yoke, crime has followed crime: torture, summary executions, sometimes of children in front of their parents, deportations of children, and so on. These war crimes and crimes against humanity have certainly been made possible by Putin’s war (hence the importance to recognize the crime of aggression), but they are crimes committed directly, in cold blood, by tens of thousands of Russians, and not just the mercenaries of the Wagner militia. Thousands or tens of thousands of Russians are murdering Ukrainians in their sleep or maiming them for life, almost every day. Prison guards torture prisoners of war, sometimes to death. Tens of thousands of Russians deliberately target not only schools, markets and hospitals, but also Ukraine's cultural heritage, burning books in libraries. The destruction is systematic, organized and carried out by an entire army.
The “ordinary Russians” acted as these “ordinary Germans” (and from other nationalities all across Europe) had done with the Jews and the populations, more in the East than in the West, of the territories they occupied. Just as not all, or even most, Nazi Germans were indoctrinated with Nazi ideology, not all the Russians who committed these massacres were acting out of respect for Putin’s ideology. They were not defending themselves as soldiers, but driven by the desire to kill, more and more, for free. Propaganda alone—as we recently saw with the film Russian At War by former Russia Today contributor Anastasia Trofimova—aims to present Russian soldiers as normal, even nice people who have nothing to do with this kind of crime. The crime is too dazzling not to see it at almost every turn.
Some will say that it wasn’t all Russians, any more than it was all Germans, but that doesn’t detract from the collective guilt of a nation whose own people committed crimes that have no statute of limitations. Those who protested against the war did so either because they did not wish to be conscripted, or because they saw no justification for it and considered that it could only bring misfortune to Russia. Only a few spoke out against the war because of the mass crimes and out of compassion for the Ukrainians—or Chechens, Georgians and Syrians before them. How many looked the other way, hating Putin perhaps for his destruction of freedom at home and the corruption of his regime, but judging him only by his behavior at home, not by the genocide committed abroad, which has an entirely different significance and importance.
Next, let’s measure why, in the very logic of these dissidents, whose ambition is to anchor Russia permanently in the world of democracies, this passage through collective guilt is indispensable. If Putin and his henchmen are the only culprits, not only will it be easy to absolve the Russians of their own crimes, but there will be no awareness of how this country came to manufacture mass murderers. If, as in post-war Germany, there is no awareness of the burden of guilt, everything can go back to the way it was—and even this burden of guilt is not a vaccine for eternity. For a long time, I myself believed that a watertight distinction had to be made between the Russians and Putin—and I debated this with my Ukrainian friends in the years after 2014. Today, the scale of the crimes prevents me from doing so.
Admittedly, the responsibility/irresponsibility debate is not easy. As I have often stressed, what the Russians are today is the result of 98 years of dictatorship, some of it totalitarian. Successive powers, from Lenin to Putin, via Stalin and Brezhnev, have shaped—and destroyed—their soul and mind. But this irresponsibility, if we respect the intimate freedom of each individual, is also a form of guilt. I have frequently written that there is no such thing as Russian DNA—what fools sometimes refer to as the “Slavic soul”. What Russians are today is the result of a political process. But precisely to refute this fatalistic, deterministic theory of a Russian people “genetically” doomed to crime and oppression, it is essential to re-establish a sense of culpability in the crimes committed. They are not the result of the implacable mechanics of history.
That’s why it would be dangerous, even for Russia’s future, to portray Russians as victims. Certainly, the dissidents murdered, tortured and imprisoned are victims of the regime in a way—or the whole of society imprisoned in a totalitarian straitjacket. But the Russians must first open their eyes, before feeling sorry for themselves: the main victims, by far, are the people who are, day after day, murdered by the Russians. A comparison cannot even be tolerated.
The debate about Putin himself is inappropriate. Yes, he must be tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for all the crimes committed—as well as all the murderers. But how would the guilt of an entire people make his crime any less unspeakable? Yes, he is the one who allowed, authorized, instigated and encouraged all the other crimes, but they would not have existed without tens or hundreds of thousands of executors. The same can be said of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Assad.
There remains the closely related question of Russian political debate. Some claim that the opposition orientates its words to speak essentially to Russians, and that their words are linked to the hope of gaining a form of political appeal with the Russian population so that Russia’s transformation will be possible when the time comes. This would explain their lack of insistence on this guilt. However, if the Russian opposition wants to prepare for the future and make the Russian people aware of the reality of what happened, it must tell the truth. This is the price of political responsibility.
On Russia’s future
Most of Russia’s opposition figures intend to promote a democratic and liberal Russia, at peace with its neighbors, banishing all aggression and, in the minds of some, looking towards Europe, to which they consider that, in terms of values, Russia should belong. They also want—not unanimously—decentralized, even truly federalized power, and a free justice system. Of course, they are also calling for a fight against corruption commensurate with the evil, all the more so as corruption is also a factor in strengthening the dictatorship and invading every pore of Russian society through compromise with the regime. This liberal part of the Russian opposition—again, not unanimous on this point—presents an overall vision that seems perfectly acceptable.
The problem, to tell the truth, lies in the silences. What does the opposition have to say about Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons and their doctrine of use? Is it prepared to accept, if certain peoples so request, the independence of certain current Russian regions? What is its position on the reparations owed to Ukraine, how much and through which way? Many are also still silent on the repatriation of deported Ukrainian children. Does the opposition want Russia to maintain its policy of influence in the rest of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia? How does it position itself in relation to Asia on the one hand, and NATO on the other?
To put it another way, does the opposition still see Russia as a “great power”, or even as the heir to an empire, or as a “normal power”, focused on its own development and renouncing any specific role in world affairs—like post-war Japan and democratic Germany? In view of the crimes that Moscow has committed without interruption over the past 25 years—not to mention the Communist era—the opposition must answer these questions. They must be committed to make Russia small again and blame any dream of grandeur.
This question also goes back to the opposition’s historical vision: does it consider that the “new” Russia, should it one day come to power, is part of a form of continuity in Russian history, even if it intends to break with its criminal tradition, or is it ready to conceive of a small Russia that would have no role in the world? Is it also ready to acknowledge the usurpation or intrusion that was Moscow’s acquisition of the seat of permanent member on the United Nations Security Council from the former USSR, and is it prepared to relinquish it? We can’t pretend that these questions are secondary, because they indicate the break—or not—that the opposition is determined to make. If it is a question of “saving” Russia’s so-called “greatness”, it will remain a major danger to the world.
Many of my friends in this opposition also see the way to a democratic Russia. Before Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine, I myself found it hard to imagine a spontaneous movement in this direction. Since then, I’ve come to believe it even less, in the light of what I perceive of both society and the structure and organization of Russian power. We can certainly envisage Putin’s downfall, his replacement, even his handover to the International Criminal Court, but not, in the present circumstances, his replacement by a “liberal”—the arrival in power of another silovik is far more likely.
Should we then talk about Russia’s future as the opposition does? Not only is it not illegitimate, it’s necessary. I myself tried to do so in a long essay dedicated to Vladimir Kara-Murza shortly after his imprisonment. But this presupposes articulating a plan, as I did in the second part of this essay, within the framework of a strategy that the Allies are struggling to define. Ultimately, it’s up to them. But this strategy presupposes a sufficiently radical defeat of Russia, and a policy implemented not within a year of Ukraine’s victory, but over at least a decade. This plan for Russia’s future cannot be conceived without Ukraine. The opposition certainly has an essential role to play in working out this “plan”, but the prerequisites I have set out regarding Russia’s vision of the future are essential. There’s another one concerning Ukraine.
The Russian opposition must first talk about Ukraine
Since the start of the all-out war, I have been struck by a difference that I don’t think has been much noticed: representatives of the Russian opposition in exile, with a few rare exceptions, hardly speak about the massive crimes committed by the Russians in Ukraine, whereas those of the Belarussian opposition to Lukashenka’s regime insistently and forcefully do so on a regular basis. The former show little compassion for particularly appalling or murderous Russian murders, whereas the latter, notably the president-elect in exile and the members of her team, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, do so regularly. The same is true of several Syrian activists who speak of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, drawing a justified parallel with those they suffer in their own country.
It’s as if Belarussians—and Georgians too, for that matter—identify with Ukrainians, both of whom are victims of Russian imperialism and its murderous repression, as were Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, while the Russian opposition fails to understand and intimately feel the abomination of these crimes. They sometimes equate Russian and Ukrainian political prisoners, both of whom are victims of Putin’s regime. Yet there can be no analogy between the two, as if Ukraine were not another nation that has nothing to do with Russia, as if we could equate internal repression with external aggression, as if, above all, we could draw an equivalence, even if only formal, between the hundreds of Russians assassinated by Putin’s regime and the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians murdered by the Russians.
Every year, I commemorate with emotion and gravity the murders of Natalia Estemirova, Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov and a few others who warned of Putin’s mass crimes from the outset. I have spoken clearly of murder in relation to Navalny. I have also often written that repression at home is a harbinger of aggression abroad. But the analogy between the murderous repression of opponents and the systematic massacre of Ukrainians would be as shocking as a parallel between the first Nazi camps for opponents and the death camps intended primarily for Jews. The comparison itself would be infamous.
This is undoubtedly where I feel somewhat deprived, certainly in terms of my power of conviction, but above all in terms of my ability to understand. Why is it that the vast majority of Russian dissidents don’t talk about Ukrainians? Why don’t they pay regular tribute to them? Why, it must be said again and again, do they not formulate a repentance for the crimes committed by the Russians against the Ukrainians? I’ve already mentioned the exceptional example of those Russian feminist activists who defied motion by erecting votive monuments, ephemeral in construction, to the victims of Bucha, Izyum or Mariupol. I’ve already mentioned this Russian writer as haunted by the evil committed, who seemed to be distancing himself from his own language, the language of the assassins? Why don’t they acknowledge that Russia never was a “great nation” and that it will never be, whereas Ukraine actually is?
To articulate a political message, you have to experience these crimes in your own skin. You have to be haunted by them. You have to dream at night of children crushed by the concrete of their collapsed building or pulverized by a Russian missile. However, I don’t get the impression that this is the case for the vast majority of Russian dissidents who are alarmed, albeit justifiably, about the fate of their own, who may die tomorrow in prison, but for whom the Ukrainian dead are not their dead. What I’m talking about here has nothing to do with the alleged “brotherhood” of Russians and Ukrainians, which is pure Kremlin propaganda as has been well established, but precisely with the feeling of guilt I mentioned earlier.
In my opinion, this is what the Russian opposition—apart from figures like Garry Kasparov, who has always been irreproachable on the question of crimes, the need for a radical defeat of Moscow and the denunciation of Western procrastination, and a few others—has failed to understand: the Russian opposition must stop with its long-winded self-complaining. I was, I believe, the first to relay the message of the murdered dissidents, and tomorrow I will continue to plead for their release. Nor will I ever blame the Russian opposition for turning to their own. But still! Let’s never compare their fate, or even the hundreds of admirable Russian figures murdered by Putin, with the hundreds of thousands of murdered Ukrainians. We must always return to this primary reality. A sense of proportion is important.
I often cite the example of the op-ed published in by Zoya Svetova, an admirable person for her courage in resisting Putin and taking real risks in Russia. But what better way to tarnish her fight than to call, as she did, for Europeans not to limit visas for Russians? It is this complaint that is inaudible and indecent when, day after day, Ukrainian children are being murdered.
In short, Russian dissidents must stop obsessing about Russia, that miserable petty country doomed to atone for its endless crimes for decades. Let them be more obsessed with Ukraine. Saving Ukraine is the only battle that counts in the face of history. Worrying about Russia can only be preventive—to prevent it from doing harm for the rest of the centuries—but it means radically humiliating it as a nation. Every Russian must be imbued with this awareness of crime like a stubborn, rancid odor. This is also why sanctions must mean hitting them directly—apart from the fact that sanctions which “ordinary Russians” may suffer are also necessary to undermine the Russian war machine.
To this day, Germany feels an indelible moral debt to the Jews, which also extends to Israel. Indeed, Berlin is often criticized for sometimes going so far as to abandon any critical view of the Israeli government (which is a debate I won’t get into here). It is essential that the Russian opposition also express this debt to the Ukrainians, Syrians, Belarussians, Georgians, Africans, etc. martyred by Russia. It’s a debt that will never be extinguished, because guilt doesn’t disappear with the death of the guilty. It is forever the weight that hangs over a nation. This debt, moreover, also weighs on France, for even if the Collaboration involved only a minority of French people, it was France which, in the words of late President Jacques Chirac, had committed the irreparable.
If they fail to express this debt, the representatives of the opposition will have failed in their historical duty. They will also have hindered the work of conscience that their country must undertake. We can appreciate the difficulty of the task facing them, since it involves converting an entire people to an awareness of crime. It may even be impossible. But they cannot, without betraying their own principles, dispense with it.