Where they burn books, the maxim goes, they will ultimately burn people. This prescient quotation predated the rise of the German National Socialists by over a century, but Heinrich Heine did not need a Nazi foil to identify where the authoritarian mindset that outright prohibits objectionable thought ultimately leads. Today, the international community’s cowed reaction to Russian aggression both on the foreign and domestic fronts seems to have reduced the axiomatic admonition “never again” to “well, maybe once in a while.” One of history’s greatest insanities threatens to repeat itself, and we dare not address the warning signs in the stark terms they deserve lest we acknowledge the gravity of the threat to our comfortable existences.
The government of the Russian Federation long ago committed to a policy that embraced the revisionist reconstruction of recent history and the remaking of Russian culture in the mold of an idealized past. For years, it was understood that journalists critical of the conduct of the Russian government were gambling with their lives. It seems likely that the next target of the Kremlin’s campaign to dismantle the reforms of the Gorbachev era will be the nation’s artists and visionaries.
The Russian government has already gone about the process of reintroducing Soviet-style bans on undesirable artistic content. For filmmakers, novelists, bloggers, and playwrights, to write provocative content with explicit language is to risk being charged a substantial fine. Moscow has also begun to censor evocative imagery. The graphic novelist Art Spiegelman was dismayed to discover last month that the Russian Federation has banned his Pulitzer Prize-winning series of books about the Holocaust, Maus, which ran afoul of the nation’s ban on the publication of the Swastika.
Calling it a “harbinger of a dangerous thing,” Spiegelman warned that Russia is attempting to sanitize the horrors of that period. At least, those that do not relate to the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazi menace. “We don’t want cultures to erase memory,” he added.
The Russian government’s crackdown on dissent has been so thorough that few dare to challenge it. “[A]lmost a quarter-century on, only remnants are left of that golden media era, and the few outlets still publishing bold, independent work are under constant threat,” The Committee to Protect Journalist’s Ann Cooper wrote of the demise of the Glasnost reforms. “Vladimir Putin, now in his 15th year as Russian leader, has systematically dismantled independent media and rolled up press freedoms within his own country.”
Having figuratively burned books, the Russian Federation now literally burns bodies.
To hide the evidence of the illegal war Russia is waging and supporting in neighboring Ukraine following the invasion and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, American lawmakers allege that Moscow is using mobile crematoriums to destroy the evidence of their involvement in the fighting.
“The Russians are trying to hide their casualties by taking mobile crematoriums with them,” Rep. William “Mac” Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin. “They are trying to hide not only from the world but from the Russian people their involvement.”
The U.S. and NATO have long maintained that thousands of Russian troops are fighting alongside separatists inside eastern Ukraine, and that the Russian government is obscuring not only the presence but also the deaths of its soldiers there. In March, NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow told a conference, “Russian leaders are less and less able to conceal the fact that Russian soldiers are fighting — and dying — in large numbers in eastern Ukraine.”
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Thornberry said he had seen evidence of the crematoriums from both U.S. and Ukrainian sources. He said he could not disclose details of classified information, but insisted that he believed the reports. “What we have heard from the Ukrainians, they are largely supported by U.S. intelligence and others,” he said.
This is not the only grotesquely familiar anecdote to emerge from the devolving Russian Federation within the last 24 hours. According to reports, the Kremlin is seriously investigating the use of prison labor to help prepare the nation for its showpiece World Cup games. Though that labor would not be entirely uncompensated, the use of prisoners to construct the facilities that will house members of the international soccer community is eerily reminiscent.
If this sounds alarmist, it should. There is no shortage of observers who will scoff at those who warn that Russia is going down a very dark road and opening a Pandora’s Box in the process. There is not much risk and even less virtue by adopting this outlook in regards to a still nascent crisis. And while the 21st Century’s scolds jealously preserve and enjoy the benefits of their pleasant and secure lives, the echoes of the 20th Century reverberate relentlessly, growing louder by the day. We dismiss them at our peril.
