In August 1991 my father felled an old birch. A huge birch that looked likely to fall onto our dacha. Once, the birch had shielded us from the fierce sun on hot summer days. Later it became a constant danger. I don’t know whether my father compared the rotten birch with the Soviet Union. Perhaps he couldn’t allow himself to make such a heretical comparison, even in 1991.
Day after day he climbed to dizzying heights and worked up there, hidden in the leaves. Sometimes I heard his powerful voice coming from far away: ‘Look out! Coming down!’
Then he would lower a sawn-off part of the tree on a rope. I had to roll the log to one side and check the rope for frayed fibres. Metre by metre I let the heavy rope slide through my fingers. What a rope it was! I’d never seen one like it before. The green fibres were intertwined with copper wire that gleamed in the sun and made the rope look like a snake.
Everyone in the dacha settlement knew that my father owned this rope, and people often came round to borrow it. No matter what you hung on that rope, it never broke. ‘Good quality’, my father said. ‘Very good quality, they don’t make things like this anymore’. He was right. Durable things were rare in the Soviet Union.
For that reason, the rope had a magical quality for me. Where did it come from? What wizards had left it behind with us? How much did my parents or grandparents pay for it? For that indestructible rope, that looked so much like a strange snake?
But I never asked. It was an unwritten family rule. You’re told what you’re told. Anything else must remain in the shadows. I never questioned the rule. It was just how it was.
The birch was gone. The Soviet Union was gone. But the rope remained – like an unbreakable bond between two times. A throughline, a golden thread, Ariadne’s thread. Or shackles. Damnation made manifest. It was only much later that I understood the true meaning of the rope.
My grandmother, who owned our dacha, had been married twice. My grandfather Grigoriy, my mother’s father, an officer in the Red Army, died of his war wounds in the sixties. My grandmother’s second husband, Aleksandr, died when I was six months old. Both were like phantoms, ghosts, portraits on the wall, minor characters in family conversations.
But there was also an inheritance. A valuable inheritance. In my grandmother’s Moscow home was a chocolate box labelled ‘Finest Selection’. Inside, there were no chocolates. Just the finest selection of the Soviet Union’s highest decorations. An Order of Lenin. Two Orders of the Red Star. Orders of the Red Banner, also two. And countless medals, like coins, like fish scales. The open box shone like treasure: gold, silver, ruby red. It was heavy. It had an irresistible allure: symbols of power, symbols of a nation’s greatness. I was entranced every time. Or bewitched. A question of perspective.
When nobody was looking, I would take the Red Star and hold it against my shirt in front of the mirror. I imagined myself standing in a row next to the heroes who had fought against fascists, imperialists and other enemies of my homeland. A long-serving general would then call out my name and award me the Red Star, a replica of the Kremlin stars… It was like a patriotic orgasm, a waking dream, a wonderful mirage that I never grew tired of seeing.
Nobody had told me so, but I was absolutely sure that the orders had belonged to Grandfather Grigoriy. He was a captain, had fought at Stalingrad and had been one of the first to cross the Dnieper in the Soviet offensive in 1943. He had been badly wounded three times… and Grandfather Alexsandr? A nobody, a good-for-nothing. In other words, a civilian. No photographs in uniform, no war stories that I was aware of… his worldly goods, which were left at the dacha, consisted of the baskets he took mushroom-picking, bamboo fishing rods, a small fishing stool, a straw hat, a linen jacket… A stupid, boring civilian. It was no coincidence that so little was said about him in the family.
During my childhood I thought we were a completely normal family. Normal in the Soviet sense: no memories of the time before the Revolution, no relatives abroad, no family tree, no history… As if we had come into being with the Soviet Union. One hundred percent Soviet, all our possessions Soviet, all our memories Soviet.
I knew that both my grandmothers had been born before the Revolution, in 1908 and 1909. But I paid no attention to the years between their births and the Revolution. They were insubstantial, a time before the beginning of time, the other side of the horizon, unreal. An empty, meaningless past, that could not and ought not to have anything to do with me.
But in 1993, two years after the departure of the communists, my other grandmother (always cautious, always playing it safe), let us read her handwritten memoir. We did have a family tree. We had a history before the Revolution. We had lost relatives abroad, including some with German and Polish roots. We were not, in fact, one hundred percent Soviet. We were a remnant, a scrap, a splinter of a large family that had not survived the civil war, the Stalin era and the Second World War. It was a miracle. And a disaster. A mass grave instead of a past. A dead past that could never be revived.
But I tried to revive it. I searched in archives for the missing people. Searched for destroyed churches, manors and family homes. Plunged into the shadowy land of loss, the land of utter injustice. That was the paternal side of the family. On the maternal side, as a counterweight, as a sign of the possibility of justice, stood Grandfather Grigoriy. And on the scales of destiny lay a chocolate box full of weighty, righteous, honourable war medals.
I found a letter among some records belonging to a relative of my grandmother. The wife of a man who had been arrested and murdered in September 1937 had written to the KGB in 1957. She said that two days after her husband’s arrest, one of the NKVD agents who had arrested him had moved into her husband’s room. As she wrote in 1957, twenty years later: ‘When he opens the door, I sometimes see some of my husband’s belongings, which mean a lot to me as mementoes of him.’
Her husband was later rehabilitated due to ‘a lack of incriminating evidence’. That means the person who arrested him was guilty. But she did not dare demand justice. She continued to live next-door to the culprit. She asked (almost an act of bravery) for these mementoes, which were so precious to her, to be returned. She knew that justice was absolutely impossible. That was just a fact of nature. And she lived with it.
It was as if I had been hit. Why, I asked myself, do I too lack any thirst for justice? Why is there no ethical ignition switch, no spark to ignite a desire for revenge, no plea for divine judgement? I remember those who were killed, I cherish their memory – but I too do not dare demand revenge for their deaths. It is no coincidence that I see ghosts, but I do not crave revenge like Hamlet.
One day I went into my grandmother’s former apartment. I wanted to know when and why Grandfather Grigoriy had been honoured. Somewhere there had to be an officer’s identification card recording the reason for each of his awards. It turned out that the documents had been carefully hidden. Why, I wondered, would my grandmother have hidden them before her death? But I found them. Two officer’s cards, not just one. My second grandfather, Aleksandr, the uninteresting civilian, also had one. The ‘awards’ page in Grandfather Grigoriy’s card was completely empty. There must be some mistake, I thought. Maybe he had been issued a new card and the military commissariat forgot to fill out the page.
No. All the orders and medals belonged to Grandfather Aleksandr. He was no civilian. He was a secret service agent. A colonel in the political police. He had served in the VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB. He had been awarded the Order of Lenin, the Red Star and the Red Banner in 1937, the year of the Great Purge.
After this discovery I asked my father if he knew the truth. He did.
He knew the truth and yet he had welcomed my second grandfather into our home, shared a table and food with him, drunk vodka and celebrated my birth with him. The last son of a destroyed family and a career destroyer sitting at the same table.
Why, I asked, did you not tell me? I thought, replied Father, that it was an unnecessary burden for you. You didn’t have to share it. And suddenly, without me asking, he told the story of the green rope. Grandfather Aleksandr had broken his silence one day when he was completely drunk. Maybe he wanted to boast, maybe he wanted to instil fear.
In 1920 he had been drafted into the special force responsible for requisitioning grain during the civil war. They were so brutal that the farmers revolted. The rebels fought bravely and tirelessly; not all that long ago, they had been soldiers in the First World War. And they had something else to help them. An icon of the Mother of God. A revered old icon that people in the area believed had a special power. The farmers saw her as a protectress who gave them strength in their struggle against the godless.
The Red Army’s command staff decided that the icon had to be destroyed. Then the revolt would lose its power. The commander asked for volunteers. The first time, nobody stepped forward. The ranks of the special forces included brutal thugs and sadists, and yet… The Mother of God. The. Mother. Of. God. The commander asked again, this time more insistently. My second grandfather stepped forward. He saw a chance to distinguish himself. Two equally young comrades followed him.
Together they found the icon and, under the eyes of the distraught farmers, fired a volley of gunshots at it. They sank what was left of it in a deep well. And the rope that had been used to hang the large, heavy icon in the church… My second grandfather took it with him. Never throw a good thing away. It will come in useful again some time in life. The green rope, green with interwoven copper wire, which as a child I believed was a magical object.
The rope that was not allowed to be used. The rope that belonged to the murderer of the Mother of God. The rope that physically bound me to him. Like an umbilical cord.
The impunity of state criminals. What does it consist of? Fear? Shame? A sense of loyalty? The feeling that somehow everyone is guilty?
The crimes of the Soviet Union have gone virtually unpunished. One reason for this is civil society’s consistent focus on commemorating the victims, rather than restoring justice or punishing the perpetrators. But memory does not create justice. Lists of victims do not punish the murderers.
The most common, shortest explanation is that we have no right to judge. Or, as the playwright Griboyedev put it, А судьи кто? Who are the judges? This seems to be an ethically considered position. On closer inspection, however, it turns out to be a kind of moral paralysis, a renunciation of any effective morality.
Impunity leads to more impunity. And so it becomes the norm. In the thirty years and more since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has committed new state crimes and started new colonial wars. Astonishingly, the Kremlin regime’s opponents have never made a demand for justice a core part of their agenda. The opposition spoke first and foremost about corruption, civil liberties, stolen votes. But not about blood, ethnic cleansing, the widespread use of torture and Chechen lives destroyed. In my view this is the same moral paralysis, a conscious or unconscious reluctance to confront the state directly in its role as murderer – a futile attempt to tame the man-eating wolf.
Even now, in the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, in the fifth year of this war of extermination, I do not get the impression that the Russian opposition in exile is truly aware of the magnitude and urgency of the question of restoring justice. That it understands that the question must be addressed in the clearest possible terms.
Some say we first need to get to the point where we can confront the question. We must be realistic, they say. We thereby unwittingly lay the foundations for the next deal, a pact with the devil. We hope that the next evildoers will at least be a bit better and more humane. We continue to glorify dissidents and new political prisoners, creating a smokescreen behind which to hide our lack of clear political will. The will to fight for justice for Ukraine, to punish Russian war crimes – no matter how many decades we have to wait.
We refuse to see or acknowledge this helplessness. A moral helplessness that is a result of a life lived under Russian imperial authoritarianism. A moral helplessness that paralyses us. And binds us to the perpetrators. Like an infinite green rope. Green with woven copper wire.
This is the text of a speech given in Dresden on 26 March 2026 at the opening of the annual conference of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde, titled ‘Authoritarianism and violence on eastern Europe’.