HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

This is not a unique situation, of course. When a temporary government comes to power, forces linked to the old regime never disappear instantaneously from the face of the earth. Some of them will be eased out, but many will remain in place. And they won’t just remain in place; they’ll stay there with their money, their families, and with the old connections that they’ve built up along with their economic and social capital. They – or, to be more precise, already their  second and third level officials – will also be awaiting the opportunity to establish themselves in position. This is why any new group in power always has to try to avoid being crushed by representatives of the old power. But how they can achieve this? How do they define the borders that are so essential for their political defence? How do they avoid going too far in defending themselves against the old terror without giving rise to a new terror? Where do you draw the line of reasonable sufficiency when it comes to suppressing an internal counter-revolution?

These are the questions that many are struggling with today, not in an abstract sense but precisely when they consider recent experience. When they examine closely the 1990s, people want to understand: what did we miss? What mistakes were made that have allowed the Soviet Union to return? By far the most popular answer is that it’s because we didn’t instigate a purge of the old guard. When we look at today’s political situation you could argue that not carrying out a purge was a mistake. But I wouldn’t rush to this conclusion.

In such circumstances, a purge means removing the rights of the old elite. How widely this reaches can vary, both in terms of the people affected and the rights that are taken away from them. If we’re talking about Russia, then probably the most wide-ranging purge was carried out by the Bolsheviks after the revolution. They enacted repressive measures against millions of people who fell into the category of the so-called “privileged classes” of the old Russia (the gentry, members of the clergy, army officers, the kulaks and others). A significant percentage of them were repressed in various ways or even killed, while millions of others were denied the right to take part in various activities, professions were closed off to them, their children were deprived of the possibility to be educated and so on.

But this is an extreme example. After the velvet revolutions in Europe, velvet purges became fashionable. They were on a much smaller scale and a lot more gentle in terms of the pressure they put on the old elite. Whole social classes were no longer included among those who were purged. Now it was rather about individuals who directly cooperated with the regime or who occupied specific positions in the hierarchy. These could have been officials (in the first instance, of course, members of the law enforcement bodies or the special services), judges, secret agents and other similar categories. The lists of these people differed depending on the country, but the general principle was the same: a change from class-based repression to specific professional or political categories.

Naturally, in modern Russia you won’t find many people who would want to repeat “the red terror”. But in terms of milder restrictions, such as those applied in Eastern Europe or certain countries of the post-Soviet space, there tends to be a different opinion. A significant proportion of the liberally-minded intelligentsia today would welcome such an approach. People look to the past and say, “we didn’t do this in the 1990s – and look what happened!” But before answering the question as to whether or not this should be done, it would be sensible to ask whether in principle it would be possible to do this in Russia. And the answer to this question is not as simple as it may seem.

This so-called “mild purge” is principally aimed at breaking the automatic production chain of the nomenklatura – a somewhat closed circle of professional bureaucrats who amazingly manage to reinstate their positions inside any power set-up following a revolution. There are many examples of this; and they all show that – in the countries of the former USSR at least – no purge is going to solve this issue.