Источник картинки (не коммерческое использование)

In the history of the countries of the former USSR, there are pages that are impossible to read without a shudder. Not because they are full of brutality — there has always been no shortage of that in history. But because they lay bare a mechanism that did not operate somewhere far away or in some distant past: it worked here, on our land, with our people. And, most terrifying of all, this mechanism has not disappeared even in our own time.

Let us begin with facts that can no longer be disputed. In 1943–1944, entire peoples were torn from their homelands and shipped in freight cars to Siberia and Central Asia. These were the Karachays, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, and the Crimean Tatars. Hundreds of thousands of people, including the elderly, women, and children, were declared “traitors” solely on the basis of their ethnicity. This was not punishment for specific crimes. It was collective retribution, unprecedented in the legal practice of the 20th century. Soviet law contained no provision for collective liability based on ethnicity. And all these deportations ran counter to the Constitution of the USSR. But who cared, when the so‑called “purity” of the state was at stake — almost like the fascists’ “purity” of the nation?

Yet there is a chapter that is spoken of much more quietly. And it may be even more horrifying.

After the Great Patriotic War, the country that had paid for victory with millions of lives became filled with the disabled. Veterans returned without arms and without legs. And what did the “just” Stalinist state do with them? In 1950, in Karelia, on Valaam Island, within the walls of an ancient monastery, a so‑called Home for War Veterans was established. Officially, it was the “Home for War and Labour Veterans.” In reality, it was a closed institution of a prison‑camp type, where those who had become inconvenient to the regime were taken. The legless and the armless, cynically dubbed “samovars,” were rounded up in the streets of cities and sent to the island, their documents annulled. It was as if these people had never existed. Eyewitnesses described the living conditions as classically prison‑like. Electricity was installed only two years after the facility opened; sewage and heating were lacking for a long time. In good weather, the disabled were carried out to the garden and hung from tree branches — simply so that they could breathe fresh air.

And formally, this was not a camp at all. Not an “execution,” as some publicists claim. It was something far more insidious. It was a cruel system of isolation. A mechanism that did not kill outright, but pushed people beyond the bounds of visibility. The society of victors had to look beautiful. Legless men on carts simply did not fit into this “socialist realist” image. And so they were removed. Not shot, but simply made invisible.

Today, historians argue: was this genocide? Was it a “deportation of the disabled”? Some call these stories a myth. But even if the numbers and details differ, the essence remains unchanged. A state that sends entire peoples to their deaths certainly will not stop at getting rid of its own disabled. And this is logical — because the logic here is singular: remove the inconvenient ones from sight.

Now let us ask the main question. What do Stalin’s deportations of peoples and Yeltsin’s “shock without therapy” have in common? What connects the camp on Valaam with the privatization of the 1990s? What links the lie about “traitor peoples” with the lie about a “bright future”? The answer is simple: continuity. These are not two different regimes. They are one and the same process, stretched across decades. Stalinism and Yeltsinism are not opposites. They are two stages of the same disease. In 1944, in the USSR, people were deported because they were “the wrong ones.” In the 1990s, in Russia, they were deceived, devalued, and left without pensions or social guarantees — also because they were “the wrong ones,” because they “did not fit in,” because they “were too slow.”

And this mechanism works flawlessly: first, create an enemy; then, make them invisible. In the Stalin years, these were the “special settlers” and the “rootless cosmopolitans.” In the Yeltsin years, they were the “state employees,” the “elderly,” the “inefficient.” And today? Today, they are those who disagree. Those who remember. Those who ask uncomfortable questions.

The end of this process is predictable. If lies remain the foundation of state policy, if the memory of the victims is replaced with convenient myths, if the inconvenient are still pushed to the margins, then nothing in society can change — at least, not for the better. The deadly red wheel of the state’s meat grinder will keep turning. And the only question is: who will be next?