Dmitry Borodaenko @angdraug@mastodon.social

I was born in USSR. There were no votes in USSR. I remember Perestroika. When I was just a teen, my parents were seriously discussing going off the grid to sit out the civil war if the 1991 KGB putsch against Gorbachev succeeded. Everybody was surprised when it failed. What followed was very confusing time, people had no idea how democracy is supposed to work, including the people who somehow made it work anyway, for a few years.

If you don't want to accept the collective blame, don't. But then you've earned no right to feel national pride, either.

Like it or not, red terror and gulags are the national disgrace of the Russian people, and this disgrace isn't lessened by the fact that Russians suffered from it the most. Sweeping all these crimes under the rug, out of the way of national pride and patriotism, has only made Russia relive the worst parts of its history, instead of learning from them.

Feeling proud of achievements of other representatives of your nation is just as illogical as repenting for their crimes. Declaring people to be guilty of Nazi crimes just because their were born in Germany is a ridiculous injustice. But balancing the many causes for national pride with regular reminders of national disgrace is a good way to teach people to approach patriotism with a healthy doze of skepsis and caution.

Sadly, treating nations as entities is universal: politicians exploit it to manufacture feelings of national pride, patriotism, and, in its extreme form, xenophobia. Of course, it would have been better if all people on Earth dismissed this idea and felt pride and responsibility for achievements and mistakes of the entire humanity, not just an artificially isolated part of it. Instead, national pride does exist, and, in absence of collective responsibility, creates collective irresponsibility.

Repentance is an expression of remorse and acknowledgement of guilt. At the individual level, it is a completely natural feeling, an essential part of emotional development.

Generalizing repentance to a whole nation is indeed a stretch, based on two questionable postulates: considering nation as a single entity, and extending collective responsibility for actions of that entity to every person within it.

It's never a good idea to take something to an extreme, and yet I think that Russians, who never took the bitter medicine of repentance for the crimes of Bolsheviks and Stalinists, and Americans, who still haven't repented for the genocide of the continent's native population, nor for racism and slavery, are missing out on an important part of building national character.

Collective Irresponsibility

Lately I've seen many calls to stop making Germans repent for Nazi crimes. A recent argument about this made me analyze the reasons I think it is a wrong call to make.

I first posted this on FB in 2017, when Russian Nazism was already evident to Russia's former colonies, but not yet obvious to the rest of the world. In 2020 I deleted my FB account. May 9, from now on #RussianShameDay, is a good day to revive this small prescient text. Thread.