Aleksander Cherkasov: "War is a political Viagra."

"We did not let the tragedy be turned into a statistic." Aleksander Cherkasov is a Russian human rights activist, journalist, and physical engineer. For the last 10 years he headed the board of the "Memorial" human rights centre, which, together with the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties and the Belarusian lawyer Ales Belyatskiy, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. After Memorial's liquidation, Aleksander left the country. Aleksander Cherkasov talks about how the work of Memorial began, about the post-Soviet wars and the role of sentiment in the war with Ukraine, and about personal and collective responsibility in the Witnesses Project.

Tell us about yourself

– My name is Aleksander Cherkasov. I am from Moscow. A lifetime ago I was an engineer-physicist. For 15 years I worked at the Kurchatov Institute. I am in my 34th year at Memorial. I worked mostly in the post-Soviet wars. Now I am also doing something related to that.

How did you end up at Memorial?

– A physicist is a physicist, but I was a boy brought up by chemists, who read samizdat (outlaw underground books – tr.), which my parents hid from everyone, but it is hard to hide from a boy. When I didn't get into the Mechanics anв Mathematics, I went to work. A month later, the photocopier of the main building of the Kurchatov Institute started multiplying the Tamizdat (russian literature published overseas – tr.) edition of Strugatsky in six copies. In general, it was natural.

What did "Memorial" represent when it began?

– And these were the same young people who had about the same concerns. That something was wrong and something is wrong now. Namely, that armed conflicts were breaking out on the periphery of the Soviet Union. Somewhere there are elections being interfered, and somewhere there are shootings. And there is no reliable information about it. There was no normal journalism, no normal war journalism then, and the fog of war was the same as it is now. People who have some scientific methods can sometimes use very indirect signs which are not falsified, because who is going to look in the hospital register or in the call log of the fire department, they can reconstruct what is going on. Fights or pogroms, fires or arson, when everybody lies. Hemingway wrote in his novel "The Fifth Column", which is about Madrid, about the year 37, he had such a character as counterintelligence officer Philip. Hemingway wrote about him: "He believed nothing of what he heard and almost nothing of what he saw." A normal approach to information, even in our time.

What is the importance and value of Memorial's work for Russia and beyond?

– If we talk about the work of the Human Rights Centre, the work in the post-Soviet wars, it seems that we also did not do what we were supposed to do. We didn't do what we were going to do. Our mission was formulated as studying the totalitarian past in order to prevent its repetition. Ta da! We have a repetition in some perfectly classic forms. At least we know something now. It's not just a question of understanding the processes that went on. We have prevented the tragedy from being turned into a statistic. The names of people have been preserved. This is not the history of some processes or currents. Not history recorded from angelic heights, but focused on individuals.

In the early '90s, when a wave of rehabilitations began, the names of the victims were mentioned, but the names of the executioners were not. Was this critical?

– Thirty-odd years ago, at the end of '92, there was no re-certification of the senior staff of the Ministry of Security. Some Viktor Vasilievich Cherkesov, an investigator, then head of the investigative department of the KGB directorate for Leningrad and the region, who had been involved in dissident cases all his career, he became head of the Security Ministry Directorate for St. Petersburg. After that, he had a varied career. He was in charge of the Goskomshit, i.e., Drug Control. But he is remembered for his article about the Chekists as the new nobility, and for his words: "Russia didn't fall into the abyss because it was hooked on the Chekists' hook. Some journalism, of course.

But Putin is also a man who was at work from the very beginning to the very end catching dissidents and was by no means such a jolly counter-intelligence guy. Here they all stayed, and became the very new elite that helped bring us back to the past, in a new spin. Yes, that's one of the reasons we didn't make it. There were others. For all these 30 years, it's been a common societal assumption that the Soviet Union was ruined by the U.S. "Pindostan" Americans. In fact, they didn't. In '90, realising that something was going wrong, that many of the union republics were going to come out, something would have to be done about it in Moscow, on Old Square, the Kremlin came up with an ingenious plan. We need to make sure that the Kremlin, Moscow, the Union Centre is needed by the republics. Needed in resolving conflicts between these republics and autonomies. From that point on, the Union Centre at least did not interfere with the growth of separatist sentiments in the autonomies. Because the Union has the internal troops, the Union has the army. If anything, they will go in as peacekeepers. They are needed. No one thought there was no such thing as controlled destabilisation. Nobody thought that at a critical moment, everything would go to hell. That's where it went.

But after August '91, Russia took the baton, trying to maintain influence in the post-Soviet space, continuing exactly the same policy. In '92, we, a democratic Russia, seemed to separate ourselves from all those wars somewhere. At best we went in as peacekeepers to South Ossetia after the Dagomys agreements. And in July of '92 in Transnistria, where General Lebed brought peace. In fact, Russia was involved in five hybrid wars. Russia stabilised what it did not prevent, to put it mildly, from destabilising. After Afghanistan, after the withdrawal of troops in '89, Russia did not stop fighting. More than 40 years, if you count from December of 79. And it preserved the tradition of "The Army is our formidable glory," the culture of different kinds of special forces, maintained that subculture. And Russia, unlike other post-Soviet countries, had oil and gas, that is, a source of money. All of this allowed Russia to maintain a large number of powerful law enforcement agencies. The first Chechen war, the second Chechen war, and so on. Add to this the impunity of those who committed crimes in these wars, and we'll get what we have now. When all the commanders of the gangs in Ukraine had previously commanded a gang in Syria. And even before that had a rich career connected with the Caucasus or Central Asia. Russia's post-Soviet wars are not isolated events, but a chain of wars, a chain of crimes, a chain of impunity.

Your first thoughts and feelings on February 24?

– On February 24, 22, we were supposed to go back to Russia, me and my colleagues. And then there was the war. And then we had a mate arrested in Moscow. And here we are at the airport trying to do something about the lawyer. And here we were flying on an airplane that was not going through the Caspian Sea, but through Eastern Europe. Anyway, on the other hand, I haven't been in these wars since February 24th. And this feeling that all this is close, it was there all the time.

Was the war a personal choice of Putin, or was it programmed by the logic of post-Soviet Russia?

– It's very tempting to say that everything was programmed by all logic. It gets rid of responsibility. Because if everything was programmed, then nothing could be changed. So there were no bifurcation points, no choice points where you could intervene, where you could do something. It wasn't programmed. But precisely because the right choices were not made at the right moments, we are now in this state. As Fazil Iskander said in Chegem: "Such is the time in which we stand!"

What role can ressentiment play in what is going on?

– I am a simple former engineer. I do not know such words, but if you say the words more simply - "nostalgia for the past", "revenge". Well, yes, revanchism in its purest form. The once-beaten generals who once crawled out of Europe, out of the former Soviet republics, out of Chechnya, got a chance to get even. At what cost? Decades and the lives of entire generations have been lost. A whole century is crossed out. That century, when there could have been something else besides survival, other than these wars, terror, and attempts at life in the midst of wars and terror. It's a shame. But if someone has nostalgia for the times when they were 20-something years old and a right ice-cream then why should others suffer from it.

What could have been done to avoid this war?

– You are opening Pandora's Box, because there is so much here. The right understandings, the right actions then in the early 90s. I saw Colonel Shamanov at the Azerbaijani headquarters in '92, but I did not understand what that meant. And the re-attestation, i.e. the lustration of the state security, and the prevention of a small civil war in Moscow in '93. It was largely a conscious choice. And preventing a war in Chechnya, which was just a political technology operation, an attempt to boost the country's plummeting rating. Political Viagra. Nothing works better than a small victorious war. An attempt to reclaim a province that had fallen away from the bosom of the Empire. The list could go on and on. But it requires knowing this history in detail, understanding where mistakes were made, and trying not to repeat them. It seems we will have a second chance to make the same mistakes, or not to make them.

Are pseudo-historical lectures like "Lenin invented Ukraine" a political ploy or a real shift in people's minds?

– Normal people travel a lot, talk to other people a lot. They know that there really are other people. If Russia traveled more, communicated more, maybe people would believe it less. Of course, this is all some kind of wild, fierce nonsense. But how does this fierce nonsense differ from the words of comrade Dolgikh, who came to the Caucasus in eighty-eighth year, and said: "Well you two brotherly Islamic nations, Armenia and Azerbaijan, can't you agree?" In what part are they talking nonsense, knowing it's a lie, and in what part are they just dormant and believing their own lies, I don't know. Does it really matter that much?

What's wrong with Russia?

– There are a lot of things that are wrong. First of all, people don't take responsibility. They delegate the choice to someone else. A Georgian mate used to say: "Democracy is not like eating lobio." It's more like baking bread. You have to bake bread every day. Choose every day, control power every day. Focused attention on what's going on – every day. And if you let it go, that's what happens.

Why did you leave Russia?

–  This was the decision of my colleagues. The thing is that in the case on the liquidation of the Memorial Human Rights Centre I was the only one mentioned personally, with the wording "Justification of extremism and terrorism. This sentence didn't hold up in court, but when the Federal Security Service took over our liquidation, we were arrested and searched. Then there had to be interrogations. For some reason I didn't want to be interrogated. I left. A month later they started calling me and inviting me.

Who is to blame for this war?

The number of guilty here is large. Putin may be first on the list. There are a lot of different characters out there. And those who previously committed a terrible act, but were not punished and so were able to participate in this war. I hope that each of these people will also be named and there will be no rest for them. None.

Should Russians be held accountable - personally, collectively?

Responsibility is, in general, a personal choice, something a person takes upon himself and does something with the understanding that it depends on him. If he doesn't do that, then people get caught up in things that it's better not to think about. I love my city, my country very much. Like some of the Old Testament characters who begged the Lord to save this city. I don't know if this city can be saved. I remember the Lord saying that if 20 righteous men could be found, he would not destroy it. I know more than 20 righteous people. whether I will be heard, I don't know.

Is the Russian invasion of Ukraine Europe's fault? Could the West have prevented it?

– After World War II, some conclusions were drawn. Not very simple ones. States that violate human rights within their national borders in a crude mass sooner or later become a threat to international peace and security. It is very simple and the system of international organisations was built like this: human rights are not the internal affairs of a state. Violation of human rights is not an internal state affair. But at a certain moment our Western partners, as the Kremlin bosses like to say, forgot their obligations. In particular, for example, not a single case out of hundreds has been investigated in the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights on the crimes committed in Chechnya. The result is what we have today. But it would be a very great temptation to shift responsibility to somebody else.

Putin will not last forever. How do you see Russia evolving after Putin leaves?

– You know, I'm not a good pythian. Besides, there's already a queue lined up to describe what's coming later. I just realise that it's going to be a very long and complicated job. Busy, for many years. But without that daily work, without baking bread every day, we're going to have to stay at this school for a third year as well. Whether we will have a third year, I don't know.

Will you go back to Russia?

– One of the temptations is to dream about when we cross the finish line. I'm going to disappoint everyone. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. You have to keep your marathon breath. To think, to speculate about when I'll be back, when I'll be back, tomorrow, the day after that, is to knock yourself out of breath. Twenty-two years ago, I talked to my Chechen colleagues about that, but I didn't think it would last this long. The more important it is not to take your breath away with empty dreams of what tomorrow will bring. When tomorrow comes, we'll see. You know, it's easier for Germans. They have futurum zwei in their grammar, the second future. I hope we have a future. On the other hand, reasoning about the future is also nothing. As Stanislav Markelov, who was murdered in January 19, said, not said, but written in perhaps his best article, there is no future for us other than the one we create here and now. And this reasoning, this lining up of plans – I won't get in line.