I’m not the only one to have thought — and I have thought so for a long time now — that one of the key failures of the Russia that emerged from the wreckage of the USSR was the absence of any material accounting for the Soviet past. There was no Soviet Nuremberg. There are plenty of reasons for that, not least that so much of the old regime had survived in one form or another into the new era. This failure is just one reason for the current Russian war on Ukraine, driven as it is, in part, by a dangerously flawed view of Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet history.

Vladimir Sorokin may be Russia’s most famous living writer. He is not known for understatement, and his books are not, shall we say, PG. It is, in particular, worth reading his Day of the Oprichnik (2006), a disturbingly prescient satire of the way that Russia was going. He now lives outside of the country.

About a month ago, Sorokin spoke to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty about the war in Ukraine. The whole interview is well worth reading, but much of it concerned the unresolved Soviet past.

RFE/RL: You once said that the corpse of the Soviet world was not buried in the 1990s but rather continued to rot in the corner all these years. Now that corpse has stood up and started killing. How is that possible? What kind of creature is this?

Sorokin: A zombie. And, as zombies do, it came back to life, but not as a human. During the era of [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin, it was shoved into a corner and covered with sawdust. They hoped it would rot away on its own. But no. It turned out to be alive – in an infernal, otherworldly sense. It was brought back by champions of imperial resentment, both on television and in real life. They hooked it up to electrodes, and, to use an expression, the corpse got up off its knees. Now it is destroying foreign cities and threatening the world with nuclear weapons . . .

RFE/RL: The war in Ukraine has nullified the efforts of millions of our countrymen who wanted to live in a new way. All the efforts of the last 30 years — since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika — have been in vain. It feels like our entire conscience existence has been for nothing. Don’t you feel this way?

Sorokin: Of course, that is an ontological question, but it wasn’t all in vain. If only because we are still alive, and we can talk about all this. There is a sufficient number of Russians with common sense who understand that the inertia of five centuries was too strong. It turned out that a small group of democrats in the 1990s was not able to stop this machine. Perhaps because they included many former communists. It wasn’t like in Germany in the late 1940s or in Czechoslovakia in the 1990s. We didn’t have a Vaclav Havel, unfortunately. Germany suffered complete military defeat, and the victors decided everything. They dug the grave for the corpse of Nazism, and German anti-fascists threw it in.

In the 1990s, most of the countries of the former Soviet bloc managed to bury totalitarianism. But the Soviet Union collapsed of its own unsustainability.

Sorokin’s reference to the “machine” is a reference to the way that he sees power as having being structured in the USSR and, indeed, under the czars:

The state machinery exists according to models constructed in the 16th century. The present “power vertical” does not significantly differ from the pyramid of power created by Ivan the Terrible. Of course, it isn’t made of brick and wood, but rather of glass and concrete.

There’s a lot to that, but there is also something else, to which Sorokin alludes, which is that, unlike Germany, Russia never had a “year zero.” By contrast, in 1945 there was an abrupt break from the Nazi system (which, incidentally, had “only” lasted twelve years) that was enforced by the war’s victors. What is more, Germans, living amid ruins, and with millions of their people dead, and the crimes of the Third Reich visible to all, could see where Nazism had taken them. Even then, the abrupt political break was not quite matched either psychologically or societally. That took much longer than is usually understood.

Now look at post-Soviet Russia. It had lost its Eastern European empire, and its Soviet republics, but it remained a vast, powerful country. It did go through some very tough times in the 1990s, but too much of that was blamed on the country’s switch to a form of capitalism rather than on the principal culprit, the system that had created such a profound economic crisis in the first place, and of which enough had survived to hobble and distort Russia’s transformation.

Another difference between Russia and the Eastern European countries was that the latter benefited from a living memory of capitalism. There was a very real sense that communism had been imposed on them, as indeed it had. It was widely seen as an alien imposition — as something to be shrugged off.

An overwhelming majority of Russians, by contrast, had lived under communism for all their lifetimes and felt that, for all its faults, it was “theirs.” It was, after all, the legacy of their revolution and the system that they, one way or another, had built. In 1996, I wrote for NR about a visit to Russia’s far north. Someone I met there was a man named Vladimir Mityn. He had begun looking for traces of those who had been deported there at a time when such research was still frowned upon.

The piece ended like this:

For Russia’s is the holocaust that worked, that devastated a continent, and then disappeared into a new ruling class. The society it leaves behind is hopelessly compromised, still tempted by a past that it has never been allowed to understand. While the survivors of the Gulag generations still live, there needs to be a reckoning, a Soviet Nuremberg which might influence the attitudes of the new Russia before it is too late.

But it will never happen. No one wants it. Not even Vladimir Mityn, a man who wanders through forests in search of history. “You see,” he explains, “I was a Communist myself.”