After Putin, Russia will need to reckon with its crimes |
Last month, two very symbolic — and very telling — news stories came out of Russia in the space of a few days. On April 19, under the cover of darkness, the authorities in the Siberian city of Tomsk demolished the Stone of Grief, a memorial to the victims of Soviet political repression that had stood on one of the city’s central squares since the early 1990s in honor of the hundreds of thousands of people murdered in this region by the communist regime and its security services. According to eyewitnesses, the monument was destroyed by tractors using their buckets to tear it down.