Dealing with the Difficult Past

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But the promise didn’t hold, and we live not in the long shadow of justice, but in what might be called the age of impunity. In this world, power often shields itself from the mechanisms of responsibility it helped to create. International criminal law is inconsistently applied and is itself under attack. The promise of Nie wieder is not only broken—it is used, at times, to justify further violence. The hypothesis driving this project is that in societies that avoid formal judgment, the consequences of past and present violence do not disappear; they resurface internally, over time, in corrosive and destabilizing ways.

Course on Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding / Anti-War Activists Initiative

As the experience of Russia at the turn of the 1980s-90s shows, incomplete and inconsistent implementation of transitional justice measures creates conditions for democratization to fail, the rule of law not to be established, and authoritarian revenge to become possible. We believe that this negative experience should be taken into account in the political transition from Putin’s regime to liberal democracy. Preparations for the implementation of transitional justice should be initiated before the war ends and before the political regime in Russia changes.

The traditional view of transitional justice processes is that the state is the main actor while civil society acts more as a consultant and auditor of these processes. In the case of Russia, we want to emphasize the crucial importance of civil society participation as the main actor in initiating and preparing transitional justice processes.

This course on transitional justice includes an overview of the diversity of transitional justice practices in different societies, combined with practical modules aimed at developing a vision for building these processes in Russian society.

If we proceed from the primacy of the legal aspects of transitional justice, such as trials and reparations, then the conditions for launching these processes are pushed back to the point of democratic transition, which, in today’s Russia, appears to be a point on the historical horizon. At the same time, it must be understood that there exists, if not mass, then at least significant potential for resistance, reflection on violence, and a demand for a transition to democracy within society. If this demand is not supported now, time may be lost, and a new generation will have to start all over again, without being able to draw on the practices that society still preserves—from the work done by Memorial to the joint efforts of the civil and anti-war communities, which, although not consolidated, signify society’s efforts to resist.

The aim of this project is to develop an understanding of transitional justice processes in societies that have experienced large-scale violence and to formulate initial practices that could be applied now, before the democratic transition takes place. The conversation about understanding the past and present, as well as formulating a new social contract, must begin in schools. Therefore, at this stage, we see school teachers, museum workers, and civil society activists involved in educational projects both within Russia and abroad as the main audience for the project, and the work of truth commissions, memorialization*, and guarantees of non-repetition at this point in history we believe wll eventually become the responsibility of civil society.

* The work of the Special Tribunal (ad hoc) on the crimes of Russian aggression in Ukraine is also part of memorialisation. Crimes committed on Russian territory (abducted children, prisoners of war, illegally detained civilians, and crimes committed by the regime against its own people) will add to the number of crimes committed during this war, and the collection of evidence and documentation of massive human rights violations by civil society should be part of the evidence base for the Special Tribunal.

This course is also aiming to become a part of a broader task of developing a political vision of the integrity of transitional justice processes and promoting them in wider public, building a political language for discussing these processes, preparing the foundations for rebuilding the social fabric with guarantees for the rights of vulnerable groups, overcoming totalitarian and imperial legacies, and educational programmes aimed at transforming public consciousness in transition. It will eventually support interdisciplinary exchanges between researchers in the social sciences and humanities and legal experts and civil society.