 Long ago, and far away, when I was a senior in college, I went to Professor Hollander's office to talk to him about American and liberal-left perceptions of Stalin, so it's a great privilege to be here today with him. I'm going to be talking to you about some work that I've been doing over the last couple of years, and usually this is a presentation that's done with a sociologist, Ted Gerber from the University of Wisconsin. He is the data guy. He's the quantitative person on this team. So there are some places where, and we have a limited amount of time, where I'm going to be highlighting some numbers for you, and if you have specific questions about the statistical analysis, I'm going to refer you to the person who's not in the room. At CSIS, I run this program, the Human Rights and Security Initiative, where we look at a number of security implications of human rights abuse in a number of contexts. Today I'm going to be talking about a considerable focus of our work, which focuses on historical or absent memory. Let me just give you a quick definition of what absent memory is, and then I'll go back and tell you a bit more about our work. How a state in a society reconciles or not with violent episodes of the past has profound, yet really underspecified implications for political social development. We, and by we I mean human rights activists that I work with in Russia and in the United States, and elsewhere, assume that wanting to look back, wanting to understand what happened in the past, correlates or can lead to a greater appreciation of human rights and support for the rule of law. Obviously, if terrible crimes have been committed related to torture, indefinite detention, or disappearance, the ability to prosecute has a bearing on the robustness of the law. The preliminary findings that I'm going to discuss from Russia today suggest that this relationship of wanting to look back and rights is actually a little bit more complicated than we had hoped to find. When we did this work initially with colleagues from the Human Rights Organization in Russia Memorial, we're trying to identify essentially who among the younger generation of Russians would be possible future workers in Memorial, because if you know anything about Memorial, the average age of those in the organization is hovering somewhere between 65 and 75. So the work that we're doing at CSIS on this includes what I'm going to talk to you today about a 2005 and 2007 survey of Russian youth and their views on, among other things, Stalin. We are currently, that is later today, I'm finishing a survey that looks at young ethnic Russians in Estonia and comparing their views with ethnic Estonians in Estonia and young Russians in Russia on a variety of these same questions. Later this year we're going to do a multi-generational survey in Russia on views of history. We also have, as part of this work, we're looking at lessons learned from other contexts and at the risk of wandering into that moral equivalence. We think there is something to be learned from colleagues in Argentina and Chile and Northern Ireland and elsewhere, Germany and Poland, and how they've moved the field of memory in their respective contexts. So the work that we're talking about today draws on these large random sample surveys that first we did focus groups in 2004 and 2007 and then we wrote the survey instrument and as you can see these are large random sample surveys that were conducted by the Lovata Analytics Center which is the most reputable polling organization in Russia and if you'll think about it for a moment the young people that we're doing the focus groups with and then the surveys could in some ways be considered either the Helsinki generation right they're born the eldest at about 1976 or the fall of the Berlin wall generation right with the youngest being born around 1989. Unfortunately what we find over and over and over again is it's the Putin generation. These are young people who have really responded to and embraced internalized a lot of the messages that Putin himself and other senior Kremlin officials have advanced. We've written about this in Foreign Affairs in the Washington Quarterly. Some of the work that I'm going to be presenting today in my short period of time is still preliminary and I ask that if you are going to cite anything that you contact me. So quickly I'm going to be walking you through views of young Russians on Russia today that is Russia's political trajectory and by today I really do mean 05 and 07. We'll see later in 2009 how they view Russia today. We'll be talking about young Russians views of Stalin and a hypothesis that we had that looking back would wanting to look back would signal or correlate with those who would be most human rights friendly and what our results were and what it means. And just a warning we end on a somewhat somber note but maybe we can cheer ourselves up over question and answer. Russia today I probably don't need to describe for this audience the various ways in which in the last 8, 9 years political space in Russia has shrunk whether you're looking at television, elections, parties, NGOs rampant abuse by the police and the rise of the security services. Okay so that's a snapshot. When you ask Russians in 05 and 07 and I realize there are people at the back of the room maybe even in the front of the room who won't be able to read these numbers. What you find is that by 2007 a majority that is 56% of Russians agree, somewhat agree or fully agree that Russia is currently on the right path. And you have about 29% in 2007 who fully disagree or somewhat disagree. Alright this is a complex or this has a lot of information and in little time so I'm going to just highlight a few things. We asked a battery of questions on how young people think about Stalin. We asked, and I'm only going to report a few of these results, whether or not they thought Stalin was a wise leader. And in 2005 we found a majority that is 52% somewhat or fully agreed with that by 2007 it was 49%. We asked and this number has been quoted many places. Stalin may have made some mistakes but he did more good than bad. And in both 2005 and 2007 we find a majority believe that Stalin did more good than bad. Now we thought well okay maybe they don't know about what happened. Stalin was directly responsible for the imprisonment, torture and execution and it should say of millions of innocent people. That's the questions cut off. We find overwhelming majorities know this. 72% in 2005 and 68% in 2007 somewhat agree and fully agree that Stalin was directly responsible. So on the one hand we have a majority saying that Stalin did more good than bad but we have an overwhelming majority also saying that Stalin was directly responsible. And that is our first signal that in fact what we see is tremendous amount of ambivalence in how young people are thinking about Stalin. We had a few other questions that I'm going to run us through that give us a sense of the viewpoints of young Russians today. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest, should say, geo-strategic catastrophe of the 20th century. This is a statement that Vladimir Putin made in a 2005 State of the Union address. These are the 2007 findings. 63% of young Russians agree, somewhat agree, fully agree. We think that this is a nice barometer of where Russians in general but young Russians are how they view and whether or not they agree with the world view that Putin is advancing. And later this year we'll know whether or not this translates across different generations. We suspect based on focus groups which you cannot generalize on but we're going to test the hypothesis that in fact there is a demographics of memory and that in fact the initial hypothesis that we had which did not bear up was we thought and I think this is going to be something that Andrei picks up more on. The assumption was that as Russia developed economically that as people got iPods and skateboards and traveled to the West and drank lattes it somehow they would become more human rights-friendly, more democratic and we just see none of that in the survey data. What we saw in the focus groups that we did in July in fact was in praise of the middle age that actually the 40-somethings may be the generation in Russia that is more sympathetic to democracy and human rights and we suspect it has nothing to do with economic development. It has to do with where they were when the Soviet Union collapsed but that's something that we need a lot more work on. Okay so let's in my remaining time talk a little bit about young Russians on remembering. Now we don't have enough time to walk through this in any kind of detail this is all just to say that the hypothesis and we're going to do more work on this later this year. We thought that if we we had a variety of questions that would suggest to us whether or not young people were eager or at least some segment of that demographic were eager to learn more about the past that they would also correlate with human rights friendly views and that that might be a demographic that Memorial and other human rights organizations might move towards and that we'd have some understanding of those views by looking at how they thought about Russia's current path views on Stalin and Soviet collapse and we asked a variety of questions also about views of Memorial views of the Kremlin funded youth group Nashi democracy and human rights very briefly and I we just don't have enough time to go through this the three questions that we asked to measure barometer on whether or not we could consider young people eager learners or forgetters as we call them people who wanted to forget about what happened we asked number one how would you describe your level of knowledge about the history of the USSR during the Stalin era I shudder to think what professor Hollander students how they might have responded to this we asked a next question some say that Russia needs to move forward and forget about the Stalin period others say that we should learn more about that period so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past which of the following statements is closest to your view and we ask a variety there's no harm in looking back we should learn more about the period avoid repeating mistakes we need to forget about the Stalin period move forward and we had a third question some say there's too much discussion in media television private conversations about Soviet era oppressions and these discussions hurt Russia others disagree which of the following statements is closest to your view the punchline in all of this is that we had through statistical analysis which Ted Gerber performed we found a variety of views the strongest the modality of ambivalence that people expressed a lot of ambivalence about what they wanted to know we clearly identified eagles and forgetters people who really did want to know about the past people who absolutely didn't want to know about the past and people who are uncertain and it was not surprising that you found people who hard to say modal response to all three questions and we found complacent respondents now how did those various categories excuse me line up with views on Russia's on the right path views on Stalin collapse as catastrophe and views on human rights the punchline ladies and gentlemen is that there was no clear relationship between the learner categories and attitudes towards these these issues there's statistically significant findings but their contradictory or counterintuitive relationships specifically if you if you thought about a measure that and you know we can argue that maybe these are not the correct measures but views on Stalin whether Russia's on the right path whether the Soviet collapse was a catastrophe and not and questions that we don't report here on human rights the torture is never acceptable we thought that if you were you thought Russia was not on the right path that you really did want to know more about Stalin that you didn't think that the Soviet collapse was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe and that torture is never acceptable that that would be a category that suggested that you would come out as a coherent worldview right and that you would you would be an eager learner and more human rights ambivalent unfortunately we found no difference on Russia on the right path among eager ambivalent or forgetters we found no differences among eager ambivalent and complacent I've used in Stalin in fact the least pro Stalin were the forgetters which is a problem especially if you're thinking about trying to build a robust human rights movement in Russia and trying to bolster memorial and other human rights organizations the fact that you know this eager and the eager learners and the forgetters end up not having significant differences on a number of these questions really calls into question I think how we we we still believe it's important for young people to know about what happened in the past and we still believe that not knowing about what happened allows for all sorts of things to go on today including the rise of the security services without reform you know the second war in Chechnya control of television but it means that it's even more complicated in Russia than than we had anticipated the implications of this work going forward are that frankly there is no cohesive collective memory there is in fact the possibility that focusing again and again on the role of victims has a way of shutting people down and it may be that we need to identify more heroes that a lot of times you you don't hear about the few defiant who stand up against Stalin I remember reading a book by Adam Harkschild not too long ago where he identified this incredibly brave young woman who at the tender age of I don't know something like 16 actually was in an anti-Stalinist cell and was arrested and all the other folks that she was arrested with were shot and this woman still lives in Moscow and you know no one knows about her and and there's no documentary made on her life we have a fundamental problem that this desire to remember which is really a kind of an assumption in much human rights work and in transitional justice work that the desire to remember does not equate with human rights friendly views that morale does not lack an easily identifiable target audience and so we're left at the end of the research with the same question that we had in some ways in the beginning which was how do you move the memory field forward if you believe that understanding the past is and acknowledging the past is critical to Russia's political trajectory and challenging the shrinkage of political space in Russia then how do you move it forward in a way that that doesn't turn people off and I think you know this is you know parts of this we've published parts of this is preliminary we need to see whether or not there's been a shift by 2009 whether or not we see younger generations in 2009 looking any different from how they looked in 05 and 07 and whether or not ethnic Russians in Estonia are looking somewhat different the preliminary findings from the focus groups that we did in March 2009 with there were four groups of ethnic Russians in Estonia and that the way in which we sliced and diced that group was we had two focus groups with young ethnic Russians who held Estonian citizenship and we had two focus groups with young Russians who had alien passports and here's here's the optimistic note the young ethnic Russians that had Estonian passports were integrating that their mentality was much more European Russia was not the answer for any of these people in this focus group they were not looking to Russia to solve their problems but the young ethnic Russians who had alien passports were not surprisingly alienated they had not integrated they had not felt the the the the hand of Moscow if you will they did there was not a lot of evidence that and they didn't believe that Moscow really cared about them but they also didn't believe that Tallinn cared about them as well and so they're kind of somewhat vulnerable population that you know whoever gets there first they could lean in in a different direction but you know as a as a young person after the Soviet Union collapsed I went to work in Moscow on political party development thinking that Russia's trajectory was going in a certain way and the young ethnic Russians in the focus groups in Estonia who had Estonian citizenship were essentially the young people that we were looking for they were they were interested in the past they they acknowledged what happened and and we're going to end with that and the idea that in some ways perhaps it was their ability to you know these people live in a NATO and EU member country and the battles had been in some ways fought and you know they were interested in and having a normal life and and being European so they ended there thank you very much