Politics & Power Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

The sting in Kapuscinski's line is how calmly it indicts. He doesn't accuse Russia of lying; he points to something more structurally corrosive: the refusal to name. "No official, formal assessment" is bureaucratic language deployed like a scalpel, exposing how power launders history through paperwork. The point isn't that individuals in Russia don't know what happened. It's that the state, by withholding a stamped verdict, keeps the past in a usable, elastic form.

Kapuscinski, a reporter trained in the moral weather of empires, understands that regimes don't just control archives; they control the grammar of public memory. To say "criminal" would be to assign agency, victims, perpetrators, and therefore obligations: restitution, apology, a new national narrative that doesn't treat Soviet violence as unfortunate scenery on the road to greatness. Silence becomes policy. The absence he describes is not a gap in scholarship but a deliberate political asset, allowing nostalgia and pride to coexist with mass repression untroubled by legal or ethical clarity.

The repetition of "Nobody... No one... No one" reads like a drumbeat of institutional evasion. It's also a warning about what happens after authoritarianism "ends" without a reckoning: the old apparatus may dissolve, but its habits remain. In that context, memory isn't a museum question; it's a live instrument of legitimacy. If the state never calls the Soviet project "terrible", it preserves the option to rehabilitate its methods whenever the present demands them.