Gulag (84 page)

There are some good, or at least some forgivable, explanations for this public silence. Most Russians really do spend all of their time coping with the complete transformation of their economy and society. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. Post-communist Russia is not postwar Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities were still fresh in people’s minds. In the early twenty-first century, the events of the middle of the twentieth century seem like ancient history to much of the population.

Perhaps more to the point, many Russians also feel that they have had their discussion of the past already, and that it produced very little. When one asks older Russians, at least, why the subject of the Gulag is so rarely mentioned nowadays, they wave away the issue: “In 1990 that was all we could talk about, now we don’t need to talk about it anymore.” To further complicate things, talk of the Gulag and of Stalinist repression has become confused, in the minds of many, with the “democratic reformers” who originally promoted the debate about the Soviet past. Because that generation of political leaders is now seen to have failed—their rule is remembered for corruption and chaos—all talk of the Gulag is somehow tainted by association.

The question of remembering or commemorating political repression is also confused—as I noted in the Introduction to this book—by the presence of so many other victims of so many other Soviet tragedies. “To make matters more complicated,” writes Catherine Merridale, “a great many people suffered repeatedly; they can describe themselves as war veterans, victims of repression, the children of the repressed and even as survivors of famine with equal facility.”
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There are plenty of memorials to the wartime dead, some Russians seem to feel: Will that not suffice?

But there are other reasons, less forgivable, for the profound silence. Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking ill of the dead.

Some—still—also fear what they might find out about the past, if they were to inquire too closely. In 1998, the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen described what it felt like to discover that one of her grandmothers, a nice old Jewish lady, had been a censor, responsible for altering the reports of foreign correspondents based in Moscow. She also discovered that her other grandmother, another nice old Jewish lady, had once applied for a job with the secret police. Both had made their choices out of desperation, not conviction. Now, she wrote, she knows why her generation had refrained from condemning their grandparents’ generation too harshly: “We did not expose them, we did not try them, we did not judge them . . . merely by asking such questions each one of us risks betraying someone we love.”
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Aleksandr Yakovlev, chairman of the Russian rehabilitation commission, put this problem somewhat more bluntly. “Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past,” he told me, “because so many people participated in them.”
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The Soviet system dragged millions and millions of its citizens into many forms of collaboration and compromise. Although many willingly participated, otherwise decent people were also forced to do terrible things. They, their children, and their grandchildren do not always want to remember that now.

But the most important explanation for the lack of public debate does not involve the fears of the younger generation, or the inferiority complexes and leftover guilt of their parents. The most important issue is rather the power and prestige of those now ruling not only Russia, but also most of the other ex-Soviet states and satellite states. In December 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thirteen of the fifteen former Soviet republics were run by former communists, as were many of the former satellite states, including Poland, the country which supplied so many hundreds of thousands of prisoners for Soviet camps and exile villages. Even in those countries not actually run by the direct ideological descendants of the Communist Party, former communists and their children or fellow travelers also continued to figure largely in the intellectual, media, and business elites. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin was a former KGB agent, who proudly identified himself as a “Chekist.” Earlier, when serving as the Russian Prime Minister, Putin had made a point of visiting the KGB headquarters at Lubyanka, on the anniversary of the Cheka’s founding, where he dedicated a plaque to the memory of Yuri Andropov.
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The dominance of former communists and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out “reforms,” even when they personally had nothing to do with past crimes. In Hungary, the ex–Communist Party, renamed the Socialist Party, fought bitterly against opening the museum to the victims of terror. When the ex–Communist Party, renamed the Social Democrats, was elected to power in Poland in 2001, it immediately cut the budget of the Polish Institute of National Memory, set up by its center-right predecessors. Many, many excuses have been given for Russia’s failure to build a national monument to its millions of victims, but Aleksandr Yakovlev, again, gave me the most succinct explanation. “The monument will be built,” he said, “when we— the older generation—are all dead.”

This matters: the failure to acknowledge or repent or discuss the history of the communist past weighs like a stone on many of the nations of post-communist Europe. Whispered rumors about the contents of old “secret files” continue to disrupt contemporary politics, destabilizing at least one Polish and one Hungarian prime minister. Deals done in the past, between fraternal communist parties, continue to have ramifications in the present. In many places, the secret police apparatus—the cadres, the equipment, the offices—remains virtually unchanged. The occasional discovery of fresh caches of bones can suddenly spark controversy and anger.
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This past weighs on Russia most heavily of all. Russia inherited the trappings of Soviet power—and also the Soviet Union’s great power complex, its military establishment, and its imperial goals. As a result, the political consequences of absent memory in Russia have been much more damaging than they have in other former communist countries. Acting in the name of the Soviet motherland, Stalin deported the Chechen nation to the wastes of Kazakhstan, where half of them died and the rest were meant to disappear, along with their language and culture. Fifty years later, in a repeat performance, the Russian federation obliterated the Chechen capital, Grozny, and murdered tens of thousands of Chechen civilians in the course of two wars. If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered—viscerally, emotionally remembered—what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way—which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.

There have also been consequences for the formation of Russian civil society, and for the development of the rule of law. To put it bluntly, if scoundrels of the old regime go unpunished, good will in no way have been seen to triumph over evil. This may sound apocalyptic, but it is not politically irrelevant. The police do not need to catch all the criminals all of the time for most people to submit to public order, but they need to catch a significant proportion. Nothing encourages lawlessness more than the sight of villains getting away with it, living off their spoils, and laughing in the public’s face. The secret police kept their apartments, their dachas, and their large pensions. Their victims remained poor and marginal. To most Russians, it now seems as if the more you collaborated in the past, the wiser you were. By analogy, the more you cheat and lie in the present, the wiser you are.

In a very deep sense, some of the ideology of the Gulag also survives in the attitudes and worldview of the new Russian elite. I once happened to listen in on a classic, late-night Russian kitchen-table conversation, which took place in the home of some Moscow friends. At a certain point very late in the evening, two of the participants—successful entrepreneurs—began to argue: Just how stupid, and just how gullible, are the Russian people? And just how much more intelligent are we? The old Stalinist division between categories of humanity, between the all-powerful elite and the worthless “enemies” lives on in the new Russian elite’s arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens. Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia’s citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today’s northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running.

Tragically, Russia’s lack of interest in its past has deprived the Russians of heroes, as well as victims. The names of those who secretly opposed Stalin, however ineffectively—the students like Susanna Pechora, Viktor Bulgakov, and Anatoly Zhigulin; the leaders of the Gulag rebellions and uprisings; the dissidents, from Sakharov to Bukovsky to Orlov—ought to be as widely known in Russia as are, in Germany, the names of the participants in the plot to kill Hitler. The incredibly rich body of Russian survivors’ literature—tales of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying conditions of the Soviet concentration camps—should be better read, better known, more frequently quoted. If schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud of even in Russia’s Soviet past, aside from imperial and military triumphs.

Yet the failure to remember has more mundane, practical consequences too. It can be argued, for example, that Russia’s failure to delve properly into the past also explains its insensitivity to certain kinds of censorship, and to the continued, heavy presence of secret police, now renamed the
Federalnaya
Sluzhba Bezopasnosti
, or FSB. Most Russians are not especially bothered by the FSB’s ability to open mail, tap telephones, and enter private residences without a court order. Nor are they much interested, for example, in the FSB’s long prosecution of Alexander Nikitin, an ecologist who wrote about the damage Russia’s Northern Fleet is doing to the Baltic Sea.
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Insensitivity to the past also helps explain the absence of judicial and prison reform. In 1998, I paid a visit to the central prison in the city of Arkhangelsk. Once one of the capital cities of the Gulag, Arkhangelsk lay directly on the route to Solovetsky, to Kotlas, to Kargopollag, and to other northern camp complexes. The city prison, which dated back to before Stalin’s time, seemed hardly to have changed since then. I entered it in the company of Galina Dudina, a woman who qualifies as a genuine post-Soviet rarity, a prisoners’ rights advocate. As we walked the halls of the stone building, accompanied by a silent warder, it seemed if we had stepped back into the past.

The corridors were narrow and dark, with damp, slimy walls. When the warder opened the door to a men’s cell, I caught a glimpse of naked bodies stretched out on bunks, covered in tattoos. Seeing the men were undressed, he quickly closed the door and allowed them to compose themselves. Opening it again, I walked in to see about twenty men standing in a row, not at all pleased to have been interrupted. They offered mumbled, monosyllabic answers to the questions put to them by Galina, and mostly stared hard at the cement floor of their cell. They had, it seemed, been playing cards; the warder led us quickly away.

We spent more time in the women’s cell. In the corner, there stood a toilet. Other than that, the scene could have been drawn straight from the pages of a 1930s memoir. Women’s underwear hung from a rope strung across the ceiling; the air was thick and close, very hot, and heavy with the smell of perspiration, bad food, damp, and human waste. The women, also half-dressed, sat on bunks around the room and showered insults on the warder, shrieking their demands and complaints. It was as if I had walked into the cell that Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had entered in 1938. I repeat again her description:

The arched walls were dripping. On either side, leaving only a narrow passage between them, were low continuous bed boards packed with bodies. Assorted rags were drying on lines overhead. The air was thick with the foul smoke of strong cheap tobacco, and loud with arguments, shouts and sobs.
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Next door, in the juvenile cell, there were fewer prisoners but sadder faces. Galina handed a handkerchief to a sobbing fifteen-year-old girl who had been accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of $10. “There now,” she said, “you keep working on your algebra, and you’ll be out of here soon.” Or so she hoped: Galina met many people who had been imprisoned for months without a trial, and this girl had only been in jail for a week.

Afterward, we spoke to the prison boss, who shrugged when asked about the girl in the juvenile cell, about the prisoner who had been on death row for many years yet claimed to be innocent, about the foul air in the prison and the lack of sanitation. It all came down to money, he said. There just was not enough money. The prison warders were badly paid. The electricity bills were mounting, which explained the dark corridors. No money was available for repairs, no money was spent on prosecutors or judges or trials. Prisoners just had to wait their turn, he said, until the money started flowing.

I was not convinced. Money is a problem, but it is not the whole story. If Russia’s prisons look like a scene from Adamova-Sliozberg memoirs, if Russia’s courts and criminal investigations are a sham, that is partly because the Soviet legacy does not hang like a bad conscience upon the shoulders of those who run Russia’s criminal justice system. The past does not haunt Russia’s secret police, Russia’s judges, Russia’s politicians, or Russia’s business elite.