Gulag (83 page)

They’re wrong to think that memory
Hasn’t an increasing value
Or that the weeds of time grow over
Any real past event or pain.

That on and on the planet rolls,
Measuring off the days and years . . .
No. Duty commands that everything now
That hasn’t been said be said in full ...
⁴¹

Epilogue

MEMORY

And the killers? The killers live on . . .

—Lev Razgon, Nepridumannoe, 1989
¹

IN THE EARLY AUTUMN of 1998, I took a boat across the White Sea, from the city of Arkhangelsk to the Solovetsky Islands. It was the last cruise of the summer: after the middle of September, when the Arctic nights start to lengthen, boats stop traveling that route. The sea becomes too rough, the water too icy for an overnight tourist expedition.

Perhaps the knowledge that it was the end of the season imparted a touch of added gaiety to the trip. Or perhaps the passengers were simply excited to be out on the open sea. Whatever the reason, the ship’s dining room buzzed with good cheer. There were many toasts, many jokes, and hearty applause for the ship’s captain. My assigned dining companions, two middle-aged couples from a naval base down the coast, seemed determined to have a good time.

At first, my presence only added to their general merriment. It is not every day one meets a real American on a rickety ferry boat in the middle of the White Sea, and the oddity amused them. They wanted to know why I spoke Russian, what I thought of Russia, how it differs from the United States. When I told them what I was doing in Russia, however, they grew less cheerful. An American on a pleasure cruise, visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see the scenery and the beautiful old monastery—that was one thing. An American visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see the remains of the concentration camp—that was something else.

One of the men turned hostile. “Why do you foreigners only care about the ugly things in our history?” he wanted to know. “Why write about the Gulag? Why not write about our achievements? We were the first country to put a man into space!” By “we” he meant “we Soviets.” The Soviet Union had ceased to exist seven years earlier, but he still identified himself as a Soviet citizen, not as a Russian.

His wife attacked me as well. “The Gulag isn’t relevant anymore,” she told me. “We have other troubles here. We have unemployment, we have crime. Why don’t you write about our real problems, instead of things that happened a long time ago?”

While this unpleasant conversation continued, the other couple kept silent, and the man never did offer his opinion on the subject of the Soviet past. At one point, however, his wife expressed her support. “I understand why you want to know about the camps,” she said softly. “It is interesting to know what happened. I wish I knew more.”

In my subsequent travels around Russia, I encountered these four attitudes to my project again and again. “It’s none of your business,” and “it’s irrelevant” were both common reactions. Silence—or an absence of opinion, as evinced by a shrug of the shoulders—was probably the most frequent reaction. But there were also people who understood why it was important to know about the past, and who wished it were easier to find out more.

In fact, with some effort, one can learn a great deal about the past in contemporary Russia. Not all Russian archives are closed, and not all Russian historians are preoccupied with other things: this book itself is testimony to the abundance of newly available information. The story of the Gulag has also become part of public debate in some of the ex-Soviet republics and ex-Soviet satellites. In a few nations—as a rule, those who remember themselves as victims rather than perpetrators of terror—the memorials and the debates are very prominent indeed. The Lithuanians have converted the former KGB headquarters in Vilnius into a museum of the victims of genocide. The Latvians have turned an old Soviet museum, once dedicated to Latvia’s “Red Sharpshooters,” into a museum of Latvian occupation.

In February 2002, I attended the opening of a new Hungarian museum, located in a building which was both the headquarters of the Hungarian fascist movement between 1940 and 1945, and the headquarters of the Hungarian communist secret police between 1945 and 1956. In the first exhibition room, a bank of television screens beamed fascist propaganda from one wall. Another bank of television screens beamed communist propaganda from the other wall. The effect was immediate and emotional, as it was intended to be, and the rest of the museum continued in that vein. Using photographs, sound, video, and very few words, the museum’s organizers are unapologetically aiming its exhibits at people who are too young to remember either regime.

In Belarus, by contrast, the lack of a monument has become a major political issue: in the summer of 2002, the dictatorial president, Alexander Lukashenka, was still loudly proclaiming his intention to build a highway over the site of a mass murder that took place outside Minsk, the capital city, in 1937. His rhetoric galvanized the opposition, and sparked a greater discussion of the past.

Dotted around Russia itself, there are also a handful of informal, semiofficial, and private monuments, erected by a wide variety of people and organizations. The headquarters of Memorial in Moscow contains an archive of oral and written memoirs, as well as a small museum which houses, among other things, an outstanding collection of prisoners’ art. The Andrei Sakharov Museum, also in Moscow, has exhibits and displays about the Stalinist era as well. On the outskirts of many cities—Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tomsk, Kiev, Petrozavodsk—local Memorial chapters and other organizations have put up monuments to mark mass burial grounds, the sites of the mass murders of 1937 and 1938.

There are also larger efforts. The ring of coal mines around Vorkuta, each one a former
lagpunkt
, is dotted with crosses, statues, and other memorials, erected by Lithuanian, Polish, and German victims of the Vorkuta camps. The local historical museum in the city of Magadan contains several rooms devoted to Gulag history, including a camp watchtower; on a hill overlooking the city, a well-known Russian sculptor has built a monument to Kolyma’s dead, featuring symbols of all of the many faiths they practiced. A room tucked inside the walls of the Solovetsky monastery, itself now a museum, displays prisoners’ letters, photographs, and scraps from the archives; outside, an alley of trees has been planted in commemoration of the Solovetsky dead. In the center of Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic, local leaders, and the local chapter of Memorial, have constructed a small chapel. A handful of prisoners’ names are listed on the inside, deliberately chosen to illustrate the many nationalities of the Gulag: Lithuanian, Korean, Jewish, Chinese, Georgian, Spanish.

Strange, surprising, individual monuments can sometimes be found in out-of-the-way places. An iron cross has been placed on a barren hill outside the city of Ukhta, the old headquarters of Ukhtpechlag, commemorating the site of a mass murder of prisoners. To see it, I had to drive down an almost impassable muddy road, walk behind a building site, and clamber over a railway track. Even then I was too far away to read the actual inscription. Still, the local activists who had erected the cross beamed with pride.

A few hours north of Petrozavodsk, another ad hoc memorial has been set up outside the village of Sandormokh. Or perhaps, in this case, “memorial” is the wrong word. Although there is a commemorative plaque, as well as several stone crosses put up by Poles, Germans, and others, Sandormokh—where prisoners from the Solovetsky Islands were shot in 1937, the priest Pavel Florensky among them—is memorable for its strangely moving handmade crosses and personal monuments. Because there are no records stating who is buried where, each family has chosen, at random, to commemorate a particular piles of bones. Relatives of victims have pasted photographs of their relatives, long dead, on wooden stakes, and some have carved epitaphs into the sides. Ribbons, plastic flowers, and other funerary bric-a-brac are strewn throughout the pine forest which has grown up over the killing field. On the sunny August day that I visited—it was the anniversary of the murder, and a delegation had come from St. Petersburg—an elderly woman stood up to speak of her parents, both buried there, both shot when she was seven years old. A whole lifetime had passed before she had been able to visit their graves.

Another larger project has taken shape outside the city of Perm. On the site of Perm-36, once a Stalinist-era
lagpunkt
, later one of the harshest political camps of the 1970s and 1980s, a group of local historians has constructed a full-scale museum, the only one actually located inside the barracks of a former camp. With their own resources the historians rebuilt the camp, barracks, walls, barbed-wire fences, and all. They even went so far as to set up a small logging business, using the camp’s own rusted and discarded machines, to pay for their project. Although they did not have much support from the local government, they attracted West European and American funding. Ambitiously, they now hope to restore twenty-five buildings, using four of them to house a larger Museum of Repression.

And yet—in Russia, a country accustomed to grandiose war memorials and vast, solemn state funerals, these local efforts and private initiatives seem meager, scattered, and incomplete. The majority of Russians are probably not even aware of them. And no wonder: ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families. Throughout the 1980s, competitions were held to design such a monument, but they came to nothing. Memorial succeeded only in dragging a stone from the Solovetsky Islands—where the Gulag began—and placing it in the center of Dzerzhinsky Square, across from Lubyanka.
²

More notable than the missing monuments, however, is the missing public awareness. Sometimes, it seems as if the enormous emotions and passions raised by the wide-ranging discussions of the Gorbachev era simply vanished, along with the Soviet Union itself. The bitter debate about justice for the victims disappeared just as abruptly. Although there was much talk about it at the end of the 1980s, the Russian government never did examine or try the perpetrators of torture or mass murder, even those who were identifiable. In the early 1990s, one of the men who carried out the Katyn massacres of Polish officers was still alive. Before he died, the KGB conducted an interview with him, asking him to explain—from a technical point of view—how the murders were carried out. As a gesture of goodwill, a tape of the interview was handed to the Polish cultural attaché in Moscow. No one suggested at any time that the man be put on trial, in Moscow, Warsaw, or anywhere else.

It is true, of course, that trials may not always be the best way to come to terms with the past. In the years after the Second World War, West Germany brought 85,000 Nazis to trial, but obtained fewer than 7,000 convictions. The tribunals were notoriously corrupt, and easily swayed by personal jealousies and disputes. The Nuremburg Trial itself was an example of “victors’ justice” marred by dubious legality and oddities, not the least of which was the presence of Soviet judges who knew perfectly well that their own side was responsible for mass murder too.

But there are other methods, aside from trials, of doing public justice to the crimes of the past. There are truth commissions, for example, of the sort implemented in South Africa, which allow victims to tell their stories in an official, public place, and make the crimes of the past a part of the public debate. There are official investigations, like the British Parliament’s 2002 inquiry into the Northern Irish “Bloody Sunday” massacre, which had taken place thirty years earlier. There are government inquiries, government commissions, public apologies—yet the Russian government has never considered any of these options. Other than the brief, inconclusive “trial” of the Communist Party, there have in fact been no public truth-telling sessions in Russia, no parliamentary hearings, no official investigations of any kind into the murders or the massacres or the camps of the USSR.

The result: half a century after the war’s end, the Germans still conduct regular public disputes about victims’ compensation, about memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even about whether a younger generation of Germans ought to go on shouldering the burden of guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin’s death, there were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia, because the memory of the past was not a living part of public discourse.

The rehabilitation process did continue, very quietly, throughout the 1990s. By the end of 2001, about 4.5 million political prisoners had been rehabilitated in Russia, and the national rehabilitation commission reckoned it had a further half-million cases to examine. Those victims—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more—who were never sentenced will of course be exempt from the process.
³
But while the commission itself is serious and well-intentioned, and while it is composed of camp survivors as well as bureaucrats, no one associated with it really feels that the politicians who created it were motivated by a real drive for “truth and reconciliation,” in the words of the British historian Catherine Merridale. Rather, the goal has been to end discussion of the past, to pacify the victims by throwing them a few extra rubles and free bus tickets, and to avoid any deeper examination of the causes of Stalinism or of its legacy.