Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  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 p
arliamentary 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.

  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.”4 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.” 5

  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.”6 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. 7

  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. 8

  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, Gr
ozny, 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.