Do Not Speak, Memory

Masha Gessen - Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia

The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2018

Vagankovskoye Cemetery, Moscow, Russia, March 1993 © Andrew Stuttaford

Imagine a Germany where the Third Reich’s monuments abound but memorials to the Holocaust are scarce. Hitler is venerated by millions and his dictatorship given a positive spin by an authoritarian state that never definitively broke with the Nazi past. Replace Germany with Russia, Hitler with Stalin, and the Third Reich with the Soviet Union and that is pretty much the situation that prevails in Russia today.

The unbroken connection to the Soviet era is key to understanding “Never Remember,” a short, haunting and beautifully written book by Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist who is one of Vladimir Putin’s most trenchant critics. About halfway through, Ms. Gessen tells how Irina Flige, an activist who spent decades trying to restore to public view memories of what occurred under communism, has concluded it is wrong to see the problem as forgetfulness because, as Ms. Gessen summarizes it, “forgetting presupposes remembering—and remembering had not happened . . .” In Ms. Flige’s words, “historical memory can exist only when there is a clear line separating the present from the past. . . . But we don’t have that break—there is no past, only a continuous present.” In contrast to Germany, there was no reckoning. There was no Soviet Nuremberg.

Ms. Gessen offers up various explanations for this, including the long duration of Communist rule and the ways in which the categories of victim and perpetrator overlapped. The trauma was something that Russians inflicted on one another. In a sense they still do. Ms. Gessen is evidently saddened and frustrated by the spectacle of a people—her people—wandering through a manufactured reality unbothered by, or oblivious to, the obscenities or incongruities that surround them. Some of the old regime’s statues were, in the false democratic dawn of the 1990s, defaced and toppled or—in the case of one statue of Stalin—dug up and exiled to a sculpture park of shame in central Moscow. Now, however, the statues stand in the same place proudly, cleaned up but unexplained, sharing space with a rare commemoration of the Soviet regime’s victims as well as statues of poets, writers, and—why not?—Adam and Eve.

The melancholy that saturates Ms. Gessen’s prose is reinforced by pages filled with Misha Friedman’s bleakly evocative photographs, images that convey unease, absence and loss. The huts and barracks of the Gulag, ramshackle to start with, and often designed to be temporary, have often just rotted away—“only the barbed wire remained,” Ms. Gessen writes. Other, sturdier structures survive, either ignored—one of Mr. Friedman’s photographs is of a ruined prison on the edge of a housing complex—or inaccessible, swallowed up in the vastness of Siberia. One camp—just one—not far from the Urals has been restored, a project begun, tellingly, on the private initiative of two local historians but now taken over by the state. While, as Ms. Gessen notes, it has not been turned into some defense of the Gulag, its message has been muffled, shrouded in a deceptive neutrality. Ms. Gessen herself is no neutral (she describes the “distinguishing characteristic of the Putin-era historiography of Soviet terror as . . . [saying] in effect, that it just happened, whatever”).

This is an angry book. Ms. Gessen makes her case with a series of vignettes ranging from the discovery of a mass grave in northwestern Russia to a trip to the region of Kolyma in the country’s far east. (“If the Gulag was anywhere, it was in Kolyma.”) The years of glasnost and Boris Yeltsin finally provided pitifully small scraps of comfort to the descendants of the disappeared—a photograph, a death certificate, something—yet the Gulag’s poison continues to seep through the generations. When Ms. Gessen visits Kolyma’s “capital” in 2017, all the people with whom she has contact are later visited by the FSB, the successor to the KGB.

A World Behind Barbed Wire

Anne Applebaum (ed) : Gulag Voices

Tamara  Petkevich: Memoir of a  Gulag Actress

Cathy Frierson & Semyon Vilensky: Children of the Gulag

Stephen Cohen: The Victims  Return - Survivors  of the Gulag after Stalin

Fyodor Mochulsky: Gulag Boss

Alexander  Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

Kolyma Tales: Varlam Shalamov

Journey into the Whirlwind: Eugenia Ginzburg

My Testimony: Anatoly Marchenko

Faithful Ruslan: Georgi Vladimov

The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2011

Lubianka, Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

The most remarkable thing about "The Way Back," the 2010 film by Peter Weir, was neither its protagonists (escapees from the Soviet gulag system who trekked thousands of miles to their freedom) nor the curious tale of the almost certainly fictional 1956 "memoir" that inspired it (Slawomir Rawicz's "The Long Walk"). No, what distinguished "The Way Back" was its depiction of life in Stalin's camps. There have been a handful of films on this topic, but, as observed Anne Applebaum, author of a fine 2004 history of the gulag, this was the first time it had been given the full Hollywood treatment. Hitler's concentration camps are a Tinseltown staple, but Stalin's merit barely a mention.

Publishers have been more even-handed. There are many books on Soviet terror, and some have won huge readerships. Yet, as Hollywood's cynics understand, the swastika will almost always outsell the red star. That's due partly to the perverse aesthetics of the Third Reich but also to a disconcerting ambivalence—even now—about what was going on a little further to the east. The slaughter of millions by Moscow's communist regime remains shrouded in benevolent shadow. The Soviet experiment is given a benefit of a doubt that owes nothing to history and far too much to a lingering sympathy for a supposedly noble dream supposedly gone astray.

A flurry of recent books on Soviet oppression—surely encouraged by the interest generated by Ms. Applebaum's "Gulag"—is thus to be welcomed. One of the best is edited by Ms. Applebaum herself.

"Gulag Voices" (Yale, 195 pages, $25) is a deftly chosen anthology of writings by victims of Soviet rule. Some are published for the first time in English, most are by writers little known in the West and each is given a succinct, informative introduction. Above all, they help illustrate the duration, variety and range of Soviet despotism.

The Third Reich lasted for scarcely more than a decade. Most of those who died at its hands were slaughtered within the space of five years or so. The Soviet killing spree dragged on, however, from the revolutionary frenzy of 1917, through the terrible bloodbaths of the Stalin era, to the last violent spasms in 1991. The ultimate death toll may have been higher than that orchestrated by Hitler, but absolute annihilations like those envisaged by the Nazis were never on the agenda. Instead the nature of Soviet repression shifted back and forth over the years: sometimes more lethal, sometimes less, sometimes carefully targeted, sometimes arbitrary. The gulag itself was, as Ms. Applebaum notes, "an extraordinarily varied place." As the title of Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" reminds us, Stalin's hell, like Dante's, was layered. And how it endured: The most recent account in "Gulag Voices" is an excerpt from Anatoly Marchenko's "My Testimony," a memoir from 1969 that highlighted the way that Stalinist cruelty had successfully survived the dead, officially disgraced, dictator.

"Gulag Voices" begins in 1928. Dmitry Likhachev, an old-style St. Petersburg intellectual, was arrested when his literary discussion group was deemed to be a hotbed of counterrevolutionary plotting. He served four years in the Solovetsky Islands, the beautiful northern archipelago that from 1923 hosted the first organized camps, the tumor that metastasized into the hideous "archipelago" of Solzhenitsyn's great metaphor.

Mr. Likhachev's contribution is followed by a sampling of what could be found within that wider archipelago. Misery, gang rape and murder co-exist with Potemkin parodies of "normal life"—an excerpt from Gustav Herling's "A World Apart" (1951) describes the arrangements for conjugal visits. Occasionally, the prisoners might even carry on approximations of a career within the camp as an engineer, doctor or, as Tamara Petkevich recounts in "Memoir of a Gulag Actress" (Northern Illinois, 481 pages, $35), a performer for audiences of fellow convicts.

Such recollections come, as Ms. Applebaum acknowledges, with their own bias. With the exception of Mr. Marchenko, who died in the course of a later sentence, the authors all survived. Millions were not so fortunate. And some of those lives had hardly begun. In the devastating "Children of the Gulag" (Yale, 450 pages, $35), Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky chronicle the awful fate of those literally countless children whose parents had fallen foul of the rage of the Soviet state. Here, a gulag convict nurse recalls handing over a batch of prisoners' children for transfer to a "special home": "The worst happened: We'd given, according to the receipt, eleven healthy beautiful children, and not one of them was ever returned. Not a single one!" This was a story repeated again and again and again. And as for those who did survive, many were forced to accept a suspect, fragile existence in which, for decades, the knock on the door was never so far away.

That tension would have been familiar to many prisoners eventually freed from the gulag. "Gulag Voices" includes one account by the pseudonymous K. Petrus, describing his 1939 release into what Ms. Applebaum describes as "the strange ambiguity" of a life that was closer to limbo. The big cities were denied to most former inmates. Their families were broken. Many chose to remain near the camps that had once held them.

The fate of those who emerged is also a central concern of Stephen F. Cohen's "The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin" (Publishing Works, 224 pages, $22.95), a perceptive study of Khrushchev-era attempts to secure justice for Stalin's victims, the backsliding that followed and, finally, in the Glasnost years, the mass, too often posthumous "rehabilitations" of former prisoners—rehabilitations unaccompanied, however, by any realistic prospect that their tormentors would be brought to justice. Mr. Cohen was a frequent visitor to Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s and came to know some of those who had survived. His account is powerful and, often, very moving, marred only by traces of a belief in the impossible dream of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union, the will-o'-the-wisp that beguiled and destroyed Mikhail Gorbachev.

A very different (and highly unusual) perspective can be found in "Gulag Boss" (Oxford, 229 pages, $29.95) by Fyodor Mochulsky, the reminiscences of an engineer recruited by the NKVD (the Stalin-era secret police) to supervise forced labor in a Siberian camp. It was written during and after the U.S.S.R.'s implosion and ends with Mochulsky appearing to reject the methods, although not necessarily the ideology, of the system he served for so long. But he does so in the strained, awkward prose of a man unwilling to face up to what he had done. Mr. Mochulsky talks of disease, lack of food and other hardships, but the scale of the death toll that he must have witnessed is, at best, only there by implication. His overall tone is one of pained technocratic disappointment that the camp was so poorly run: He was a Speer, so to speak, not a Himmler. Yet Albert Speer served 20 years in jail. Mr. Mochulsky went on to enjoy a successful diplomatic and intelligence career and, in retirement, the luxury of modest regret.

And in those twilight years, he is unlikely to have been troubled by fears of prosecution. There has been no Bolshevik Nuremberg. Total defeat left Nazi horror open for all to see, but many Soviet archives remain closed, their tales of atrocity unpublished. The new books on the gulag cannot begin to redress the crimes they describe, but they can at least help history locate the facts with which it can pass the judgment that the victims and their jailers deserve.

Tales of the Gulag

The Gulag Archipelago By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

That "The Gulag Archipelago" had to be written says the worst about humanity. That it was written says the best. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) created an unanswerable indictment of the totalitarian regime under which he was still living and, no less critically, established that it had been poison from the start. As carefully researched as the difficult circumstances of its production would allow, "The Gulag Archipelago" is no dry roster of the dead but a work of passion and fury, underpinned by bleak humor and the hope (vain, it seems) that someday justice would be done.

Kolyma Tales By Varlam Shalamov

Far less well-known than they should be, these short stories by Varlam Shalamov (1907-82) are terse, lightly fictionalized, partly autobiographical glimpses into the gulag's abyss. "Kolyma Tales" derives its name from the region in Russia's far northeast that played host to a vast forced labor complex, in which hundreds of thousands (at least) perished. Written in a style of ironic, hard-edged detachment and so spare and so crystalline that they sometimes tip over into poetry, the tales rest at the summit of Russian literary achievement.

Journey into the Whirlwind By Eugenia Ginzburg

Rightly or wrongly, the Great Terror of 1937, an immense wave of violence that took down many who had either supported or benefited from the rise of the Soviet state, has come to be seen as the epitome of Stalinist despotism. Eugenia Ginzburg (1904-77) was among those expelled from a heaven under construction to a fully finished hell. "Journey Into the Whirlwind" remains a profoundly humane, wonderfully written first-hand account of arrest, imprisonment and exile into the gulag.

My Testimony By Anatoly Marchenko

Eugenia Ginzburg was a member of the Soviet elite; Anatoly Marchenko (1938-86) was the opposite, the son of illiterate railway workers. "My Testimony," his description of life in the 1960s gulag, is matter-of-fact, something that only makes its horrors seem worse. Marchenko's gulag experience transformed him from everyman into dissident. The last of his many re-arrests was in 1980. Still imprisoned, he died from the effects of a hunger strike in 1986. Perestroika had just begun: too late, far too late.

Faithful Ruslan By Georgi Vladimov

Moments of extraordinary beauty mark this haunting fable by Georgi Vladimov (1931-2003), told through the eyes of Ruslan, the most loyal of guard dogs. Abandoned by Master after their camp is closed down following Stalin's death, Ruslan patiently patrols the neighboring town waiting for the old order to return. It does, but only as a hallucination as Ruslan drifts into death after one final bloodletting. When Vladimov offered this novella for publication, though, it was rejected. Khrushchev had fallen and new masters were in charge. For real.

Dark Comedy

National Review Online, July 31, 2006

Sometimes there can be nothing more telling than contrast. The boat sailing in the sunshine of a July 4th weekend was filled with anticipation, exhilaration, tourists, New Yorkers, the yellow t-shirts of the Jones family reunion, and the pointing and squinting of countless digital Kodak moments. Ahead lay Ellis Island, its museum of immigration, and, tucked away in a corner of that museum’s third floor, an exhibition (Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom) dedicated to a monstrosity that had its origins on some very different islands, islands scattered in the White Sea, islands that became (in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words) the “mother tumor” of a cancer that eventually metastasized into an archipelago of terror, slavery and murder all across the Soviets’ gargoyle “union.”

It stretched so far, in fact, that to reach some of its most dismal, desolate, and destructive outposts, the camps at Kolyma, took a boat trip too. There was no exhilaration on these ferries to an underworld darker than Hades, just death, hunger, squalor, rape and disease. The only anticipation was of worse to come.

Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia .

Annotated illustrations by one former prisoner, Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, displayed in this exhibition showed what awaited the guests of her particular corner of the Gulag. They were glimpses of a drained, pitiless world, populated by predators and their hopeless, helpless victims, illuminated only by the surviving shreds of Kersnovskaia’s humanity and the bleak poetry of her furious prose. Here she recalls her own arrival at a “corrective labor camp”:

“First we were made to strip naked and were shoved into some roofless enclosures made out of planks. Above our heads the stars twinkled; below our bare feet lay frozen excrement. An enclosure measured 3 square feet. Each held three to four naked, shivering, and frightened men and women. Then these ‘kennel cages’ were opened one after the other and the naked people were led across a courtyard …into a special building where our documents were ‘formulated’ and our things were ‘searched.’ The goal of the search was to leave us with rags, and to take the good things, sweaters, mittens, socks, scarves, vests, and good shoes, for themselves. Ten thieves shamelessly fleeced these destitute and barely alive people. ‘Corrective’ is something that should make you better, and ‘labor’ ennobles you. But ‘camp’? A camp wasn’t a jail. So then what on earth was going on? ”

This exhibition never quite told us. What it did do was give a sense of what life, death, and the condition somewhere in between (they even had a word for that) in the Gulag was like. Sometimes this was achieved by the display of a few simple objects, such as a crude handmade spoon; a luxury in the camps (prisoners were expected to eat with their hands). Sometimes it was just the stories of the victims themselves.

Take Maria Tchebotareva, for example. The regime did. Her photograph was on display. She was sad-eyed, broad-faced, head-scarfed, an icon of the Slavic heartlands. In happier times she might have been imagined as backdrop to some Tolstoyan pastoral idyll, but she found herself trapped instead inside a real, far darker script. Her ‘crime’ was to steal three pounds of rye from the field the state had stolen from her. She had four hungry children to feed, and in the famine years of 1932-33 (oddly no mention was made of the fact that that famine, known to Ukrainians as the holodomor, was man-made, and left millions of deaths in its wake) and nothing to feed them with. She served twelve years in the Gulag for those three pounds, followed by another eleven in Arctic exile. She never saw her children again. For the Tchebotarevs there was to be no family reunion.

In 1949 they took Ivan Burylov too, a middle-aged beekeeper stung beyond endurance by the hypocrisy of it all. His offense? To write the word “comedy” on his supposedly secret ballot paper (there was, naturally, only one candidate). They tracked him down. Of course they did. They gave him eight years. Of course they did. We’re never told whether he survived, but his ballot endured (it was included in the display), and in its acerbic, laconic way, it was as effective a monument to the USSR as any I’ve seen.

Another such monument, but this time specifically to the cruelty and futility of Soviet rule is the “Belomor” canal. Carved through the roughly 140 miles of granite that divide the White and Baltic seas, it was a typically pharaonic scheme of the early Stalin era involving well over 100,000 prisoners with primitive tools (pickaxes, shovels and makeshift wheelbarrows) and a lack of precision that would have shocked the ancient Egyptians: it proved too shallow and too narrow to ever be of much use.

As a killing machine, however, the Belomor project worked very well. In her history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum cites an estimate of 25,000 dead (there are others, far higher), but no number was given in this exhibition, just the bland adjective “many.” That was fairly typical of an exhibition that too often shied away from specifics. That was a mistake: the statistics and the details count, if only as a warning for the future, a warning that, judging by one statistic that was included, has yet to be properly heeded. Polls in Russia show that “approval” (whatever that might mean) of Stalin’s leadership has risen from 7 percent to 53 percent over the last ten years.

That’s not to say an attempt was made to minimize the horror that was the Belomor. Far from it. Most striking was a continuous loop of old propaganda newsreel purporting to show the enthusiasm of the prisoners, drones of the anthill state, as they clawed, dug, and hacked their way to reform, rehabilitation, and socialist reconstruction through the rock, swamp, and snow; and, yes, just like in Hitler’s camps, there was an orchestra.

A few feet further down the corridor (somehow the immigration museum’s still visibly institutional character added to the force of an exhibit dedicated to a state run amok) was yet more footage: those familiar parades of the weapons of Armageddon, syncopated gymnasts and marching ranks of regimented enthusiasm, but also, more revealingly, film of a young factory worker shouting her praises of great Comrade Stalin, the edge to her voice betraying the collective hysteria that always lurks somewhere within the order, discipline and control of a totalitarian system.

Much of the rest of the exhibition was dedicated to Perm 36, a logging camp set up in the wake of World War Two, that, after the end of Khrushchev’s brief “thaw,” was used to imprison, torment and sometimes kill the Kremlin’s most determined opponents, the bravest of the brave, who persisted in their political work even after serving earlier sentences, men like the Lithuanian Balis Gayauskas. Undaunted by two years in Nazi custody, 35 years in the Gulag, and a further three years in exile, this extraordinary individual had the last laugh — he was elected to the parliament of a Lithuania that had itself won back its freedom.

That happy ending is a satisfying reminder of the USSR’s ignominious collapse, but before reaching the inevitable pictures of a tumbling Berlin Wall, the exhibit took time to pay tribute to the tiny band of dissidents, who for long, lonely years did what they could to preserve the idea of freedom in lands that had known too little of liberty. Naturally, the giants were featured, Solzhenitsyn, the great chronicler, Old Testament in his wrath and grandeur, the gentle-souled, iron-willed Sakharov and, of course, Sakharov’s wife, the spiky, indomitable Bonner, but so were others too, lesser-known, but no less courageous: Sergei Kovalev, Ivan Kovalev (father and son), Tatiana Khodorovich, Tatiana Veilikanova, Grigorii Pod’iapolskii, Anatolii Krasnov-Levitin, Valerij Senderov, Tatiana Osipova (Ivan Kovalev’s wife), Levko Lukjanenko, Leonid Borodin, and Vasyl Stus. Remember their names. Remember their sacrifices.

It would have been unreasonable to think that this relatively small exhibition could ever have illustrated the full scope of decades of Soviet tyranny, but it was disappointing that it never really managed to answer Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia’s haunting question: “What on earth was going on?” It wasn’t just a question of the exhibition’s missing statistics. The bigger problem was the failure to put the Gulag into its wider context. The impression was somehow left that the camps were primarily a means (albeit brutal) of providing the manpower for “Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power,” something that sounds if not exactly benign then at least more reasonable than the description that this murderous system actually deserved. Certainly, forced industrialization was part of the story, but it’s an explanation that obscures the camps’ significance within a far more ambitious plan.

Why Soviet Communism, a poisonous blend of millennial fantasy, imperial dream, paranoia, and psychosis, to name but a few of its sources and symptoms, evolved in the way it did is the subject of potentially endless debate, but in understanding the way that the dictatorship managed to maintain its grip for so long, it’s necessary to realize that the Gulag was just one part of a network of terror, mass murder, and oppression intended, by eliminating all inconvenient traces of the past, to remake man into a cog in the new, perfect and all-encompassing Soviet machine. That is what was going on, something that this exhibition never truly managed to convey.

Despite this, its joint organizers, Perm’s Gulag Museum and the National Park Service, should be congratulated for doing something to bring the often overlooked horrors (and lessons) of the Gulag to wider attention over here (after closing at Ellis Island on July 4th, the exhibition travels to Boston, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Independence, California). The fact, controversial to some, that space was found to note that many other countries (including the United States) have, like today’s Russia, found it difficult to come to terms with brutal systems that have defaced their histories, should be seen as a statement of the obvious, not some underhand attempt to play down the extraordinary evils of the Soviet past.

But if you want to consider how much more remains to be done in this respect in Russia itself, remember the disturbing poll I mentioned earlier, and, while you are at it, reflect on the fact that according to Memorial (an organization dedicated to keeping alive the history of Soviet repression) between 2002 and 2005 30 monuments to Stalin were erected in the territories of the former USSR, There are, reportedly, plans for another 20 more.

Now ask yourself what the reaction would be if Germans began putting up new statues to Adolf Hitler.