Alexis Berelowitch, sociologist specializing in contemporary Russian society and teacher at Paris IV university
Files on thousands of prisoners of the Gulag are kept in the archives of Memorial, a Moscow-based association.
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Concern about the future cannot be regarded as willingness to forget. Forgetting should never be thought of as a passport to social peace. Memory is part of civil peace. Bronislaw Geremek, Polish historian and politician (1932- ) |
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Timeline 1917: The October Revolution brings
the Bolsheviks to power under Lenin’s leadership. |
Russians
looked back in anger when perestroika revealed the full scale of Stalinist massacres
and repression. But current difficulties have largely halted this reappraisal of
the past
The body
of a dictator is buried and dug up several times in Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze’s
1986 movie Repentance. Stalin had a similar fate: he was symbolically exhumed during
the political “thaw” of Nikita Khrushchev’s reign, hidden away during the Brezhnev
years, disinterred again during perestroika and is today more or less out of sight.
These ups and downs show how hard it is for Russians to perform acts of remembering
and mourning as a prelude to accepting and coping with what happened in the dark
days of Stalinist terror.
During the thaw years, between 1956 and 1964, Soviet society was confronted with
its past for the first time when Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes. But the denunciation
only went part of the way, and a thoroughgoing reappraisal of Stalinism was not possible.
From the mid-1960s on, all references to Stalin were censored. During the Brezhnev
years, the dictator was quietly rehabilitated as the architect of the victory over
Nazi Germany.
But while the Soviet establishment officially tried to play down or make people forget
about Stalinism, the most radical wing of the liberal intelligentsia, the dissidents,
continued their scrutiny of the Stalinist era. The high point of this struggle to
remember came in 1974 with the publication in the West of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
The Gulag Archipelago.
In the
grip of a reading frenzy
When perestroika allowed
people to speak freely, from 1985 on, the first thing the intelligentsia did was
to turn to the past and try to make sense of it. In 1986 and 1987, historical novels
which had been written decades earlier and had either been unpublished in the Soviet
Union or published only in the West turned the spotlight back onto Stalinism. Nearly
10 million copies were printed of the most popular of these novels, Anatoly Rybakov’s
Children of the Arbat. All the key moments and events of the Stalinist era were now
dealt with–the 1930s, collectivization, the Second World War and state-sponsored
anti-semitism.
In 1988, Vassili Grossman’s great novel Life and Destiny, which had been published
in the West in 1980, appeared in Russia, followed in 1990 by The Gulag Archipelago.
The circulation of the magazine Novy Mir in which these works appeared reached two
million. The whole country was gripped with a reading frenzy.
When the Soviet people discovered the scale of the disaster it came as a terrible
shock. A sense of shared responsibility spread throughout the country. People wondered
whether the whole society should repent, and there was a call for a Nuremberg-type
trial of Stalinism. It was no longer just a matter of contrasting an evil Stalin
with good communists and comrades of Lenin, as had been done during the 1987 rehabilitation
of the victims of the Stalinist show trials, but of asking what it was in Russian
society that had made Stalinism possible. Essays and articles by historians took
over from literature. Most authors belonging to the liberal intelligentsia looked
for the causes in Russian history–in serfdom, the absence of a civil society and
democratic practices, and the huge size of the state sector. Essays and articles
by historians took over where literature left off.
Waning
interest in the past
The duty of remembrance
was performed by groups which painstakingly sought out the names of the victims,
as the young historian Dimitri Yurasov did, or looked for mass graves.
This movement led to the founding in 1987-1988 of a Moscow-based human rights association
called Memorial, with member groups all over the Soviet Union. It drew a map of the
labour camps, set up a museum and compiled lists of victims. In 1989, the Leningrad
newspaper Vecherny published day after day the names of people who had been shot.
At first Memorial was a mass organization which planned to put up a monument to the
victims. But which victims? The victims of Stalinism or everyone who had been persecuted
by the Soviet regime? From 1988 on, criticism was levelled not only at the Stalinist
period but at the entire socialist regime, and this encouraged the adoption of the
second definition.
But just as the monument project was being discussed, public opinion began to lose
interest in the past. In 1996, the inauguration of a memorial called The Mask of
Sorrow in the Kolyma region, where the most terrible labour camps had been, passed
largely unnoticed.
There seem to have been several reasons for this public loss of interest. First the
economic disaster and its social consequences are leading Russians to give priority
to the present. They are also making people question the very validity of the democratic
project. Many Russians feel nostalgic for the Soviet era and about a quarter of them
hanker after what they call the most “glorious” era, when the USSR was feared and
respected, during Stalin’s rule.
The sense of national humiliation Russians have felt in the 1990s has weakened their
desire to delve into the darkest years. Opinion polls show more and more people think
there is too much talk about Stalinist crimes. For some Russians, as the French historian
Maria Ferretti has shown, the desire to forget this period of the past has sprung
from a rejection of the whole Soviet period as an unfortunate interlude in Russian
history and from the glorification of pre-1917 Russia. Today’s Russia is coming to
be seen as the direct heir of Tsarist Russia, passing over the black hole of socialist
rule.
So the Stalinist experience has now been erased. The dictator remains the least popular
figure in Russian history–though those with favourable opinions of him rose from
eight per cent in 1990 to 15 per cent in 1997, while his disapproval rating fell
from 48 per cent to 36 per cent in the same period. The proportion of the population
which listed the mass repression of the 1930s among the main events of the 20th century
fell from 38 per cent in 1989 to no more than 18 per cent in 1994.
This new situation has not stopped investigations into Stalinism and its crimes,
but it has greatly changed their nature. During perestroika, research was a joint
effort and a central part of daily life, but now it is confined to professional scholars.
Memorial has became mainly a research centre. Historians working on the Soviet period
are devoting most of their efforts to publishing official archives, providing people
with a less romantic and increasingly accurate view of what went on. But the task
of remembering for society as a whole has again been interrupted before Russians
have been able, at last, to reconcile themselves with their own history.