The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin - Softcover

Hochschild, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140157956 ISBN 13: 9780140157956

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1995

Synopsis

Stalin's rule over Russia left some 20 million people dead and, in the 35 years since his death, no one would openly write or talk about his vast self-inflicted genocide. With the advent of glasnost, journalist Hochschild explores how Russians today are healing the wounds from an avalanche of long-repressed memories. Photos.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. The Unquiet Ghost won the Madeline Dane Ross Award of the Overseas Press Club of America, given to "the best foreign correspondent in any medium showing concern for the human condition." Hochschild's work has also won prizes from the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and the Society of American Travel Writers. An anthology of his shorter pieces, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.

Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It, Half the Way Home, and The Unquiet Ghost were all named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. His books have been translated into six languages.

Besides his books, Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Nation, and many other newspapers and magazines. He is a former commentator on Nation- al Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Jour- nalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a guest teacher at other campuses in the U.S. and abroad. In 1997- 98, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Fran- cisco with his wife Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons.

From the Back Cover

"I was in Moscow during the first shock of Khrushchev's 'secret speech' in 1956, and have followed the long, traumatic process of de-Stalinization. No other work has brought home the full horror of this monstrous dictator's rule than this close-up account by Adam Hochschild." --Daniel Schorr

"A book that adds greatly to our grasp of the dreadful phenomena of Stalinism--and even gives the interrogation records of American citizens caught in the terror machine." --Robert Conquest

"In the spirit of scholarship and empathy, Adam Hochschild has journeyed into the totalitarian past. The voices he has recorded, the relics he has seen, are haunting--and the raw material of a terrific book." --David Remnick

Reviews

"As the Russians started to come to grips with the trauma that had numbed three generations, words poured forth in newspapers and magazine stories, public meetings, exhibitions, documentary films, plays and novels, each adding to the awakening of memories that many still found painful to confront. For the first time, it became possible to ask about the injury and the guilt, to inquire into the inner feelings of those who had lived on both sides of the barbed wire that had once encircled the hundreds of islands that made up the gulag archipelago. At the beginning of 1991, Adam Hochschild hurried to Moscow to bring this collective memory into focus. The result of his effort is this probing and sensitive book, which casts striking new light upon the Russian past and present."

Journalist Hochschild (Half the Way Home), records the long-suppresed memories of Russians still healing from the wounds of Stalin's rule.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

About ten years ago, I was on a visit to Moscow with a delegation of American journalists, politicians and academics. Under the glittering chandeliers of a prerevolutionary merchant's mansion, we held a week of talks about Cold War issues with Soviet intellectuals and government officials. This was before glasnost; although some of the Russians were fairly prominent, none felt free to voice any real criticisms of official policy. As a result, our week of meetings was stupefyingly boring.

One day we were sitting at lunch with our Soviet hosts. The talk remained polite and stilted. An American at my table suddenly noticed an old friend walking through the restaurant, another American. He waved at the man, who came over and chatted for a few minutes. The two laughed and reminisced about the last time they had seen each other, many years before, during the stormy street demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. " . . . Weren't you arrested that night too? What a scene in the jail! Remember? Tom Hayden was there, Dr. Spock was there, everybody was there. We sang all night! It was fantastic . . . "

A young Russian was sitting at our table, one of the most suave and sophisticated members of the Soviet delegation, a man who subtly flaunted his privileged status by cracking an occasional anti-Soviet joke. But when he overheard these two Ameri- cans, inhabitants of a strange, blithe planet where people sang happily in jail, a wave of shock crossed his face. When their conversation was over, he said, softly but with great feeling, "You must not joke about being in prison."

It was a sudden reminder of the chasm between our own experience and that of people in Russia. Like tens of millions of others, I guessed, this man must have had someone from his family--a father, a grandfather, an aunt--sent to prison or shot during Stalin's time. He still could not talk about it openly, however, especially not with a group of foreigners, where his job was to say how much the Soviet Union wanted peace. The talk around the table moved on to other subjects. But for a moment, in the unexpected intensity of his voice, I felt as if I had glimpsed the hidden part of an iceberg, before the water covered it again.

I have had other such glimpses on trips to Russia over the years, although before glasnost they were usually fleeting, and, if other people were in earshot, it was usually hard to get someone to say much. For almost as long as I have been reading, I have been drawn to the submerged part of that iceberg: the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin. There are many rea- sons; one of them, certainly, is the spectacle of domination and evil on an epic scale. In few major nations in modern times has one man wielded such absolute power for so many years (Stalin ruled, after all, more than twice as long as Hitler). And perhaps no tyrant at any time so thoroughly tried to rearrange reality itself. Stalin's historians and encyclopedists rewrote the past to make him a great hero of the Russian Revolution and the greatest statesman of all time. His pet scientist, Trofim Lysenko, rewrote biology to eliminate genes and let acquired characteristics to inherited. Farm and factory managers rewrote production statistics to meet the high quotas the government demanded. Stalin dispatched some 1,500 writers to their deaths, and often rewrote the manuscripts of those who survived, marking his changes in red or green pencil ("I have added a few words on page 68," he wrote to the novelist Alexander Korneichuk, "It makes things clearer"). His ambition to rewrite history knew no limits. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, eventually died of natural causes--a rare achievement in the Soviet Union of the 1930s--but Stalin threatened that if she did not stop criticizing him, the Communist Party might have to find Lenin a new widow.

In a recent piece by a Russian satirist, Stalin comes back to life, looks around, and asks who started all the changes.

"Khrushchev," is the answer.

"Execute him!" says Stalin.

"He's already dead."

"Execute him posthumously!" says Stalin.

Execution was the favored solution to every problem, including those caused by previous executions. When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country's population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot. The new officials, not surprisingly, came up with higher figures. Between about 1929, when Stalin had vanquished his rivals and concentrated power in his hands, and his death in 1953, he had, most historians now estimate, been directly responsible for the deaths of somewhere around 20 million people.

In a country where some archives are closed, others destroyed, and where uncounted bodies were often bulldozed into mass graves, statistics is not an exact science. Most estimates are that between a third and half the dead perished in famines in the early 1930s. This was when the Soviet government forced peasants onto the new collective farms. In the process the authorities took over the land of the kulaks, the better-off peasants, which usually meant anyone who had two or more animals. Many kulaks were shipped off to Siberia in boxcars at the beginning of winter, and starved. These farmers had been the country's most productive, and starvation also claimed millions of other people who depended on the food that they had grown.

The remainder of those who died ended their lives in execution cellars and in the huge network of concentration camps. The gulag existed for most of Soviet rule, but mass arrests reached their height in the Great Purge, a nationwide frenzy of jailing and killing in the late 1930s. According to the latest official figures from the Russian government, between 1935 and 1941, the secret police arrested more than 19 million Soviets. Seven million were shot outright; a large but unknown proportion of the rest died of malnutrition or exposure in the far-flung camps of the gulag.

Unlike the Nazis who killed Jews, Gypsies, and other groups, the Turks who killed Armenians, or the Belgian colonizers who killed millions of native inhabitants of the Congo, the executioners of the Great Purge did not choose their victims on an ethnic basis. Instead, the Purge was one of those moments in history--like the Spanish Inquisition or the reign of the guillotine in France--when a religious or political movement turns inward and begins devouring its own members. Paradoxically, this crazed slaughter of imaginary enemies did not erupt in full force until the new Soviet Union's real enemies were no longer a threat. Surviving supporters of the old regime had long since left for Paris or New York. The kulaks were collectivized or dead. The arch-dissenter Leon Trotsky was in exile in Mexico. Anyone openly opposed to Stalin at home was in prison.

Only then, strangely, did the Great Purge begin. It rolled through almost every Soviet ministry, university, factory, village and apartment house. On the walls of overflowing prisons throughout the country was scrawled the word, zachem? [Why?] A bewildered world watched hundreds of top Red Army generals arrested and shot, and veteran revolutionaries accused of being British or French or German spies at show trials in Moscow. Being a dutiful true believer was no protection. It was even a danger, for the vast apparatus of torture and death quickly swallowed up well over a million members of the Communist Party. Five successive First Secretaries of the Komsomol, the Party's youth organization, were shot. Thirteen successive Secretaries of the Academy of Sciences in Kiev were arrested. The wave of mass arrests even swept up some 20,000 members of the secret police itself. "Bravo!" the monarchist officer in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon taps in code on his cell wall when he learns that the next cell contains a high-ranking Party official. "The wolves devour each other." The Great Purge is a metaphor for our time: to confront it fully is to grapple not only with the human capacity for cruelty to others, but also with our capacity for self-destruction.

For many Russians who lived through it, the era of Stalin remained the central trauma of their lives. The great poet Anna Akhmatova waited endlessly in line outside Leningrad prisons for news of her husband and son:

And if some day in this country
They decide to raise a monument to me,
On only one condition will I consent
To this commemoration: if they do not place it
By the sea, where I was born . . .
Nor in the royal gardens . . .
But here, where for three hundred hours I stood,
And where they never unlocked the door for me.

That climate of cold, pervasive fear, of denunciations and confessions and midnight arrests, has long seemed to the survivors a moral touchstone that revealed a person's fiber, and who your true friends were. In a recent memoir about the arrest of her father, the scientist Natalya Rappaport writes: "35 years have passed since then, and in my life there have been many different encounters, but still today when I meet new people I measure them by the standards of those years, and I ask myself how they would have acted."

Among what makes the Stalin period so riveting, then, is the vastness of the suffering, the strange spectacle of self-in- flicted genocide, and the way people's courage or cowardice was laid bare. There is also one more thing that gives the era special meaning. What happened in those years was not only evil but, in the original sense of the word, tragic. For the famine, the gulag and the millions of executions evolved not out of a movement that now seems thoroughly sinister from the start, like the European conquest of Africa or the ambitions of Hitler, but out of an event, the Russian Revolution, which was celebrated by good people, enlightened people, progressive people all over the world. With its great gap between autocratic rich and illiterate poor, its prisoners, censorship and secret police, and its all-powerful Tsar, Russia cried out for drastic change. To anyone who dreamed the great Utopian dreams of justice and human betterment, there seemed no nation that needed a revolution more.

The desire to eradicate tyranny and suffering is one side of the Utopian impulse. All sorts of good ideas, from the abolition of slavery to equal rights for women, were first scorned as Utopian, then gradually accepted. However, there is another, more hazard- ous part of Utopianism: the faith that if only we make certain sweeping changes, then the good society will flourish. Most of us have, at one time or another, felt the appeal of a simple solution for life's difficulties. And one aspect of Marxism offered this: the belief that once people overthrew the social and economic system under which they lived, human character itself would be trans- formed. With the Russian Revolution, this transformation seemed to be taking place as predicted, and, miraculously, in Europe's most backward major nation. In contrast to various other imagined Utopias--the arrival of a Messiah, the world of the Noble Savage, proposals for communal farms--this one was actually happening, and on a huge scale. You could get on a ship or a train and go there.

The promised Utopia, of course, rapidly became quite the opposite. Even though it took a dozen years after the 1917 Revolution for Stalin's dictatorship to be complete, ominous signs increased throughout the 1920s: the swift suppression of all non- Communist parties, the rising power of the secret police, and much more. Thus a visit to the new Soviet state was always a laboratory test of an idealistic traveler's ability to see clearly. Few did. Lincoln Steffens found, in his famous phrase, the future that worked. In the famine year of 1931, George Bernard Shaw discovered that Stalin was a fine fellow and that everyone in Russia had plenty to eat. An appalling number of other people who should have known better, from Theodore Dreiser to Julian Huxley to Beatrice and Sidney Webb, came home with tales of proud steelworkers and apple-cheeked milkmaids.

As we look today at this generation of starry-eyed fellow- travelers of sixty years ago, it is easy to shake our heads at their naivete. But at the same time, I've long had the uncomfortable feeling that if I had come of age in those decades, I, too, would have welcomed the Russian Revolution with great hope. If you believed in social justice and equality, and in the rights of labor, women and minorities, how splendid it would have been to brandish the Soviet Union in the face of conservatives at home: they're doing all this over there--and it works! Why can't we do the same?

In every way, Communism embodied the hope of human transformation. It transcended the blind nationalism behind the appalling slaughter of World War I. It offered an alternative to the despair and unemployment of the Great Depression. It promised a sense of comradeship that would gradually spread to all countries of the earth. It gave intellectuals solidarity with the working class (and how especially noble it felt to have that bond with the working class of another, far-off country). Finally, it allowed you to feel that solidarity at the very same time you were in a confident vanguard that understood exactly how history was unfolding. How magic a combination!--To be a stalwart ally of the toiling masses, and a member of an elite, all at once.

By the time of my own political generation, that of the 1960s, most of us had learned at least something from preceding decades, and were more likely to admire Orwell than Lenin. Still, a good many people briefly projected their dreams of the ideal society onto Cuba or China or North Vietnam. If you can imagine Utopia, it seems, there is a temptation to believe that somewhere, especially somewhere far away, it already exists. Earlier in the century, when the regime that seized power in distant Russia was the very first of its kind, this temptation was overwhelming. And so part of what leads me back to that time, when so many people believed in the Russian Revolution's promise to end injustice forever, was the question of whether, had I been alive then, I would have been among them. And that leads in turn to the larger question posed by how both Russians and Westerners of the '20s and '30s idealized the Soviet Union: What makes for clear-seeing, and what makes for denial?

* * *

For Russians, the question of seeing clearly still applies, in different form, today. No nation easily faces a shameful period of its past. Before the 1970s, none of the exhibits at Colonial Williamsburg acknowledged that half the people in the original Wil-liamsburg were slaves. Only in the 1980s did U.S. school text- books admit that the arrival of Columbus and the westward expansion of the frontier was not good news for American Indians. Japanese schoolbooks still say little about Japan's brutal imperial conquests of the 1930s. A school of revisionist historians in Germany claims that, in some ways, the Nazis weren't quite so bad after all.

In Germany, the job of facing the past is far from complete, but in Russia it has barely begun. Even long after the bloodshed was over, what made Russia remarkable was the scale of the silence. For decades after Stalin died in 1953, nearly all public discussion of his rule was strictly forbidden. Only for a brief interlude was this not so. Khrushchev's famous "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's crimes--rather tamely, given what was known--came in 1956, and only the Communist Party elite was privy to it. Over the next half dozen years a few books about the labor camp system, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, appeared. Stalin's body was quietly slipped out of Lenin's tomb, and the thousands of schools and factories and towns bearing Stalin's name were renamed after other people. But the little public comment was allowed except in the vague, deadening Party rhetoric about "errors and excesses during the period of the personality cult." There was no real debate: too many people still in power had blood on their hands.

Soon the lid was screwed on again, very tightly. Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964, and his secret speech itself was not published in the Soviet Union until more than 30 years after he gave it. The government banned all other novels by Solzhenitsyn, and his epic dissection of the prison system, The Gulag Archipelago. Historians wrote about other periods. For three and a half decades after the dictator's death, not one new Soviet biography of Stalin, from any point of view, was allowed to be published. In the more than two dozen volumes of the edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that appeared in the 1970s, Stalin rated only a page and a half (compared to 31 pages, for example, for the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic), a dry listing of dates, posts held and a few stilted remarks like, "certain of his character traits had negative repercussions." Statisticians were not allowed to try to calculate whether these negative repercussions sent 20, or 25, or merely 18 million of their countrymen and women to early deaths by famine or in the gulag. Economists were not allowed to analyze the problems of transforming an economy where more than 20% of the national labor force had been prisoners. The Politburo member in charge of ideology told the novelist Vasily Grossman that his long novel about the Stalin years, Life and Fate, couldn't be published "for two or three hundred years." Just as we remember the late 1930s in Russia by the Great Purge, this later period--most of the 1960s, the 1970s, and first half of the 1980s--we can call the Great Silence.

For roughly a quarter of a century, the entire wrenching, bloody Stalin era, which had devoured so many mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles of people now alive, was officially unmentioned. People had ways of recognizing each other among strangers: if you said that your sister or grandfather had "lived for many years in the Far East," someone else who had lost a family member to the gulag would know what you meant. Otherwise, Russians only talked about the whole subject behind closed doors, or in the furtively circulated typescripts of samizdat literature. This constant, looming, unacknowledged catastrophe was, as therapists say of long-denied family secrets like incest or alcoholism, "the elephant in the living room," that no one dares speak of. And, like an individual survivor of prolonged abuse, a whole society that survives shows the same post-traumatic symptoms: Amnesia. Shame. Numbness. And a lingering fear.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took office and the first stir- rings of glasnost began. In the exhilarating several years that followed, doubtless the first elections and the end of the Cold War mattered more, but I found that what moved me most was news of how Soviet writers, artists, filmmakers, and ordinary people were now finally starting to talk openly about that long-suppressed past. Washington Post correspondent David Remnick called it "the return of history." The Great Silence was finally broken. Russia was like a person who had endured unimaginably terrible suffering as a child, then for many years was strictly forbidden to ever mention it, and who now at last, in middle age, was able to speak.

The words came pouring out. By 1987, previously forbidden books about the Stalin era began to appear, and in 1988 they became a flood. At public meetings, victims of the Great Purge stood, wept, and told their stories of torture, prison and exile. Plays that had been forbidden for decades filled the country's stages, and powerful new documentary films raised unsettling questions about how the country could have let itself be mesmerized by Stalin for so long. At an exhibit in Moscow about the gulag, visitors laid flowers in a labor camp wheelbarrow; on the snowy street outside, in mid-winter, the line of people waiting to get in was more than half a mile long. From the country's Supreme Court and Politburo came announcement after announcement that famous revolutionaries shot after the show trials of the 1930s were rehabilitated.. The Politburo appointed a special subcommittee to study the repression of the Stalin era. It is hard to recall another case where the government of a major country seemed so preoccupied, almost daily, with events that had happened 40 or 50 years earlier.

* * *

One part of the Soviet past seemed particularly to demand confronting. If the metaphorical center of the Holocaust is the railway platform at Auschwitz in the months when Dr. Mengele stood there making his famous "selections," the equivalent time for Stalin's Russia would be around the year 1937, the height of the Great Purge, and the place would be Kolyma.

For Russians, Kolyma--pronounced Kol-ee-MA--is, like Auschwitz, a shorthand word, the final, fatal destination, the part that stands for the whole. With the local names changed, you hear the same joke in every city in Russia:

"What's the highest building in St. Petersburg?"

"It's St. Isaac's Cathedral."

"No it's not. It's the Shpalerka [the secret police interroga- tion prison]. Because from the top floor, you can see all the way to Kolyma."

To find Kolyma on the map, run your finger across the Bering Strait from Alaska, continue a few inches to the left, and there you will find a swath of land sandwiched between the Arctic Ocean to the north, and, to the south, the Sea of Okhotsk--the arm of the Pacific above Japan, ringed with ice for part of each year.

Part of Kolyma lies north of the Arctic Circle, and much of it is mountainous. The desolate, windswept Kolyma town of Oymyakon is the coldest inhabited place on earth. In the 1920s, the Soviets discovered that the region had a great wealth of minerals, including some of the world's greatest known deposits of gold. And so when millions of prisoners began flooding into the gulag in the 1930s, it was to Kolyma, to dig the gold from the perpetually frozen earth, that the most unlucky were sent.

Even today, no railroad or year-round highway reaches Kolyma. Prisoners sent there in the 1930s, '40s, and early '50s traveled in boxcars or special prison cars thousands of miles across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Next they were held in one of the infamous "transit camps" at the Pacific end of the Trans-Siberian. Then came a week's journey in the hold of a freighter, northwards across the Sea of Okhotsk, to Magadan, Kolyma's capital. Many prisoners died on the train. Others succumbed during the sea voyage. For those who still lived, the work then began. Some Kolyma prisoners died in mining accidents; some were shot; most gradually starved.

So far as anyone can determine, the majority of prisoners sent to Kolyma never returned. Russians spoke its very name in hushed tones. Then, as surviving prisoners were released after Stalin's death and came back to what they called "the mainland," they brought with them stories of this distant, wintry land of the dead. One of these survivors was Varlam Shalamov, whom Alexan- der Solzhenitsyn called "the finest writer of the gulag." Shalamov wrote poetry and spare, understated, razor-sharp short stories about this world of ice and death. In one story, a desperate escaper, guards and dogs closing in on him, takes refuge in a bear's lair. In another, a secret police interrogator reverently recalls the most thrilling moment of his career: the time he actually touched the file of Gumilev, the famous executed poet. In another story, two Kolyma prisoners slip out of their barracks at night to dig up a just-buried corpse; they want its clothing, to trade for bread: "Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a face of darkness."

Another writer who survived Kolyma was Eugenia Ginzburg, author of two vivid, searing volumes of memoirs about her seven- teen years of prison and exile. Like Shalamov, she saw her books published to great acclaim in the West, but did not live long enough to see them printed in Russia itself today. "Even the stranger whom you meet on your travels . . . immediately becomes near and dear to you when you learn that he was there," wrote Ginzburg of the gulag. "In other words, he knows things that are beyond the comprehension of people who have not been there, even the most noble and kind-hearted among them."

As glasnost unfolded and I followed the new Soviet debate over the Stalin years, I wondered what life was like there, in the gulag territory, today, especially in remote Kolyma, where skeletons in frozen, shallow mass graves far outnumber the living. There are so many bones still lying about, said one account I read, that today in the summer Kolyma children use human skulls to gather blueberries. What was it like to live and work daily amid such reminders of mass murder? Surely for those who still live in Kolyma, dealing with the past would be an even more painful job than for people in the rest of the country. Until recently, it was impossible to find out: Kolyma was still closed to foreigners.

This restriction, however, was one of many that was lifted as the Soviet Union itself slowly began to crumble. This moment in the country's history felt like the opening of a great window. I had made half a dozen shorter visits to Russia as a journalist, spoke the language passably, and had always wanted to go back for a longer stretch of time. Now, at last, there was an opportunity I had thought might never arise in my lifetime: to see how Russians were breaking the Great Silence and dealing with Stalin's ghost.

With glasnost, it now seemed possible to find all sorts of people whom it would have been difficult or impossible to speak to before. It was less than four decades, for instance, since Stalin had died. There must be people still alive who worked with him. How did they feel about him now? The liberal weekly Moscow News was now running stories about a notorious torturer for the secret police of the 1930s, whom a reporter had just discovered alive and well and working as a scientist in Moscow. This was a man who had once interrogated a woman for eight days straight, then ordered her hung up by her hair until she died. Of the thou- sands like him, could I find any willing to talk? Would they be repentant? Or defiant? Besides the executioners, I also wanted to talk to the victims. There were an estimated 100,000 or so people still alive who had been in labor camps in the Stalin years. How did they now look back on that time?

Then there were the mass graves turning up all over the various republics of the fast-dissolving Soviet Union. In earlier years, if somebody stumbled onto a pile of human bones, it had been immediately hushed up. But now the Soviet press was filled with news of these discoveries. Workers laying a gas pipeline through a pine forest near Minsk came upon one of the largest sites: an estimated 100,000 or more skeletons dating from 1937 to 1941, some still clutching the items they were holding when ar- rested--eyeglasses, medicines, purses full of coins. At some grave sites, corpses were lined up in pairs: executioners had saved bullets by killing two victims with each. People found hundreds of thousands more skeletons jammed into abandoned mining tunnels in the Urals, yielded up by the permafrost in Siberia, and beneath grass and trees in hidden corners of Moscow itself.

In most societies, barriers of time and space surround such things. The worst deeds on our own collective conscience--slavery, and the slaughter of the American Indians--are safely back in the last century and beyond. And, for more recent events, we usually have an ocean in between: no American child digging in a backyard is going to stumble onto skeletons of the Vietnamese who died at My Lai, or the victims of the U.S.-financed death squads in El Salvador. Yet people in Russia have no such barriers. What would it be like, I wondered, if beneath a familiar park or street you suddenly found a mass grave--which might contain the bones of your own relatives? I wanted to visit such a town and find out.

Finally, there was that larger set of questions, which Westerners have been debating for decades, but which Russian intellectuals have become free to talk about openly only now: about what allows people to become executioners, about the two faces of Utopianism, and about seeing and denial.

I planned a stay in Russia of some six months. My family and I arrived in Moscow on a snowy night in January 1991, the beginning, as it turned out, of Gorbachev's final year in power and of the Soviet Union's final year as one country. In the build- ing where we found an apartment, we were the only foreigners. It was an immense structure dating from the Stalin years, built like a fortress around a central courtyard. The dirty stairwell was dimly lit, and the small elevator sounded like a meat grinder. But double-paned windows and thick stone walls kept out the cold. The building stood between a factory still named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Soviet secret police, and an attractive little park still named after Pavlik Morozov, the 14- year-old boy who became an official hero in the 1930s for de- nouncing his own father to the authorities. It seemed an appro- priate spot to begin my own journey of exploration back to that dark time, through the memories of people still living. Before the end of those travels, I wanted to talk with Russians of every sort to see how they were remembering, judging, and coming to terms with that period--and to talk not only with people in Moscow, but with men and women across this entire vast country, all the way to the icy heart of darkness itself, Kolyma.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140157956
• ISBN 13: 9780140157956
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336