2
Poet and person of remarkable courage, Osip Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 after he wrote a satirical poem about Stalin, an act that he understood as suicidal. After investigation, he was sentenced to a mild exile, and, exceptionally, his wife, Nadezhda, was allowed to accompany him. Several years later, he wrote an ode to Stalin, a complex piece of poetry that essentially glorified Stalin.1 It seems that Stalin read the brutal caricature of 1934 and, paradoxically, liked it.2 Stalin probably read Mandelstam’s reverent ode of 1937 as well, though we do not know how he understood it. We know only that Mandelstam was arrested again and subjected to the standard treatment: separation from family, transportation to eastern Siberia, barracking with criminals, hard labor, hunger, and lack of medical care. Nothing more was heard of Mandelstam until the collapse of the gulag system in the mid-1950s, when random survivors returned from the camps to tell partially true, partially fantastic stories about their victims. Yulian Oksman, a sober literary scholar who survived ten years in a camp also in eastern Siberia though thousands of miles away from Mandelstam, wrote to an émigré colleague in 1962:
Already during the transportation Mandelstam began to demonstrate signs of insanity. Suspecting that the camp officials . . . had received an order from Moscow to poison him, he refused food. . . . Neighbors caught him stealing their bread rations and beat him brutally, until they realized that he was mad. . . . He was thrown out of the barracks, lived near trash pits, and ate garbage. Dirty, covered with grey hair, long-bearded, in rags, crazy—he had been turned into the camp’s scarecrow.3
In Auschwitz, these people were called Muselmänner, or Muslims.4 In the Soviet camps, they were called dokhodiagi (“goners” or “the soon-to-be-dead”).5 By all accounts, these goners constituted a large proportion of the camp population. Since the Soviet camps did not practice the Nazi procedures of “selection,” which were aimed at eliminating the sick and weak, many of those who perished in the gulag spent their last weeks and months as goners.6 Wasting precious resources, the goners were a nuisance; but there was no official guidance on what to do with this never-decreasing group of people. Some of these individuals might be cured or killed, but any consistent program of elimination—or, by the same token, of support—would be punishable. Only the camp medics had concepts and contexts within which they could handle these people, but even if they wanted to do so, their resources were inadequate. Sometimes the goners were even released “for medical reasons,” a strategic response that improved the camp mortality statistics. More often, they were left to die in the camp.7 Produced by the gulag in huge numbers, the goners personified the abject world of the camps, its ideal type (to borrow a concept from the social sciences). Julia Kristeva defined the abject as “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness . . . a weight of meaninglessness on the edge of non-existence and hallucination.”8 These words might serve as a portrait of Osip Mandelstam, who prophetically wrote in 1931, “Only my equal can kill me,”9 and a collective picture of the millions of his equals in the gulag.
Having survived the camp, Solzhenitsyn understood its functioning by analogy with the body, which cannot exist without getting rid of its waste products; thus the gulag developed a means of ejecting “its principal form of waste,” the goners. Like Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn stated that no witness could relate the experience of the goners, the central phenomenon of the camps:
Philosophers, psychologists, medical men, and writers could have observed in our camps, as nowhere else . . . the reduction of the human being to an animal and the process of dying alive. But the psychologists who got into our camps were, for the most part, not up to observing; they themselves had fallen into that very same stream that was dissolving the personality into feces and ash.10
Transformative Torture
Analyzing the early reports of the survivors of the Nazi and, in a few cases, Soviet camps, Hannah Arendt identified in these writings a common tone, which she described as a “curious air of unreality.” She focused on the incomprehensibility of the camps, which their inmates frequently described as a nightmare. From the commonsense point of view, “neither the institution itself . . . nor its political role makes any sense whatsoever.” Nothing offends common sense more, Arendt said, than “the complete senselessness” of the camps where the innocent suffer more than the criminal, labor bears no fruit, and crimes do not benefit their authors. This reign of pure violence needs an explanation, but the task of providing one presents an “extraordinary difficulty.” Responding to this puzzle, Arendt presented the camps as “laboratories in the experiment of total domination,” a goal that can be achieved only in a “human-made hell.”11
It was not the logic of production that organized the life and work in the gulag, but the logic of torture. Investigative torture has become one of the most memorable features of the Stalinist terror. However, investigative torture was applied mostly in prisons rather than in camps, where millions were kept under a different kind of torture. In the camps, the effects of hunger, hard labor, untreated illnesses, freezing temperatures, separation from families, isolation from the world, and vulnerability to violent attacks by fellow inmates combined in an overwhelming pain that, being purposefully inflicted by the regime, should also be considered as torture. As Elaine Scarry reveals in her classical analysis, “torture consists of acts that magnify the way in which pain destroys a person’s world.” Pain, Scarry argues, has a unique ability to destroy language by degrading speech to the sounds anterior to language. If pain destroys the sufferer’s world, torture has an additional element: it expands the torturer’s self and its self-perceived power. The pain of torture results in the dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside, conflation of private and public, and substitution of the victim’s agency by that of the torturers. “The torturer’s growing sense of self is carried outward on the prisoner’s swelling pain.”12
Soviet concentration camps were torture camps, not extermination camps, and if people died in high numbers it was the result of negligence rather than purposeful intent. In the language of Arendt and Scarry, the gulag’s primary function was to destroy the convicts’ language and their world. If the need for information, as Scarry shows, is a false justification for investigative torture, the economic needs of the Soviet state were a similarly false justification for the torture endemic to the camps. Economic productivity in the labor camps was about 50 percent of the average level achieved by free labor in the same industries; moreover, this estimate does not take into account those prisons and camps where millions of convicts did not perform any labor. Many of the gulag’s projects had no rational justification, and many have never been completed. Those that were finished, such as the Belomor Canal, proved to be economically useless. The gulag managers’ permanent problem was not a deficit but a surplus of labor. They did not arrest people in order to realize their projects; they invented projects in order to occupy the prisoners.13 The regime partially recognized the nonutilitarian nature of the camps when it talked about their ideological, educational, and psychological—in a word, transformative—functions.14 Osip Mandelstam’s swift degeneration in the camp demonstrates the brutal efficiency of this low-tech treatment. Used universally in the prisons and camps of the gulag era, transformative torture—“remolding and reforging human nature,” to use the language of Stalinism—efficiently turned those who were generously endowed with language, creativity, and what Arendt called “the world” into goners who were indifferent to everything but their next morsel of bread or their hated neighbor.
Seeking a philosophical means of representing the horror of the Nazi camps, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben develops the concept of bare life, or homo sacer, defined as “life that may be killed but not sacrificed.”15 Indeed, only life that has value may be sacrificed. By contrast, the bare life of the camp victims fills an irrelevant space or time between social and biological deaths. Not defined by law, custom, or faith, bare life enters into a direct relation with the sovereign: he who can declare a state of emergency can also define which of his subjects might be wasted at will. Agamben argues that camps are permanent zones of exception from the law, and therefore life in these zones cannot be described in terms that are meaningful outside of these zones. There are archives for all kinds of life but bare life. Scarcely self-conscious due to humiliation, hunger, and disease, bare life of the camps has been largely forgotten.
However, in the Stalinist context, Agamben’s analysis looks incomplete. The idea of sacrifice relies on the religious concepts of the ancient Greeks and Romans; for moderns, this is a very ambiguous concept.16 In secular terms, one could define sacrifice—for example, a loss of soldiers at war or fire fighters on duty—as based on the voluntary participation of the potential victims and the retroactive acknowledgment from the public sphere. In other words, sacrifice is voluntary, public, and meaningful to the public. In contrast, a mass murder in a gas chamber, in a state-organized famine, or in a Soviet camp does not conform to this definition because it is neither voluntary nor public.
Agamben’s sacrificial definition of bare life and his archaic concept of homo sacer need serious adjustment before they can be applied to the gulag. Revising Agamben, Eric Santner proposes the concept of “creaturely life,” which reflects the “ontological vulnerability” of humans. According to Santner, those cultural institutions and human communities that attempt to shelter their members from various threats often intensify their vulnerability by exploitation and tyranny.17 Following both these authors and also Elaine Scarry, I propose a more specific construction, “tortured life.” This is life that has been stripped of meaning, speech, and memory by torture. Like creaturely life, tortured life is created by destitution, but this is a kind of destitution that is generated by the purposeful efforts of the state and its institutions. Like bare life, tortured life is situated in direct relation to the sovereign, because it is the sovereign who tortures. Tortured life is a temporary condition, though if the torture is skillfully performed, it can be drawn out over a prolonged period of time. This life can survive and recover, but the posttraumatic consequences are unavoidable.
Soviet people were not just objects of ideological manipulations and violent coercion on the part of the institutions of the state. These institutions were also created and run by people who shared the same nature—class, ethnic, and human—as those who were tortured or murdered in the gulag. The historiography of Stalinism has featured a long-lived and enduring debate between the so-called totalitarian school and the revisionists. The revisionists carried the day in Western universities in the 1990s, though much to their chagrin the totalitarian model would largely be embraced in post-Soviet Russia. While the totalitarianists revealed the top-down control and coercion in Soviet society, the revisionists emphasized the intrinsic agency of the common people and of the low-level structures of the state. After the demise of the Soviet Union, a new generation of historians has shifted the focus of these debates toward the self-disciplining practices employed in the hearts and minds of Soviet citizens, practices that are viewed as the construction of a particular kind of subjectivity.18 One consequence of this body of new research has been to displace to the margins the massive violence that was the definitive feature of Stalinism. While Hannah Arendt and, more recently, Tzvetan Todorov see terror as the essence of totalitarian government,19 the new wave of historiography has focused on Soviet diaries, autobiographies, and dreams, all of which are manifestations of subjectivity that preserve some features of freedom even under terror.
These approaches, one that focuses on violence and another that focuses on discourse, should be creatively combined. The state-sponsored violence of the high Soviet period (1928–1953), always massive and ever increasing, imposed self-disciplinary practices on the Soviet subjects. These practices would not have developed without the omnipresent backdrop of the gulag, where discipline was external, diaries forbidden, and human life returned to its animal origins. During this period, any member of the Communist elite could be sacked, arrested, tortured, and killed at any moment and for many reasons, one of which could be insufficient loyalty. An understanding of the environment of coercion, violence, and angst is crucial for the analysis of the ideology, culture, and discursive practices of the Soviet period. The resulting complex of feelings—fear, bewilderment, resentment, compassion, and mournfulness—was a permanent feature of the Soviet life. Theoretical reasons for ignoring the Soviet violence are as thin as historical ones. The most important inspiration for the studies of Soviet subjectivity, Michel Foucault, did not ignore violence as a historical phenomenon, but rather emphasized it.20
Nevertheless, overlooking violence has become an important trend that pervades even the best studies of Soviet life. One example is the acclaimed book by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, which focuses on “the last Soviet generation” but necessarily starts the analysis by digging into the earlier periods. Having developed an original methodology for studying ideological performances as speech acts, Yurchak describes Stalinism in purely discursive terms, as the reign of an “authoritative speech.” In Yurchak’s formulation, Stalin was “the Master of discourse” and its “editor” who “legitimized the ideological discourse from a position external to it.”21 Yet Yurchak does not explain how this paradoxical mechanism—the control of ideological debates by nonideological means—worked in practice.
I submit that only violence—threats, purges, arrests, torture, show trials, executions, and the gulag—could force an ideological debate into the margins dictated by an external power. Stalin could control—“edit,” as Yurchak puts it—other people’s utterances only because he had sheer physical, and not merely discursive, means of power at his disposal. In one of his examples, Yurchak refers to an interesting Soviet publication, The History of the Civil War in the USSR.22 The very title of this work is stunningly disingenuous. In fact, the volume tells the history of the civil war in Russia and adjacent territories in 1918–1922, that is, before the creation of the USSR in 1922. Furthermore, this history makes no reference to the subsequent Soviet terror that was, strictly speaking, the civil war in the USSR. According to Yurchak, “Stalin carefully reviewed the text,” and the editors accepted 700 corrections that he suggested. The first volume of the planned multivolume edition was printed and circulated in half a million copies in 1936. But Yurchak does not say what happened next. During the following year, two out of eight members of the editorial board and eight out of eighteen contributing authors were “repressed”: eight were sentenced and executed, one committed suicide in fear of arrest, and one fled abroad. Probably because of these events, the subsequent volumes were never published. Typical for the period, this story lays bare the mechanisms of Stalin’s “metadiscourse”: physical violence turned the editors and authors, many of them heroic soldiers and radical politicians in the past, into a flock of sheep who slavishly accepted hundreds of “corrections” to their own memories and histories. The results were also typical: lives were lost, volumes were left unwritten or unpublished, and the civil war in the USSR continued. As Arendt declared, violence cannot create power but actually destroys it.23 Symbolized and largely realized by the gulag, violence was both catalyzer and corroder of the Soviet discourse.
Boomerangs of Violence
“Everything flows,” wrote Vasily Grossman, but in Soviet Russia, this flow was swirling and warped, as in a whirlwind. Based on routine, massive, and ever-increasing violence, political models fanned out from the metropolitan centers to the cultural and geographic periphery and then returned with fresh force, legitimized and magnified, to the centers. Comparing Nazism with Stalinism and both with colonialism worldwide, Hannah Arendt formulated the idea of the “boomerang effect,” whereby the practices of colonial governance were transferred back to the metropolitan country.24 With its aboriginal roots, the boomerang metaphor encapsulated the old, Kantian nightmare that the European peoples would be ruled as if they were savages who could not rule themselves. After Arendt, anthropologists have repeatedly stressed the role of colonies as “the laboratories of modernity,” where the newest technologies of power were tested before they were brought to Europe.25 In contrast, the Soviet terror’s waves and cycles were mostly centrifugal. Sent from Moscow to all corners of the enormous country, executives of terror developed their local methods of torture and murder, but the “quotas” of terror were tightly controlled from Moscow (though regional leaders often requested permission to increase them). I will show, however, that Grossman proposed a more complex understanding of terror, which he developed in parallel to Arendt’s.
In Grossman’s Everything Flows, a novel written between 1955 and 1963, the protagonist, Ivan Grigorievich, is returning from the northern camps of the gulag, where he has spent twenty-nine years of his life. He visits Moscow and Leningrad, the cities of his youth, and then settles in a provincial town of southern Russia. While reading this novel, we never move beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, but the narrative is surprisingly cosmopolitan. Scenes in the camps emphasize the multiple ethnicities of the prisoners, from the Russians to the Jews to the Poles and Crimean Tatars. The most passionate and detailed parts of the novel tell us not about the camp experience of the protagonist but about events that happened thousands of miles away from his camp. These are the chapters that describe the famine in Ukraine, and this is the best depiction of the Ukrainian famine that has been written in Russian. But with his work of mourning, Ivan Grigorievich takes us farther than Ukraine. Born in the Caucasus, on land where the memories of colonization by the Russian Empire were still recent and living, he frequently revisits his childhood in dreams that are narrated in the novel. The place where his father built his house had formerly been populated by the Circassians, a rebellious tribe that led the militant resistance of the Caucasian peoples against Russian domination. Thousands of Circassians were killed during the Russian colonization of the Caucasus; in the mid-nineteenth century, many were expelled to Turkey. Growing up among the ruins of this civilization, the young Ivan would come across the remains of abandoned Circassian gardens and cemeteries among Russian fields and roads. Once, after coming home from such a walk, he broke down and wept: “It was as if, there in the half-dark of the forest, someone were lamenting, searching for people who had vanished, looking behind trees, listening for the voices of Circassian shepherds or the crying of babies.” Ivan asked his father for an explanation, and the father answered with a popular Russian saying that was often used for explaining the Stalinist terror, but is here applied to the colonization of the Caucasus: “When you chop down the forest, splinters fly”: the victimization of the Circassians was a fair price for Russian, and later Soviet, imperial glory.26
Thinking about his childhood in the colony, Ivan Grigorievich describes both his shame for the past and premonitions of future disasters. This combination of political guilt, sentimental nostalgia, and apocalyptic mindset is typical of the childhood reminiscences of postcolonial thinkers who grew up in settlers’ colonies. Grossman himself was in fact born and raised in Berdichev, one of the centers of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, a colonial institution of the Russian Empire that practiced apartheid for two centuries. Grossman’s life experience was thus essentially the opposite of that of Ivan Grigorievich: the former was a native victim of apartheid, the latter an imperial settler. By giving his ethnically Russian protagonist, Ivan Grigorievich, who stands here as a quintessential victim of Stalinism, childhood roots in a settlers’ colony in the Caucasus, Grossman presents us with the living trajectory of Arendt’s boomerang: a sweeping loop that turned Ivan Grigorievich, a descendant of imperial perpetrators in the colony, into a victim of internal violence at home. Emphasizing this construction, the novel reaches its finale with Ivan Grigorievich’s pilgrimage to his home in the Caucasus (see chapter 3 for more details of his trip). The family house is no longer there, but the novel ends at this site of memory, having described a full circle like a boomerang.
Long musings about Russia’s unfreedom precede this finale. According to Grossman, Russian progress and Russian slavery were shackled together by a thousand-year-long chain. Essentially, Grossman understands the Soviet horrors of collectivization, mass famines, and concentration camps as the resurgence of serfdom, which the Empire abolished in 1861.27 In the twentieth century, speculates Grossman, the Soviet state extended serfdom to social and ethnic groups that historically had never experienced it, such as miners in Ukraine or the Tatars in the Crimea. Grossman explains both the old czarist and new Soviet serfdom as the result of Russia’s geographic space—the “tragic vastness,” as he put it. Like Arendt, Grossman perceives an affinity between the Nazi and the Soviet totalitarianisms, or, as Grossman formulated it: “the unity of the barbed wire stretched around Auschwitz and the labor camps of Siberia.” This intuition is also central for Grossman’s great novel, Life and Fate.
In Grossman’s philosophical vision, serfdom was thus the primary manifestation of Russia’s internal unfreedom that continued through the millennia. However, in Grossman’s poetic vision, Ivan Grigorievich’s imperial childhood foreshadowed his experience in the gulag. One boomerang flies back to the gulag from the site of the external colonization, in this case, the Caucasus. Another boomerang returns from Russia’s internal colony, which was serfdom. In this stereoscopic picture, we find two centripetal movements that both returned from Russia’s geographical and social periphery to its core, which was the gulag.
The First Collapse
We can only speculate about what would have happened if Nazi Germany won World War II: would Hitler’s successor have denounced the Holocaust? In the Soviet Union, the very same institutions and personalities that had organized the mass crimes later revealed them voluntarily. Ironically, Stalin’s major achievement, the military strength of the Soviet Union, created a unique situation in which his regime had to analyze, exculpate, and dismantle itself. There was nobody else to do it. But under this kind of control, the process of working through could not achieve closure.
In 1956, the head of the Soviet state, Nikita Khrushchev, started the de-Stalinization process. There is no doubt whatsoever that he was personally implicated in the “repressions” that he oversaw through the decades of his service as the party leader of Ukraine and Moscow, some of the bloodiest of the bloodlands.28 There was nothing coercing Khrushchev to confess other than his own guilty memory of the terror and his fear of the terror’s reenactment.29 This autonomous, self-imposed character of Khrushchev’s revelations makes them unique, even unprecedented in the history of the twentieth-century violence.
In 1953, there were 166 labor camps in the Soviet Union, plus a large number of other penitentiary institutions, from prisons to special settlements. Many millions served time in these institutions. Almost all of them were released between 1954 and 1956.30 The enormous system of the gulag melted away with amazing ease, foreshadowing the collapse of the Soviet Union a few decades later. At the moment of his celebrated confession at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, Khrushchev was at the height of his power. But according to his son, Khrushchev was “ceaselessly returning to Stalin, poisoned by Stalin, trying to expunge Stalin out of himself and failing to do so.”31 Whether his incomplete revelations were driven by individual atonement or political calculation, he explained them using the vaguely Hegelian and, to some extent, Freudian idea that a crime should be acknowledged in order to prevent its repetition. “Never again” resounded as a leitmotif both in his report to the Twentieth Congress and later in his memoirs. Mourning and warning were tightly linked in his rhetoric, with the latter providing political arguments for the former. You may feel no remorse, he kept warning his peers, and you are not required to confess your own crimes; but if you do not mourn your victims, your fate will be the same as theirs. Khrushchev succeeded in transforming his milieu to such an extent that he escaped the worst: deposed in 1964, he was left in peace to live for many more years, dictated his memoirs, and was buried by his family. As the Soviet phrase went, he enjoyed the supreme luxury of dying in his own bed—a luxury that, in his case, was well earned.
Desperately in need of a conceptual apparatus that neither Marxist tradition nor the Stalinist legacy could provide, Khrushchev coined two operational concepts: “unjustified repressions,” to embrace mass arrests, tortures, and deportations, and the “cult of personality,” to describe the accompanying ideological practices. Both concepts served to scapegoat Stalin. “Unjustified repressions” blamed the preceding ruler for the meaningless, unmotivated man-made catastrophe. The quasi-religious concept of the “cult of personality” accused Stalinism of violating two fundamental tenets of Marxism—rationality and egalitarianism. These conceptual contributions were substantial if euphemistic, and Khrushchev’s language is still with us.
If the Nazi Holocaust was ended and exposed by others, the Soviet terror was ended and exposed by its former perpetrators, who were also its potential victims. For the speaker and the researcher, self-applied concepts present notorious epistemological problems. I suspect that many of Khrushchev’s political difficulties were connected to this paradoxical logic of self-reference, which was first exemplified by the Cretan sage of 600 B.C., Epimenides, who said, “All Cretans are liars.” If all Cretans are liars, of course, then this statement is a lie, too. If every Communist believed in the lie, could they reveal the truth? Khrushchev relied on dialectics rather than logic, and this Hegelian method provided some relief. However, self-applicability does make it difficult to comprehend, represent, and remember the Soviet terror. In retrospect, its agents and targets seem blurred, agency dispersed, purpose uncertain, causality cyclical, and renunciation incomplete.
Two readings of the term “repression(s),” the Freudian and the Khrushchevian, are intimately correlated. After Stalin died, the long-mourned, secretly familiar, inadvertently forgotten returnees were received with mixed feelings that ranged from horror to compassion to indifference and hostility. They returned with an experience of violence, humiliation, and suffering that was out-of-scale for their family, friends, and neighbors. Familiar and alien, they were uncanny. In Freud’s famous definition, the uncanny “is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it”: the return of the repressed.32 After the collapse of the gulag, the victims of repressions were coming back from their camps as uncanny returnees. While perpetrators saw the dead returning to take a terrible revenge, others imagined the fate of the repressed with horrifying details that mixed oral histories, personal fears, and literary paradigms (see chapter 3). The whole country turned into a “contact zone” between the innocent victims of the gulag and the guilty survivors who managed to escape it.33 In 1956, Anna Akhmatova said: “Now two Russias are eyeball to eyeball. Those who were in prison and those who put them there.”34 But these two Russias were also aware of the third, which died in the process. Shaping a zone of indistinction between bare life and state law, between repression and rehabilitation, and finally, between mourning and oblivion, this triangular relation determined the cultural dynamics of the late-Soviet period.
Mourning and haunting have etched their imprints on many products of late-Soviet and post-Soviet culture. Striving to understand and appreciate this culture, scholars need a particular sensitivity to the warped, the uncanny, and the ghostly. According to a credible witness—the trained historian, Soviet dissident, and later leading post-Soviet human rights activist Liudmila Alexeyeva—in 1953 the Moscow public was accustomed to stories like this:
One night the general was found in a cold sweat, screaming, “Forgive me, Dmitry Ivanovich!” His wife asked him who he was talking to; he did not respond. After a few weeks, the general started talking to the invisible Dmitry Ivanovich while awake. After they took him to the insane asylum, his wife learned that Dmitry Ivanovich was a man the general shot with his own revolver in 1937.35
A similar effect—mournful and somewhat mystical experience of the belated justice—was felt everywhere among the Communist sympathizers, some of them defectors at this stage. Resigning from the French Communist Party in October 1956, the Martiniquan author and politician Aimé Césaire wrote:
Khrushchev’s revelations concerning Stalin are enough to have plunged all those who have participated in communist activity, to whatever degree, into an abyss of shock, pain, and shame. . . . The dead, the tortured, the executed—no, . . . these are not the kind of ghosts that one can ward off with a mechanical phrase. From now on, they will show up as watermarks, . . . obsession, . . . malaise, . . . wound at the core of our consciences.36
Despite the enormous difference between the criminal Soviet general and the sophisticated postcolonial intellectual, we see similar metaphors for the new situation that remained beyond comprehension: they both perceived the ghosts of the dead returning to torment the living. But within his party, Khrushchev failed to rally support for his courageous repentance. His sympathizers were mainly intellectuals in the Russian capitals and provinces who were numerous and important in the technocratic and still-ambitious Soviet Union, but he failed to address them directly. This intelligentsia included scores of gulag survivors and their relatives. Ilia Ehrenburg, a popular writer who outlived Stalinism, named this period “the Thaw.” Defrosting three decades of Stalinism (1924–1953), this remarkable decade ended in 1964, when a vigorous protest from the Communist Party against Khrushchev’s capricious reforms led to his dismissal.37 During the long, dreadful Stagnation that followed (1964–1985), the authorities resumed their attempts to escape from the memory of Stalinism. Playing with the two meanings of “repression,” I call this dark period of memory “the repression of repressions.” However, those inconsistent moves revealed as much as they obscured. Banished from politics and transferred to culture, the work of mourning became the most sensitive ideological issue in the late-Soviet period.
Tragically incomplete, the Thaw was the most successful of Russia’s de-Stalinization projects. Led by poets and writers, Russia’s mourners had their moment of recognition that eventuated in their unprecedented popularity during the Thaw and in the later period. Less than ten years after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev staged a performative act of major importance: the removal of Stalin’s corpse from the mausoleum on Red Square (1961). Announced on televisions that the Soviet people had only recently obtained, the news about this removal was watched with wonder and relief. I was a child in Leningrad, and I remember watching this news together with my father, who was inexplicably moved by it. Watching my father who was watching Stalin’s removal happened to be the first political experience of my life, though of course I did not know what would follow.
Cosmopolitan Memory?
The periods that within the Soviet Union were called the Thaw and Stagnation coincided with what has gone down in global memory as the central phase of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the Western world. Throughout this period, the memory of the gulag was preserved internationally, by American and European historians, activists, writers, and politicians, and by Soviet dissidents and memoirists. As the legacies of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and many others can testify, the Cold War struggle against the Soviet expansion was also a struggle for human rights within the Soviet Union and for the historical memory of its victims. The Cold Warriors smuggled, translated, and published manuscripts by Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, Osip Mandelstam and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and many others; they produced magisterial pieces of scholarship such as Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) or Robert Conquest’s Great Terror (1968); and they gathered an amazing array of Soviet artworks, such as Norton Dodge’s collection that preserved precious pieces of art from the gulag and other places (see chapter 5 for some examples).
In the aftermath of genocides and other catastrophes, global memory has played various roles. Sometimes it has been a supplement to national memories, sometimes a catalyst, and sometimes a substitute. The prominent Holocaust historian Dan Diner recently reexamined this problem. Starting with Maurice Halbwachs’s classical argument that collective memory requires a remembering collective, Diner comes to the conclusion that nations can preserve memory while some other social groups, such as classes, cannot. Diner states that the Nazi crimes “entered the ethnicized memory” of Germans because the regime eliminated those whom Germans considered to be “part of a culturally and historically different collective.” In contrast, the Soviet regime defined both victims and perpetrators “as part of the same historical mnemonic collective.”38 Therefore, Diner concludes, German guilt and Jewish mourning have been passed down through generations, while the Soviet crimes vanished from memory.
Naturalizing ethnic differences, Diner denies the ability of nonethnic groups to structure “mnemonic collectives” and remember their dead in a collective way. Even in the German-Jewish case, I find this argument questionable. Germans were not “fundamentally different” from Jews; it was the Nazis who invested enormous efforts into construing this religious group as the national Other. Unavoidably, the “thesis of a fundamental difference” between ethnic and other groups underestimates those types of solidarity that transcend and transgress national borders. According to Diner’s argument, the repressions of “kulaks” or “nepmen” could not and do not remain in the collective memory, either because these groups were ideological fictions created by the Bolsheviks with their theories of class warfare or because these groups were successfully exterminated and did not leave descendants to mourn them. Diner characterizes such crimes as historically describable but mnemonically nontransmissible. With some hesitation, Diner makes an exception to this rule for those Soviet groups who suffered from repressions that were defined by ethnicity. Diner mentions Ukrainians here, but he could give many more examples—for instance, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, or, indeed, Jews after World War II. However, my central question addresses not these ethnically defined cases but a more general picture that Diner draws here: is Diner’s nationalization of memory (that is, the identification of the remembering collective with the nation) historically true and morally defensible? I do not believe so. Diner’s concept of collective memory seems to be custom-made for the Nazi Holocaust. Designed to clarify comparisons between the Holocaust and other cases of mass murder, it precludes many of these comparisons. Diner seems to operate within a simplified distinction between two types of human collectives, nations and classes. Marxist efforts to furnish classes with self-conscious identities do not seem convincing to Diner, but the idea that nations have identities, and therefore subjectivities, is something he appears to take as a given.
It is individuals who feel guilt or sorrow. However, these individuals have the ability to pass on, preserve, and exchange their feelings; culture provides them with the instruments for these purposes. Culture allows people to share their experiences without requiring physical encounter. Various media and genres of culture transmit and distort memory, which moves between individuals, communities, and generations. Using cultural means, some individuals and groups are able to shape the feelings of other individuals and groups. With the help of texts, images, and other cultural instruments, some individuals even create new groups and collectives. Besides nations and classes, there is a third type of collective: associations, as Alexis de Tocqueville first described them.39 The post-Soviet transformation has not happened within an undivided—classless, nationless, subjectless—unity. It has been a struggle between myriads of collective subjects, who construct themselves according to a variety of principles, from the ethnic to the political to the generational to the memorial, and shape their identities in this struggle.
The concept of cultural memory is close to the concept of collective memory but is significantly broader.40 Cultural memory presumes a remembering collective only in the broadest and loosest sense. In the modern world, the cultural communities of those who subscribe to a certain journal or take part in online chat play the role of “mnemonic collectives.” The turn from “collective memory” to “cultural memory” de-emphasizes the remembering collective and focuses on the materials of which memory is made. It is a turn from the sociology of memory in the tradition of Maurice Halbwachs to cultural studies of memory in the tradition of Walter Benjamin. “Multimedia collages” of cultural memory integrate multiple types of signifiers: from memoirs to memorials; from historical studies to historical novels; from family albums to museums and archives; from folk songs to films to the Internet.41 The leading role of the Memorial Society, a typically Tocquevillian association, in preserving memory of the Soviet victims, monitoring human rights, and struggling for Russia’s democratization, exemplifies the post-Soviet type of the remembering collective and testifies to the powerful role of memory in structuring the social space.
In the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev launched glasnost, a sweeping project of public truth-seeking that revealed more about the Soviet past than about Russia’s present. Newly published memoirs, archival findings, and popular histories documented the processes, institutions, and personalities of the Soviet terror in unprecedented detail.42 The great texts of the Thaw that remained unpublished at the time—Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Grossman—were all published in large print-runs. Hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies published in the 1980s dealt with the sufferings of their authors or their parents under the Soviet regime. In 1993, the literary historian Marietta Chudakova, then an adviser to President Yeltsin, wrote that such writing would fulfill the function of a “Russian Nuremberg,” staged not in the courtroom as in Germany but on the pages of memoirs.43
This hope failed to materialize. In fact, historians and journalists often lament the cynicism of the post-Soviet public, which instead of learning about pluralism has learned a sad lesson about the dependency of historical truth on the changing interests of those in power. Though the memories of social catastrophes have a long life, the feelings of survivors differ from those of their children, and the feelings of the second and third postcatastrophic generations are different again. The so-called second de-Stalinization, which began in Russia in 1985, was smothered during the second Stagnation period, which stabilized and coagulated in 2000.
Dispersed and marginalized, the intelligentsia of early twenty-first-century Russia have been deprived of their economic or political relevance. Nostalgia for the Soviet past has been purposefully spread by the state-controlled television, and its manifestations have become increasingly frequent on the printed page and the computer screen. Among the historical novels, biographies, films, and documentaries that have been disseminated in abundance during this period, a growing share belongs to conspiracy theories and propaganda that effectively deny the crimes of the Soviet period. Often, this “restorative nostalgia” has more to do with the drive to criticize the current Russian government than it does with any genuine sympathy for the world of communal apartments, collective farms, and the gulag.44 But the booming social media in Russia and their decisive role in political processes in the 2010s testify to the truth of Tocqueville’s words that he wrote, by quill, in the 1830s:
Among the laws that rule human societies there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.45
There is no doubt that the increasingly consumerist and also sociable Russian society has become less interested in the Soviet guilt than it was fifty, or even twenty, years ago. However, references to this legacy are surprisingly robust in political debates and cultural products of the post-Soviet era. During this decade, the challenging task of making sense of the Soviet past has also produced original and important novels and films (see chapter 11). About 2010, some intellectuals started talking about a third de-Stalinization. Equivocally supported by President Medvedev, this initiative entailed a series of meetings and declarations, with the most important result being the projected plans for two national museums of the “totalitarian terror,” one in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg. It will be the next decade, and maybe the fourth de-Stalinization, that will hopefully see these museums open.46
For the Soviet regime, an insistence on its own definition of truth was crucial; as soon as it faltered in this, it collapsed. In the twenty-first century, Russia’s authoritarian “transition” demonstrates the tortured complexity of its postcatastrophic situation, in which the past haunts the citizenry, divides the society, and limits political choice. If the second and third generations live on the same territory where the catastrophe happened; if the political regime on this territory, despite having gone through multiple transformations since the catastrophe, remains ambiguous in its treatment of the catastrophic past; if the perpetrators are not condemned, the victims are not compensated, the criminal institutions are not banned, the monuments are not built—the postmemory of the catastrophe acquires intense and peculiar forms. The very concept of postmemory is not easily applicable to this situation because, strictly speaking, this is not yet a post memory. Transforming time in a way that is typical for the posttraumatic condition, the mourned and dreadful loss, the subject of remembrance, continues into the present and shapes the future. The memory of the past becomes indistinguishable from the obsessive fear of its repetition, and the dread of the future takes the shape of compulsory repetitions or creative remembrances of the past. Mourning merges with warning, shaping a temporal zone of indistinction, which combines the past and the future in a joint effort to obscure the present.