Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [307]
The Communist Party was also wary of admitting too much error. Although it reviewed more than 70,000 petitions from ex-members, demanding to have their Party membership reinstated, less than half the petitions were granted.36 As a result, full social rehabilitation—with the complete reinstatement of job, apartment, and pension—remained very rare.
Far more common than full rehabilitation was the mixed experience, and the mixed feelings, of Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, who filed for her rehabilitation and that of her husband in 1954. She waited for two years. Then, after Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, she received her certificate. It declared that her case had been reviewed, and closed for lack of evidence. “I had been arrested on April 27, 1936. So I had paid for this mistake with twenty years and forty-one days of my life.” In compensation, the certificate stated, Adamova-Sliozberg was entitled to two months’ pay for herself and her dead husband, and a further 11 rubles and 50 kopeks to compensate for the money that had been in her husband’s possession at the time of his death. That was all.
As she stood in the waiting room outside an office of the Supreme Court building in Moscow, absorbing this news, she became aware of someone shouting. It was an elderly Ukrainian woman, who had just been handed a similar piece of news:
The old Ukrainian woman started yelling: “I don’t need your money for my son’s blood; keep it yourself!” She tore up the certificates and threw them on the floor.
The soldier who had been handing out the certificates came up to her: “Calm down, citizen,” he began.
But the old woman started shouting again and choked in a paroxysm of rage.
Everyone was silent, overwhelmed. Here and there I heard stifled sobs and tears.
I went back to my apartment, from which no policeman could evict me now. There was no one home, and finally I was able to weep freely.
To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubyanka, when he was thirty-seven years old, at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up orphans, stigmatized as the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for Nikolai who was tortured in the camps; and for all of my friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma.37
Although often ignored in standard histories of the Soviet Union, the return home of millions of people from camps and exile must have stunned the millions of other Soviet citizens they encountered upon their arrival. Khrushchev’s secret speech had been a shock, but it was a remote event, directed at the Party hierarchy. By contrast, the reappearance of people long considered dead brought home the message of the speech in a far more direct way, to a far wider range of people. Stalin’s era had been one of secret torture and hidden violence. Suddenly, the camp veterans were on hand to provide living evidence of what had happened.
They were also on hand to bring news, both good and bad, of the vanished. By the 1950s, it had become customary for released prisoners to pay visits to the homes of both their dead and living comrades, to transmit oral messages or to repeat last words. M. S. Rotfort went back to Kharkov via Chita and Irkutsk, in order to see the families of his friends. 38 Gustav Herling paid an awkward visit to the family of his camp mate General Kruglov, whose wife pleaded with him not to tell their daughter about her father’s new camp sentence, checked her watch repeatedly, and begged him to leave quickly.39
The returning prisoners were also a source of terror—to the bosses, the colleagues, the people who had sent them to prison in the first place. Anna Andreeva remembered that all of the trains to Moscow from Karaganda