Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [310]
The most important factor that secured my survival in those harsh conditions was my unflinching, ineradicable belief in our Leninist Party, in its humanist principles. It was the Party that imparted the physical strength to withstand their trials . . . Reinstatement in the ranks of my native Communist Party was the greatest happiness of my entire life.57
The historian Catherine Merridale goes a step further, arguing that the Party, and the collective ideology of the Soviet Union, actually helped people to recover from whatever trauma they had suffered: “Russians really do seem to have lived with their histories of unspeakable loss by working, singing, waving the red flag. Some laugh about it now, but almost everyone is nostalgic for a collectivism and a common purpose that have been lost. Up to a point, totalitarianism worked.”58
Even though at some level they knew this struggle to be a false one; even though they knew the nation was not as glorious as its leaders claimed; even though they knew that whole Soviet cities had been built on the bones of people unjustly condemned to forced labor—even then, some camp victims still felt better when they were part of the collective effort, and no longer excluded from it.
Either way, the enormous tension between those who had been “there” and those who had stayed home could not remain confined in bedrooms and locked behind doors forever. Those responsible for what had happened were still alive. Finally, at the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev, now fighting for influence within the Party, began naming them. He announced that Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Malenkov were all “guilty of illegal mass repressions against many Party, Soviet, military and Komsomol officials and bear direct responsibility for their physical destruction.” More ominously, he also hinted darkly at the “documents in our possession” which would prove this guilt.59
Yet Khrushchev did not, in the end, publish any such documents in the course of his struggle against the Stalinists who opposed his reforms. Perhaps he was not really powerful enough to do so—or perhaps such documents would have revealed his own role in Stalinist repressions as well. Instead, Khrushchev deployed a new tactic: he widened the public discussion of Stalinism even further, broadening it beyond internal Party debates—spreading it to the literary world. Although Khrushchev probably was not much interested in Soviet poets and novelists for their own sake, he had seen, by the early 1960s, that they could play a role in his bid for power. Slowly, vanished names began to reappear in official publications, without explanation of why they had gone and why they were being allowed back. Characters hitherto unacceptable in Soviet fiction—greedy bureaucrats, returning camp inmates—began to appear in published novels.60
Khrushchev saw that such publications could conduct his propaganda for him: literary writers could discredit his enemies by tarring them with the crimes of the past. That, at any rate, appears to have been the reasoning behind his decision to allow the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the most famous of all Gulag novels.
For his literary significance, as well as for the role he played in publicizing the existence of the Gulag in the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would certainly deserve special mention in any history of the Soviet camp system. But his brief career as a famous, widely published, “official” Soviet author is also worth telling because it marks an important moment of transition. When Ivan Denisovich first appeared in print, in 1962, the Thaw was at its height, political prisoners were few, and the Gulag seemed a thing of the past. By the summer of 1965, when a Party journal described Ivan Denisovich as “an undoubtedly controversial work, both ideologically and artistically,” Khrushchev had been ousted, the backlash had begun, and the number of political prisoners was rising with ominous speed. By 1974, when The Gulag Archipelago—Solzhenitsyn