Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [331]
They were wrong: he was different. Few knew, at the time, that Gorbachev came from a family of “enemies.” One of his grandfathers, a peasant, had been arrested and sent to a labor camp in 1933. His other grandfather had been arrested in 1938 and tortured in prison by an investigator who broke both of his arms. The impact on young Mikhail had been enormous, as he later wrote in his memoirs: “Our neighbors began shunning our house as if it were plague-stricken. Only at night would some close relative venture to drop by. Even the boys from the neighborhood avoided me . . . all of this was a great shock to me and has remained engraved on my memory ever since.” 14
Nevertheless, the refuseniks’ suspicions were not wholly ill-founded, for the early months of the Gorbachev era were disappointing. He threw himself into an anti-alcohol campaign, which angered people, destroyed the ancient vineyards of Georgia and Moldavia, and might even have provoked the economic crash that followed some years later: some believe that the collapse in the sales of vodka destroyed the country’s delicate financial balance for good. Only in April 1986, after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear complex in Ukraine, was Gorbachev ready to make genuine changes. Convinced that the Soviet Union needed to speak openly about its troubles, he came up with another reform proposal: glasnost, or “openness.”
At first, glasnost, like the anti-alcohol campaign, was essentially an economic policy. Apparently, Gorbachev hoped that open discussion of the Soviet Union’s very real economic, ecological, and social crises would lead to quick resolutions, to the restructuring—the perestroika —he had begun talking about in his speeches. Within an amazingly short period of time, however, glasnost began to be about Soviet history.
Indeed, when describing what happened to public debate in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, one is always tempted to use flood metaphors: it was as if a dam had broken, or a dike had burst, or a water main had given way. In January 1987, Gorbachev told an intrigued group of journalists that the “blank spots” in the Soviet Union’s history would have to be filled in. By November, so much had changed that Gorbachev became the second Party leader in Soviet history to refer openly to the “blank spots” in a speech:
. . . the lack of proper democratization of Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality and the violations of the law, arbitrariness, and repressions of the 1930s—to be blunt, crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of members of the Party and non-members were subjected to mass repressions. That, comrades, is the bitter truth.15
Gorbachev was actually less eloquent than Khrushchev had been—but his impact on the broad Soviet public was probably greater. Khrushchev’s speech had, after all, been made to a closed meeting. Gorbachev had spoken on national television.
Gorbachev also followed up on his speech with far more enthusiasm than Khrushchev had ever shown. In its wake, new “revelations” began appearing in the Soviet press every week. Finally, the Soviet public had the chance to read Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, even Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. After a struggle, Novyi Mir, now under new editorship, began publishing installments of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.16 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would soon sell millions of copies, and authors whose works had previously circulated only in samizdat, if at all, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their Gulag memoirs too. Some became household names in the process: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev