Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [332]
The rehabilitation process resumed as well. Between 1964 and 1987, only twenty-four people had been rehabilitated. Now—partly in response to spontaneous press revelations—the process began again. This time, those who had been overlooked in the past were included: Bukharin, along with nineteen other Bolshevik leaders convicted at the 1938 purge trials, was first among them. “The facts had been falsified,” a government spokesman announced solemnly.17 Now the truth would be told.
The new literature was accompanied by new revelations from the Soviet archives. These came both from Soviet historians who had (they claimed) seen the light, as well as from the Memorial Society. Memorial was founded by a group of young historians, some of whom had been collecting oral histories of camp survivors for many years. Among them was Arseny Roginsky, founder of the journal Pamyat (Memory), which first began to appear in samizdat, and then abroad, as early as the 1970s. Already, the group around Roginsky had begun to compile a database of the repressed. Later, Memorial would also lead the battle to identify the corpses buried in mass graves outside Moscow and Leningrad, and to build monuments and memorials to the Stalinist era. After a brief, failed attempt to turn itself into a political movement, Memorial would finally emerge, in the 1990s, as the most important center for the study of Soviet history, as well as for the defense of human rights, in the Russian federation. Roginsky remained its leader, and one of its star historians. Memorial’s historical publications were soon known to Soviet scholars around the world for their accuracy, their fidelity to facts, and their careful, judicious archives.18
Yet although the change in the quality of public debate had come about with astonishing rapidity, the situation was still not quite as straightforward as it seemed to those on the outside. Even as he was introducing the changes which would soon lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union, even as “Gorbymania” swept through Germany and the United States, Gorbachev remained, like Khrushchev, a deep believer in the Soviet regime. He never intended to challenge the basic principles of Soviet Marxism, or the achievements of Lenin. His intention was always to reform and modernize the Soviet Union, not to destroy it. Perhaps because of his own family experience, he had come to believe that it was important to tell the truth about the past. Yet he did not, at first, appear to see the connection between the past and the present.
For that reason, the publication of a slew of articles about Stalinist camps, prisons, and mass murders of the past was not immediately accompanied by mass releases of the still-imprisoned dissidents. At the end of 1986—although Gorbachev was preparing to start talking about “blank spots,” although Memorial had begun openly to agitate for the construction of a monument to repression, although the rest of the world was beginning to talk with excitement about the new leadership of the USSR—Amnesty International knew the names of 600 prisoners of conscience still in Soviet camps, and suspected the existence of many more.19
One of them was Anatoly Marchenko, who died during a hunger strike in Khristopol prison in December of that year.20 His wife, Larisa Bogoraz, arrived at the prison to find three soldiers standing guard over his body, which had been taken apart in an autopsy. She was not allowed to meet anyone at the prison—no doctors, no other prisoners, no administrators—except for a political officer, Churbanov, who treated her rudely. He refused to tell her how Marchenko had died, and would not give her a death certificate, a burial certificate, a medical case history, or even Marchenko’s letters and diaries. With a group of friends, and the three-man prison “escort,” she took Marchenko to be buried in the town cemetery:
It was deserted there, and a strong wind blew, and there was nobody else around apart from us and Tolya’s escort. They had everything