Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [333]
We erected a white pinewood cross—I hope that it had been made by the other prisoners. On the cross I wrote in ball-point pen “Anatoly Marchenko 23.1.1938–8.12.1986 ...”21
Although the authorities surrounded Marchenko’s death with mystery, Bogoraz said later, they could not conceal that “Anatoly Marchenko died in struggle. His struggle had lasted twenty-five years, and he had never hoisted the white flag of surrender.”22
But Marchenko’s tragic death was not entirely in vain. Possibly spurred on by the wave of bad publicity surrounding his death—Bogoraz’s statements were broadcast around the world—Gorbachev finally decided, at the end of 1986, to grant a general pardon to all Soviet political prisoners.
There were many strange things about the amnesty that shut down the political prisons of the Soviet Union for good. Nothing was stranger, however, than the scarce amount of attention it attracted. This, after all, was the end of the Gulag, the end of the camp system that had once contained millions of people. This was the triumph of the human rights movement, which had been the focus of so much diplomatic attention for the past two decades. This was a real moment of historical transformation—yet almost nobody noticed.
Moscow-based journalists sometimes dashed off the odd article but, with one or two exceptions, very few of those who wrote books about the era of Gorbachev and Yeltsin mentioned the last days of the concentration camps at all. Even the best of the many talented writers and journalists who lived in Moscow at the end of the 1980s were too preoccupied with the other events of that time: the bungled attempts at economic reform, the first free elections, the transformation of foreign policy, the end of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, the end of the Soviet Union itself.23
Distracted by those same issues, nobody in Russia much noticed either. Dissidents whose names had been famous in the underground returned— and found themselves famous no longer. Most of them were old, and by now out of sync with the times. They had, in the words of a Western journalist who was in Russia at the time, “made their careers in private, tapping out petitions on ancient typewriters at their dachas, defying the authorities while sipping absurdly sweet tea, dressed in their bathrobes. They weren’t made for battles in parliament or on TV, and they seemed profoundly confused by how dramatically their country had changed while they were away.” 24
Most of those former dissidents who remained in the public eye were no longer solely focused on the fate of the Soviet Union’s remaining concentration camps. Andrei Sakharov, released from internal exile in December 1986, elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, quickly began agitating for the reform of property ownership.25 Two years after his release, the Armenian prisoner Levon Ter-Petrossian was elected president of his country. A host of Ukrainians and Balts moved straight from camps in Perm and Mordovia into their respective countries’ political madhouse, agitating loudly for independence.26
The KGB noticed that its political prisons were closing, of course—yet even they seemed scarcely able to understand the significance. Reading the few available official documents from the second half of the 1980s, it is striking how little the language of the secret police had changed, even relatively late in the game. In February 1986, Viktor Chebrikov, then the head of the KGB, proudly told a Party Congress that the KGB had carried out a major counter-intelligence operation. It had been necessary, he said, because “the West spreads lies about human rights violations to spread anti-Soviet aspirations among such renegades.”27
Later that same year, Chebrikov