Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [339]
There are some good, or at least some forgivable, explanations for this public silence. Most Russians really do spend all of their time coping with the complete transformation of their economy and society. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. Post-communist Russia is not postwar Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities were still fresh in people’s minds. In the early twenty-first century, the events of the middle of the twentieth century seem like ancient history to much of the population.
Perhaps more to the point, many Russians also feel that they have had their discussion of the past already, and that it produced very little. When one asks older Russians, at least, why the subject of the Gulag is so rarely mentioned nowadays, they wave away the issue: “In 1990 that was all we could talk about, now we don’t need to talk about it anymore.” To further complicate things, talk of the Gulag and of Stalinist repression has become confused, in the minds of many, with the “democratic reformers” who originally promoted the debate about the Soviet past. Because that generation of political leaders is now seen to have failed—their rule is remembered for corruption and chaos—all talk of the Gulag is somehow tainted by association.
The question of remembering or commemorating political repression is also confused—as I noted in the Introduction to this book—by the presence of so many other victims of so many other Soviet tragedies. “To make matters more complicated,” writes Catherine Merridale, “a great many people suffered repeatedly; they can describe themselves as war veterans, victims of repression, the children of the repressed and even as survivors of famine with equal facility.”4 There are plenty of memorials to the wartime dead, some Russians seem to feel: Will that not suffice?
But there are other reasons, less forgivable, for the profound silence. Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking ill of the dead.
Some—still—also fear what they might find out about the past, if they were to inquire too closely. In 1998, the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen described what it felt like to discover that one of her grandmothers, a nice old Jewish lady, had been a censor, responsible for altering the reports of foreign correspondents based in Moscow. She also discovered that her other grandmother, another nice old Jewish lady, had once applied for a job with the secret police. Both had made their choices out of desperation, not conviction. Now, she wrote, she knows why her generation had refrained from condemning their grandparents’ generation too harshly: “We did not expose them, we did not try them, we did not judge them . . . merely by asking such questions each one of us risks betraying someone we love.” 5
Aleksandr Yakovlev, chairman of the Russian rehabilitation commission, put this problem somewhat more bluntly. “Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past,” he told me, “because so many people participated in them.”6 The Soviet system dragged millions and millions of its citizens into many forms of collaboration and compromise. Although many willingly participated, otherwise decent people were also forced to do terrible things. They, their children, and their grandchildren do not always want to remember that now.
But the most important explanation for the lack of public debate does not involve the fears of the younger generation, or the inferiority complexes and leftover guilt of their parents. The most important issue is rather the power and prestige of those now ruling