Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [342]
We spent more time in the women’s cell. In the corner, there stood a toilet. Other than that, the scene could have been drawn straight from the pages of a 1930s memoir. Women’s underwear hung from a rope strung across the ceiling; the air was thick and close, very hot, and heavy with the smell of perspiration, bad food, damp, and human waste. The women, also half-dressed, sat on bunks around the room and showered insults on the warder, shrieking their demands and complaints. It was as if I had walked into the cell that Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had entered in 1938. I repeat again her description:
The arched walls were dripping. On either side, leaving only a narrow passage between them, were low continuous bed boards packed with bodies. Assorted rags were drying on lines overhead. The air was thick with the foul smoke of strong cheap tobacco, and loud with arguments, shouts and sobs. 10
Next door, in the juvenile cell, there were fewer prisoners but sadder faces. Galina handed a handkerchief to a sobbing fifteen-year-old girl who had been accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of $10. “There now,” she said, “you keep working on your algebra, and you’ll be out of here soon.” Or so she hoped: Galina met many people who had been imprisoned for months without a trial, and this girl had only been in jail for a week.
Afterward, we spoke to the prison boss, who shrugged when asked about the girl in the juvenile cell, about the prisoner who had been on death row for many years yet claimed to be innocent, about the foul air in the prison and the lack of sanitation. It all came down to money, he said. There just was not enough money. The prison warders were badly paid. The electricity bills were mounting, which explained the dark corridors. No money was available for repairs, no money was spent on prosecutors or judges or trials. Prisoners just had to wait their turn, he said, until the money started flowing.
I was not convinced. Money is a problem, but it is not the whole story. If Russia’s prisons look like a scene from Adamova-Sliozberg memoirs, if Russia’s courts and criminal investigations are a sham, that is partly because the Soviet legacy does not hang like a bad conscience upon the shoulders of those who run Russia’s criminal justice system. The past does not haunt Russia’s secret police, Russia’s judges, Russia’s politicians, or Russia’s business elite.
But then, very few people in contemporary Russia feel the past to be a burden, or as an obligation, at all. The past is a bad dream to be forgotten, or a whispered rumor to be ignored. Like a great, unopened Pandora’s box, it lies in wait for the next generation.
Our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Soviet Union and central Europe does not, of course, have the same profound implications for our way of life as it does for theirs. Our tolerance for the odd “Gulag denier” in our universities will not destroy the moral fabric of our society. The Cold War is over, after all, and there is no real intellectual or political force left in the communist parties of the West.
Nevertheless, if we do not start trying harder to remember, there will be consequences for us too. For one, our understanding of what is happening now in the former Soviet Union will go on being distorted by our misunderstanding of history. Again, if we really knew what Stalin did to the Chechens, and if we felt that it was a terrible crime against the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladimir Putin who would be unable to do the same things to them now, but we also would be unable to sit back and watch with any equanimity. Nor did the Soviet Union’s collapse inspire the same mobilization of Western forces as the end