Gulag

At the highest levels, many feared the rehabilitation process could go too fast and too far. “We were scared, really scared,” wrote Khrushchev later. “We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which could drown us.”³⁴ One former senior KGB investigator, Anatoly Spragovsky, later recalled that between 1955 and 1960 he had traveled throughout the Tomsk region, interviewing witnesses and visiting the scenes of alleged crimes. He learned, among other things, that ex-prisoners had been accused of plotting to blow up factories or bridges that never existed. Yet when Spragovsky wrote to Khrushchev, proposing to streamline the rehabilitation process and speed it up, he was rebuffed: in Moscow, it seemed, officials did not want the errors of the Stalin years to seem too broad, or too absurd, and they did not want the investigation of old cases to proceed too quickly. Anastas Mikoyan, a Stalinist Politburo member who survived into the Khrushchev era, at one point explained why it was impossible to rehabilitate people too quickly. If they were all declared innocent at once, “it would be clear that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters.” ³⁵

The Communist Party was also wary of admitting too much error. Although it reviewed more than 70,000 petitions from ex-members, demanding to have their Party membership reinstated, less than half the petitions were granted.³⁶ As a result, full social rehabilitation—with the complete reinstatement of job, apartment, and pension—remained very rare.

Far more common than full rehabilitation was the mixed experience, and the mixed feelings, of Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, who filed for her rehabilitation and that of her husband in 1954. She waited for two years. Then, after Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, she received her certificate. It declared that her case had been reviewed, and closed for lack of evidence. “I had been arrested on April 27, 1936. So I had paid for this mistake with twenty years and forty-one days of my life.” In compensation, the certificate stated, Adamova-Sliozberg was entitled to two months’ pay for herself and her dead husband, and a further 11 rubles and 50 kopeks to compensate for the money that had been in her husband’s possession at the time of his death. That was all.

As she stood in the waiting room outside an office of the Supreme Court building in Moscow, absorbing this news, she became aware of someone shouting. It was an elderly Ukrainian woman, who had just been handed a similar piece of news:

The old Ukrainian woman started yelling: “I don’t need your money for my son’s blood; keep it yourself!” She tore up the certificates and threw them on the floor.

The soldier who had been handing out the certificates came up to her: “Calm down, citizen,” he began.

But the old woman started shouting again and choked in a paroxysm of rage.

Everyone was silent, overwhelmed. Here and there I heard stifled sobs and tears.

I went back to my apartment, from which no policeman could evict me now. There was no one home, and finally I was able to weep freely.

To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubyanka, when he was thirty-seven years old, at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up orphans, stigmatized as the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for Nikolai who was tortured in the camps; and for all of my friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma.³⁷