Gulag

The writer and folk poet Bulat Okudzhava has also written a story describing a man’s encounter with his mother who has spent ten years in camps. The man anticipated his mother’s return with pleasure, believing he would pick her up at the train station, take her home for dinner after a tearful but joyful reunion, tell her of his life, maybe even go and see a film. Instead, he found a woman with dry eyes and a detached expression: “She looked at me but didn’t see me, her face was hardened, frozen.” He had expected her to be physically frail, but was totally unprepared for emotional damage—an experience that millions must have shared. ⁵³

True stories were often as bleak. Nadezhda Kapralova wrote of meeting her mother after thirteen years, having been separated from her at the age of eight: “We were the closest of possible people, mother and daughter, and yet we were strangers, we spoke of irrelevancies, mostly crying and remaining silent.”⁵⁴ Another prisoner, Evgeny Gnedin, was reunited with his wife after fourteen years, but found they had nothing in common. He had, he felt, “grown” in those years, whereas she had remained the same.⁵⁵ Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had to tread carefully when she was reunited with her son in 1948: “I was afraid to tell him anything of what I had learned ‘on the other side.’ No doubt I could have convinced him that there was a great deal wrong with our country, that Stalin, his idol, was actually far from perfect, but my son was only seventeen. I was afraid to be completely frank with him.”⁵⁶

Yet not everyone felt at odds with Soviet society either. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the returnees came back eager to rejoin the Communist Party, not merely for the sake of privileges and status but in order to feel, once again, full members of the Communist project, as it were. “Allegiance to a belief system can have deep, non-rational roots,” is how the historian Nanci Adler tries to explain the feelings of one prisoner when he was reinstated in the Party:

The most important factor that secured my survival in those harsh conditions was my unflinching, ineradicable belief in our Leninist Party, in its humanist principles. It was the Party that imparted the physical strength to withstand their trials . . . Reinstatement in the ranks of my native Communist Party was the greatest happiness of my entire life.⁵⁷

The historian Catherine Merridale goes a step further, arguing that the Party, and the collective ideology of the Soviet Union, actually helped people to recover from whatever trauma they had suffered: “Russians really do seem to have lived with their histories of unspeakable loss by working, singing, waving the red flag. Some laugh about it now, but almost everyone is nostalgic for a collectivism and a common purpose that have been lost. Up to a point, totalitarianism worked.”⁵⁸

Even though at some level they knew this struggle to be a false one; even though they knew the nation was not as glorious as its leaders claimed; even though they knew that whole Soviet cities had been built on the bones of people unjustly condemned to forced labor—even then, some camp victims still felt better when they were part of the collective effort, and no longer excluded from it.

Either way, the enormous tension between those who had been “there” and those who had stayed home could not remain confined in bedrooms and locked behind doors forever. Those responsible for what had happened were still alive. Finally, at the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev, now fighting for influence within the Party, began naming them. He announced that Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Malenkov were all “guilty of illegal mass repressions against many Party, Soviet, military and Komsomol officials and bear direct responsibility for their physical destruction.” More ominously, he also hinted darkly at the “documents in our possession” which would prove this guilt.⁵⁹