Gulag

Indeed, when describing what happened to public debate in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, one is always tempted to use flood metaphors: it was as if a dam had broken, or a dike had burst, or a water main had given way. In January 1987, Gorbachev told an intrigued group of journalists that the “blank spots” in the Soviet Union’s history would have to be filled in. By November, so much had changed that Gorbachev became the second Party leader in Soviet history to refer openly to the “blank spots” in a speech:

. . . the lack of proper democratization of Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality and the violations of the law, arbitrariness, and repressions of the 1930s—to be blunt, crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of members of the Party and non-members were subjected to mass repressions. That, comrades, is the bitter truth.¹⁵

Gorbachev was actually less eloquent than Khrushchev had been—but his impact on the broad Soviet public was probably greater. Khrushchev’s speech had, after all, been made to a closed meeting. Gorbachev had spoken on national television.

Gorbachev also followed up on his speech with far more enthusiasm than Khrushchev had ever shown. In its wake, new “revelations” began appearing in the Soviet press every week. Finally, the Soviet public had the chance to read Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, even Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. After a struggle, Novyi Mir, now under new editorship, began publishing installments of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.¹⁶ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would soon sell millions of copies, and authors whose works had previously circulated only in samizdat, if at all, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their Gulag memoirs too. Some became household names in the process: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Anatoly Zhigulin, Varlam Shalamov, Dmitri Likhachev, and Anna Larina.

The rehabilitation process resumed as well. Between 1964 and 1987, only twenty-four people had been rehabilitated. Now—partly in response to spontaneous press revelations—the process began again. This time, those who had been overlooked in the past were included: Bukharin, along with nineteen other Bolshevik leaders convicted at the 1938 purge trials, was first among them. “The facts had been falsified,” a government spokesman announced solemnly.¹⁷ Now the truth would be told.

The new literature was accompanied by new revelations from the Soviet archives. These came both from Soviet historians who had (they claimed) seen the light, as well as from the Memorial Society. Memorial was founded by a group of young historians, some of whom had been collecting oral histories of camp survivors for many years. Among them was Arseny Roginsky, founder of the journal Pamyat (Memory), which first began to appear in samizdat, and then abroad, as early as the 1970s. Already, the group around Roginsky had begun to compile a database of the repressed. Later, Memorial would also lead the battle to identify the corpses buried in mass graves outside Moscow and Leningrad, and to build monuments and memorials to the Stalinist era. After a brief, failed attempt to turn itself into a political movement, Memorial would finally emerge, in the 1990s, as the most important center for the study of Soviet history, as well as for the defense of human rights, in the Russian federation. Roginsky remained its leader, and one of its star historians. Memorial’s historical publications were soon known to Soviet scholars around the world for their accuracy, their fidelity to facts, and their careful, judicious archives.¹⁸

Yet although the change in the quality of public debate had come about with astonishing rapidity, the situation was still not quite as straightforward as it seemed to those on the outside. Even as he was introducing the changes which would soon lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union, even as “Gorbymania” swept through Germany and the United States, Gorbachev remained, like Khrushchev, a deep believer in the Soviet regime. He never intended to challenge the basic principles of Soviet Marxism, or the achievements of Lenin. His intention was always to reform and modernize the Soviet Union, not to destroy it. Perhaps because of his own family experience, he had come to believe that it was important to tell the truth about the past. Yet he did not, at first, appear to see the connection between the past and the present.