Gulag

For that reason, the publication of a slew of articles about Stalinist camps, prisons, and mass murders of the past was not immediately accompanied by mass releases of the still-imprisoned dissidents. At the end of 1986—although Gorbachev was preparing to start talking about “blank spots,” although Memorial had begun openly to agitate for the construction of a monument to repression, although the rest of the world was beginning to talk with excitement about the new leadership of the USSR—Amnesty International knew the names of 600 prisoners of conscience still in Soviet camps, and suspected the existence of many more.¹⁹

One of them was Anatoly Marchenko, who died during a hunger strike in Khristopol prison in December of that year.²⁰ His wife, Larisa Bogoraz, arrived at the prison to find three soldiers standing guard over his body, which had been taken apart in an autopsy. She was not allowed to meet anyone at the prison—no doctors, no other prisoners, no administrators—except for a political officer, Churbanov, who treated her rudely. He refused to tell her how Marchenko had died, and would not give her a death certificate, a burial certificate, a medical case history, or even Marchenko’s letters and diaries. With a group of friends, and the three-man prison “escort,” she took Marchenko to be buried in the town cemetery:

It was deserted there, and a strong wind blew, and there was nobody else around apart from us and Tolya’s escort. They had everything necessary ready to hand, but they understood that we would not let them approach the grave, and they stood to one side “until the end of the operation” as one of them put it. Tolya’s friends spoke some words of farewell over the grave. Then we started to fill in the grave with earth—first with our hands and then with spades . . .

We erected a white pinewood cross—I hope that it had been made by the other prisoners. On the cross I wrote in ball-point pen “Anatoly Marchenko 23.1.1938–8.12.1986 ...”²¹

Although the authorities surrounded Marchenko’s death with mystery, Bogoraz said later, they could not conceal that “Anatoly Marchenko died in struggle. His struggle had lasted twenty-five years, and he had never hoisted the white flag of surrender.”²²

But Marchenko’s tragic death was not entirely in vain. Possibly spurred on by the wave of bad publicity surrounding his death—Bogoraz’s statements were broadcast around the world—Gorbachev finally decided, at the end of 1986, to grant a general pardon to all Soviet political prisoners.

There were many strange things about the amnesty that shut down the political prisons of the Soviet Union for good. Nothing was stranger, however, than the scarce amount of attention it attracted. This, after all, was the end of the Gulag, the end of the camp system that had once contained millions of people. This was the triumph of the human rights movement, which had been the focus of so much diplomatic attention for the past two decades. This was a real moment of historical transformation—yet almost nobody noticed.

Moscow-based journalists sometimes dashed off the odd article but, with one or two exceptions, very few of those who wrote books about the era of Gorbachev and Yeltsin mentioned the last days of the concentration camps at all. Even the best of the many talented writers and journalists who lived in Moscow at the end of the 1980s were too preoccupied with the other events of that time: the bungled attempts at economic reform, the first free elections, the transformation of foreign policy, the end of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, the end of the Soviet Union itself.²³

Distracted by those same issues, nobody in Russia much noticed either. Dissidents whose names had been famous in the underground returned— and found themselves famous no longer. Most of them were old, and by now out of sync with the times. They had, in the words of a Western journalist who was in Russia at the time, “made their careers in private, tapping out petitions on ancient typewriters at their dachas, defying the authorities while sipping absurdly sweet tea, dressed in their bathrobes. They weren’t made for battles in parliament or on TV, and they seemed profoundly confused by how dramatically their country had changed while they were away.” ²⁴