Gulag

Symptomatic of the time was the plight of Bohdan Klymchak, a technician from Ukraine, arrested for trying to leave the USSR. In 1978, fearing arrest on charges of Ukrainian nationalism, he had walked over the Soviet border into Iran, and had asked for political asylum. The Iranians sent him back. In April 1990, he was still being held in the political prison at Perm. A group of American congressmen managed to visit him there, and discovered that conditions in Perm were virtually unchanged. The prisoners still complained of extreme cold, and were still sent to the punishment cells for crimes such as the refusal to button the top buttons of their uniforms.³⁷

Nevertheless, creaking and cranking, groaning and complaining, the repressive regime was finally grinding to a halt—as was the entire system. Indeed, by the time the Perm political camps were finally closed for good, in February 1992, the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist. All of the former Soviet republics had become independent countries. Some of them— Armenia, Ukraine, Lithuania—were led by former prisoners. Some were led by former communists whose beliefs had crumbled in the 1980s, when they saw for the first time evidence of the past terror.³⁸ The KGB and the MVD, if not quite disbanded, had been replaced by other, different organizations. Secret police agents started looking for new jobs in the private sector. Prison warders saw the light, and discreetly moved into local government. The new Russian parliament passed, in November 1991, a “Declaration of Rights and Freedoms of the Individual,” guaranteeing, among other things, freedom to travel, freedom of religion, and the freedom to disagree with the government.³⁹ Sadly, the new Russia was not destined to become a paradigm of ethnic, religious, and political tolerance, but that is another, separate story.

The changes took place with bewildering speed—and no one seemed more bewildered by them than the man who had launched the Soviet Union’s disintegration. For this, in the end, was Gorbachev’s greatest blind spot: Khrushchev knew it, Brezhnev knew it—but Gorbachev, grandson of “enemies” and author of glasnost, failed to realize that a full and honest discussion of the Soviet past would ultimately undermine the legitimacy of Soviet rule. “We now visualize our goal more clearly,” he said, on New Year’s Eve, 1989. “It is a humane and democratic socialism, a society of freedom and social justice.”⁴⁰ He was unable, even then, to see that “socialism,” in its Soviet form, was about to disappear altogether.

Nor could he see, years later, the link between the press revelations of the glasnost era and the collapse of Soviet communism. Gorbachev did not realize, simply, that once the truth had been told about the Stalinist past, the myth of Soviet greatness would be impossible to sustain. There had been too much cruelty, too much bloodshed, and too many lies about both.

But if Gorbachev did not understand his own country, plenty of others did. Twenty years earlier, Solzhenitsyn’s publisher, Alexander Tvardovsky, had felt the power of the hidden past, had known what revived memories could do to the Soviet system. He described his feelings in a poem:

They’re wrong to think that memory

Hasn’t an increasing value

Or that the weeds of time grow over

Any real past event or pain.

That on and on the planet rolls,

Measuring off the days and years . . .

No. Duty commands that everything now

That hasn’t been said be said in full ...⁴¹

Epilogue

MEMORY

And the killers? The killers live on . . .

—Lev Razgon, Nepridumannoe, 1989¹

IN THE EARLY AUTUMN of 1998, I took a boat across the White Sea, from the city of Arkhangelsk to the Solovetsky Islands. It was the last cruise of the summer: after the middle of September, when the Arctic nights start to lengthen, boats stop traveling that route. The sea becomes too rough, the water too icy for an overnight tourist expedition.

Perhaps the knowledge that it was the end of the season imparted a touch of added gaiety to the trip. Or perhaps the passengers were simply excited to be out on the open sea. Whatever the reason, the ship’s dining room buzzed with good cheer. There were many toasts, many jokes, and hearty applause for the ship’s captain. My assigned dining companions, two middle-aged couples from a naval base down the coast, seemed determined to have a good time.