Gulag

At first, my presence only added to their general merriment. It is not every day one meets a real American on a rickety ferry boat in the middle of the White Sea, and the oddity amused them. They wanted to know why I spoke Russian, what I thought of Russia, how it differs from the United States. When I told them what I was doing in Russia, however, they grew less cheerful. An American on a pleasure cruise, visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see the scenery and the beautiful old monastery—that was one thing. An American visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see the remains of the concentration camp—that was something else.

One of the men turned hostile. “Why do you foreigners only care about the ugly things in our history?” he wanted to know. “Why write about the Gulag? Why not write about our achievements? We were the first country to put a man into space!” By “we” he meant “we Soviets.” The Soviet Union had ceased to exist seven years earlier, but he still identified himself as a Soviet citizen, not as a Russian.

His wife attacked me as well. “The Gulag isn’t relevant anymore,” she told me. “We have other troubles here. We have unemployment, we have crime. Why don’t you write about our real problems, instead of things that happened a long time ago?”

While this unpleasant conversation continued, the other couple kept silent, and the man never did offer his opinion on the subject of the Soviet past. At one point, however, his wife expressed her support. “I understand why you want to know about the camps,” she said softly. “It is interesting to know what happened. I wish I knew more.”

In my subsequent travels around Russia, I encountered these four attitudes to my project again and again. “It’s none of your business,” and “it’s irrelevant” were both common reactions. Silence—or an absence of opinion, as evinced by a shrug of the shoulders—was probably the most frequent reaction. But there were also people who understood why it was important to know about the past, and who wished it were easier to find out more.

In fact, with some effort, one can learn a great deal about the past in contemporary Russia. Not all Russian archives are closed, and not all Russian historians are preoccupied with other things: this book itself is testimony to the abundance of newly available information. The story of the Gulag has also become part of public debate in some of the ex-Soviet republics and ex-Soviet satellites. In a few nations—as a rule, those who remember themselves as victims rather than perpetrators of terror—the memorials and the debates are very prominent indeed. The Lithuanians have converted the former KGB headquarters in Vilnius into a museum of the victims of genocide. The Latvians have turned an old Soviet museum, once dedicated to Latvia’s “Red Sharpshooters,” into a museum of Latvian occupation.

In February 2002, I attended the opening of a new Hungarian museum, located in a building which was both the headquarters of the Hungarian fascist movement between 1940 and 1945, and the headquarters of the Hungarian communist secret police between 1945 and 1956. In the first exhibition room, a bank of television screens beamed fascist propaganda from one wall. Another bank of television screens beamed communist propaganda from the other wall. The effect was immediate and emotional, as it was intended to be, and the rest of the museum continued in that vein. Using photographs, sound, video, and very few words, the museum’s organizers are unapologetically aiming its exhibits at people who are too young to remember either regime.

In Belarus, by contrast, the lack of a monument has become a major political issue: in the summer of 2002, the dictatorial president, Alexander Lukashenka, was still loudly proclaiming his intention to build a highway over the site of a mass murder that took place outside Minsk, the capital city, in 1937. His rhetoric galvanized the opposition, and sparked a greater discussion of the past.

Dotted around Russia itself, there are also a handful of informal, semiofficial, and private monuments, erected by a wide variety of people and organizations. The headquarters of Memorial in Moscow contains an archive of oral and written memoirs, as well as a small museum which houses, among other things, an outstanding collection of prisoners’ art. The Andrei Sakharov Museum, also in Moscow, has exhibits and displays about the Stalinist era as well. On the outskirts of many cities—Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tomsk, Kiev, Petrozavodsk—local Memorial chapters and other organizations have put up monuments to mark mass burial grounds, the sites of the mass murders of 1937 and 1938.