Gulag

There are also larger efforts. The ring of coal mines around Vorkuta, each one a former lagpunkt, is dotted with crosses, statues, and other memorials, erected by Lithuanian, Polish, and German victims of the Vorkuta camps. The local historical museum in the city of Magadan contains several rooms devoted to Gulag history, including a camp watchtower; on a hill overlooking the city, a well-known Russian sculptor has built a monument to Kolyma’s dead, featuring symbols of all of the many faiths they practiced. A room tucked inside the walls of the Solovetsky monastery, itself now a museum, displays prisoners’ letters, photographs, and scraps from the archives; outside, an alley of trees has been planted in commemoration of the Solovetsky dead. In the center of Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic, local leaders, and the local chapter of Memorial, have constructed a small chapel. A handful of prisoners’ names are listed on the inside, deliberately chosen to illustrate the many nationalities of the Gulag: Lithuanian, Korean, Jewish, Chinese, Georgian, Spanish.

Strange, surprising, individual monuments can sometimes be found in out-of-the-way places. An iron cross has been placed on a barren hill outside the city of Ukhta, the old headquarters of Ukhtpechlag, commemorating the site of a mass murder of prisoners. To see it, I had to drive down an almost impassable muddy road, walk behind a building site, and clamber over a railway track. Even then I was too far away to read the actual inscription. Still, the local activists who had erected the cross beamed with pride.

A few hours north of Petrozavodsk, another ad hoc memorial has been set up outside the village of Sandormokh. Or perhaps, in this case, “memorial” is the wrong word. Although there is a commemorative plaque, as well as several stone crosses put up by Poles, Germans, and others, Sandormokh—where prisoners from the Solovetsky Islands were shot in 1937, the priest Pavel Florensky among them—is memorable for its strangely moving handmade crosses and personal monuments. Because there are no records stating who is buried where, each family has chosen, at random, to commemorate a particular piles of bones. Relatives of victims have pasted photographs of their relatives, long dead, on wooden stakes, and some have carved epitaphs into the sides. Ribbons, plastic flowers, and other funerary bric-a-brac are strewn throughout the pine forest which has grown up over the killing field. On the sunny August day that I visited—it was the anniversary of the murder, and a delegation had come from St. Petersburg—an elderly woman stood up to speak of her parents, both buried there, both shot when she was seven years old. A whole lifetime had passed before she had been able to visit their graves.

Another larger project has taken shape outside the city of Perm. On the site of Perm-36, once a Stalinist-era lagpunkt, later one of the harshest political camps of the 1970s and 1980s, a group of local historians has constructed a full-scale museum, the only one actually located inside the barracks of a former camp. With their own resources the historians rebuilt the camp, barracks, walls, barbed-wire fences, and all. They even went so far as to set up a small logging business, using the camp’s own rusted and discarded machines, to pay for their project. Although they did not have much support from the local government, they attracted West European and American funding. Ambitiously, they now hope to restore twenty-five buildings, using four of them to house a larger Museum of Repression.

And yet—in Russia, a country accustomed to grandiose war memorials and vast, solemn state funerals, these local efforts and private initiatives seem meager, scattered, and incomplete. The majority of Russians are probably not even aware of them. And no wonder: ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families. Throughout the 1980s, competitions were held to design such a monument, but they came to nothing. Memorial succeeded only in dragging a stone from the Solovetsky Islands—where the Gulag began—and placing it in the center of Dzerzhinsky Square, across from Lubyanka.²