Gulag

Tragically, Russia’s lack of interest in its past has deprived the Russians of heroes, as well as victims. The names of those who secretly opposed Stalin, however ineffectively—the students like Susanna Pechora, Viktor Bulgakov, and Anatoly Zhigulin; the leaders of the Gulag rebellions and uprisings; the dissidents, from Sakharov to Bukovsky to Orlov—ought to be as widely known in Russia as are, in Germany, the names of the participants in the plot to kill Hitler. The incredibly rich body of Russian survivors’ literature—tales of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying conditions of the Soviet concentration camps—should be better read, better known, more frequently quoted. If schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud of even in Russia’s Soviet past, aside from imperial and military triumphs.

Yet the failure to remember has more mundane, practical consequences too. It can be argued, for example, that Russia’s failure to delve properly into the past also explains its insensitivity to certain kinds of censorship, and to the continued, heavy presence of secret police, now renamed the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB. Most Russians are not especially bothered by the FSB’s ability to open mail, tap telephones, and enter private residences without a court order. Nor are they much interested, for example, in the FSB’s long prosecution of Alexander Nikitin, an ecologist who wrote about the damage Russia’s Northern Fleet is doing to the Baltic Sea.⁹

Insensitivity to the past also helps explain the absence of judicial and prison reform. In 1998, I paid a visit to the central prison in the city of Arkhangelsk. Once one of the capital cities of the Gulag, Arkhangelsk lay directly on the route to Solovetsky, to Kotlas, to Kargopollag, and to other northern camp complexes. The city prison, which dated back to before Stalin’s time, seemed hardly to have changed since then. I entered it in the company of Galina Dudina, a woman who qualifies as a genuine post-Soviet rarity, a prisoners’ rights advocate. As we walked the halls of the stone building, accompanied by a silent warder, it seemed if we had stepped back into the past.

The corridors were narrow and dark, with damp, slimy walls. When the warder opened the door to a men’s cell, I caught a glimpse of naked bodies stretched out on bunks, covered in tattoos. Seeing the men were undressed, he quickly closed the door and allowed them to compose themselves. Opening it again, I walked in to see about twenty men standing in a row, not at all pleased to have been interrupted. They offered mumbled, monosyllabic answers to the questions put to them by Galina, and mostly stared hard at the cement floor of their cell. They had, it seemed, been playing cards; the warder led us quickly away.

We spent more time in the women’s cell. In the corner, there stood a toilet. Other than that, the scene could have been drawn straight from the pages of a 1930s memoir. Women’s underwear hung from a rope strung across the ceiling; the air was thick and close, very hot, and heavy with the smell of perspiration, bad food, damp, and human waste. The women, also half-dressed, sat on bunks around the room and showered insults on the warder, shrieking their demands and complaints. It was as if I had walked into the cell that Olga Adamova-Sliozberg had entered in 1938. I repeat again her description:

The arched walls were dripping. On either side, leaving only a narrow passage between them, were low continuous bed boards packed with bodies. Assorted rags were drying on lines overhead. The air was thick with the foul smoke of strong cheap tobacco, and loud with arguments, shouts and sobs. ¹⁰

Next door, in the juvenile cell, there were fewer prisoners but sadder faces. Galina handed a handkerchief to a sobbing fifteen-year-old girl who had been accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of $10. “There now,” she said, “you keep working on your algebra, and you’ll be out of here soon.” Or so she hoped: Galina met many people who had been imprisoned for months without a trial, and this girl had only been in jail for a week.

Afterward, we spoke to the prison boss, who shrugged when asked about the girl in the juvenile cell, about the prisoner who had been on death row for many years yet claimed to be innocent, about the foul air in the prison and the lack of sanitation. It all came down to money, he said. There just was not enough money. The prison warders were badly paid. The electricity bills were mounting, which explained the dark corridors. No money was available for repairs, no money was spent on prosecutors or judges or trials. Prisoners just had to wait their turn, he said, until the money started flowing.