The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In the late 1940s, years after the Soviets had resanctified marriage, as Lyosha's grandfather made his way up the Party ladder, he finally registered his marriage to Lyosha's grandmother. Serafima took her husband's Russian surname, Misharina. The last people to carry the German family name, Klauser—Lyosha's great-grandparents—died long before he was born. Lyosha had seen photographs of their funerals and he had asked about their coffins, adorned with what looked to him like a very strange Christian cross, but no one had answered his questions. Now his mother explained that her grandparents had been Catholic, and her sister recalled that as children, Serafima's two daughters and three sons would spend summers in the German-speaking village and their grandfather would ply them with candy to persuade them to agree to speak a little German or to read from his German Bible. When Serafima's parents died, the German stopped—none of her children remembered it now —and so did the connection with family on the Klauser side, who had once written Lyosha's great-grandfather letters, some from Kazakhstan, where they had also been exiled, and others from Germany and New York, where they had escaped during the war.

Serafima confirmed the story for Lyosha and added personal details about her five children. Two of her daughters—Lyosha's aunts —had been left alone with their children because, like Serafima, they had married alcoholics. One of the husbands drowned while drunk, the other died of alcohol poisoning. As for Galina, said Lyosha's grandmother, she had been lying to him when she told him that his father lived in Perm. Lyosha's father was right there in Solikamsk—he was "Uncle Yura," who had stopped visiting when Lyosha's stepfather came on the scene. Unlike the stepfather, Yuri was an educated man who did well for himself in the new economy, rising to the position of director at a manufacturing company. He came from a family of Polish Jews who had also been exiled to these parts. He was married and had a daughter, about ten years Lyosha's senior, who worked at the local children's library. Lyosha started going to the library even more frequently. He fantasized about inserting a note to his half sister into one of the books he was returning. "You don't know me, but we have something important in common." Or, "I see you several times a week, and I wonder if you ever notice our likeness." The logistics of the plan were unclear—what if someone else found the note?—and the consequences were unpredictable, so Lyosha never followed through.

When he was not thinking about being his father's son, he thought about being German. It all made sense now: his punctuality, his obsessive neatness, his love of all things that made sense, and his inability to tolerate the sounds Sergei made when eating. Lyosha was no Alexei Sergeevich Gorshkov or even Alexei Yurievich Misharin: he was Alexei Klauser. He won the history essay contest.

Meanwhile, Galina sent a query to the state archives in Saratov, the major city in the Volga region from which she understood her family to have been exiled. You could do this now—ask for information on family who had been declared traitors, criminals, or enemies by the Stalin state. The archives confirmed that Lyosha's great-grandfather had, in the language of the authorities, "been repressed." As for Lyosha's great-grandmother, her file had been misplaced and no information was available.

"to learn about oneself is the toughest among the challenges of learning," wrote Alexander Etkind, one of the most perceptive scholars of the post-Soviet cultural experience. He was writing about the particular horror of the Soviet legacy:

Victims and perpetrators were mixed together in the same families,

ethnic groups, and lines of descent If the Nazi Holocaust

exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal. The self- inflicted nature of Soviet terror has complicated the circulation of three energies that structure the postcatastrophic world: a cognitive striving to learn about the catastrophe; an emotional desire to mourn for its victims; and an active desire to find justice and take

revenge on the perpetrators The suicidal nature of the Soviet

atrocities made revenge all but impossible, and even learning very

difficult.²

Before perestroika, dissident historians had been trying to do the work of learning in the near-complete absence of information. Even after mass terror ended with the death of Stalin, even after Nikita Khrushchev chose to speak out about the terror, he first doctored the information and then made the redacted story secret. When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief—not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name.³