The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

In 1989, Gorbachev made Alexander Nikolaevich chair of a newly created Rehabilitation Commission, in charge of reviewing archival documents and clearing the names of those who had been unjustly punished in the Stalin era. Alexander Nikolaevich was better prepared than Gorbachev to start learning about the terror, both because he was old enough to have heard Khrushchev deliver his secret speech to the Party Congress and because he had seen the cattle cars carrying Soviet prisoners of war to the Gulag after the Great Patriotic War. But what he saw when he studied the archives during perestroika made his stomach turn. He saw that Stalin personally had signed execution orders for forty-four thousand people, people he did not know and whose cases he had not read, if the cases even existed—he had simply signed off on long lists of names, apparently because he enjoyed the process.⁴ He saw evidence of secret-police competitions, formal ones —like when different departments within the NKVD (the precursor agency to the KGB) raced one another to highest number of political probes launched—and informal ones, like when three of the NKVD brass took three thousand cases with them on a train journey, got drunk, and engaged in a speed challenge: Who could go through a stack of cases fastest, marking each with the letter P. They were not reading the cases. The letter P—pronounced r in Russian—stood for rasstrel, "execution." He saw evidence of specific days on which the fate of thousands was decided. On November 22, 1937, Stalin and two of his closest advisers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Zhdanov, approved twelve lists submitted by the NKVD, containing 1,352 people who would be executed. On December 7, they signed off on

thirteen lists for a total of 2,397 people, 2,124 of whom were to be executed. On January 3, 1938, they were joined by two other top Bolsheviks, Kliment Voroshilov and Lazar Kaganovich, and together they signed off on twenty-two lists with 2,547 names, 2,270 to be executed.

June 10, 1938: twenty-nine lists, 2,750 people, 2,371 to be executed.

September 12, 1938: thirty-eight lists, 6,013 people, 4,825 to be executed.

There were too many such dates and figures to make them commemorative or otherwise meaningful. Some lists had a specific makeup. On August 20, 1938, Stalin and Molotov together signed off on a list of fifteen women who were classified as "wives of enemies of the people." Ten of them were housewives and two were students. All were executed. Their husbands, who had been arrested earlier, were executed later.⁵ Other lists looked altogether random, though the mind scrambled each time to make sense of them.

Lidiya Chukovskaya, a writer whose husband, a physicist, was executed in 1938 at the age of thirty-one, raged against this habit of attempting to make sense of the absurd:

The truth was too primitive and too bloody. The regime had attacked its citizens for no imaginable reason and was beating them, torturing them, and executing them. How were we to understand the reason for such whimsy? If you let it sink in that there is no reason, that they were doing it "just because," that killers killed just because it is their job to kill, then your heart, though no bullet has pierced it, will be torn apart, and your mind, in its intact shell of a head, will grow shaky. Looking at the truth would have been akin to

staring down the barrel of a gun, so one tried to steal oneself away.⁶

Alexander Nikolaevich had not read these lines: Chukovskaya drafted and redrafted this book for decades, perhaps still hoping to land on a narrative. It was published by Chukovskaya's daughter only in 2001, five years after its author's death. The book was called The Elision.

Alexander Nikolaevich ultimately concluded that the terror could not be understood. The explanations offered by his colleagues and any number of historians—that Stalin was mentally ill, that he suffered from paranoid delusions—explained nothing. The tyrant had had any number of his relatives, and the relatives of his wives, executed. One time, Alexander Nikolaevich discovered, Stalin invited an old friend back in Georgia to Moscow for a reunion. They dined and drank—Stalin took pride in his hospitality and his menus, which

he personally curated.⁷ Later the same night, the friend was arrested in his hotel room. He was executed before dawn. This could not be explained with any words or ideas available to man.⁸