The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Alexander Nikolaevich could not understand it, but he could try to describe it. The Soviet state was based on punishment. As Young Pioneers, children were taught to criticize one another and themselves in a group setting, reveling in the details of their shortcomings, the intricacies of blame, the ecstasy of repentance, and the imagined precision of the penalties. The Komsomol and the Party itself were also enforcement organizations, as was the "labor collective"—Sovietspeak for "workplace"—where meetings were regularly convened to "expose" fault and to "take measures."⁹

In 1989, its first year in existence, the Rehabilitation Commission reviewed about 280,000 court cases and cleared 367,690 names.¹⁰ This was, by Alexander Nikolaevich's estimate, about 2 percent of the job. From what he could tell now that he had full access to existing documents, casualties of mass terror numbered about twenty million. That was just Stalin's part of it: more people had died in the collectivization campaign that preceded his rise to power, and the punishment machine had continued to work, albeit at a greatly reduced pace, after Stalin's death.¹¹ Even if the group continued to review cases at the same rate as in its first year, it would not complete the job in Alexander Nikolaevich's lifetime.

The Rehabilitation Commission had been formed under the auspices of the Central Committee. This meant that Yeltsin's 1991 decree halting all economic activity of the Communist Party turned the commission into a nongovernmental organization with no funding, and Alexander Nikolaevich into its unpaid coordinator. He decided to ensure that the documents to which he had access were at least published. He planned to put together volumes on the secret police and on Stalin's chief henchmen, and a series on the Party's foreign activities, including a book on the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. If everyone had access to the facts on paper, it would be harder to lie about history, he reasoned. The documents might also make it possible to tell the truth—if anyone ever did find a way to begin making sense of the past. He assembled a team of ten people, if you counted the administrative assistant, the accountant, and the typist, and began the work of sorting, verifying, and cross- referencing.¹² The first volume, on a failed 1921 military rebellion against Bolshevik rule, was published in 1997. Seryozha began helping too, first with the typing, then with some of the more complicated tasks. His grandfather was in a hurry—he said that he had to publish as much as possible before he, and the country, lost access to the documents.

By law, information about mass terror had to be publicly available: Yeltsin had issued a decree to that effect in June 1992.¹³ Early on, even some of the dissident historians had favored a cautious approach. Some of what they had glimpsed in the archives, they argued, could not be released to the public without further analysis. Take, for example, a report submitted by a little-known writer on her much more famous friend. The report's author wrote that the other woman had praised Stalin in superlative terms. It appeared likely that the lesser-known writer had made the claim—and, indeed, had agreed to be an informant—solely to protect her friend from suspicion and persecution. But if the document were released uncritically, it might sully a great writer's name. Or take another case: a low-level KGB operative reports that he has met with a dissident who has been consigned to internal exile and the man has agreed to cease all anti- Soviet activity. It is known, however, that after his term in exile the man continued to be active in the dissident movement. How is the report to be interpreted? Was the KGB officer lying, was the dissident telling him what he wanted to hear just to end the conversation, or is there reason to believe that after his exile the dissident had become a mole? Something similar had happened in Poland, where the secret- police archives turned up a dossier on Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement, Nobel laureate, and the country's first post- Communist president. If the dossier was to be believed, Walesa had been a paid secret-police informant. Walesa's stature and popularity outweighed the damage the dossier could have done, but the paper trail continued to haunt him for years.¹⁴