The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

There was a deeper reason Russia did not throw open the door to its secret-police archives. The Eastern Bloc countries that took this step—Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic among them— treated the documents as having been left behind by an occupying power. But Soviet institutions had become Russian institutions after 1991, and soon the Russian bureaucracy began to guard many Soviet secrets like its own. Following the logic of institutions rather than the law, a government commission was formed to review archival documents one by one and decide whether they could be declassified. As time went on, fewer and fewer documents made it into the open. A variety of institutions, ranging from the KGB to the foreign ministry to the Cartographic Service, all of which used to be "all-Soviet" and became "all-Russian," stopped releasing any part of their archives to authorities that could theoretically declassify them. Soviet secrets ossified.¹⁵

Alexander Nikolaevich concentrated on publishing the documents to which he had already secured access—those would be enough for a lifetime and more. The inability to make sense of tragedy continued to plague him: not only was there no identifiable reason for what had happened, there was no clear border between the victims and the executioners. He had decided early on that he would focus on victims on a case-by-case basis, regardless of who the victims had been before. But what if a person was victimized by becoming the executioner? Take Stalin's last wave of terror, euphemistically called "the anti-cosmopolitan campaign." Blatantly anti-semitic in nature, it had hinged on a conspiracy ostensibly discovered among the country's most prominent doctors—most of them Jewish—who were accused of poisoning their patients among the Party elite. When the smear campaign against the doctors kicked into gear in January 1953, the nation learned of a Russian doctor who had apparently exposed the Jewish bastards. Her name was Lidia Timashuk, and she was promptly, amid much fanfare, awarded the Order of Lenin for her vigilance. The campaign claimed thousands of victims in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc before it was halted abruptly following Stalin's death in March 1953. The doctors were presently exonerated, and the Order of Lenin was quietly rescinded—so quietly, though, that Timashuk remained forever associated with the plot to frame the Jews.¹⁶

As late as 1966—thirteen years after Stalin's death—Timashuk wrote to the Party leadership asking for her good name back. She had never claimed the doctors were enemies of the state, much less killers, she wrote. All she had done was, years earlier, disagree with an older colleague on the course of treatment chosen for a top member of the Politburo. It had emerged that she had been right to disagree—the older doctor had misdiagnosed a heart attack as a chronic condition—but she was remembered as the woman who had launched the hideous campaign against Soviet Jews, not as the doctor who had the right diagnosis.¹⁷ Timashuk may or may not have been telling the truth when she wrote that she never, not even when questioned by the secret police, cast aspersions on the Jewish doctors. She had certainly suffered less than the other doctors, who had been jailed and tortured and one of whom had died in pretrial detention: Timashuk complained that she had been forced to retire a decade after the Doctors' Plot because those who had been targeted by the campaign refused to work side by side with her. Surely, as executioners went, she was not in the major leagues. Neither was she unequivocally a victim. When she wrote her letter in 1966, the post- Stalin Thaw was over and her appeal was ignored. By the time Alexander Nikolaevich read the letter, Timashuk was dead. He decided to publish the letter.