The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The cases of other, more obvious executioners presented legal conundrums but not moral ones. Stalin's terror machine executed its executioners at regular intervals. In 1938 alone, forty-two thousand investigators who had taken part in the great industrial-scale purges were executed, as was the chief of the secret police, Nikolai Yezhov. The last of the top-level killers, Lavrentiy Beria, was executed after Stalin's death—but he was convicted not of murder, torture, and abuse of power but of having spied for fourteen different foreign countries. Other executioners had also been punished for imaginary crimes. Legally, this was grounds for rehabilitation. Morally, Alexander Nikolaevich decided that as long as he headed the Rehabilitation Commission, honor would not be restored to a single executioner. He also decided that he would run the commission as long as he lived and was able. Under Yeltsin, the commission was taken back into the fold of the state, with the heads of all federal law- enforcement agencies joining as members, though Alexander Nikolaevich continued to serve in an unpaid capacity. Clearing the names of tens of millions of Soviet citizens was his volunteer job.¹⁸

a woman came to see Arutyunyan about her eleven-year-old daughter, an otherwise lovely girl who kept having strange accidents that her mother suspected were not entirely accidental. Once, for example, she accidentally set the curtains on fire. Another time she accidentally locked the door to the balcony when her own grandmother—the woman's mother—was outside, stranding the older woman in the brutal cold without a coat. The family dynamics were clear enough: three generations of women were living together as an insular family unit—a fairly typical setup. The grandmother ruled the family like a tyrant. The mother carried out all the grandmother's orders, no matter how unreasonable, and tolerated all interventions, no matter how cruel. One time, for example, the mother had the apartment renovated—an expensive and arduous task. When the job was completed, the grandmother demanded a change of wallpaper, and the mother complied. Another time the older woman showed up at her granddaughter's school to denounce the girl for being insufficiently conscientious about homework.

Clearly, the girl's "accidents" were outward expressions of aggression that her mother was stifling. Arutyunyan and her patient began working through it. The woman's pain was immense: she was facing the apparent facts that she, a loving daughter, secretly wished her mother dead, and, even worse, that she, a loving mother, had saddled her own daughter with unmanageable feelings. Then the mother made a discovery: the grandmother had once worked as a guard in the Gulag.

The family was now recast as a camp, complete with dead-end make-work, the primacy of discipline, and the total abolition of personal boundaries. The balcony incident looked particularly eerie in this light: it reproduced a common torture technique, when inmates were forced to stand in the freezing cold just outside their barracks. Arutyunyan remembered reading—back when she had access to only some of Freud's writing—that humans play out that which they cannot remember.

A man came seeking help for problems that clearly resided in his relationship with his father. The man's life looked like an unfunny caricature of Soviet culture. He had grown up in a bedroom where the walls were entirely covered with slogans. He went to bed and woke up to "Man! The word has a proud sound!" (a quote from the writer Maxim Gorky), "Courage lies not in a lack of fear but in one's ability to suppress one's fear" (a quote from educator Alexei Makarenko), and the like. Not an inch of space was left vacant, and the message of all these pronouncements together was that not a fraction of the little boy's soul or body should remain unoccupied. When he broke both of his arms, he dared not tell his father, because he was afraid to admit that he had engaged in disorderly play. Nor could he admit to feeling pain—the slogans had taught him that would be weakness—so he never cried. The boy's father had no room for thoughts and perceptions in his mind either, so he made no notice of his son's injuries. The man who came to Arutyunyan now had limited mobility in both of his arms because they had healed without the aid of casts.

Arutyunyan worked with the man to reconstruct a family story: whatever had hurt him so profoundly had clearly traumatized his father first. The father, as the man described him, was a man who had