The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

"You see, there was a time when innocent people could be condemned. And if their families did not reject them, then children could be in danger." Maya got out a volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a tome in blue-black cloth. This was volume five, which began and ended with perfectly incomprehensible words: "Berezna" and "Botokudy." Maya opened the book to a full-page portrait of a middle-aged, mostly bald man with a round face, perfectly thin lips, and a pince-nez with round rimless lenses. This was Lavrentiy Beria, whom the accompanying four-page article described as "one of the most outstanding leaders of the All-Soviet Communist Party of Bolsheviks and of the Soviet state, a loyal student and comrade of J. V. Stalin," and so forth. This was not Arutyunyan's grandfather—this was Stalin's chief executioner. After he himself was executed, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia received a letter that Maya was now showing her:

The state scholarly publishing house of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia recommends that pages 21, 22, 23, and 24, as well as the portrait bound in between pages 22 and 23, be removed and replaced with new pages, enclosed with this letter.

Use scissors or a razor blade to remove the above- mentioned pages, taking care to retain inner margins to which new pages are to be glued.

The replacement pages contained an article on the Bering Strait.²³

"You see, this is the sort of thing that would happen," explained Maya. "And if it was a close relative, you had to be really careful."

This was a fascinating answer. It had a tinge of adventure to it. The physical and figurative disappearance of Grigory Yakovlevich Yakovin registered as mystery rather than tragedy.

Then, in high school, Arutyunyan read A Steep Road,* a memoir by a woman, a historian and a loyal Party member, who was falsely accused of being a Trotskyist and spent a decade in the Gulag, followed by another in internal exile. The book was a clear-eyed catalog of human suffering:

When I was young, I liked to repeat the phrase, "I think, therefore I am." Now I could say, "I hurt, therefore I am." . . .

Back in 1937, when I first admitted my share of responsibility for all that had happened, I dreamed of redemption through pain. By 1949, I knew that pain works only for a time. When it stretches for decades and becomes a part of the everyday, it is no longer redemptive. It is simply something that turns you into a block of wood.

Physical suffering drowns out the pain of inner torment.

This is a horror theater in which some of the actors have been assigned to play victims and others, the executioners. The latter

have it worse.²⁴

The book was published in the West and smuggled into the Soviet Union, and Arutyunyan had simply found it sitting on the desk of one of her parents. Now she could not put it down. She could not sleep. She could not stop crying. She summoned her closest friends from school. They spent the night—the book could not be taken out of the apartment—reading and crying.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Arutyunyan demanded of her parents.

"But we did," they said.

"Not like this!"

She came back to them after this conversation, asking for details about her grandfather. After a few queries, Maya handed her a copy of

a poem typed, in the samizdat fashion, on what was called "cigarette paper"—it was thin as rolling papers, and this allowed as many as four copies to be produced through the use of carbon paper and a manual typewriter.

"Here, read this," Maya said. "The facts don't match, but this is your grandmother's story."

It was a long piece by the emigre poet Naum Korzhavin. It was written in the second person, addressed to a woman who, if the poem was to be believed, was wholeheartedly, slavishly devoted to the Party.

You lied in the name of ideals, but the tradition of lying

Was continued by those

better suited for purposeful lies.

We are all mortal beings.

Our passions express who we are....

You rejected your love

in the name of a higher desire.

But was there love,

was there love even once in your life?

No, said the poem, the woman had never loved. Yes, it contradicted itself, once she did fall in love, with a fellow Party intellectual, a skinny bespectacled Jew. His views were to the right of the protagonist's—which meant that they were to the right of the Party line—and they argued the issues, until he got arrested. She was asked to testify, and she did not hesitate.

The work of the Party is sacred, no room for emotions.

Stick to the substance. Discard everything else.