The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

The unbelievable story of Anna Mikhailovna's failed redemptive visit also proved true. She had been dispatched by the Party to try to lure her estranged, ideologically wayward husband back into the fold. He was released into her custody. They spent three or four nights together at a hotel before irreconcilable ideological differences separated them forever. Arutyunyan's friend was even able to make copies of photographs—two sets of mug shots, taken at two arrests. Grigory Yakovlevich was handsome, with strong features and a full head of dark wavy hair. He looked tall, if one can look tall in a mug shot. His likeness had nothing in common with the "skinny, bespectacled Jew" from the Korzhavin poem. There had been other scant but more accurate descriptions of him, including this from the memoir of revolutionary expat Victor Serge:

Grigory Yakovlevich Yakovin, aged thirty, had returned from Germany, on which country he had just written an excellent book. A sporting enthusiast with a constantly alert intelligence, good looks,

and a spontaneous charm . . .—

The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano gave Grigory Yakovlevich a three-line cameo in his epic novel 2666: "Grigory Yakovin, a great expert in contemporary Germany history."²⁷ Several years after Maya, the last person to have seen Grigory Yakovlevich alive, had died, Arutyunyan was finally able to see a clear picture of her grandfather— in an academic paper her historian friend wrote after researching the case.²⁸

arutyunyan found herself regretting that her mother did not live to read her own father's court documents—and then she wondered why Maya had not used the brief window of openness in the early 1990s to look for the case herself (a history professor, she would have been

confident undertaking that kind of research). Had Maya harbored her own doubts? Her information had, after all, come solely from her mother, who had idolized her late husband and whose authority Maya would have feared undermining even decades after her death.

There was something extravagantly old-fashioned about the way Anna Mikhailovna and Grigory Yakovlevich's generation had carried its beliefs. "In the disillusioned world of post-Stalinism, maintaining the values of the revolutionary years was perceived as personal vanity," wrote Etkind, the cultural historian.²⁹ In the post-Stalin era, scaling desires and ambitions from universal down to petit-bourgeois was seen as a virtue, a sign of humanity that was being gradually restored. That made it complicated to admire Grigory Yakovlevich and empathize with Anna Mikhailovna, and it made it difficult to mourn them. The tools of mourning are epic and profound, but after Stalin, people trusted only small emotions and soft categories. "Now, Shakespeare seemed too earnest, austere, stiff; his gravity seemed laughable," Etkind wrote.³⁰

The people who most clearly opposed the Soviet regime were, at least in Arutyunyan's generation, the ones who were most suspicious of grand gestures and big pronouncements. Perhaps this was one of the reasons people stopped removing Soviet monuments within a couple of days of the August 1991 coup. The toppled Dzerzhinsky, along with a Stalin, a head of Khrushchev, and a couple of very large Old Bolsheviks, were delivered to a vast vacant lot in the back of a recently constructed House of the Artists in central Moscow. But hundreds, if not thousands, of Lenins, Bolsheviks, obscure heroic Young Pioneers, and disembodied hammer-and-sickles and five- pointed stars continued to dot Moscow parks, public squares, and building facades. Alexander Nikolaevich suggested removing the largest Lenin monument in the city, in Oktyabrskaya Square, and replacing it with a monument to all victims of Soviet terror—but retaining the name of the square "as a lesson to our descendants."³¹ Instead, Lenin kept standing, roughly as tall as a three-story building, but the square was renamed.

In November 1996, on the seventy-ninth anniversary of the Great October Revolution, Yeltsin renamed the holiday that was always celebrated on November 7. From now on, it would be called the Day of Agreement and Reconciliation. The following year, the eightieth since the Revolution and the sixtieth since the year of the Great Terror—the most brutal year of Stalinism—would become an entire Year of Agreement and Reconciliation.³² The same year, post- apartheid South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which harked back to a number of "truth commissions" that had functioned in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Nepal, and others. But Yeltsin was omitting the fact-finding component of the process, focusing solely on reconciliation, or at least agreement. Indeed, Yeltsin was proposing to dispense with all three of the "energies" that Etkind has described as components of postcatastrophic recovery—knowledge, grief, and justice—and proceed directly to some imaginary future in which reckoning had been left behind.