MILLIONS of people perished in Stalin’s twenty-year terror along with Bukharin, but other victims survived and began to return to Soviet society after the tyrant’s death in 1953. Until recently, relatively little was known about their lives after the Gulag, which is the subject of this chapter. The chapter itself has a long history. My research for it began more than thirty years ago in forbidding circumstances—in Moscow in the still repressive Soviet 1970s and early 1980s, when the entire subject was officially banned. No sensible scholar would have chosen such a project in those prohibitive circumstances, but, as I came to think, the subject chose me.
In 1976, I began living in Moscow for extended periods, usually on a U.S.-Soviet exchange program. By then, Bukharin’s widow, Anna Larina, and son, Yuri, had obtained a copy of my Bukharin biography and had welcomed me into their family.1 Indeed, much of my Moscow social life revolved around their friends and acquaintances, and I soon realized that most of the people I met were also survivors of Stalin’s Gulag or children and other relatives of his victims.
Public knowledge of their terrible fate had been proscribed by censorship since shortly after the overthrow of Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1964, and they had little hope, if any, of ever making it widely known. For that reason, and because Anna Larina assured them of my discretion, they were eager to tell me their stories and even give me unpublished memoirs. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I found myself dwelling in a subterranean history, a kind of living archaeological find, known only fragmentarily in the Soviet Union and almost not at all in the West.2 Writing that history, it seemed, had fallen to me.
THE book I planned had two purposes. One was a collective biography of Gulag returnees during the years of Khrushchev’s reforms from 1953 to 1964, beginning with their liberation and ending with their efforts to rejoin society. The other purpose, reflecting my interest in past and possible future reforms in the Soviet Union, was to explore how the return of millions of “zeks” (the colloquial acronym for prisoners) after Stalin’s death had affected policymaking and the system itself under Khrushchev.
Both dimensions were outside the mainstream of Western Soviet studies at that time. Still adhering to the “totalitarianism” model, most studies treated the political system as something apart from both its history and society, largely unaffected by either and thus essentially immutable.3 The impact of Gulag returnees in the 1950s and 1960s suggested otherwise. Their fates were a central factor in the intensely historicized politics of the period, when controversies over the past, including historical alternatives to Stalinism, became an inescapable aspect of struggles over power and policy at the top. At the same time, the personal needs of so many freed prisoners and their families created both a social constituency for further de-Stalinization and a test of the system’s capacity for change. (Before it became commonplace in the field, I was trying to fuse social and political history.)4
But where could I obtain the information needed for such an empirical work? Almost no secondary literature existed on the subject; the best Western books about the terror focused on people’s victimization, not their subsequent experiences.5 And in a country of encompassing censorship, closed archives, many still-intimidated victims, and a hostile officialdom, there was, not surprisingly, only one fragmentary Soviet study—the brief account of a few post-Gulag lives at the end of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared in the West in the 1970s.6
This meant I had to rely mainly on primary sources. A number of uncensored Gulag memoirs had been published abroad, but they were of limited value. Most covered years before 1953, were by repatriated foreign prisoners whose later experiences were not typical of Soviet ones, or said little about life after the Gulag.7 There were, however, two other written sources of information, both of them Soviet and important, though still little used by Western scholars.
One was a considerable body of writings on the “camp theme,” including fiction, published under the somewhat relaxed censorship of Khrushchev’s “Thaw.” The false impression prevalent in the West is that few such texts were printed even at that time in the Soviet Union—in literature, for example, only Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich— or that being pro-Soviet, they were unworthy of attention.8 Many commentaries on Stalin’s terror, including memoir accounts by Gulag survivors, appeared in officially sanctioned publications, and not only in the Moscow-based press. Prompted by returnees, I found a wealth of information in intelligentsia journals published in remote Soviet regions where there had been large concentrations of camp inmates and exiles and where many had remained after their release, particularly in Siberia and Kazakhstan.9
The other written Soviet source was entirely uncensored—the growing volume of materials circulating in typescript (samizdat) or smuggled abroad for publication (tamizdat). By the 1970s, those expressions of unofficial glasnost—histories, memoirs, contemporary political and social commentaries, documents, fiction, and more—should have been essential reading for most Sovietologists, as they were for me.10 Indeed, terror-era subjects and returnee authors were a major component of that literature.
Most of all, though, I relied on the firsthand testimonies of Stalin’s victims with whom I was in personal contact. In the beginning, I met them through the Bukharin family but very soon also through three other exceptional Muscovites. Two, with whom I developed close personal and professional relations, were dissident historians and themselves sons of victims—Roy Medvedev, whose father had perished in a labor camp; and Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, who lost both parents to the terror and himself “sat” for almost thirteen years in the Gulag.11 Admired and trusted by many returnees, Roy and Anton persuaded several of them to help me.
My third enabler, Tatyana Baeva, was a young woman at the center of Moscow’s beleaguered human-rights movement, which included a number of survivors of Stalin’s twenty-year terror as well as grown children of victims who did not return. Indeed, Tanya’s father, Aleksandr Baev, a much-honored, internationally known biochemist and high official in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, had spent seventeen years in Stalinist camps and exile, where she was born.12 Friendship with Tanya led me to another circle of people whose experiences I needed.
Within two years of periodic visits to Moscow, I was in direct touch with more than twenty returnees or close relatives of other victims, in addition to members of the Bukharin family, whom I interviewed at various lengths.13 I was not the first person to engage them in oral history—in many instances, Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev, or Antonov-Ovseyenko had been there earlier for their uncensored (or “dissident”) books on the Soviet past14—but I was, I think, the first foreigner. That circumstance heightened my awareness that by abetting my project they (unlike me) might again be at considerable risk. I was very cautious, which usually meant surreptitious.
I realized, however, that those close encounters were selective cases, most involving elderly people linked to the original Soviet Communist elite and who had lived in Moscow before and after the Gulag. (Contrary to politically motivated myths, the great majority of Stalin’s victims, 70 percent or more, were not members of the Communist Party or any Soviet elite.)15 To reach beyond them, I prepared a lengthy Russian-language questionnaire—also the first on the subject—that friends, acquaintances, and people unknown to me circulated more widely inside the Soviet Union and among survivors who had emigrated.16 By the early 1980s, it had yielded, through various channels, twenty or so detailed replies. With cases culled from printed and typescript sources, I now had files on nearly sixty individuals. Considering the millions of victims, it was a small sample. But considering recent Western generalizations about the entire Stalin era based on many fewer diaries and other personal materials found in archives, it was substantial.17
By then I was running out of time to pursue the project inside the Soviet Union. My Moscow double life—as an official exchange scholar working on an approved subject while increasingly engrossed in a disapproved one—had become known to Soviet authorities, as no doubt had my role in sending banned memoirs and contemporary dissident materials out of the country. My sporadic “tail” became more constant, and a KGB officer at an academic institute bluntly warned me to “stop spending time with people who have grievances against the Soviet government.” (Whether he meant Gulag survivors or latter-day dissidents, I didn’t ask.)
Inevitably perhaps, that stage of the project ended in 1982, when for the next three years I could no longer obtain a Soviet visa. I turned instead to the large quantity of materials I had already amassed, using some in my publications about past and current political struggles over reform in the Soviet system.18 I also drafted the original version of this chapter as a summary of the book I intended to write.
That intention was overwhelmed in 1985 and 1986 by the unfolding drama of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. The new leader’s policies soon represented the attempted Soviet reformation I had long considered possible, and they raised the possibility of access to long-inaccessible documents for a fuller edition of my Bukharin biography. Glasnost filled the Soviet press with new information about Stalin’s victims, which I dutifully collected, but my other projects took priority. My swollen returnee files languished in storage until the mid-1990s, when I met the young American scholar Nanci Adler. Impressed by her ongoing work on a similar project, I gave her full access to my materials for her own excellent book, which appeared in 2002.19
Even so, Gulag returnees are still a remarkably little known phenomenon, certainly compared to Holocaust survivors.20 Since the Khrushchev years, returnees have appeared in several Russian and Western novels, including Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing, Vassily Aksyonov’s The Burn, Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House, and Martin Amis’s House of Meetings ; a few memoirs about their post-Gulag lives have been published; and their testimonies have informed a number of more general Western studies.21 But despite large repositories of relevant manuscripts and published volumes of archive documents, Adler’s book remains the only full-scale examination of their experiences, even, inexplicably, in Russia.22
An expanded version of my 1983 manuscript, this chapter is an overview of the political and social dimensions of the returnee phenomenon. Incorporating information that has become available since 1983, it takes the story beyond the Khrushchev years and into the post-Soviet era. But enough of the original draft remains to reflect the circumstances in which it originated when many victims (and victimizers) were still alive and, I think, to offset the widespread impression that such research was impossible before Gorbachev’s glasnost or the post-Soviet “archive revolution.”
As a Russian historian has remarked about writing history during those decades of strict Soviet censorship, “Every era gives rise to its own specific types of sources.”23 Even now, however, I have not named all the sources who, trusting in my pledge of confidentiality, informed my work in the 1970s and early 1980s. Even though most of them are now dead, I remain reticent about several identities, partly because of uncertain developments in post-Soviet Russia or perhaps simply because of promises made and habits ingrained long ago.
RETURNEES from the Gulag were survivors in almost the full sense of victims who had survived the Nazi extermination camps. (Even Soviet newspapers later charged Stalin with “genocide against his own people.”)24 Unlike Hitler’s camps, the Gulag’s primary purpose was forced labor, but treatment and conditions in Stalin’s camps and in the vast associated system of prisons, transport, penal colonies, and “special” places of harsh exile were often murderous. Many of the 12 to 14 million victims swept into that system between the early 1930s and early 1950s died there or were discharged because they were already dying.25 Most of those liberated in the 1950s had been arrested in the 1940s or later, surviving “only” ten years or less.
Survival was therefore a subject that troubled returnees much as it had tormented Nazi victims.26 Who had survived, and why? Some zeks endured because of strong bodies and unrelenting wills or the circumstantial good fortune of less arduous work, less brutal climate, or early release into exile. Others did so by becoming informers or collaborating in different ways with camp authorities. Many of the returnees I interviewed did not want to discuss the question or did so without recriminations, but several accused other survivors of perfidious behavior and wanted me to condemn them as well. (I declined to make such judgments, explaining that having never faced such life-and-death choices, I could not be sure how I would have behaved in those circumstances.)
Exactly how many political victims survived to be freed after Stalin’s death in March 1953 is uncertain even now. At least 4 to 5 million were still in camps, labor colonies, prisons and exile.27 To that number must be added, however, the uncounted millions of relatives of “enemies of the people”—or in another formulation of Stalinist repression, “members of families of traitors to the Motherland.” (Some renounced their accused kin or managed to hide such relationships, but many would not or could not.) The story of all those collateral victims, whose spouses, parents, or siblings became the inadvertent “culprit of my fate,”28 as the poet Anna Akhmatova’s son characterized her involuntary role in his arrest, remains largely unwritten.
A great many children and other relatives had also been imprisoned or deposited under false names in NKVD-authorized orphanages across the country.29 Millions more remained nominally free but so stigmatized by their “spoiled biographies” they could not live or work as they desired or obtain essential social benefits. (There were notable exceptions of people, well-known in Russia but not in the West, who nonetheless had honored public careers under Stalin.)30 They, too, had been “repressed,” as the Russian government acknowledged decades later, and they, too, wanted exoneration and full integration into Soviet society. Considering only immediate family members (other relatives were also affected), there could scarcely have been fewer than 10 million survivors of some kind of political victimization by 1953, and possibly considerably more.
Many previous releases had occurred in the Gulag’s long history, but the post-Stalin liberation was entirely different—profoundly political, fraught with questions about innocence and culpability, and the source of fearful conflict in the Kremlin. A March 1953 amnesty released 1 million of the approximately 2.7 million camp inmates, most of them said to be ordinary criminals.31 The freeing of political prisoners, however, unfolded slowly over the next three years, agonizingly for those still in the Gulag.32 The primary reason was, of course, the new leadership’s complicity in Stalin’s crimes, particularly that of Lavrenty Beria, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Georgy Malenkov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Khrushchev himself.
During the three years following Stalin’s death, his successors, while fighting among themselves over power and policy, relied on bureaucratic procedures to investigate the status of political prisoners, most convicted as “counterrevolutionaries” under the infamous Article 58, and review the mounting flood of appeals. But the victims with the best chance of early release in 1953 and 1954 were those who had personal connections with or were known to Party leaders and other influential Soviet figures. Beneficiaries ranged from relatives of the leaders themselves, a few once prominent Communists whom Stalin had not shot, and surviving Jewish doctors arrested in the tyrant’s last terror scenario to famous performers such as the actress Zoya Fyodorova, the Starostin brothers (Spartak soccer players), and the jazzman Eddi Rozner. (Molotov’s wife, freed on the day of Stalin’s funeral, may have been the first.)33
Otherwise, apart from partial amnesties, the procedure was a slow, case-by-case process that usually stretched over months, even years, and often ended in rejection. Of 237,412 appeals formally reviewed by April 1955, barely 4 percent resulted in release.34 Spurred in part by rebellions in the camps, large crowds of petitioners outside the procurator’s building in central Moscow, and thousands of appeals sent to the Party’s headquarters and the KGB, the exodus from the Gulag grew. By the end of 1955, 195,353 people were reported to have been released, though only 88,278 from labor camps and colonies, the rest from various kinds of exile.35 It was a substantial number, but it was growing too slowly to save the lives of many left behind. As Lev Gumilyov wrote despairingly from camp in 1955 to his mother, the great but proscribed poet Akhmatova, “Most likely I’ll be rehabilitated posthumously.”36
Khrushchev’s historic assault on Stalin’s still cultlike reputation at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 was the turning point. The new leader did not tell the full truth, or even mention the Gulag, but by accusing the dead tyrant of “mass repressions” over twenty years, Khrushchev tacitly exonerated millions of falsely condemned victims. His speech was not published in the Soviet Union for thirty-three years, but nor was it ever really “secret.” Within a few months, it had been read officially to meetings across the country, making its general contents widely known. A policy of selective releases was no longer tenable. Mass liberation began immediately through special resolutions, accelerated reviews, including of appeals previously rejected, and blanket amnesties.37
The most dramatic component of the accelerated release program consisted of ninety-seven special commissions authorized in Moscow and sent directly to many of the Gulag’s sixty-five or so largest camps. Each commission was supposed to have three to seven members, including Party and state officials and, to insure “objectivity and justice,” one already freed and exonerated veteran Communist, though the latter was often excluded. All the commissions were empowered to review cases on the scene and free prisoners, usually upon a simple denial of guilt. (Zeks called them “unloading parties.”) Some, staffed by unsympathetic officials, did not act justly, but many did. Within a few months, they had freed more than 100,000 prisoners, adding significantly to the ever-growing total.38 By 1959, most of Stalin’s surviving political victims had been released from camps, colonies, prisons, and exile.39
In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s speech, the homeward trek of liberated zeks became a familiar sight on trains and in streets and shops across the Soviet Union. With nothing more than documents authorizing their release and destination, a railway ticket, and a few rubles for food, many looked emaciated and aged and were still in standard Gulag garb.40 When one arrived at Communist Party headquarters embarrassed by how he was dressed, another former prisoner now working there assured him, “It’s nothing. Many people are walking around Moscow today in such clothes.”41
Not all released prisoners and exiles actually went home. Some arrested in connection with sensitive political cases were banned from Moscow and other capital cities for several years. Not all deported nationalities were permitted to return to their Soviet native homelands. For a great many others, home no longer existed, years of imprisonment having cost them their families, careers, possessions, and sense of belonging.
Hundreds of thousands of freed zeks and exiles—“sensible” ones, according to Solzhenitsyn42—remained in the vast regions of the diminished Gulag empire, especially Central Asia and Siberia. They stayed because of new families, salaries offered by state enterprises desperate for their now voluntary labor, a lack of travel documents, psychological attachments to the harsh expanses of their punishment, or because they had nowhere else to go.43 Long after the Gulag’s barbed wire and watch towers had been bulldozed, visitors still stumbled upon terrible traces of that world—camp structures, mass graves, skulls. They also found living traces in the remote former Gulag capitals such as Magadan, Norilsk, and Vorkuta—elderly survivors and a large number of their descendents.44 Most would fall on new hard times when the post-Soviet state ended essential subsidies to those regions.
But millions of survivors did go home, or tried to. They were people once as diverse as the Soviet Union itself, formerly of all classes, professions, and nationalities. Over the decades, Stalin’s terror had victimized virtually every social group, high and low. In the Gulag, however, as the anti-Stalinist poet and editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky, whose own peasant parents had been deported, wrote:
Fate made everyone equal
Outside the limits of the law,
Son of a kulak or Red commander,
Son of a priest or commissar.
Here classes all were equalized,
All men were brothers, campmates all,
Branded as traitors every one.45
Now they went their separate ways.
FEW generalizations are possible about the post-Gulag lives of returnees. Some were so broken physically they died soon after release—“from freedom,” it was said; others lived into their nineties.46 (Solzhenitsyn, for example, died in 2008 just before his ninetieth birthday, while Antonov-Ovseyenko was still active in Moscow at eighty-eight.) Some had been so traumatized that they remained fearful, concealed their past, refused to discuss it even with family members, shunned fellow-survivors, and tried to “shed [their] prisoner’s skin”; others were “professional zeks,” wearing their Gulag experiences as a badge of honor, maintaining life-long friendships with camp comrades, talking and writing because “they could not do otherwise.” (A Communist truth teller, when asked menacingly by a Party official if he was in the “Soviet or anti-Soviet camp,” defiantly replied, “I am from [the Gulag camp] Kolyma!” And a poet adopted the pen name “Vladimir Zeka.”) For such people, as for Solzhenitsyn, “There was never a question of whether to conceal his past or take pride in it.”47 Returnees young enough to aspire to a new or renewed profession usually followed a middle course, confiding in relatives, close friends, and trusted colleagues.48
The great majority of survivors slipped back into the anonymity of society, but a significant number went on to eminent Soviet careers. They included several released to fight in World War II—Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky; General Aleksandr Gorbatov; the father of the Soviet rocket and space program, Sergei Korolev; and an eventual head of the Writers Union, Vladimir Karpov—as well as post-Stalin returnees like Baev, Rozner, Andrei Starostin, the popular actors Georgy Zhzhenov and Pyotr Veliaminov, and many literary figures.49 Innumerable returnees who lived out their lives privately also achieved a relatively “kheppi end,” though possibly more did not. Some ended up hopelessly dysfunctional, destitute, and homeless. Even the great writer Varlam Shalamov died in exceptionally lonely circumstances, and the last years of the poet Olga Berggolts were ones of “pain, alcohol, and loneliness.”50
Nor are political generalizations possible. Many victims blamed the entire Soviet system, a few becoming well-known dissident religious figures such as Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov and Father Dmitri Dudko; others blamed only Stalin and sought restitution of their Communist Party membership as full exoneration; and still others, like my close friend Yevgeny Gnedin, rejoined the Party after their return but later quit in protest.51
Political conflicts among survivors were not uncommon. There were disputes among former zeks over Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of camp life in Ivan Denisovich, and he developed significant disagreements with the other major Gulag author, Shalamov (who came to dislike Solzhenitsyn), and “ideological” differences with his once close Gulag friend Lev Kopelev. The memoirist Eugenia Ginzburg, who refused to rejoin the Party, despised a Gulag friend because she thought he had reacquired not only his Party card but his prearrest official attitudes.52 A returnee who rose high in the scientific establishment was angered by his daughter’s dissident activities because they “jeopardized what I suffered to achieve,” not unlike the reaction of Bukharin’s daughter to her half-brother’s public protests.53 Years later, a war of words broke out between rival organizations of former zeks.54 And while most victims hated Stalin, after the end of the Soviet Union Karpov and Father Dudko praised his historical role.55
Collectively, however, the millions of returnees were an important new factor in Soviet life. Their common experiences, needs, and demands generated widespread problems, conflicts, and cultural expressions that required responses from the political-administrative system. Virtually every returnee wanted, for example, a family reunion, medical care, an apartment, a job or pension, financial compensation, and the return of confiscated property. The Soviet government’s general response was an unwritten but often spoken social contract: We will meet your needs within limits and leave you in peace, but you must not make political demands or clamor about the past. (When released, many survivors had been warned not to talk about what had happened to them.)
Government agencies could do little for families torn apart by years of mass repression except help returnees locate relatives, and even that was done mainly by friends and other relatives. (Still worse, the KGB continued to lie for several years about the deaths of loved ones.)56 Children who vanished into orphanages and foster homes were usually found, but some parents were still searching for them decades later.57 And when children had been young or had not known who their parents were, reunions were frequently difficult and sometimes never fully successful. Even adult returnees often could not reestablish relationships with parents or siblings who had not been arrested. (There was also a cruel coincidence in 1956, the year a soccer star helped his Soviet team win Olympic gold at Melbourne while his brother was returning from the Gulag.)58
As for marriages, many were irreparably damaged, even when both the husband and wife had been imprisoned for long periods.59 When one spouse had remained free (usually the wife), sometimes blaming the victim for the stigma that ensued, the outcomes ranged from joyous to traumatic and tragic. There were countless instances of long marital faithfulness but also many of political renunciation, divorce, and new marriage.60 Returnees who found no family waiting often quickly remarried, not infrequently to other victims—and many affected children married other children whose parents had been in the camps—while some men sought new lives with much younger women.61 More women returnees, not surprisingly, remained without spouses, adding to the large number of unmarried women that had resulted from World War II.
Nor did the government do much for Gulag survivors suffering from psychological “post-camp syndrome”—those who lived in constant anxiety, tormented by memories, nightmares, and everyday reminders of their terrible experiences. The Soviet system lacked the will, and its mental health profession did not acknowledge the condition. Quite a few former zeks sought comfort in intimate circles of other victims, who were “like a family,” some even expressing “nostalgia” for the survivalist comradeship of the Gulag. How many ever found inner peace is unknown.62
The government did, however, meet the basic material needs of most returnees, though many felt the response was not adequate. Despite existing statutes, few survivors were given financial compensation for their years of suffering or their impounded savings accounts, only a flat two months of their prearrest salary; nor, as a rule, were their personal possessions—many of them now in the hands of NKVD-KGB families—returned, though compensation was sometimes granted. (To take a particularly horrific example, Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor at Stalin’s falsified show trials of the 1930s, took for himself the dacha of one of the defendants he condemned to death.)63 But most returnees did eventually receive health and dental care (dentures were especially important), living space, work, pensions, and other modest benefits of the Soviet welfare system. A general pension reform of 1956, for example, expanded the definition of time in the workplace to tacitly include years of forced labor.64
Recovering those benefits of full citizenship was not automatic or easy. Having been “legally” convicted, returnees needed official exoneration, or “rehabilitation,” which amnesty and other release documents usually had not provided. Obtaining the “sacred” certificate of rehabilitation, which was supposed to delete their “dark past” or that of relatives who had perished, involved another case-by-case bureaucratic process.65
Here again it was easiest for survivors who had influential help. For elderly Communists, the most active “intervenors” were the few Leninist-era Bolsheviks Stalin had not arrested, notably Grigory Petrovsky, Yelena Stasova, and Vyacheslav Karpinsky. For cultural figures, they were eminent figures such as the writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov.66 Less fortunate returnees were often subjected to grudging, protracted procedures. Nonetheless, between 1954 and Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1964, 700,000 to 800,000 of Stalin’s victims were rehabilitated, many posthumously.67 Millions more had to await another Soviet reform leader.
Compared to the twenty years that followed, Khrushchev’s leadership favored returnees, but reactions to them in officialdom and society were far from uniform. Some officials were supportive, but many viewed former zeks “with suspicion,” rehabilitation as “something rotten,” and the rehabilitated as “unclean.” Those Party and state officials created obstacles to their return, from liberation to rehabilitation. Even though laws provided for positive actions, frequently bureaucrats refused survivors necessary documents, courts ruled against their claims, state employers rejected their applications, academic directors forbade them to travel abroad, and local Party secretaries punished editors who had “a mania for justice.” One official probably spoke for many when he warned a rehabilitated zek, “The mark was removed, but the stain remained.”68
Society’s reaction also varied. Returnees related many instances of welcoming kindness, not only from family and friends but also strangers. The emerging liberal intelligentsia and educated young people viewed them as “something romantic” and gave them “a hero’s reception.” The justly admired Gnedin, for example, was the subject of a well-known publication, “The Poem’s Hero.”69 But many ordinary citizens reacted with suspicion and hostility, mainly, it seems, because of major outbreaks of theft, rape, and murder resulting from the mass amnesty of criminals in 1953 and to decades of Stalinist allegations about “wreckers, traitors and assassins.” They saw no difference between released political and criminal prisoners.70
One social group had reason to be fearful. Millions of people had been implicated in some way in Stalin’s twenty-year terror—from Party and state apparatchiki who implemented his orders and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of NKVD personnel who arrested, tortured, executed, and guarded victims to countless petty informers and eager slanderers spawned by the crimson plague. Millions of other citizens had been implicated indirectly, inheriting the positions, apartments, possessions, and even wives and children of the vanished. Two generations had built lives and careers on the terror’s consequences, which killed but also “corrupted the living.”71
Some Soviet citizens had, of course, resisted complicity in the terror and even tried to help its victims, as did even a few procurators, NKVD interrogators, and camp officials,72 but by 1956 a profound antagonism was unfolding between two social communities. As Anna Akhmatova, whose son was released that year, foresaw, “Now those who were arrested will return, and two Russias will be eyeball to eyeball: The one that put people in the camps and the one put there.” The first, she added, “are now trembling for their names, positions, apartments, dachas. The whole calculation was that no one would return.”73
Widespread conflicts were inevitable. Most returnees passively accepted the government’s assistance, but a significant number wanted more—real compensation, fuller political disclosures, official punishment of the guilty. Some took action, including law suits and later public campaigns identifying secret police agents and informers. Others dreamt of a Monte Cristo–like revenge, though it usually evolved into demands for legal justice.74 A few survivors concluded that “no one was guilty” because Stalin’s terror had deprived people of choice—an outlook that may explain the romance between a leading victim’s son and the late dictator’s daughter and occasional requests by camp guards that former zeks testify to their humanity. (I witnessed a poignant example in the early 1990s when I brought together Bukharin’s widow and the daughter of his Lubyanka interrogator. Anna Larina immediately eased the daughter’s anxiety by assuring her, “They both were victims.”) But many more returnees insisted that the difference between “victims and hangmen” was absolute and “eternal.”75
There were many confrontations between them. Some were accidental encounters in public places. One returnee dropped dead upon coming face-to-face with his former tormentor, while another saw “fear of death” in the eyes of his NKVD interrogator. Awkward meetings occurred at professional institutes and clubs, where returning victims unavoidably encountered colleagues they knew had contributed to their arrest, some now in positions of authority. They reacted variously. One spit on his betrayer; another refused to shake the hand of his; yet another pretended not to know.76
One other social ramification of the great return should be emphasized. Even in conditions of repressive censorship, experiences of that magnitude and intensity were bound to find cultural expression. The irrepressible percolation of the “camp theme” from the subterrane of Soviet society into unofficial and then sanctioned culture was an important and lasting development of Khrushchev’s Thaw. Now more widely studied than when I first observed it in Moscow, Gulag culture emerged across the spectrum from language, music, and literature to paintings and sculptures.
Zeks returning from the “little zone,” as they called it, to the “big zone” of society brought with them a jargon common in the Gulag but prohibited in public discourse under Stalin. Some people were offended by its coarseness and seeming romanticizing of the criminal world, but I heard it spoken casually by many Muscovites, especially intellectuals and young people. (It soon became the subject of several dictionaries.)77 Gulag vernacular also spread widely through songs performed by popular bards, including two sons of victims, Bulat Okudzhava and Yuli Kim. (One musical returnee had an official impact, the saxophonist Rozner being assured by the minister of culture in 1953, “We are rehabilitating the saxophone.”)78
Visual art, on the other hand, was less portable and thus more easily prohibited, but judging by what I saw and was told, a considerable number of Gulag-related paintings, drawings, and even sculptures were seen in apartments, studios, and, in one instance, on the lawn of a zek who remained in Siberia.79 Such works, virtually all of them done by returnees, ranged from large oil canvases depicting arrests and life and death in the camps to small graphic drawings of the torture of naked female prisoners. The existence of such art was known in select circles by the 1970s, but its first public showings in the late 1980s were a sensation.80
Meanwhile, returnees had begun to put their experiences in prose and poetry. Most of it remained part of the underground or “catacomb” culture until the Gorbachev period, but not all.81 A small wave of Gulag-related writings made its way into official publications soon after Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, well before the “flood” unleashed by his public anti-Stalinist revelations in late 1961, highlighted by Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich. By the mid-1960s, camp literature had grown into a substantial published genre that posed searing questions about the Soviet past and present—about the nation’s “dreadful and bloody wound,” as even the government newspaper acknowledged.82
None of those social developments after 1953 should be understood apart from what was still a harshly repressive political system. To have a larger impact, they required initiatives at the top. Nonetheless, the social and cultural dimensions of the victims’ return created pressure “downstairs” for a response “upstairs” (in the imagery of a former Soviet journalist) more radical than Khrushchev’s remarks at a closed gathering of the Party elite. When that response came in the early 1960s, this “muffled rumble of subterranean strata” was both a causal and deeply divisive factor in the political struggles that followed.83
GULAG returnees played a little-known but significant role in Soviet politics under Khrushchev. Unlike in several East European Communist countries and China, no survivor of political purges returned to the leadership. Stalin had long since killed everyone who might have done so. A number of returnees acquired positions in the ruling Party apparatus, but mostly at lower levels either because of age or because “the stain remained.” (Several reported being trusted but, as Arthur Miller could have written, not well trusted.)84
Many former zeks did, however, make their way into the nomenklatura class that administered the state bureaucratic system, some even becoming nachalniki (bosses). Among them were Marshal Rokossovsky and several generals: Korolev; Baev; Boris Suchkov, who directed the Institute of World Literature; Semyon Kheiman, who held a similar position at the Institute of Economics; and Boris Burkovsky, head of the museum of the iconic revolutionary cruiser Aurora docked in Leningrad.85 I often asked acquaintances in various professions in the 1970s if their nachalstvo included anyone who had “sat” under Stalin; almost all answered affirmatively.
But the most important political role belonged to a small group of returnees who unexpectedly appeared near the center of power. All of them—notably Olga Shatunovskaya, Aleksei Snegov, and Valentina Pikina—had been veteran Communist officials before spending many years in Stalin’s camps and exile. Freed in 1953 and 1954, they quickly became, thanks to personal connections, part of Khrushchev’s extended entourage or that of Mikoyan, his closest ally in the leadership. (Their proximity to the two leaders somewhat eroded lower-level resistance to accommodating returnees.) They were referred to as “Khrushchev’s zeks,” sometimes admiringly but also derisively.86
Khrushchev and Mikoyan clearly trusted those recently released victims more than they did the Stalinist officials who still dominated the Party and state apparatuses. Shatunovskaya and Pikina soon sat on the Party’s supreme judiciary body, which oversaw rehabilitation policy; Snegov and Yevsei Shirvindt, another returnee, occupied high positions in the Ministry of the Interior, which administered the Gulag; and Aleksandr Todorsky, a former army officer and zek, was made lieutenant general and deployed in the exoneration of Stalin’s military victims.87
Snegov and Shatunovskaya, whom an independent Russian philosopher, himself a former zek, called “one of the most remarkable women in the political history of Russia,”88 were especially influential and active. They “opened the eyes” of Khrushchev and Mikoyan, as their sons later recalled, to the full horrors of Stalin’s terror and helped persuade the new Party leader to deliver his historic anti-Stalin speech at the 1956 congress. (In the speech, Khrushchev openly acknowledged Snegov’s contribution.) Together Shatunovskaya and Snegov were instrumental in freeing millions of victims, convincing the two leaders to immediately release all the unfortunates in “eternal exile” and to send the “unloading” commissions to the camps. As the fight over de-Stalinization unfolded in ruling circles, according to Khrushchev’s son, his father and Mikoyan “needed” Shatunovskaya and Snegov as their “eyes and ears” and also, it seems, for their souls.89
All of Stalin’s leading heirs had been responsible for thousands of deaths, but only Khrushchev and Mikoyan became repentant Stalinists. (Mikoyan may have been the most committed, though this may have been because of his lesser political and thus less vulnerable position. He personally helped many returnees and even, it seems, pushed for the rehabilitation of Bukharin, a step, as we saw, Khrushchev did not take.)90 Khrushchev was not the first to adopt de-Stalinizing measures—the police boss Beria set that precedent before his arrest—and he manipulated them in his drive for supreme power.
But that does not explain why Khrushchev made anti-Stalinism such an integral part of his reforms, which eventually affected almost every area of Soviet policymaking; the enormous personal risks he repeatedly took by exposing monstrous official crimes and freeing the survivors; or the immense political capital he expended in, for example, virtually compelling the Party’s top leadership to agree to the publication of Solzhenistsyn’s Ivan Denisovich. It involved a “movement of the heart,” as Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev, and other victims concluded, one influenced by “Khrushchev’s zeks.” How else to explain his astonishing proposal in 1961 to create a memorial to Stalin’s victims?91
Exposing those crimes brought Khrushchev into recurring conflicts with powerful opponents during his ten years in office, in which his zeks continued to play roles. When he initiated the trials of Beria and several other Stalinist police officials, most from 1953 through 1955, surviving victims appeared as witnesses. When Khrushchev prepared his political bomb for the 1956 congress, he made sure nearly 100 freed zeks would be visible to the 1,500 or so delegates in the hall. When he moved toward a 1957 showdown with leading unrepentant Stalinists—Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, and Voroshilov—Shatunovskaya and Snegov produced evidence of their criminal complicity. When Khrushchev struck publicly at the tenacious Stalin cult by removing the despot’s body from the Lenin Mausoleum in 1961, another returnee, Dora Lazurkina, prompted the congressional resolution. And to undermine the myth of Stalin’s Gulag as “correctional labor,” Khrushchev then arranged for the publication of a former zek’s unvarnished portrayal of life in the camps, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich.92
By the 1960s, returnees were contributing to de-Stalinization in another important way. Controversy over the past often inflames politics, but rarely so intensely as in the Soviet 1950s and 1960s (and again in the 1980s). The Stalin era was still “living history” for most Soviet adults, whose understanding of it had been shaped by decades of personal sacrifice and a falsified official history maintained by censorship and continued repression. According to that sanctioned version, Stalin’s rule was a succession of great national achievements, from collectivization and industrialization in the 1930s to the nation’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 and subsequent rise to superpower status. Post-Stalin elites were a product of that era, and for them it legitimized their power and privileges. As a young historian (and victim’s son) soon discovered, they were determined to “defend it, defending themselves.”93
The return of so many victims, even if mute, was irrefutable evidence of a parallel history of equally great crimes. And not all returnees were mute. As Khrushshev foresaw, they told “their relatives and friends and acquaintances what actually happened.” For young people in particular, “Their testimonies shed new light on events.”94 Most such returnees were still Soviet loyalists; they contributed to the kind of revisionist history and discussion of historical alternatives needed for a politics of reform. But other repressed traditions were also represented. The old Menshevik Mikhail Yakubovich and SR Irina Kakhovskaya, for example, wanted justice for their slain comrades. Solzhenitsyn and Father Dudko spoke for older religious and Slavophile values. And Mikhail Baitalsky, a former Trotskyist, had returned to his Jewish origins.
Like Holocaust survivors, many Stalinist victims wrote Gulag memoirs because “This Must Not Happen Again,” among them Suren Gazaryan, Ginzburg, Kopelev, Lev Razgon, Gnedin, and Baitalsky.95 Others became self-made historians. As an official investigator of Stalin’s crimes, Shatunovskaya collected documents and interviews that researchers still use today. Snegov’s abiding theme, “Stalin Against Lenin,” took him into closed archives and on impassioned lecture tours. Todorsky and Aleksandr Milchakov, another Communist survivor, did much the same.96
Because their lives lay ahead of them, many children of Stalin’s victims, perhaps most of them, later reconciled themselves to the Soviet system and made successful careers in its bureaucracies. There were many examples, but the most high-ranking seems to have been Pyotr Masherov, head of the Soviet Belorussian Communist Party from 1965 to 1980 and a candidate member of the national Politburo, whose father had died in a camp in 1938. In this case, as in others, we are told not to be surprised that the “son of a person illegally repressed by the Soviet authorities (and rehabilitated in 1959) could be a sincere, convinced supporter of that same regime…. Such were the times, and the people, forged in the crucible of the 1930s and 1940s.”97
But other children of victims followed the lead of outspoken returnees. The twin brothers Roy and Zhores Medvedev and Antonov-Ovseyenko wrote histories of Stalin’s despotic rule. Yuri Trifonov, Leonid Petrovsky, Yuri Gastev, Pyotr Yakir, and Kamil Ikramov prepared biographies of their martyred fathers. And a group of children of executed generals collected documents “restoring historical truth” for local museums and schools.98 (Later, in the 1980s, another son of a Stalin-era victim, Arseny Roginsky, would be one of the founders of the Memorial Society, whose mission was to expose those crimes and help the survivors.)
Only a small portion of this historical truth telling could be published in the Soviet Union under and shortly after Khrushchev. But enough became known, along with increasingly explicit literary accounts, to frighten officials throughout the system. It revealed that their power and privileges were also the product of the victimization of millions of their fellow citizens. Not surprisingly, they were “afraid of History.”99
Victimizers still in high places had the most to lose. Exposing official crimes gave Khrushchev’s other policies a moral dimension, rallied popular support for his leadership, and spurred progressive changes. The social needs of the returnees, for example, contributed to welfare and legal reforms of the period.100 And, of course, the alternative anti-Stalinist ideas and policies that Khrushchev initiated strongly influenced a new generation of Soviet intellectuals and officials, among them Mikhail Gorbachev. But such revelations, which meant victims now “were in fashion,” also galvanized powerful opposition. (Kaganovich, with Shatunovskaya in mind, protested that Khrushchev wanted “to let ex-convicts judge us.”)101 Those endangered were not only Stalin’s cohorts who had signed his lists condemning thousands of people but also legions of lesser figures with bloodstains on their careers, such as Ivan Serov, the first post-Stalin KGB chief, and Mikhail Suslov, the rising Party ideologist of the Brezhnev era.102
Some people who had prospered under Stalin in various fields followed Khrushchev’s repentant example,103 but the great majority of the complicit fought back. Senior members of the leadership, abetted by protégés in the bureaucracies, tried to sabotage his returnee policies and neuter his 1956 speech. Failing that, they collected documents showing Khrushchev’s own considerable role in the terror—as, indeed, neo-Stalinists still do today in order to discredit his historical reputation and any Soviet alternative he may have represented—while trying to conceal or minimize their own crimes, as when Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov formed a commission to investigate episodes in which they had been deeply involved. When all that failed, they moved in 1957 to depose him, nearly succeeding.104
Their fear of a “judgment day” was well founded.105 As conflicts over the past intensified, questions began to emerge about high-level criminal responsibility similar to those formalized at the Nuremberg Trial a decade before. The analogy was hard to ignore. The Soviet Union had been a prosecuting government at Nuremberg. (Indeed, Khrushchev’s new prosecutor general, Roman Rudenko, had been the lead Soviet prosecutor.) And with so many Gulag survivors now visible and their experiences increasingly known, the Holocaust-like dimensions of Stalin-era “repressions” were becoming clear.
When Stalin’s other successors tried and executed “Beria’s gang” from 1953 through 1955, they attempted to obscure any larger implications. The proceedings were closed, Beria was falsely convicted of treason and espionage, and his misdeeds were disassociated from Stalin’s remaining heirs. Even then, however, the charge of “crimes against humanity” was made in at least one case. Reactions to Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations indicated that such issues were already present just below the surface. Questions were asked at low-level Party meetings (and quickly suppressed) about the entire leadership’s responsibility for what had happened.106
Nonetheless, Khrushchev soon crossed another Rubicon, though again behind closed doors. At a June 1957 meeting of the Central Committee, he and his supporters staged a kind of trial of Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov.107 Quoting horrific documents unearthed by Shatunovskaya and others, they accused Molotov and Kaganovich, along with Stalin, of having been responsible for more than 1.5 million arrests in 1937 and 1938 alone and personally sanctioning 38,679 executions during that period, 3,167 on one day. Bloodthirsty orders in their handwriting were read aloud: “Beat, beat, and beat again…. Scoundrel, scum… only one punishment—death.”
A Soviet Nuremberg seemed to be looming. When the accused defended their actions as “mistakes,” they were met with shouts, “No, crimes!” A Khrushchev supporter hurled a threat at the three senior Stalinist leaders that must have chilled many other longtime bosses in the hall: “If the people knew that their hands are dripping with innocent blood, they would greet them not with applause but stones.” The implication seemed clear, as another Central Committee member “profoundly” objected: “People who headed and led our Party for so many years turn out to be murderers who need to be put in the dock.”108 In the end, however, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov were only expelled from the leadership and the Central Committee and banished to minor posts far from Moscow.
It was a moment of high drama, but the crimes still greatly exceeded the punishment. After Stalin died, some fifty to one hundred secret police executioners and brutal interrogators were tried and sentenced, between twenty-five and thirty to death and the rest to prison. (Exact numbers still have not been made known.) Another 2,370 are reported to have received administrative sanctions, from loss of their ranks, awards, and Party membership to their pensions.109 In addition, a dozen or so high-ranking security and political officials committed suicide, among them camp commandants, NKVD generals, and Aleksandr Fadeyev, Stalin’s longtime literary commissar, who was shattered by Khrushchev’s disclosures, the sudden return of victimized writers, and alcohol.110
Khrushchev’s zeks regarded those episodes of justice as first steps and implored him to put on trial or otherwise punish many more people. He resisted “a St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre,” as he put it, no doubt for several reasons. He, too, had signed death lists and had “blood on his own hands,” as his admirer Gorbachev later discovered. Khrushchev even admitted in retirement, “My hands are covered with blood up to my elbows.” Also, even though Khrushchev was now the top leader, he remained challengeable and without sufficient high-level support. And, as others paraphrased his explanation, “More people would have to be imprisoned than had been rehabilitated and released.”111
And yet in October 1961, Khrushchev delivered his most ramifying assault on the Stalinist past and its many defenders. At the Twenty-second Party Congress, he and his supporters considerably expanded the revelations and accusations made in 1956 and 1957—and now did so publicly. For the first time, daily newspaper and broadcast reports of the proceedings informed the nation of “monstrous crimes” and the need for “historical justice,” along with lurid accounts of mass arrests, torture, and murder carried out under Stalin across the country. (The former zek Solzhenitsyn, whose novels about those events were not yet published, was astonished: “I don’t remember reading anything as interesting as the speeches at the XXII Congress in a long time!”)112
There was more. This time Khrushchev did not limit the indictment to crimes against Communist Party members, as he had done on previous occasions. The resolution removing Stalin’s body from the Lenin Mausoleum spoke simply of “mass repressions against honest Soviet people.” And for the first time, Khrushchev and his allies publicly accused Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov of “direct personal responsibility” for those “illegal” acts and demanded they be expelled from the Party (as soon happened), which suggested they might then be put on trial. The specter of trials, inflated by references to “numerous documents in our possession” and Khrushchev’s call for a “comprehensive study of all such cases arising out of the abuse of power,” sent tremors of fear through the thousands who also bore “direct personal responsibility.”
The congress was a victory for Khrushchev’s zeks, however temporary. They were partly responsible for its radicalized anti-Stalinism. Still more, in preparation for it Khrushchev had established, behind the scenes, the Shvernik Commission, the first “comprehensive study” of dark events of the 1930s, including the assassination of the Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov, which ignited the Great Terror, and the trials and executions of Bukharin and other founders of the Soviet state. Returnees, especially Shatunovskaya, were lead investigators for the commission, which concluded that Stalin had plotted those fateful developments in order to launch a mass terror. On the eve of the congress, Shatunovskaya gave Khrushchev a preliminary report based on the “numerous documents” he would cite there. When he read it, she said, “he wept.”113
Khrushchev’s initiatives at the 1961 congress unleashed an unprecedented three-year struggle between the “friends and foes” of de-Stalinization.114 Relaxed censorship permitted historians to begin criticizing the entire Stalin era, even his long-sacrosanct collectivization of the peasantry and conduct of the war. But the flood of literary depictions of the twenty-year terror had the greatest impact. Read together, they gave a nearly unvarnished picture of what had happened to millions of people and their families. Among the works published, including ones by and about returnees, was, for example, this poem by Lev Ozerov: “The dead speak…/ From concentration camps. From isolation cells…/ Life, while it lasted, left its signature / On the prison floor in a trickle of blood.”115
Similarly emboldened by Khrushchev’s example, victims now determinedly pursued other people who had been personally responsible. Two cases became widely known in Moscow. Writers began a campaign to expose the establishment critic Yakov Elsberg as an “informer” complicit in the arrest and death of novelists and poets. And a returnee, Pavel Shabalkin, brought charges against two of the Party’s leading philosophers, until recently members of its Central Committee, Mark Mitin and Pavel Yudin, for having contributed to his long imprisonment and for plagiarizing the work of their other victims. The three escaped real punishment, but the threat was enough to inspire “mental breakdowns” among equally guilty power holders.116
Nuremberg-like issues now began to appear, guardedly and elliptically, in the censored press. They were just below the surface in conflicting reviews of Solzhenitsyn and other terror-related literature but were more open in other publications.117 In a chapter from his memoirs, to take an example that entangled even Khrushchev, Ehrenburg admitted he had “to live with clenched teeth” under Stalin because he knew his arrested friends were innocent. His confession, or “theory of a conspiracy of silence,” brought furious reactions because if the marginalized writer Ehrenburg had known the truth, so must have the many officials above him.118
Still worse in their view, the early 1960s brought a spate of Soviet writings about Germany under Hitler. Some of this commentary was, by inference, clearly about the Soviet system under Stalin. Readers instinctively saw their own recent experiences in descriptions of the Hitler cult, the Gestapo, Nazi concentrations camps, informers, and the complicity of so many German officeholders. When the powerful American film Judgment at Nuremberg was shown in Moscow in 1963, reactions were even more pointed.119 Considering the emerging analogy with Nazi Germany, increasingly graphic accounts of Stalin’s terror, and more insistent calls for justice, it is understandable why “fears of being made to answer for their crimes” spread throughout Soviet officialdom.120
At some point, even the younger men Khrushchev had put on his leadership council decided his initiatives were endangering too many people, perhaps the system itself. Unlike Suslov, Leonid Brezhnev and others who would rule for the next twenty years had little or no blood on their hands but plenty on their feet. Having risen so rapidly under Stalin as their predecessors were being swept away, they had a “complex about the past.”121 One defected from Khrushchev as early as 1957, when Dmitri Shepilov objected to putting the senior Stalinists “in the dock.” Indeed, most of Khrushchev’s new coleaders disregarded their benefactor’s initiative at the 1961 congress, remaining conspicuously silent about past crimes.
Resistance to his de-Stalinization policies continued to grow after the congress, as suggested in a 1962 poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko prominently published in Pravda on Khrushchev’s instructions. Entitled “The Heirs of Stalin,” it warned of “many” high officials who still “hate this era of emptied prison camps.”122 Behind the scenes, Khrushchev was now being defeated or forced to retreat. In 1962, Snegov and Shatunovskaya were driven from their positions, the Shvernik Commission report went unpublished and was soon buried, and rehabilitations all but ended. More setbacks followed. Despite Khrushchev’s support, Solzhenitsyn was denied the Lenin Prize in literature. And in 1964, a major editorial authorized by Khrushchev on “Stalin and His Heirs” was aborted, along with his proposed constitutional changes to prevent a recurrence of past abuses.123 Meanwhile, the memorial he had proposed to Stalin’s victims remained unbuilt.
When the Central Committee overthrew Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964, the formal indictment did not mention the Stalin question. It focused instead on the seventy-year-old Khrushchev’s failed economic and foreign policies, ill-considered reorganizations, increasingly erratic behavior, and dismissive attitude toward “collective leadership.” Nonetheless, his anti-Stalinist approach to the past and the present was a central factor. This was, after all, the driving force behind his decade-long attempted reformation of the Soviet system, which was now being ended by a sharp conservative shift in official and popular opinion. Solzhenitsyn was almost certainly right in concluding that the opposition in 1963 and early 1964 to deny him the Lenin Prize had been a “rehearsal for the ‘putsch’ against Nikita.”124
There were also clearer indications. Suslov, who particularly resented that Khrushchev “had supported all this camp literature,” delivered the detailed indictment, while Mikoyan was the only Central Committee member who tried to defend Khrushchev. (During secret discussions before the formal meeting, he was accused of “reviling Stalin to the point of indecency.”)125 Any doubts were removed when the new leaders moved to end anti-Stalinist policies relating to the past and restore some features of Stalinism, including the tyrant’s historical reputation. Solzhenitsyn instinctively called Khrushchev’s overthrow a “small October revolution,” an overstatement but a clear recognition that the prospect of an anti-Stalinist alternative in Soviet politics had been thwarted, as it turned out, for the next twenty years. Certainly, people with special interests understood the meaning of Khrushchev’s ouster. While Beria’s men in prison rejoiced, Gulag returnees were informed, “The rehabilitated are no longer in fashion.”126
THE saga of Gulag returnees and Stalin’s other victims continued long after Khrushchev. Most generally, their status in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia was determined by the changing official reputations of Stalin and Khrushchev, and those were shaped by the relative political fortunes of reformers and conservatives, who represented the two viable policy alternatives inside the Party-state establishment.
The Brezhnev years were a long era of Soviet conservatism. To defend the existing order, the new leadership needed a heroic Stalinist past during which the foundations of the system had been created. Accordingly, it ended Khrushchev’s revelations and rehabilitations (a “miserly” twenty-four were granted after 1964),127 excised him from sanctioned history, except as a “subjective voluntarist,” and refurbished Stalin’s role by ignoring the terror and emphasizing the wartime victory. (In 1970, a flattering bust was placed on his gravesite behind the Lenin Mausoleum.)
Archive documents later revealed how much Khrushchev’s successors despised their patron’s policies—and his zeks. In 1974, ten years after being nominated for a Lenin Prize, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported from the Soviet Union. Privately discussing the decision, Brezhnev’s Politburo blamed Khrushchev for “this social riff-raff.” Suslov complained, “We still have not eliminated all the consequences that resulted from Khrushchev.” Brezhnev, who said Solzhenitsyn had been justly imprisoned under Stalin, had long harbored a resentment: “He was rehabilitated by two people—Shatunovskaya and Snegov.” In 1984, the last leader before Gorbachev, Konstantin Chernenko, took another symbolic step, restoring the Party membership of the ninety-three-year-old Molotov, even meeting with him personally. Rejoicing in private, the Politburo again complained bitterly that Khrushchev had exonerated victims “illegally” and permitted “shameful outrages in relation to Stalin.”128
During those twenty years, while terror-era police officials were given honorable positions and released from prison with good pensions, others deeply involved in the terror reinvented themselves as benevolent public figures. Lev Sheinin, for example, became an honored writer after helping Vyshinsky falsify the Moscow show trials and prepare the judicial murder of the defendants, and former Gulag commandants published sanitized accounts of their camps as exemplary workplaces. Meanwhile, many of the “rehabilitated no longer felt rehabilitated.”129 Most of them led conformist lives and were left in peace, but many agreed with Antonov-Ovseyenko: “It is the duty of every honest person to write the truth about Stalin. A duty to those who died at his hands, to those who survived that dark night, to those who will come after us.” (For this and similar statements, the son of a high NKVD official executed under Khrushchev later characterized Antonov-Ovseyenko as a “raging fanatic.”)130
In the post-Khrushchev 1960s and 1970s, some victims used their semiestablished positions to be partial truth tellers in the censored media, among them the popular novelists Yuri Trifonov and Chingiz Aitmatov, the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, and the poet-singer Bulat Okudzhava, whose fathers had been shot and mothers sent to the Gulag.131 Many published poets of those years were also former zeks, including Nikolai Zabolotsky, Olga Berggolts, Anatoly Zhigulin, Yaroslav Smelyakov, and Boris Ruchev. (My returnee friends closely perused their lines for oblique references to the Gulag.) Other survivors wrote only “for the drawer,” but quite a few eventually let their manuscripts, with themes of “crime and punishment,” circulate in samizdat and be published abroad. And some became leading representatives of public dissent, including Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, and Andrei Sakharov, whose wife’s parents had also been victims.132
Considering their age and years of abuse, the majority of Gulag returnees probably did not live to witness the great turnabout under Gorbachev. His declared mission of replacing the system inherited from Stalin with a democratized one meant Gorbachev had to expose its entire criminal history. By the late 1980s, a tidal wave of exposés—documented articles, novels, plays, films, television broadcasts—had flooded the Soviet media. Calling for national “repentance,” the result was not the “second Nuremberg” some demanded but nonetheless a media trial of Stalinism, with the newly formed Memorial Society, inspired by Khrushchev’s unfulfilled proposal, in the forefront.133
Surviving victims and victimizers again played leading roles. While the glasnost press went looking for “hangmen on pension” and secret mass graves of the 1930s and 1940s—a search pioneered by Milchakov’s son Aleksandr—Stalin’s victims were featured at evenings in memory of the “national martyrology,” none more famous than Anna Larina, whose memoirs were published in 1988.134 One such public event, in 1989, was the first to honor Khrushchev, who had been in official disgrace for more than twenty years. Sitting on the dais with returnees I had interviewed in secret ten years earlier, I saw many other former zeks in the overflowing auditorium. Some of them were weeping. Most now knew the dark side of Khrushchev’s career—the blood on his own hands, his failure to tell the full truth about the past, his own repressive measures after 1953. But their gratitude, expressed virtually in one voice, remained undiminished: “Khrushchev gave me back my life.”135
As with his predecessor in reform, legal justice was also an essential component of Gorbachev’s policies. Between 1987 and 1990, a million more individuals were officially rehabilitated, and then, by Gorbachev’s decree, all of Stalin’s remaining victims.136 Reacting to those and related actions, Gorbachev’s enemies occasionally charged that an “ideology of former zeks” underlay his anti-Stalinism. It may have been partially true: several members of his inner leadership were relatives of Stalin’s victims, including Gorbachev himself, whose grandfathers had been arrested in the 1930s.137 (They survived, but his wife’s grandfather was shot.)
In the end, however, it was of little material consequence. There were a few happy exceptions. The dacha Vyshinsky had confiscated in 1937, for example, which had passed after his death in 1954 to several other eminent Soviet figures, including Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin, was finally returned to the rightful owner’s elderly daughter. But despite all the attention and promises given to victims by Gorbachev’s policies, many survivors remained so destitute that one of their organizations issued an “SOS from the Gulag” pleading for private donations. Bankrupt and crumbling by 1991, Gorbachev’s government was never able to provide most of the compensation and benefits it had legislated.138
The mixed status of Soviet-era victims continued in post-Soviet Russia. Boris Yeltsin, its first president, formally exonerated all citizens politically repressed since October 1917, not just those under Stalin, and then included their children, making them eligible for compensation as well.139 In addition, Yeltsin declared October 30 a national day in memory of the victims and passed a law giving them and relatives access to their case files in long-secret archives. (Watching elderly people study those terrible, fateful documents in Lubyanka’s reading room, as I did while working there on behalf of the Bukharin family, was deeply moving.)
More generally, tales of the terror era became a familiar aspect of post-Soviet popular culture, including its main medium, television. The Memorial Society developed into a nationwide institution that broadened the search for mass graves, sponsored monuments at many Gulag sites, and produced major documentary studies of both victims and victimizers. A growing number of Russian provincial cities published their own martyrologies. And in 2004, Antonov-Ovseyenko, nearly ninety, founded in the center of Moscow the first (and still little-known) official Museum of the History of the Gulag, with the backing of the city’s mayor.
On the negative side, however, few of the dwindling number of survivors actually received any meaningful compensation for their lost years or property. By 1993, interest in Stalin’s terror and its victims had undergone a “catastrophic fall,”140 and the national memorial proposed by Khrushchev in 1961 and endorsed by Gorbachev while he was in power was still unbuilt. By the early twenty-first century, pro-Stalin attitudes had grown significantly in both official circles and popular opinion, along with the number of burnished reputations of odious NKVD bosses, outspoken Gulag deniers, and attacks on “rehabilitation euphoria.” Increasingly it was said, and perhaps believed, that all Gulag zeks had been common criminals because “Stalin did not repress any honest citizens.”141
Most Western observers attributed favorable post-Soviet attitudes toward Stalin to the increasingly authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who became Russian president in 2000. In reality, though the phenomenon grew under Putin, most of its elements began in the 1990s, under Yeltsin. Foremost among them was the economic and social pain inflicted by “shock therapy,” which was the primary source of the pro-Stalin revival, and the decline of democratic practices after Yeltsin destroyed a popularly elected parliament with tanks and mortgaged the country’s future to a new oligarchical elite based on pillaged state property.
Nor was anti-Stalinism suppressed under Putin. Access to relevant archives, though somewhat more limited, continued, at least in those where I worked; thick volumes of previously unknown terror-era documents were published; the number of local Gulag monuments and exhibits grew; the renamed KGB (FSB), carrying on a practice started under Gorbachev, met with and even honored a number of its former victims; films based on popular anti-Stalinist novels, including Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and Anatoly Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat, were made for and shown on state-controlled television; and an international conference on the Stalinist terror was held in Moscow in December 2008.142
Indeed, Putin’s own role in this regard was contradictory. On the one hand, he made highly publicized statements supporting a new textbook that gave an almost entirely favorable picture of the Stalinist 1930s as a decade of “mobilization” and “modernization” and of Stalin himself as an indispensable leader to whom there had been no real alternative. On the other hand, one of Putin’s first acts as president was to authorize an expanded official investigation of Stalin-era crimes. And two of his last acts as president, in 2007, the seventieth anniversary of the peak of the Great Terror, were to personally present an award to Solzhenitsyn, who still personified the Gulag fate of millions, and to attend a commemoration of Stalin’s victims at an infamous NKVD killing field and burial site, the first such appearance ever by a Russian (or Soviet) leader.143 When Solzhenitsyn died in 2008, the government, now headed by Putin and the new president Dmitri Medvedev, gave him the equivalent of a state funeral and adopted measures to memorialize his life.
The contradiction in Putin’s behavior reflected the still profound division in Russia’s political elite and society over the Stalinist past. Opinion surveys taken fifty-five years after Stalin died, a half a century after most survivors of his terror had returned, and nearly twenty years after the Soviet Union ended showed that the nation was almost evenly divided between those who thought Stalin had been a “wise leader” and those who thought he was an “inhuman tyrant,” with pro-Stalin views no less widespread among young Russians.144
Those findings mean that the struggle in Russia’s political life (and soul) over the significance of the Stalin era, which is as much about the nation’s present and future as about its past, is not over. (In an open letter to Putin and Medvedev in 2008, for example, Gorbachev and other public figures renewed the call for a national monument in memory of Stalin’s victims. As before, it aroused both support and determined opposition.)145 No one can say how or when the struggle will end, but one thing seems certain. No matter how remote and extinguished the heat of the Stalinist past may appear to be, it will make itself felt again in Russian politics, as it did so fatefully in the late 1980s when it inflamed both the friends and foes of Gorbachev’s reforms.146
This is so for three reasons. First, though most of Stalin’s victims are dead, Russia remains a country significantly populated by their descendants, at least 27 percent of the nation according to a 2006 poll, particularly their grandchildren.147 Second, leadership for a new political reckoning with the past in search of lost alternatives is likely to come from the generation that matured during Gorbachev’s glasnost revelations, much as the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress” and Khrushchev’s Thaw provided it in the late 1980s. But most crucially, such a reckoning remains on Russia’s political agenda because, as events have repeatedly shown, there is no statute of limitations for historical crimes as large as Stalin’s. In all these respects, the victims’ return is not over.
