Elena Racheva
The low, long log cabin, nearly black, as if firmly rooted in the ground, resembled a camp barrack. I knocked on the door for quite some time before it cracked open, revealing a pair of wary eyes behind it. ‘I don’t want anything. I won’t say anything’, the old man blurted out. ‘If I tell you, you’ll leave, and then what? They’ll send me back to the camps?’ ‘There are no more labour camps’ I said, confused. ‘And the country that imprisoned you no longer exists’. ‘What are you talking about?’, the old man laughed. ‘Once you’ve been in prison, you’re the first in line to be arrested again’. And with that, he slammed the door.
Photographer Anna Artemyeva and I began working on a book of interviews with former Gulag political prisoners in 2010. Russia had not yet occupied Crimea. The election results were already being manipulated, but this had not yet led to widespread street protests or high-profile arrests. Gay pride parades were being dispersed, but homophobia had not yet become government policy. We started out thinking that we were creating a book about the past, preserving the last memories of something that had completely disappeared and no longer had any bearing on our everyday lives. We understood that it might be difficult for former prisoners to remember the details of camp life after so many decades had passed (the interviewees were arrested between 1937 and 1958). However, we did not anticipate that we would encounter a different problem – fear.
Conducting interviews in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned out to be the easiest. The people who lived there had generally returned from the labour camps to their waiting families and gone on to receive an education. Some of them were founding members of the International Memorial, the main organisation preserving the memory of Stalinist repressions in Russia. Everyone had read Shalamov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s books about the Gulag, and many had written their own memoirs. They remained cautiously critical of the state and organised their lives in such a way so as not to depend on it. When Susanna Pechuro, who had been sentenced to 25 years in prison under Stalin, was given a certificate of rehabilitation in the 1990s (confirming that she had been convicted unjustly), she refused to sign it: ‘This is not true. It says here that I am innocent, and that there was no anti-Soviet organisation. But there was.’
Our interviewees had not forgotten the Gulag, did not hide their past from their friends, and believed in the future. One of them, the wonderful artist Yevgeny Ukhnalev, had spent five years in a Vorkuta labour camp in the early 1950s, having been accused of digging a tunnel from Leningrad to Moscow, leading underneath the Kremlin, in order to kill Stalin. In 1992, he designed the new Russian coat of arms. When I asked him what it had been like to create the coat of arms of a country that had treated him so unfairly, he replied: ‘I thought it was a different country by then. And it was different. Of course, thanks to Putin, it’s going downhill again. But it can’t go too far down. Something has changed, it can’t go back [to the way it was].’
But as time went on, new articles sanctioning the fight against political opponents appeared in the Russian Criminal Code, reminiscent of Article 58 of the USSR Criminal Code, which the subjects of our book had been convicted of violating. The number of people arrested on political charges tripled between 2011 and 2014.[1] Stalin’s role in history began to stir more and more controversy, and the memory of the Gulag began to fade from public discourse. Our colleagues who had previously wondered why we were engaged in historical research that was unrelated to current affairs now asked whether we were afraid to work on such a dangerous and relevant topic.
We soon finished our interviews in the major cities and moved on to places where the labour camps used to be. The further away we moved from Moscow, the less people wanted to talk to us. The most common reason they refused was a reluctance to remember and relive the past. The second was fear. Even those who agreed to be interviewed asked if they would get in trouble if they spoke negatively about the government. Our subjects’ stories also changed, becoming more cautious and somehow vague: ‘They came, and they took me away. For what, I don’t know. Sentenced me to 10 years.’
Decades after their arrest, former prisoners still did not understand why they had been ejected from their lives, sometimes for many years. They never left the places where they had served their sentences. Many simply had nowhere they could return to, while others, such as Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians, who had been arrested on nationalist charges, were prohibited from doing so. Others yet feared the condemnation of law-abiding citizens and preferred to settle in the villages near the labour camps, where everyone was just like them.
We asked these people how they felt about Perestroika, whether they had read Solzhenitsyn, and whether they had heard about the prisoner rehabilitation campaign. They did not know about any of these things, and still expected night arrests, nasty looks from neighbours, and reprisals against their children. In 1945, Ukrainian Olga Goncharuk was sentenced to 10 years for her ties to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and was sent to a labour camp in the far north of the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, in Pechora. Having fully served her sentence, Olga stayed in Pechora and started working as a seamstress: ‘I didn’t tell anyone that I had been convicted. What for? I didn’t want them calling me “Banderite”*, or “traitor to the motherland”. If only you knew how they looked at us, how they despised us!’ Neither Olga nor her husband, also a former Ukrainian prisoner, ever mentioned to their two children that they had been in the camp. It wasn’t until the 1980s, on the cusp of Perestroika, that Olga’s son discovered her release certificate and wrote in one of his school essays that his parents had been repressed. Olga was as scared as she had been in the 1950s. She sought out her son’s teacher and begged her to destroy the composition: ‘It’s not my son’s fault that his father and I were imprisoned. Don’t ruin his life.’
Back then, just after 2010, I thought that these very old people had simply not noticed the emergence of a new state and the freedom that came with it. That Glasnost had not reached Pechora, and that democracy could not be seen from Kolyma. It now seems to me that they were more far-sighted than us and understood better than others that freedom had not truly come and that the changes would not last long. The Gulag made former prisoners hypersensitive to the social atmosphere, and distrustful of the illusion of change. Ultimately, they turned out to be right.
Like a Tsunami
The psychological mechanism behind the silence and fear of state terror victims has been well researched. Psychiatrist William Niederland, who was an expert witness in Holocaust survivors’ compensation lawsuits, called it a ‘tendency to remain hypervigilant’. Even after the danger had passed, victims of state repression continued to closely monitor political changes in the country and remained fearful of persecution. They also felt guilty towards those who had died just because they themselves had survived – Niederland, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, was the first to develop the concept of ‘survivor syndrome’ in 1961, the symptoms of which include insomnia, nightmares, chronic depression, memory disorders, and psychosomatic illnesses. Researchers from Canada’s Carleton University who interviewed Ukrainian Holodomor survivors found that even many years after the famine, these people remained in a ‘survival mode’ characterised by fear, stress and anxiety, as well as a general suspicion and distrust of others.
Additionally, the topics that may or may not be discussed depend on social norms and taboos. According to Werner Bohleber, president of the German Psychoanalytical Association, a person who has been the victim of a man-made disaster can only explain his or her traumatic experience through inclusion in the public discourse. Only the perpetrator’s (state or society) recognition of the trauma caused, in conjunction with an admission of guilt, reassuring the victims of the ethical and legal assessment of the event, affords them the opportunity to comprehend and evaluate their experience. Without such recognition, victims continue to feel isolated from society by their past experience, their shattered self-confidence condemning them to silence.
In Russia there were no trials analogous to those of Nuremberg, which could have led to the perpetrators of unlawful repressions being convicted. The communist regime was never condemned, and no lustration has taken place. In the whole period following the repressions no new terms emerged in the language (and, thus, in public discourse) that would help facilitate the discussion thereof. The fight for the independence of one’s people is still called ‘participation in the nationalist underground’. The policy of executing and exiling peasants in 1925—1932 is known as ‘dekulakisation’, and its victims, ‘kulaks’, meaning, ‘wealthy moneylenders’, which most of the victims of ‘dekulakisation’ never were. When speaking about their experiences, victims have no other choice but to use the derogatory terms from their original convictions. The daughter of one of our book’s subjects, who had been a member of an underground anti-Stalinist organisation, tried to dissuade us from interviewing her father: ‘He was locked up, he was a criminal! What do you need him for?’
Even after receiving rehabilitation certificates, many victims of repression continued to consider themselves guilty. In 1946, young Valentina Ievleva was imprisoned for six years along with other girls who had visited the Interclub, an entertainment venue opened in Arkhangelsk during the Second World War for sailors on northern convoys. She was accused of espionage for her affairs and dates with foreigners. Until her death, Valentina believed that she had ‘broken the law’: ‘If I was living in a country that said meeting with foreigners was forbidden, that means it was forbidden, but I went and broke the law. Of course, it was not written law, but wartime has its own rules.’
In many northern cities and settlements, former prisoners and former guards ended up living as neighbours and receiving the same – often shockingly low – pensions. The former inmates were still afraid, and the former guards were still proud. They did not consider themselves guilty of any wrongdoing. The state did not comment on their guilt either. ‘Even today, if anyone mentions Gulag victims, they make it sound as if they died as a result of an earthquake or tsunami’, says the Memorial chairman, human rights activist Yan Rachinsky, ‘but we must remember and talk about the fact that they were victims of crimes, and that those crimes were committed by people.’
Psychologists who have worked with victims of repressions and genocide agree that the effects of collective trauma are passed down from generation to generation and affect not only the survivors, but also several generations of their descendants on the individual, familial, and societal levels. For example, a study by psychotherapist Andrey Gronsky showed that even the children of Stalinist repression victims tend to remain secretive when communicating with outsiders (for example, they avoid making public statements on political issues) and have difficulty expressing their feelings within their family. At the same time, the third generation, that is, the grandchildren of those who were repressed, are still reluctant to participate in any civic activities, fearing repression and doubting that their opinions could influence society.
The Victors
Among the former prisoners we met there were some unique individuals, unlike any others with whom we had spoken. They talked about their labour camp experiences like true winners: about how they were imprisoned for things they actually did, how they managed to preserve their religion and culture in the camps, how they participated in camp uprisings, how they have not forgiven the state anything, and how, since the 1990s, they have been doing everything to tell people about the USSR’s crimes. We met these people in Lithuania.
In 1992, the Republic of Lithuania launched a government programme supporting the return of former political prisoners and exiles, as a result of which more than five thousand people were able to come home. The state provided them with apartments, paid for their travel, helped them find jobs, and awarded them the Vytis Cross and other high state honours for fighting against Soviet rule or participating in the labour camp resistance. People were proud that they had survived the Gulag. ‘I am a small person, very small, but my small contribution to the fight against the Soviet Union still counts for something’, Antanas Seikalis told us. In 1951, at the age of 20, he had been sentenced to 10 years for participation in the underground anti-Soviet organisation ‘Iron Wolf’. After his release and return to Lithuania, he re-visited Russia many times to help bring other former prisoners from distant villages back home: ‘The Lithuanians would write letters: “Save me, I’m disabled, I have no legs, no eyes, I can’t go back on my own…” And I would drive them, even if that meant driving them all the way from Siberia. I thought to myself: what if I were in their shoes? So, I drove them.’
The Lithuanian policy of memory gave Antanas, as well as many other repressed individuals, a sense of security, assigned meaning to the suffering they endured, and afforded them the moral righteousness to take pride in their past. Dori Laub, a professor of psychiatry and co-founder of the Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, wrote that in order to talk about their experiences, victims need to be sure that their testimonies are indispensable to society, and will prevent the Holocaust from happening again. Lithuania’s former Soviet camp prisoners knew that their efforts served to prevent the return of the communist regime, and that they were also playing a role in the founding of the Republic of Lithuania.
Vytautas Kaziulionis, exiled to Siberia in 1947 and then sent to a labour camp, worked as a driver for many years after returning home, during which time he also searched for and reburied the bodies of Lithuanian partisans, mapped the locations of their graves, and erected more than 700 monuments in their memory. When we met with him, he was preparing to write a memoir about his exile and experience in the camp, knowing that his hard work would mean something to others. The exiled Lithuanians we met in Russia could not relate to this feeling. Another important difference was that the people who settled near the former labour camps continued to hide their camp pasts even from their relatives and neighbours (wives told us that they did not know what their husbands had been sentenced for). They did not have the sense of community that we observed in Lithuania; it did not occur to them that they could unite and act before the state as a single force.
Victim Identity
According to Memorial estimates, more than 11 million people who lived in the USSR were repressed for political reasons. Historical memory researcher Nikolay Epplée believes that their descendants represent a substantial enough percentage of the population to assert their rights on socio-political grounds. They could, for example, demand financial compensation, similar to what Germany paid Holocaust victims, or former imperialist states paid indigenous people living in their colonies. It was restitution that often helped victims define themselves as a community, formulate their agenda, and begin to fight for their interests. Epplée believes that turning Soviet terror into the same ethical-legal issue as American slavery or the Holocaust could create a group identity for its victims, making them a part of civil society, and allowing them to use the memory of the past as a tool to influence the present. The fact that this has not happened is detrimental not only to the victims of repression and their families, but also to society as a whole: the result is a distrust of state and civil institutions, and political and civil apathy.
Over the past years, neither repressions nor their victims have ever become a subject of open discussion in Russia; millions of executioners and informers have not been punished. After a period of liberal reforms in the 1990s, a new period began, which drew the veil of silence over the difficult past lower still. After launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia changed its legislation, reintroducing political articles to the criminal code. The International Memorial was liquidated, and most of its employees left the country due to the threat of criminal prosecution. In the new official history textbook published in the summer of 2023, Stalin’s repressions are described as having been a fight against people ‘closely connected with foreign social and political activists’. Regarding the executions of innocent people, it was said that ‘death sentences’ were imposed ‘in exceptional cases’ and ‘were accepted by society’. The safe space in which it was possible to talk about repression ultimately disappeared. It became clear that the people who were afraid to talk to us about the Gulag turned out to be more far-sighted than the rest.
Our conversations with former prisoners had another, unexpected, effect: their stories about state terror helped me understand the reality in which I myself lived. ‘It’s impossible to live your life when your country’s tanks are making their way through foreign territory’, St. Petersburg resident Irina Verblovskaya, who was arrested for protesting the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, told us in the late 2000s. In the spring of 2014, when Russian troops invaded Donbass, I called her to say that only now had I understood what she meant. Meanwhile, 82-year-old Irina was packing her bags to go join her children, who had long ago emigrated to the United States. ‘I’m not afraid’, she said. ‘After you turn 70, fear completely disappears. I just don’t want to stay here and watch this happen again.’
Irina remembered the KGB officers who arrested her in 1957 well, but declined to describe them to us. ‘There are all kinds of citizens living in our country’, she said, pursing her lips. Working as a journalist and often encountering FSB officers, I always remembered this shrill tone – it helped turn my fear of them into contempt.
Speaking about his arrest in 1957 for an article criticising the invasion of Hungary published in the French newspaper Le Monde, writer and translator Nikita Krivoshein told us that he understood the risk of ending up in a labour camp for his publication. But he thought that ‘it was so disgusting in the free world that it was better not to be there’. When, after the introduction of wartime censorship in Russia, another member of the opposition refused to go abroad and ended up in solitary confinement, Krivoshein’s words helped me understand him.
The interviews we conducted were hope-inspiring. People sentenced to 20–25 years in the early 1950s were sure they would never leave the labour camps, but they were freed in 1953 when, as former prisoner Komunella Markman told us, ‘Stalin died. What a wonderful surprise that was!’
Our interviews also revealed that life in a free country requires a fight, which includes recognising past mistakes, establishing new social institutions, conducting lustration and show trials of the perpetrators of terror, while ensuring their victims’ safety, respect, preserving their memories, and allowing them the opportunity to share their experiences.
French historian Bruno Groppo wrote that the experiences of various countries have shown that forgetting – whether voluntary or forced – never lasts forever. Sooner or later there comes a moment when society finds itself face to face with the traumatic past it tried to repress. And when this happens, everything must be done so that the descendants of the victims of that terror will not be afraid to speak.
Translated from Russian by Monika Lutostanski
The article uses photographs and graphics from the collection of the Sybir Memorial Museum.
* Translator’s note: A term used to describe members of the faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B), which, after 1942, was used pejoratively in Soviet propaganda as a term for Ukrainians (the negative connotation stems from the brutality associated with the OUN-B, known to murder ethnic Poles, Jews, and Romani people)
[1] From the OVD-Info report “Политические репрессии в России в 2011—2014 годах: уголовные преследования” (trans.: “Political Repressions in Russia in 2011–2014: Criminal Prosecutions”), <https://reports.ovdinfo.org/2014/cr-report/>