Masha Gessen - Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia

The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2018

Imagine a Germany where the Third Reich’s monuments abound but memorials to the Holocaust are scarce. Hitler is venerated by millions and his dictatorship given a positive spin by an authoritarian state that never definitively broke with the Nazi past. Replace Germany with Russia, Hitler with Stalin, and the Third Reich with the Soviet Union and that is pretty much the situation that prevails in Russia today.

The unbroken connection to the Soviet era is key to understanding “Never Remember,” a short, haunting and beautifully written book by Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist who is one of Vladimir Putin’s most trenchant critics. About halfway through, Ms. Gessen tells how Irina Flige, an activist who spent decades trying to restore to public view memories of what occurred under communism, has concluded it is wrong to see the problem as forgetfulness because, as Ms. Gessen summarizes it, “forgetting presupposes remembering—and remembering had not happened . . .” In Ms. Flige’s words, “historical memory can exist only when there is a clear line separating the present from the past. . . . But we don’t have that break—there is no past, only a continuous present.” In contrast to Germany, there was no reckoning. There was no Soviet Nuremberg.

Ms. Gessen offers up various explanations for this, including the long duration of Communist rule and the ways in which the categories of victim and perpetrator overlapped. The trauma was something that Russians inflicted on one another. In a sense they still do. Ms. Gessen is evidently saddened and frustrated by the spectacle of a people—her people—wandering through a manufactured reality unbothered by, or oblivious to, the obscenities or incongruities that surround them. Some of the old regime’s statues were, in the false democratic dawn of the 1990s, defaced and toppled or—in the case of one statue of Stalin—dug up and exiled to a sculpture park of shame in central Moscow. Now, however, the statues stand in the same place proudly, cleaned up but unexplained, sharing space with a rare commemoration of the Soviet regime’s victims as well as statues of poets, writers, and—why not?—Adam and Eve.

The melancholy that saturates Ms. Gessen’s prose is reinforced by pages filled with Misha Friedman’s bleakly evocative photographs, images that convey unease, absence and loss. The huts and barracks of the Gulag, ramshackle to start with, and often designed to be temporary, have often just rotted away—“only the barbed wire remained,” Ms. Gessen writes. Other, sturdier structures survive, either ignored—one of Mr. Friedman’s photographs is of a ruined prison on the edge of a housing complex—or inaccessible, swallowed up in the vastness of Siberia. One camp—just one—not far from the Urals has been restored, a project begun, tellingly, on the private initiative of two local historians but now taken over by the state. While, as Ms. Gessen notes, it has not been turned into some defense of the Gulag, its message has been muffled, shrouded in a deceptive neutrality. Ms. Gessen herself is no neutral (she describes the “distinguishing characteristic of the Putin-era historiography of Soviet terror as . . . [saying] in effect, that it just happened, whatever”).

This is an angry book. Ms. Gessen makes her case with a series of vignettes ranging from the discovery of a mass grave in northwestern Russia to a trip to the region of Kolyma in the country’s far east. (“If the Gulag was anywhere, it was in Kolyma.”) The years of glasnost and Boris Yeltsin finally provided pitifully small scraps of comfort to the descendants of the disappeared—a photograph, a death certificate, something—yet the Gulag’s poison continues to seep through the generations. When Ms. Gessen visits Kolyma’s “capital” in 2017, all the people with whom she has contact are later visited by the FSB, the successor to the KGB.