فصل 1

PART I

BY RIGHT OF MEMORY

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

MILAN KUNDERA

CHAPTER 1

THE FOREST COUP

On a dreary summer’s day, Colonel Aleksandr Tretetsky of the Soviet Military Prosecutor’s Office arrived at his latest work site: a series of mass graves in a birch forest twenty miles outside of the city of Kalinin. He and his assistants began the morning digging, searching the earth for artifacts of the totalitarian regime—bullet-shattered skulls, worm-eaten boots, scraps of Polish military uniforms.

They had heard the alarming news from Moscow on television and radio before coming to work that morning: Mikhail Gorbachev had “stepped down” for “reasons of health.” The GKChP—the “State Committee for the State of Emergency”—had assumed power, promising stability and order. But what to make of it? Kalinin was several hours north of Moscow by train and a long way off the trail of rumor and information. And so like almost everyone else in the Soviet Union on the morning of August 19, 1991, Tretetsky set to work, an almost ordinary day.

The digging in the woods outside Kalinin was a merciless project. A half-century before, at Stalin’s direct order, NKVD executioners slaughtered fifteen thousand Polish military officers and threw the bodies into rows of mass graves. The month-long operation in Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk was part of Stalin’s attempt to begin the domination of Poland. The young officers had been among the best-educated men in Poland, and Stalin saw them as a potential danger, as enemies-in-advance. For decades after, Moscow put the blame for the killings on the Nazis, saying the Germans had carried out the massacres in 1941, not the NKVD in 1940. The Kremlin propaganda machine sustained the fiction in speeches, diplomatic negotiations, and textbooks, weaving it into the vast fabric of ideology and official history that sustained the regime and its empire. The Kremlin took history so seriously that it created a massive bureaucracy to control it, to fabricate its language and content, so that murderous and arbitrary purges became a “triumph over enemies and foreign spies,” the reigning tyrant a “Friend to All Children, the Great Mountain Eagle.” The regime created an empire that was a vast room, its doors locked, its windows shuttered. All books and newspapers allowed in the room carried the Official Version of Events, and the radio and television blared the general line day and night. Those who were loyal servants of the Official Version were rewarded and pronounced “professors” and “journalists.” In the Communist Party citadels of the Marxist-Leninist Institute, the Central Committee, and the Higher Party School, the priests of ideology swerved from the dogma at their peril. There were secrets everywhere. The KGB was so keen to keep its secrets that it built its vacation houses in the village of Mednoye near Kalinin, where the Polish officers had been executed and buried in mass graves, the better to keep watch over the bones.

But now something had changed—changed radically. After some initial hesitation at the beginning of his time in power, Gorbachev had decreed that the time had come to fill in the “blank spots” of history. There could be no more “rose-colored glasses,” he said. At first, his rhetoric was guarded. He spoke of “thousands” instead of tens of millions of victims. He did not dare criticize Lenin, the demigod of the state. But despite Gorbachev’s hesitation, the return of historical memory would be his most important decision, one that preceded all others, for without a full and ruthless assessment of the past—an admission of murder, repression, and bankruptcy—real change, much less democratic revolution, was impossible. The return of history to personal, intellectual, and political life was the start of the great reform of the twentieth century and, whether Gorbachev liked it or not, the collapse of the last empire on earth.

For decades, the massacres at Kalinin, Starobelsk, and Katyn had been a symbol for the Poles of Moscow’s cruelty and imperial grip. For a Pole merely to hint that the Soviet Union was responsible for the massacres was a radical, even suicidal act, for it made clear the speaker’s point of view: the “friendship of peoples,” the relationship between Moscow and Warsaw, was one based on violence, an occupier’s reign over its satellite. Even Gorbachev knew that to admit the massacres would be to undermine the Polish Communists. But by 1990, with Solidarity in power, Gorbachev saw little to lose. While General Wojciech Jaruzelski was visiting Moscow, Gorbachev finally conceded Moscow’s guilt and turned over to the Polish government a huge packet of files on the massacres at Katyn, Starobelsk, and Kalinin.

Soon after the Kremlin’s admission of guilt, the excavations began. Working with Soviet army soldiers and Polish volunteers, Colonel Tretetsky started work in Mednoye on August 15, 1991. Tretetsky, a career officer in his mid-forties with a thin mustache and sunken cheeks, had spent several months uncovering graves in Starobelsk. With every new grave, he felt himself more deceived. He had believed deeply in Communism and the Soviet Union. He served first in the navy and then, after studying law in Ukraine, signed on in the military for life. He served nearly four years in East Germany and even volunteered to be sent to Czechoslovakia in 1968, the year the Soviet Union crushed the “Prague Spring.” “I was dumb,” Tretetsky said. “I believed in it all. I would have given my life for the Motherland on a moment’s notice.” He petitioned the military for a commission to Afghanistan and served there from 1987 to 1989. Tretetsky came home to Moscow only to get a bitter taste of the real history of the country he knew so little about. He was assigned to the Military Prosecutor’s Office, which was conducting massive investigations into the rehabilitations of people who had been repressed over the past seventy years. Slowly, he began to learn about some of the ugliest incidents in Soviet history: the purges, the massacre of the Polish officers, the army’s bloody attack on peaceful demonstrators in 1961 at Novocherkassk.

Put in charge of the excavations, first in Starobelsk and now in Mednoye, Tretetsky attacked his work with passion and precision. In Mednoye, he knew perfectly well where to dig and what to look for. He had already interrogated a local man, a retired officer of the secret police, who had helped carry out the orders from Moscow in 1940. Vladimir Tokaryev was blind and eighty-nine years old by the time history caught up with him, but his memory was clear. Sitting with Tretetsky and a videocamera, he described how in April 1940 his unit of the secret police shot Polish officers in the woods outside Kalinin—two hundred and fifty a night, for a month.

The executioners, Tokaryev said, “brought with them a whole suitcase full of German revolvers, the Walther 2 type. Our Soviet TT weapons were thought not to be reliable enough. They were liable to overheat with heavy use.… I was there the first night they did the shooting. Blokhin was the main killer, with about thirty others, mainly NKVD drivers and guards. My driver, Sukharev, for instance, was one of them. I remember Blokhin saying: ‘Come on, let’s go.’ And then he put on his special uniform for the job: brown leather hat, brown leather apron, long brown leather gloves reaching above the elbows. They were his terrible trademark. I was face to face with a true executioner.

“They took the Poles along the corridor one by one, turned left, and took them into the Red Corner, the rest room for the prison staff. Each man was asked his surname, first name, and place of birth—just enough to identify him. Then he was taken to the room next door, which was soundproofed, and shot in the back of the head. Nothing was read to them, no decision of any court or special commission.

“There were three hundred shot that first night. I remember Sukharev, my driver, boasting about what a hard night’s work it had been. But it was too many, because it was light by the time they had finished and they had a rule that everything must be done in the darkness. So they reduced the number to two hundred and fifty a night. How many nights did it last? Work it out for yourself: six thousand men at two hundred and fifty a night. Allowing for holidays, that makes about a month, the whole of April 1940.

“I took no part in the killings. I never went into the execution room. But I was obliged to help them by putting my men at their disposal. I remember a few individual Poles. For instance, a young man. I asked him his age. He smiled like a young boy. I asked him how long he had been in the frontier police. He counted on his fingers. Six months. What had he done there? He had been a telephone operator.

“Blokhin made sure that everyone in the execution team got a supply of vodka after each night’s work. Every evening he brought it into the prison in boxes. They drank nothing before the shooting or during the shooting, but afterward they all had a few glasses before going home to bed.

“I asked Blokhin and the other two: ‘Won’t it take a lot of men to dig six thousand graves?’ They laughed at me. Blokhin said that he had brought a bulldozer from Moscow and two NKVD men to work it. So the dead Poles were taken out through the far door of the execution room, loaded onto covered trucks, and taken to the burial place. [The site] was chosen by Blokhin himself. It was near where the NKVD officers had their country homes, near my own dacha, near the village of Mednoye, about twenty miles from Kalinin. The ditches they dug were between eight and ten meters long, each one being enough to hold two hundred and fifty bodies. When it was all over, the three men from Moscow organized a big banquet to celebrate. They kept pestering me, insisting that I should attend. But I refused.” On and on the blind man droned, pointing his finger at “the others,” denying the importance of his own role, no less a cruel, bland beast than Eichmann in Jerusalem. But Tokaryev was hardly the issue now. Nor were the executioners themselves. Blokhin and three of the others had long ago gone mad and committed suicide. The point was that nearly everywhere they went, historians, prosecutors, archivists, and journalists discovered that the legacy of Soviet power was at least as tragic as everything they had heard from “forbidden voices”: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. Now no book, no voice, was forbidden. To regain the past, to see plain the nightmares of seventy years, was a nearly unbearable shock. As the return of history accelerated, television routinely showed documentary films about the slaughter of the Romanovs, the forced collectivization of the countryside, the purge trials. The monthly literary journals, the weeklies, and even the daily newspapers were crammed with the latest historical damage reports: how many shot and imprisoned; how many churches, mosques, and synagogues destroyed; how much plunder and waste. Under this avalanche of remembering, people protested weariness, even boredom, after a while. But, really, it was the pain of remembering, the shock of recognition, that persecuted them. “Imagine being an adult and nearly all the truth you know about the world around you and outside your own country has to be absorbed in a matter of a year or two or three,” the philosopher Grigori Pomerants told me. “The entire country is still in a state of mass disorientation.” The men of the Communist Party, the leaders of the KGB and the military and the millions of provincial functionaries who had grown up on a falsified history, could not bear the truth. Not because they didn’t believe it. They knew the facts of the past better than anyone else. But the truth challenged their existence, their comfort and privileges. Their right to a decent office, a cut of meat, the month of vacation in the Crimea—it all depended on a colossal social deception, on the forced ignorance of 280 million people. Yegor Ligachev, a conservative figure in the Politburo until his forced retirement in 1990, told me ruefully that when history was taken out of the hands of the Communist Party, when scholars, journalists, and witnesses began publishing and broadcasting their own version of the past, “it created a gloomy atmosphere in the country. It affected the emotions of the people, their mood, their work efficiency. From morning to night, everything negative from the past is being dumped on them. Patriotic topics have been squeezed out, shunted aside. People are longing for something positive, something shining, and yet our own cultural figures have published more lies and anti-Soviet things than our Western enemies ever did in the last seventy years combined.” When history was no longer an instrument of the Party, the Party was doomed to failure. For history proved precisely that: the Party was rotten at its core. The ministers, generals, and apparatchiks who organized the August coup of 1991 met secretly at KGB safe houses outside Moscow many times to discuss the ruin of their state. They talked of the need for order, the need, somehow, to reverse the decline of the Party. They were so deluded about their own country that they even believed they could put a halt to the return of history. They would shut it down with a decree and a couple of tank divisions. The excavations at Mednoye and the other sites of the Polish massacre were no exception. The putschists would try to undermine the work as well as they could. Long before the coup, Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff and one of the key plotters in the August coup, tried to control the damage by secretly transferring many key documents on the case from Division Six of the Central Committee archives to the “presidential archive,” which he controlled. But that small step did very little. Boldin and the rest of the plotters were now prepared to eliminate everything that aggrieved them. They would end the return of history. They would turn back time. Once more, fear would be the essence of the state.

On the day of the putsch, Tretetsky’s men, both the Soviets and the Poles, tried to keep their minds on their work. They dug up old graves and washed the bones and skull fragments in battered bowls. But as the news of the coup reached them, piece by piece, it became harder to concentrate. The soldiers under Tretetsky even heard that the troops deployed on the streets of Moscow were from their own division: the Kantemirovskaya Division. They turned on a television in one of the tents near the work site and saw familiar faces, friends sitting on armored personnel carriers near the Kremlin, outside the Russian parliament, and on the main streets of the capital.

“The weather was wretched,” Tretetsky remembered. “It rained nearly all the time, and so to dry the fragments of uniforms, we had to put them in tents, fire up a furnace, and keep the tent open to circulate the air.” The team worked until late in the afternoon, when Tretetsky told them all, “The work for today is over.” He told them nothing more.

All day long, Tretetsky had been getting calls from the headquarters of the KGB command in Kalinin. The KGB general there, Viktor Lakontsev, warned Tretetsky that the excavation “was no longer necessary,” that work should stop and that he must come immediately to headquarters. Tretetsky refused, saying work would go on as planned. He said he would come to KGB headquarters only at the end of the working day. Despite his brave front, Tretetsky was frightened. “I knew there was trouble,” he said.

That evening Tretetsky was driven under KGB guard to Lakontsev’s office in Kalinin.

The work must stop, Lakontsev insisted. “If it does not,” he said, “we cannot guarantee your safety or the safety of the Polish workers.” Tretetsky had to laugh. Throughout his work in Starobelsk and Mednoye there had always been KGB men at the sites—“observers,” they called themselves. “Our United Nations observers,” the workers called them.

Tretetsky would not back down. “Over my dead body,” he thought to himself. To Lakontsev, he put the refusal more subtly. He told the KGB general that if it was a question of the Poles, he would take responsibility for their safety. The Poles could live together in the tents with the Soviet army troops instead of in the city.

“The investigation cannot stop,” Tretetsky said. “What would I tell the Poles? I need to talk to my own chief. This is not an easy question.” All the same, Tretetsky thought, “Lakontsev is a big boss, and who am I?” When he returned to his camp, Tretetsky called Moscow and was told that there had been no stop-work order. He was relieved. Exhausted, he went to sleep in his tent. But not long after, the commander of the army troops woke him saying that an order had come from Moscow: the soldiers had to return to the Kantemirovskaya base in the town of Naro-Fominsk outside Moscow.

“Listen, Viktor,” Tretetsky told the commander, “this is an oral order, isn’t it?” “That’s right.”

“And to bring your men here, you had a written order.”

“Yes, I did.”

“So why should you obey?”

The troops stayed where they were. The KGB had tried to trick Tretetsky and they had failed. There never had been an order from the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow.

At nine the next morning, Tretetsky went before the men and said, “The work goes on. Let’s begin now. Everyone is to work intensively, with enthusiasm. And that’s it!” The KGB sabotaged the tractor the men had been using for the excavation. But by now Tretetsky had connections with people in the area, and a collective farm lent him one of its tractors. The Polish workers were especially grateful and pounded Tretetsky on the back. For two more days, the Soviets and the Poles worked at the graves and listened to the radio reports coming from Moscow. Slowly, the news improved. When the men heard that the coup was on the verge of collapse, they seemed to work even harder. Finally, on the morning of August 21, after the plot had failed and troops had returned in relief and triumph from Moscow to their bases, Tretetsky went before his men. He would not live the lie any longer. He refused to return to the past, except to study its bones.

“The criminal investigation ordered by the president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, goes on!” he cried out. Then the colonel gave the order and his men began to dig.