فصل 8

CHAPTER 8

MEMORIAL

Esther has no idea where her grandfather died or where he is buried. Most likely, he was shot in the back of the head. Probably he is buried in a mass grave somewhere near the city of Gorky. She can guess, but she does not know.

In the Soviet Union, an empire of holocaust survivors and the children of survivors, this gnawing uncertainty was the usual condition of life. As Hannah Arendt writes, “The concentration camp, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.” I am not sure we met anyone who did not have a grandparent, a parent, a sibling, a friend, someone who still wandered through his dreams, still ghostly because there was no way to fix the dead one’s end in time and place. The survivor can usually imagine the death in a generic way—the executioner’s rubber apron, the ditch dug in frozen mud. But the suffering continues because there is no closure. It’s as if the regime were guilty of two crimes on a massive scale: murder and the unending assault against memory. In making a secret of history, the Kremlin made its subjects just a little more insane, a little more desperate.

Awake, the people lived in the ruins of their nightmares. In their daily lives they lived in apartment buildings that had been built by prisoners, sailed through canals dug by slaves of the state. One afternoon in Karaganda—an industrial city in central Kazakhstan that, seen from the air, looked like an ashtray stuffed with cigarette butts—I wandered into the woods and discovered an abandoned school. The coal miners showing me around pointed to the bars in the windows. “It was a pretty good school, but it was a wonderful prison camp,” one miner said bitterly. His father spent a year for “anti-Soviet activity” in a room that later became the second grade. The rooms were dank, and a bitter wind blew through them. In the basement playrooms, the miner said, the guards carried out their nighttime executions. There were drainpipes in the floors to catch the blood, zebras and wildebeests on the walls to amuse the children.

Much later on, I took another trip, this time to Kolyma in the Russian far east, the old prison camp region just across the water from Alaska. At least two million prisoners died in Kolyma. The survivors went home years ago, but the place was still haunted. The Russian north was once the region of “little peoples,” hunters and nomads, Eskimos, Yakuts, Chukchis, Yukagiris. A friend told me that one hundred or so Eveni people lived in the village of Godlya an hour north of Magadan. Would I like to see them?

We arrived in Godlya at about eight-thirty in the morning. The village was a sea of mud, a few heaps of garbage, an empty store, a couple of wooden houses tilting into the mud, and the sort of poured-concrete barracks you’d see on the outskirts of almost any Soviet city. We saw a young woman—a beautiful woman, with a round Eskimo face—stumble drunkenly through a puddle. She sort of squinted at us and dropped to one knee. Farther on, we saw a few more people, some leaning against a wall, a couple more passing a bottle back and forth and saying nothing. Half the town was smashed before breakfast. It was always this way in the morning, and by sundown hardly anyone was awake, my friend told me. They drank vodka, bathtub gin, hair tonic, eau de cologne, even bug spray. It had been that way for years. The Eveni had been herded into these villages after centuries of hunting reindeer in the forest; once they ceased to wander, they were lost. The regime, in order to create a more perfect Soviet Eveni, or Chukchi or Eskimo, took children away from their parents and villages and “educated” them in state boarding schools, sickening little places in the middle of nowhere. By the time the schools got done with them, there was no Eveni left in them at all. Now they spoke Russian miserably and Eveni not at all.

One of the few sober men around, a squat young man with a withered arm, introduced himself. He said his name was Viktor, and I asked him my earnest questions. “The Eveni are dying out,” he said. “They have nothing to do and they drink until they can’t drink anymore. I spoke Eveni until I was four years old. That’s what they tell me. Then they sent me off to the schools. It wasn’t school really. They just let us sit there and made sure we spoke only Russian. So most of us didn’t say anything at all.” I asked him what chances he thought he had in life and whether the changes in Moscow might help. By now a small crowd of drunks had circled round us. Their eyes were glassy and their heads swayed slightly, like dandelions in a breeze.

“We are done for,” Viktor said, looking at his neighbors. “It’s too late. They killed us.” Viktor led us over to two other Eveni men. They were wearing cheap Soviet coveralls and University of Alaska baseball caps that must have floated across to Siberia on the Bering Strait. They were the only two men in town working. They had a curious job. With huge blowtorches they scorched the skin on a huge dead hog until it was pink and dry. Then, they cut the skin in strips and fried and salted them. “Very tasty with vodka,” one said. Bar food, Eveni potato chips.

Another man, Pavel Trifonov, came over and watched this strange ritual with us for a while. “This is the sort of thing we do now,” he said. “The state won’t let us fish. And there are no reindeer left. They call this village a state farm, but there hasn’t been any farming here in a long time. It’s way below zero most of the time. What are we supposed to raise? Lemons? Most of the time, this place is a sheet of ice.” I asked him what his family had done before they settled here in Godlya.

“My grandfather was a trapper and a hunter and he traded with the Japanese,” Pavel said. “And what am I? I stand around and watch this. I don’t feel like an Eveni and I am not a Russian. I don’t feel like anyone. They are killing us. No, they already have. This is slow genocide, and it’s almost at its end.” How to put a limit on these stories, this sense of hauntedness? On a winter afternoon in Leningrad, I paid a call on Dmitri Likhachev, a distinguished scholar of medieval Russian literature at the Leningrad institute known as Pushkin House. Likhachev was eighty-four at the time, and his office seemed designed to ignore all things Soviet. The feeling of entering that room was the reverse of what happens to the pitiful exile in Nabokov’s story “The Visit to the Museum,” who wanders through a museum in France and magically finds himself “not in the Russia I remembered but in the factual Russia of today.” One entered Likhachev’s study as if into another time. There was Dal’s great dictionary of the Russian language, a prerevolutionary clock, a stunning portrait of Pushkin where the dull face of a general secretary might have been. But it somehow avoided fakery. This was not fantasy, but rather an act of attention and defiance. In a city where thousands of volumes in the main library had been burned and ruined from neglect, where Rembrandts faded needlessly on the walls of the Hermitage, Likhachev created an idealized room in which to read and think.

“Most of all, I like the quiet,” he told me that winter afternoon. “Russia is a noisy state.” When he was a boy, Likhachev watched the February and October revolutions from his window. A decade later he had an even closer view of the rise of Soviet civilization, courtesy of a five-year term in a labor camp. Likhachev was arrested in 1928 for taking part in a students’ literary group called the Cosmic Academy of Sciences. The club posed about as great a threat to the Kremlin as the Harvard Lampoon does to the White House. For election as an “academician,” Likhachev presented a humorous paper on the need to restore to the language the letter “yat.” The Bolsheviks banned the letter as part of a campaign to “modernize” Russian after the revolution. Later, one of Likhachev’s interrogators railed at him for daring to waste his time on such things.

“What do you mean by language reform?” the interrogator shouted. “Perhaps we won’t even have any language at all under socialism!” Likhachev spent most of his term in Solovki, a labor camp established by Lenin in 1920 on a White Sea island. The monastery on the island had been used as a prison before, but a single statistic gives some idea of the difference between the czarist repressions and the Bolshevik Terror. From the sixteenth century to the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, there were a total of 316 inmates at Solovki. On a single night—the night of October 28, 1929—Likhachev listened to gunfire as three hundred men were executed.

“It was autumn and my parents had come to visit me. We had rented a room from one of the guards,” he once said. “A man came running to see me on that night saying the wardens had just been to the barracks to get me. Well, I told my parents that I had to go because I was being summoned for night work and that they shouldn’t wait up for me. I could not tell my parents that they were coming to take me away and shoot me. I hid myself behind stacks of firewood so they would not see it happening.

“Meanwhile the shooting was in full swing. I was not found. It meant that I was also included in that number, I was also meant to be one of those three hundred. So they took somebody else instead of me. And when I emerged from my hideout the next morning, I was a different man. So many years have passed since then, more than half a century, sixty years in fact, and I still cannot forget it. Exactly three hundred people were mowed down just like that, as a warning.… Three hundred shots, one per man. The executioner was drunk, so he did not manage to kill them all immediately. But all the same, they threw all the bodies in a big pit. The executioner is older than me, and he is still alive.” A little while after the Nina Andreyeva affair in the spring of 1988, I was walking along the Arbat, the pedestrian mall in downtown Moscow, and saw a young woman in her twenties collecting signatures. This was still dangerous business in 1988. I’d seen people arrested on the Arbat and near Pushkin Square for handing out petitions or organizing an “unauthorized” demonstration. Sasha Podrabinek regularly got himself arrested when he passed out his underground paper, Express-Khronika, on the street.

There were about a half-dozen people huddled around the woman. A couple signed; the others kept a step back and listened, passing the time. She said her name was Elena and her petition, a sheaf of onionskin sheets riffling in the wind, was for a new “historical, anti-Stalinist” group called Memorial.

Memorial, Elena said, wanted to “give a name” to the victims of the Stalin era; they wanted to build monuments, research centers. The more she explained the group, the more it seemed to me their goal was to build a kind of Soviet Yad Vashem, the memorial center in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. She kept talking about “the names,” giving people back their names, and as I stood there, I remembered going to Yad Vashem nearly twenty years before and walking into a vast, dark library, a room filled with immense volumes containing the names of the lost. I had never even begun to understand the immensity of the Holocaust until that moment. I’d had teachers who had asked us to imagine four of the five boroughs of New York gassed to death. But it was only in that simple room, surrounded by the names of all of them, that I felt it. And what had Solzhenitsyn written? What was his count of the victims of the Soviet regime? Sixty million?

The woman told me how I could find out more about Memorial. She said I should find Lev Ponomarev or Yuri Samodurov, a human rights activist and a friend of Sakharov’s. Lev Ponomarev lived on the very outskirts of Moscow, a neighborhood that had apartments on one side and miles of birch forest on the other. He was in his forties but looked many years younger. Unlike the shaggy Russian intellectual of legend, Ponomarev looked like an astronaut, fit, clean-cut. With his daughter running in occasionally with a shriek and announcements about the weather (“huge snow!”) or dinner (“coming soon!”), Ponomarev brought me up to date on the start of Memorial. He said that he and most other intellectuals in their twenties, thirties, and forties viewed the advent of Gorbachev skeptically. But when Sakharov was released from internal exile, he said, “We began to come around.” “Like a lot of people,” Ponomarev said, “I thought that what had to be done at the start in order to dismantle the system was to tell people how many victims there have been, to plant the idea that monuments should be erected to those who had perished, archives should be published. This is the real start of perestroika. The truth. And with that, the process can become irreversible. Without that, without everyone acknowledging that the system is discredited and guilty, a crackdown can always succeed.

“In the winter of 1987, I got together with Yuri Samodurov. We formed an action group of about fifteen people. This was at a time when many informal groups were being launched. A general meeting was held in someone’s apartment. We started drafting a one-page-long appeal in order to begin a petition campaign. To get the language of it just right was very tricky. For example, we knew that millions of people had been killed, no one doubted it, and yet we didn’t know whether we ought to include the word ‘millions’ in our document. We still had no legal proof to substantiate it. We were afraid of turning people off.” The Memorial founders, a group of mainly young unknown scholars and writers, first tried to collect signatures at their various offices. That seemed to be the safest route. But Ponomarev and the others found that even close friends they had known for many years were refusing to sign.

“A lot of them agreed with what we were after,” he said, “but they were suspicious. You could see they were wondering if their friends had suddenly become agents and the petition was some kind of trap. So then we decided to take the more anonymous route and go to the streets and ask passersby to sign. And since we wanted our appeal to have legal force, we asked people for both their names and their addresses. We all had our doubts about this. This is something that is terribly dangerous in our country. The levels of suspicion run so deep. But people responded! After all these years, people were just ready for this. It was such an amazing sociological experience. We discovered that there were people willing to give a name and an address and yet they had no idea that we were not KGB agents. They trusted us.” The Memorial people usually went to the streets in groups of threes. One held a poster saying “Sign this appeal,” another collected signatures, and the third held up a quotation from Gorbachev’s speech saying there should be no “blank spots” in history. Gorbachev still had tremendous authority and popularity; what’s more, Lev said, Memorial hoped that a quotation from the general secretary would ward off the police. It did not always work. The petition groups were often arrested, until, finally, mysteriously, they found themselves getting hauled into the police stations less and less often. Divine—or Party—intervention, they supposed.

If the Memorial group was to become the preeminent historical preservation society, it needed historians to help. This was an almost impossible order. The field of Soviet history had become so degraded over the years that the Memorial people felt they could not trust anyone; the ones they could trust, people like Dima Yurasov, were not professionals.

There was one exception at first, a young scholar named Arseny Roginsky. Roginsky’s father was arrested twice in the Stalin era and died in 1951 at a camp near Leningrad when his son was five years old. But, typically, the KGB did not bother to tell the Roginsky family about the death. Month after month, until 1955, Arseny’s mother sent parcels to her husband in the camps, all the while planning for his eventual return. The family learned about the death only when they received a telegram informing them that the “packages are no longer being received.” Later on, the Roginskys were given a packet of documents that claimed the cause of death had been a heart attack. “When I saw that document I was eight or nine years old,” Arseny told me one afternoon at the Memorial headquarters. “I saw the stamp and the seal of the Soviet Union, and yet I knew it was false. They were telling us lies and they didn’t care how absurd they were. That’s when I decided to become a historian.” Roginsky took his university degree in Tartu, a university town in Estonia that had about it the air of the Berkeley academic underground in the sixties. The most influential teacher there—and Roginsky’s mentor—was the cultural historian Yuri Lotman. While it was impossible to conduct courses and draw up reading lists on subjects considered “anti-Soviet,” Lotman and his students looked at the structure of literary texts and cultures in a way that they all understood as a thinly veiled critique of the society they were living in. Their refusal to use Newspeak and channel everything into Marxist-Leninist categories was a form of dissidence. At Tartu, Roginsky’s classmates included Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who joined Pavel Litvinov on Red Square for the 1968 demonstration, and Nikita Okhotin, another future leader of Memorial.

After graduating and moving to Leningrad, Roginsky took a tremendous risk. He founded an underground group called Pamyat, or Memory (not to be confused with the racist Russian nationalist group of the same name). Roginsky’s Pamyat was a forerunner to Memorial. Working secretly and with friends in the dissident movement, he began building an archive of Western and Soviet documents on the Stalin period. Roginsky followed Solzhenitsyn’s lead in The Gulag Archipelago and interviewed dozens of camp survivors about their experiences. “More than anything, I wanted to prove that the study of history actually could exist in this country,” he told me. It was not long before the police and the KGB were on to him. They searched his apartment seven times, bugged his telephone, and called him in for questioning. But while the KGB obviously knew what Roginsky was up to, he made it difficult for them, carefully burying his tapes and papers. The KGB never found that evidence. Then in 1981 the KGB ended all pretense toward the legal niceties. They arrested Roginsky and he was sentenced to four years in the camps. They moved him from camp to camp in order to prevent him from “infecting” the other inmates with anti-Soviet ideas and to make sure he never got too comfortable. When Roginsky finally returned to Moscow in August 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. He was ready to try the same crime again. “I had to assume that history would outlast stupidity and cruelty,” he said.

Through the spring of 1988, Memorial was adding thousands of names to its petition lists. Gorbachev planned on holding a special conference at the end of June to plant the seeds of a more democratic political system, and Memorial wanted to find some way to use the historic meeting to establish itself. For that it needed support at a higher level; it needed backing from people who would command the attention of at least the reformist flank in the Party leadership. The activists needed a core of names that would lend some political heft to Memorial. Most of the names were obvious: Sakharov, of course, writers such as Ales Adamovich, Dmitri Likhachev, Daniil Granin, Lev Razgon, Anatoly Rybakov, and Yuri Karyakin; the editor of Ogonyok, Vitaly Korotich; and Boris Yeltsin, who had become a mythic figure of defiance after his ouster from the Politboro in 1987.

And there were two historians on the list. The first was Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev. Throughout the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, there had been other scholars who tried to work honestly, to conduct research outside the system of Party rules and guarded archives. Mikhail Gefter, another of Arseny Roginsky’s mentors, was well known to historians in the West for his essays on what he saw as the Stalinist “aberration.” Viktor Danilov’s groundbreaking first attempts to describe the scope and brutality of the collectivization campaign had also won respect abroad.

But while Western historians trying to piece together the scale of the Soviet catastrophe relied almost solely on published Soviet documents, literature, and émigré sources, only one historian still living in Moscow played a major role in deepening the world’s understanding of Stalin and his successors. The publication in the West of Medvedev’s Let History Judge in 1971 astonished foreign scholars with its unstinting denunciation of Stalin and the sheer accumulation of evidence.

I came to Moscow thinking that Roy Medvedev was the man to know. Dozens of my predecessors—especially the American and Italian correspondents—depended mightily on him for analysis and high-grade gossip: who was fighting whom, who had a fatal cold in the Politburo. The same sources in the world of Communist Party politics, bureaucracy, and journalism who had informed Let History Judge also provided Medvedev with nuggets of information that, for foreigners, could be mined almost nowhere else.

Roy and his wife, Galina, lived on Dybenko Street in a distant part of town not far from Sheremetyevo Airport. Medvedev’s tiny study was a meticulous arrangement of books and files, a masterly use of space imposed by necessity. File cards peeked out of the shelves announcing “early Leninists,” “Beria,” or “Brezhnev.” Roy’s twin brother, Zhores, who had lived in a middle-class section of London called Mill Hill since his exile in 1973, had arranged his own office in the same fashion. London street life murmured outside, but inside, Zhores had recreated Russia. All through their separation, Roy and Zhores exchanged necessities with the help of obliging Western diplomats and journalists. For Zhores’s books on Soviet agriculture and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Roy sent clippings and source materials; Zhores handled Roy’s foreign-language publication rights and sent him packages of books, rubber bands, envelopes, folders, and underwear, socks, and shoes.

Before Gorbachev came to power, Roy Medvedev was considered a dissident. After years of study and teaching school in the provinces, Medvedev took Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress and the further anti-Stalinist mood of the Twenty-second Party Congress in 1961 as a signal of permission. Year after year he accumulated source materials and interviews with Party officials, camp survivors, and other witnesses to the era. As a scholar he pushed the limits of the possible. But Medvedev’s timing was dangerous. By the time he finished Let History Judge and sent it to the West for publication, Khrushchev was out of office and Brezhnev had already begun a movement to rehabilitate the reputation of Stalin.

Medvedev, who had maintained his membership in the Communist Party, was soon banned from its ranks. But while he was rejected by officialdom, he was also never really accepted by the dissidents. In his memoirs, Sakharov rarely levels any personal attacks, but in several spots he makes it clear that by the early seventies he not only disagreed with Medvedev’s Marxism but also did not entirely trust him. Without saying so directly, he wonders if Medvedev did not have at least the tacit support of, or some kind of unsavory relationship with, the KGB. Other dissidents were far less guarded in their conjectures.

I find it hard to believe the worst. In the early eighties, a KGB guard sat outside Medvedev’s door, and I doubt he was there to give out flowers to foreign guests. The specter scared off some visitors, but not all, and by the time I arrived, Roy still gave help to anyone who asked for it. I think his fallen reputation among the dissidents and then, later, among the liberal intelligentsia as a whole had more to do with his refusal to shed Marxism than with any shady dealings with the Party and its organs. It seemed strange to me that people who had never made a peep for thirty years could forgive themselves rather quickly for their cowardice, but were brutally critical of Medvedev’s constancy. This was a man who first made sense of his life as a scholar during an interrogation at Lefortovo Prison in the mid-seventies.

“Comrade Medvedev, tell me, please,” the KGB officer had said, “would you have written your books about Stalin if your father hadn’t been sent away to the camps?” For nearly two decades before the start of glasnost, the KGB had regularly shown its interest in Roy and Zhores Medvedev. Zhores was Roy’s equivalent in the scientific world, a biologist and gerontologist who wrote about the abuse of genetics under Stalin and the use of psychiatric wards as prisons for dissidents under Brezhnev. In 1970, the authorities declared that Zhores suffered from “paranoid delusions of reforming society” and threw him into an insane asylum. Only Roy’s intervention, his rallying of Soviet and Western scholars, forced the Kremlin to release Zhores within three weeks.

The KGB officer at Lefortovo had surely asked Roy the right question. “Why?” No one had ever posed it to him quite so directly or with such perverse intent. “I realized then just how closely my destiny was intertwined with my father’s,” Roy told me one day in his tiny study. “I was sitting there in that prison room, and it all came back.” On an August night in 1938 there was a knock on the door. The familiar scene had begun. Working with their uncanny efficiency and speed, KGB men introduced themselves and went to work. The twins, fair and thin, sat up in bed and tried to make out the muffled commotion outside the bedroom door.

“Why do you come so late, comrades?” they heard their father say.

They could not make out the answer.

For weeks the boys had noticed that their father was depressed, eating almost nothing. It was a mystery to them why their father, Aleksandr Medvedev, a respected officer in the Red Army and a professor of philosophy and history at the Tolmachev Military-Political Academy, had been fired from his job. And why had they been sent home early that summer from Pioneer camp? Some of the family’s friends had been arrested, but the boys could not understand what their father understood only too well, that the defining principle of the terror was its randomness. There was no reason for any of this except the ruthlessness, perhaps the pathology, of Josef Stalin and the system he had built.

When the boys woke the next morning, the visitors were still there, opening and slamming cabinets, pushing aside furniture, rummaging through everything. The bedroom door opened and the boys’ father walked in. He was dressed in a military tunic, but wore no belt. He looked as if he’d gone days with no sleep. Without a word, he sat down on the bed and embraced his sons. There was something final and desperate about his grip. Zhores told me he still remembered the feel of his father’s prickly, unshaven face scratching against his cheek, how his father’s wordless terror was so obvious, so physical, that all three began to cry at once.

A few minutes later, the visitors left with Aleksandr Medvedev.

In the first months after the arrest of their father, Roy and Zhores and their mother received a series of letters from Aleksandr Medvedev. He was writing from Kolyma, the camps of the far east. Some of the letters from their father were addressed for forwarding to the Communist Party Central Committee, the Supreme Court, the secret police. They all protested his innocence.

“There was always the sense that this was odd, a mistake that could not have happened to us,” Zhores said. “Of course, everyone in the country, when it touched them, felt that way.” Roy and Zhores had idolized their father. He had been a strict teacher and a scholarly example to them, urging them to read everything from Jack London to the Russian classics. His letters to them from Kolyma betrayed none of his own suffering. They concentrated instead on the boys’ future.

My dear Roy and ‘Res:

At last, spring has come, a rare guest in this part of the country. I am very far from you, but in my thoughts and in my heart, I am very close, closer than ever. You fill my everyday thoughts, and you are the aim and essence of my life. You are on the threshold of becoming young men. I so want to be beside you and give you all my experience and deliver you from youth’s mistakes. But destiny has decided otherwise. I do not want my absence from your lives to sadden your youth.

The main thing is that you must study persistently and not limit yourselves just to the school program. Use your time when your perceptiveness and memory are especially keen. Try to be disciplined in your work, for even a mediocre man can accomplish a great deal if he is disciplined. You are talented capable boys. You must learn to think and be well organized. What you need above all is patience. You must learn to overcome difficulties no matter how large. I am sorry for the preaching tone … Love,

Your Father

In the winter of 1941, the Medvedev family received a letter from Aleksandr saying he was in the hospital and needed vitamins. A few months later, a letter they had sent to him in Kolyma came back unopened and stamped: “The money is returned on account of the death of the addressee.” For a while, the family could not accept this all too obvious reality and continued sending parcels. But each time they were returned with the same dark stamp.

When he was just a teenager, Roy’s mother told him, “Don’t be a philosopher or a historian. It’s too dangerous.” And too painful. When Roy was studying at Leningrad State University in the forties, he began to do some independent research. He slowly uncovered who had betrayed his father. At the height of the terror, Boris Chagin was both a military officer and an intelligence agent of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. He was the author of numerous letters slandering his fellow officers. Those letters helped send many men, including Aleksandr Medvedev, to the camps. In Leningrad, Roy discovered that Chagin held a prestigious position in the same history department in which Roy was studying. Chagin was a professor of dialectical materialism.

The Medvedev brothers stood off to the side, observing the man who had betrayed their father. Zhores especially made a thorough study of Chagin’s books: The Struggle of Marxism-Leninism Against the Philosophy of Revisionism and The Struggle of Marxism-Leninism Against Reactionary Philosophy. They took no action. They did not confront him. They learned. “I felt disdain for him, but not hatred or the desire for revenge,” Zhrores said.

Decades later, when Roy was interviewing camp survivors for Let History Judge, a woman called him at home. “Are you the son of Aleksandr Medvedev?” she asked. Roy said he was, and the woman invited him to visit her at her apartment, which she shared with several other survivors from the Kolyma camps. There, for the first time, Medvedev heard the story of his father’s death, how he had injured his arm in an accident while working in a copper mine and was sent to work in a greenhouse. He developed cancer and was admitted to the camp infirmary. The inmates knew their friend was gone only when they saw the camp foreman walking like a peacock around the muddy yard. He was wearing the dark wool jacket Aleksandr Medvedev had had on his back when he arrived in Kolyma.

For all his credentials as a scholar, Roy Medvedev was not for Memorial, and Memorial was not for him. Although he was nominally a member of the group’s “public committee”—its council of well-known senior figures—Medvedev did not attend meetings and even doubted the value of the group. Roy believed in Gorbachev and in the Party as the only legitimate body of power. Memorial, to him, seemed ragtag, beside the point.

The man who quickly took the lead as Memorial’s chief scholar-politician and was an admitted hypocrite, a calculating man who had been on the editorial board of Kommunist and was an instructor in the Higher School of the Young Communist League. Yuri Afanasyev had no illusions about his past. “For more years than I care to remember,” he said one night on television, “I was up to my neck in shit.” His ascendance was astonishing. In my first year in Moscow, Afanasyev was already the democratic movement’s master of ceremonies. At nearly every meeting you’d go to—at the Saturday-morning sessions of Moscow Tribune, at the lectures on Stalin—Afanasyev was invariably the man at the microphone, mediating, introducing, lecturing. He was a specialist in French historiography, and yet he looked, with his bullfrog neck and barrel chest, like a high school football coach. He had the gruff confidence of a man who had led many a committee meeting, first in the Young Communist League (the Komsomol), later in the radical opposition.

His metamorphosis was not so much laughable as pitiable. Here was a man who never would have dared defend Roy Medvedev in the seventies and then scorned him as “hopelessly reactionary” in the late eighties. But I found that for all his presumption, his gall, Afanasyev’s analyses of what was happening in the country and where the situation was leading were uncanny. There were times when Afanasyev, with his supreme confidence, reminded me of Norman Mailer. He knew he had lived a life full of mistakes but he insisted on being heard. His campaign for the “return of history,” his early attacks on the “Stalinist-Brezhnevite” Supreme Soviet and on Gorbachev himself, always preceded fashion. He was not much loved—he had none of Sakharov’s subtlety or carriage—but he was often right. In contrast, Medvedev’s predictions now were not nearly as reliable as his gossip had once been. Typically, the day that Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister in December 1990 predicting the rise of a dictatorship, Medvedev declared to all who would listen that Shevardnadze was stepping down because of trouble in the Georgian Republic.

Afanasyev grew up in Ulyanovsk, the town where Lenin was born. His father, a household repair man, was sent to jail for several years in eastern Siberia on the usual false pretense: he had pilfered a few kilos of flour from the collective farm to give to a poor family. “But the strange thing,” Afanasyev told me one afternoon at his office at the Historical Archives Institute, “is that we did not experience it as a grief or tragedy, because literally every other person we knew then was in prison for collecting leftovers on the farm or for missing a day of work. We never had any conversations about Stalin and I had no doubts about him.” Like Gorbachev, Afanasyev was a provincial boy whose grades were good enough to gain him admission to the best university in the country, Moscow State University. As a student, Afanasyev said, “I was like everyone else. I memorized The Short Course like any good Komsomol boy, like any other Communist.” On the night before Stalin’s funeral in March 1953, Afanasyev wandered the streets near the Kremlin. Tens of thousands of people jammed the streets headed for the Hall of Columns, where Stalin lay in his coffin. People were hysterical, wracked with fear after the death of their living god. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people suffocated to death in the mad crush to get to the hall. Afanasyev broke free of the crowd. As he walked, he could hear some drunks singing in an alleyway. He had never heard such joyous singing. The drunks were celebrating the death of Stalin.

“I suppose once or twice in a lifetime you have those moments when you see something or hear something that tilts your life just slightly in another direction. When I heard those men, well, suddenly the purity of my political consciousness was stained,” Afanasyev said. “I felt the first moment of doubt. It wasn’t until Khrushchev’s speech three years later that I really started to rethink things more thoroughly, but it was this drunken celebration in the dark corners of Moscow that made me start to doubt. I was never quite the same.” After graduation, Afanasyev worked as a Komsomol leader in Krasnoyarsk, not far from where his father had been in jail. He certainly was no radical. He believed in the “infinite possibilities” of the Party. He and his friends talked about the great vistas of Leninist ideology, the great hydroelectric power station they—or at least the workers—were building.

“That enthusiasm,” he said, “lasted until the late sixties, when Brezhnev tried to reanimate Stalinism.” Back in Moscow, Afanasyev worked in the national leadership of the Komsomol organization and then took his graduate degree in history, specializing in French historiography. Afanasyev knew enough to stay away from Soviet history as a field—“That’s where all the real idiots and time-servers were”—but even in his own work he made sure to glorify the obvious and denigrate “foreign influence.” For years his published works set out to prove that the “bourgeois” historians had grossly misinterpreted the October Revolution. Basically, he said, “I scoured the texts for their ‘glaring insufficiencies.’ ” But like so many others of his generation, Afanasyev developed a kind of two-track mind. Because he was such a loyal servant of the official line, he was sent abroad several times to study in France. In Paris, Afanasyev read books by the dissidents and émigrés. He lived in an academic atmosphere where he could speak a little more freely. So by the time he returned to Moscow, Afanasyev had changed just a little more. Once more he had heard the shouting from the dark corners, and he responded—or at least part of him did. Little by little, it became harder for him to resist the evidence. His faith—what little there was of it—eroded. Polish students at the university told him about Stalin’s massacres of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Afanasyev saw how senior professors of history at the university were arrested, or at least fired and silenced, when they strayed too far from doctrine.

In the late seventies and early eighties, Afanasyev was a resident scholar of “the critique of bourgeois historiography” at a Moscow institute and was an editor at Kommunist, the Party’s chief theoretical journal. When Gorbachev came to office, Afanasyev wrote him a series of daring letters about the situation in Soviet historical science, calling on him to use his position as general secretary to end restrictions on academic study and open the archives of the Party and the KGB. Afanasyev got no direct answers. But he did win the key appointment in 1986 to take over as rector of the Historical Archives Institute and quickly used that position to give the first public lectures criticizing Stalin and introducing to the public several new faces—Dima Yurasov included.

Afanasyev was determined to use his new post to help open up the study of the Soviet past. Exploiting his new access to at least some Party archives, he reviewed the letters of Olga Shatunovskaya, a woman who had been a member of the Communist Party Control Committee under Khrushchev. In those letters Shatunovskaya wrote that she had collected sixty-four folders of documents saying that according to KGB and Party data, between January 1935 and 1941 19,800,000 people had been arrested; and of these, seven million were executed in prisons. Her statement was supported by specific data describing how many were shot and where and when. But the files Shatunovskaya described were declared “missing.” By reading such letters, Afanasyev began to realize that the Party and the KGB had probably destroyed many of the most incriminating documents in the archives.

Afanasyev got into some of his first battles with the Party hierarchy when he began to insist that professional scholars and not the Central Committee—not even the general secretary—should be the country’s principal historians. Although Gorbachev’s 1987 history speech helped open the process, Afanasyev said that there could no longer be such speeches. “As long as such things still exist,” he said, “there will still be the idea that history should be made not in the archives and universities and by writers, but rather at Party conferences and committees. That way history remains a handmaiden of propaganda and an extension of policy rather than a sphere of knowledge on the level of science or literature. If power wants to gain authority, then it has to say honestly, ‘We are not linked in any way with the previous regime.’ “When we talk about perestroika, we see it in the following way: the former model of socialism was no good, so let’s work out a new model and put it into life. Again, we have it backward. We must give up this idea of a conscious construction of a more perfect society, the whole culture of belief in the limitless capabilities and opportunities of the human mind, and the ability to construct a model of socially engineered society and then realize it all.

“Educators and Utopian thinkers used to think that the opportunities were endless. That the idea of a just society could be formed by the human mind, that it could be discovered on a theoretical basis; and it seemed to them that those theories could be realized in practice. In other words, a society of universal justice and prosperity could be built by thinking things out. We are now living through the final stages of that culture. Marx and Lenin are vanishing. They are being swept away in the same way that the ‘truth’ of Newtonian mechanics was swept away by Einstein and relativity.” By June 1988, Gorbachev’s victory in the Nina Andreyeva affair had given the Memorial leadership a sense of hope and expectation. Afanasyev and the liberal head of the Filmmakers’ Union, Elem Klimov, decided to seize on the Nineteenth Party Conference as Memorial’s moment. Both men had been elected delegates to the conference and here was a chance to propose the Memorial platform to the top officials of the Communist Party.

Afanasyev had already helped to lay the political and intellectual groundwork for Memorial’s plan. A few weeks before the conference, he produced the most important political book of the Gorbachev era: Inogo ne dano (“There Is No Other Way”), a collection of thirty-five essays by the leading intellectuals of the “thaw” generation, men and women who had become the torchbearers of the glasnost era. While Gorbachev’s own book, Perestroika, was sodden with Party cliché, “There Is No Other Way” provided dazzling clarity and a sense of possibility. Published by the huge state-run firm Progress and edited by Afanasyev, “There Is No Other Way” read like an underground manifesto but it was printed officially and on good paper. Afanasyev, Mikhail Gefter, the renaissance scholar Leonid Batkin, and the journalist Len Karpinsky all wrote essays on the persistence of Stalinism and the need to evaluate the past in order to create a humane future. In one way or another, the need for truth, for a clear-eyed view of history, was behind every piece in the collection, among them Vasily Selyunin’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy, Aleksei Yablokov’s survey of ecological disasters, Yuri Chernichenko’s essay on the “agro-gulag” of the collective farm system, Gavriil Popov’s piece on the absurdity of the centralized economic system. Nearly all the authors were scholars and journalists who had, for years, pulled their punches, spoken in euphemism, or spoken not at all. The presence of one author, however, honored the entire project. The simple addition of Andrei Sakharov, and his essay “The Necessity of Perestroika,” showed that an alliance existed between the dissidents and a much wider category, the liberal intelligentsia. Sakharov’s article was not much different from his underground manifestos; what was different now was the audience. The first printing alone was 100,000. Until Sakharov’s release from exile there were probably not ten thousand people in the country who knew the name Sakharov as anything other than an odious figure in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia. In his essay, Sakharov wrote that perestroika “was like a war. Victory is a necessity.” To even begin to win that war, he wrote, the leadership had to end the folly in Afghanistan, sponsor a thorough rewriting of the criminal code, endorse freedom of speech, and agree to a radical reduction in strategic and conventional weapons. In the next two years, Gorbachev would follow Sakharov’s prescriptions almost to the letter.

A few days after buying my blue-and-silver copy of “There Is No Other Way,” I went to a demonstration organized by Memorial outside a sports arena in Moscow. It was a brilliant sunny day, and the people on the streets outside the arena took obvious delight in their freedom to chant slogans and carry signs reading “No to Political Repression,” “Death to Stalinism,” “Stalin’s Boot Still Endangers Us.” A half-dozen of the contributors to “There Is No Other Way” gave speeches on the steps. But one moment struck me above all. Not far from Sakharov, a young man carried a sign saying, in Russian, “I would like to call you all by name,” the famous line from Anna Akhmatova’s long poem Requiem.

During Stalin’s Terror, Akhmatova spent seventeen months, day after day, waiting in long lines to find out what had become of her son, who had been arrested at the height of the purges. “One day someone ‘identified’ me,” she wrote in a preface to the poem. “Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.” I quote a few lines here (in a translation by D. M. Thomas) because, in them, Memorial found its voice and credo: Again the hands of the clock are nearing

The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch

All of you: the cripple they had to support

Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;

And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and

Say: “I come here as if it were home.”

I should like to call you all by name,

But they have lost the lists.…

I have woven for them a great shroud

Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.

I remember them always and everywhere,

And if they shut my tormented mouth,

Through which a hundred million of my people cry,

Let them remember me also.…

And if ever in this country they should want

To build me a monument

I consent to that honor,

But only on the condition that they

Erect it not on the seashore where I was born:

My last links there were broken long ago,

Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,

Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

Lest in blessed death I should forget

The grinding scream of the Black Marias,

The hideous clanging gate, the old

Woman wailing like a wounded beast.

And may the melting snow drop like tears

From my motionless bronze eyelids,

And the prison pigeons coo above me

And the ships sail slowly down the Neva.

A few days after the demonstration, Afanasyev and Klimov hauled their huge sacks of petitions through the gates of the Kremlin. It was the opening day of the Nineteenth Party Conference, and the Party apparatchiks eyed them suspiciously. Afanasyev and Klimov presented the petitions to Gorbachev and his aides and waited for a response.

On the last day of the Nineteenth Party Conference—after Boris Yeltsin’s dramatic appeal for rehabilitation, after a war over the direction of reform—Gorbachev took the podium and delivered a long speech. Just before he finished, he said that an idea had been “introduced,” one that echoed a similar suggestion in 1961 by Khrushchev—to build a memorial to the victims of the Stalin era. Now the Party, he said, must finally approve the idea. Gorbachev’s words had a tacked-on feel to them; they sounded like an afterthought. In fact, it was one of the most critical moments in the political and emotional life of the perestroika era. Although the Party would later try to block Memorial, although it would try to deny it funds and meeting places, the group had sown the first seeds of a struggle far deeper and more unpredictable than anyone had imagined.