THE RETURN OF THE GHOSTS
Banknotes sometimes have hidden meanings. If you look at the Russian five-hundred-rouble bill, you’ll see on it a picture of the famous Solovetsky Monastery, a prison monastery with a history going back over many centuries, situated on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, in the North of Russia. And if it’s an older banknote, issued before 2011, then you will see rising over the churches not cupolas but wooden boards. This indicates that it is not the monastery that is shown, but the Solovetsky Special Designation Prison Camp, one of the most terrifying Soviet labour camps, a predecessor of the GULAG[12] system and, indeed, of the Nazi concentration camps, where the inmates were ordered at the end of the 1920s to cover up the cupolas with wooden boards. These bills are still in circulation, knocking around in our hands, our pockets and our wallets, these symbols of the GULAG that hardly anyone recognizes, like ghosts come to visit us from a different reality, from the black hole of our history and our collective memory.
This image is shown in the book by the literary critic and historian Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, translated into Russian from English. A psychologist, literary critic and cultural historian, and the author of such intellectual bestsellers as Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia; Whip: Sects, Literature and Revolution; and Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, Etkind writes in Warped Mourning about the practice of collective memory and about the Stalinist repressions in the Soviet and post-Soviet consciousness. He poses what could be the key question for our political history and social psychology: why is the fundamental catastrophe of Stalin’s terror, which befell Soviet society in the very heart of its history – for thirty years, from the mid-1920s until the mid-1950s, and accounting for tens of millions of victims – still not comprehended and conceptualized by our society and our politics? Why have we not rid ourselves of this trauma – named the victims, judged the executioners? And, what’s more, why are the torturers justified in modern historical and political narratives by the self-appointed ‘patriots’? In other words, why is Russian mourning so ‘warped’?
Shortly before his death, the poet Joseph Brodsky expressed his surprise in an interview:
It seemed to me that the greatest product of the Soviet system was that we all – or many of us, at least – considered ourselves to be victims of a terrible catastrophe, and even if this didn’t create a brotherhood it did at least produce a feeling of compassion, of pity for each other. And I hoped that through all the changes this feeling of compassion would survive and live on. Because our monstrous experience, our terrifying past, unites people – the intelligentsia, at least. But this didn’t happen.[13]
In actual fact, if in postwar Germany the memory of their catastrophe became a point of consensus and the nation united around the slogan, nie wieder, ‘never again’, then in Russia the memory of the repressions divided society into those who remembered and those who chose to forget – or even denied or justified the repressions: ‘Those were difficult times’; ‘But we won the War’; ‘When you cut down trees, splinters fly.’
In Russia there are ‘wars of memory’ around the key events of our twentieth-century history: the revolution of 1917, the repressions of 1937, the Victory over Germany in 1945 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991; but far from uniting people in grief or pride, each of these dates drives wedges between friends, colleagues and family members. In reality, the Civil War in Russia has not let up for a single day but carries on in our collective memory. At the heart of our national consciousness, a black lacuna has formed, a sucking void, which the majority of people manage to skate around. But then occasionally bones rise to the surface, like on the bank of the Kolpashevo River near the Siberian city of Tomsk, where on 1 May 1979 the River Ob flooded and burst its banks, opening up a mass grave of victims who had been shot in 1937. Thousands of well-preserved corpses were washed out; and the local authorities ordered that they be chopped up by the propellers of the river tugs and washed away.
What is the source, what is the anamnesis of this ‘anaesthesia dolorosa’, the insensitivity of our nation to the fundamental trauma of the Stalinist terror? Why is it that Germany could acknowledge the catastrophe of Nazism and carry out the difficult task of self-cleansing, while Russia today is further than ever from comprehending Stalinism? Etkind maintains that there are a few reasons. First, the sheer number of genocides and democides that were caused by Stalinism: from collectivization and the Holodomor[14] in Ukraine, to the deportation of whole peoples (the Chechens, the Kalmyks, the Crimean Tatars, and many others); from the Great Terror of 1937–8 to the antisemitic ‘struggle with cosmopolitanism’ in the last years of Stalin’s life, from 1949–53. The Soviet terror struck at the most diverse ethnic, professional and territorial groups.
Second, there is the absurd suicidal nature of the repressions, the total madness and irrationality of turning the terror against the country. Much research has shown that the terror was ineffective economically (labour productivity in the camps was half what it was among free people), and destructive for the state and national security; the war was won against incredible odds in spite of the terror, not thanks to it. And here there is one more feeling that interferes with the memory: scepticism that such a thing could ever really happen. The historian of the Holocaust, Saul Friedländer, wrote that a deep disbelief – a refusal to believe in the reality of what had happened – was a typical reaction to the Nazi terror.[15] And this is exactly what happens with the victims and the witnesses of the GULAG. What’s more, our contemporaries refuse to believe in the reality of Stalin’s terror because it is so absurd and unimaginable. ‘The human brain is simply not capable of imagining the crimes that were committed’, said the writer Varlam Shalamov, who left us the most terrifying accounts of the GULAG in his work, The Kolyma Tales.[16]
The main difference, of course, was that in Germany the criminal regime suffered a military defeat, the country underwent occupation and enforced de-Nazification, which continued for decades. Nothing of the sort could have happened in the USSR, where victory seemed to justify the repressions, which began again with renewed vigour in 1946, and where the regime, with a few changes and modifications, has survived up to the present as the philosophy and practice of chekism, which is considered to be quite respectable these days. Etkind points out how incomplete was Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization programme, because it basically left the ruling elite untouched, making Stalin the scapegoat and removing the question of the criminality of the regime itself. Mourning could never be fully expressed in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia in terms of the structural reasons while there are still people and institutions in power who are the direct descendants of Stalin’s repressions.
12
The system of prison camps established across the Soviet Union under Stalin. GULAG is an acronym for
13
https://www.krugozormagazine.com/show/Brodskiy.2107.html.
14
In 1932–3, Stalin ordered the deliberate creation of a manmade famine in Ukraine, which wiped out millions of Ukrainians. The word
16
Varlam Shalamov,