And here she is stating one of Russia’s deep secrets: all too often, sacrifices are simply pointless. For what did tens of thousands die from cold, hunger and beatings in the now abandoned coal-mines of Vorkuta, or lie buried beneath the sleepers of the useless ‘railway of death’ from Salekhard to Igarka in the Far North? Why did tens of thousands of civilians perish in the first Chechen campaign in 1994–6, which was so ineptly lost by Russia; or in the equally senseless and helpless war in the Donbass today? The people remain silent, the state refuses to comment – and the victims are merely a footnote.
Suffering in Russia is supposed to have its own value, which fits in with the Orthodox line (‘Christ suffered and so should we’, as the Russian saying goes), and with the centuries-old tradition of slavery, reverence before the Leviathan of the state, disdain for the life of a single person, and the endless patience that has been elevated to a state-approved virtue: remember Stalin’s famous toast at the Victory banquet on 24 May 1945: ‘To the patience of the Russian people!’ The experience of this state-sanctioned suffering does not carry across into social action, but does come out in certain cultural forms: in the well-known Russian sense of longing (toska), in the boundless Russian song and in the depths of Russian drunkenness (usually, all three at once). But there is also the endless Russian self-irony: as the writer, Viktor Pelevin, puts it, ‘the cosmic significance of Russian civilization is in transforming solar energy into people’s grief’.[41]
Svetlana Alexievich breaks this cultural convention of violence by the state and suffering by the people, and the sanctification of the victim. She violates what is taboo as well as the etiquette of our speech; she is the awkward witness who spoils the blissful picture in the courtroom, which has already been agreed by the judges, the prosecutor, the accused and the victims themselves. This is why the ‘patriots’ and the guardians of the state myth are so afraid of her books. And it’s why Alexievich’s Nobel Prize is so essential for Russia – it’s not politics and it’s not literature: it’s a therapy session, an attempt to teach society to listen and to speak about pain. Like the impassive witness, John, in the Book of the Apocalypse, Alexievich says to her readers: ‘Come and see.’[42]
THE PRIVATE NUREMBERG OF DENIS KARAGODIN
Russian state propaganda has found yet another enemy. It is thirty-four-year-old Denis Karagodin, a philosophy postgraduate student at Tomsk University, who undertook a private investigation into the shooting by the Chekists in 1938 of his great-grandfather, a peasant called Stepan Ivanovich Karagodin, with the aim of naming and condemning those responsible for the murder. One might think that there would be nothing special in Karagodin publishing the names of all those responsible for his great-grandfather’s murder, since all of them are dead and the case has been long closed on the time principle. Surely the information would have only academic and archival interest, and no legal consequences? However, the haste with which the regime’s propagandists set about hounding Karagodin illustrates that his action struck a painful chord and scratched a weak link in the machine of violence.
The peculiarity of our situation is that violence is anonymous, an inherent part of the state, accepted in society like some kind of constant in Russian life; it’s inescapable, like the cold winter. The names of the members of each troika were anonymous (‘people’s courts’ of three people); and the names of everyone who took part in the firing squads, the names of the investigators and the snitches (stukachy, as they call in Russian those who denounce others, from the verb stuchat, ‘to knock’), are all hidden away in the KGB archives. In the USSR after 1956 there was an unwritten agreement according to which the victims of Stalinism were rehabilitated in exchange for anonymity for those who carried out the terror. The KGB carefully censored any information about the repressions; the names of the investigators and denouncers were removed from all the personal details of the victims; relatives received the files with pages either glued together or torn out. They considered that the very act of rehabilitation was sufficient for a person to be satisfied: you were still alive (or had been shot but had had your good name returned), so thank God; could you expect anything more from our state? In conditions of a permanent borderline situation, of a choice between life and death, the state not having shot you began to look like the greatest good.
‘I’d like to name you all by name’, wrote Anna Akhmatova, in her poem Requiem, a powerful witness of the Stalinist repressions, but her dream was merely to name all the victims; Akhmatova wasn’t talking about those who carried out the repressions.[43] During the period of rehabilitation of the victims of the Stalinist repressions under Khrushchev, the NKVD investigators were called to account; but in practice only a few individuals were punished. On the whole it was limited to administrative responsibility – being fired from their posts or losing their pension or their rank. According to the evidence uncovered by the historian Nikita Petrov, under Khrushchev no more than a hundred people were declared responsible. Under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, the whole process was stopped. There were a few cases when incriminating evidence against individuals was published, such as about the investigator Alexander Khvat, who tortured the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, or about the Head of the NKVD Komendatura (Commandant’s office), Lieutenant-General Vasily Blokhin, who personally shot between ten and fifteen thousand people, but these were individual cases and there were no legal consequences. The executioners and the investigators and their victims continued to live side by side; they would bump into each other on the street or in queues and sometimes even went drinking together (there is the famous case of the writer Yury Dombrovsky, who spent ten years in the camps doing just that with his investigator). In the space of anonymity which was ‘the Soviet people’, there was a yawning great black hole right in the centre named ‘repressions’; but everyone carefully went around the edge of this lacuna, from official government reports to private family histories, where this matter was diligently covered up.
Moreover, this conspiracy of silence became a guarantee that the terror would continue. In the same way that the flywheel of the Stalinist repressions worked anonymously, so the pursuit of dissidents continued anonymously in Brezhnev’s USSR, using the machine of ‘punitive psychiatry’. Nowadays we come across the anonymous violence of the law enforcement system, where torture has become the norm. But only isolated cases come to light thanks to social networks, like the tortures that took place in the ‘Dalny’ police station in Kazan, where a man arrested for being drunk on the street was raped to death with a champagne bottle; or the case of the lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died while in a detention centre because he was refused medical help. But hundreds of other police stations, detention centres and prison camps remain places of totally depersonalized violence, just like thousands of Russian homes, in which daily – hourly – women become the victims of domestic violence. (Officially, up to forty women die every day in Russia from being beaten, but no one knows how many deaths are covered up by medical staff and police putting them down to other reasons.) But this violence is considered normal; it remains unnamed and anonymous, it’s not usual to talk about it or tell the police, and now, in any case, it’s been decriminalized: according to a law passed by the State Duma in 2017, beating people close to you when it’s inflicted for the first time is not considered a crime. But cases do become known through social media, such as one recently in the city of Oryol, where the police refused to help a girl but promised ‘to register her corpse’ when she was killed – within half an hour the man she lived with had beaten her to death.
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