David Satter - It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past

IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO,
AND IT NEVER HAPPENED ANYWAY

Russia and the Communist Past

David Satter

Yale
UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven & London

Copyright 2012 by David Satter.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Satter, David, 1947

It was a long time ago, and it never happened anyway :
Russia and the communist past / David Satter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-11145-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Soviet Union History 1925-1953. 2. Atrocities Soviet Union
History. 3. Atrocities Soviet Union Public opinion. 4. Communism
Soviet UnionHistory. 5. CommunismSoviet UnionPublic opinion.
6. Public opinion Russia (Federation) 7. Kommunisticheskaia partiia
Sovetskogo Soiuza History. 8. Soviet Union. Narodnyi komissariat
vnutrennikh delHistory. 9. Soviet Union. Komitet gosudarstvennoi
bezopasnosti History. 10. Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953. I. Title.
DK267.S24 2012
947.0842 dc23
2011022685

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Raphael, Claire, and Mark

I would have wanted to recall them all
by name

But they took the list and theres
nowhere to find it

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem
(translation by the author)

CHAPTER 1
The Statue of Dzerzhinsky

CHAPTER 2
Efforts to Remember

CHAPTER 3
Butovo and Kommunarka

CHAPTER 4
St. Petersburg

CHAPTER 5
The Appeal of Communism

CHAPTER 6
The Responsibility of the State

CHAPTER 7
The Trial of the Communist Party

CHAPTER 8
Moral Choice under Totalitarianism

CHAPTER 9
The Roots of the Communist Idea

CHAPTER 10
Symbols of the Past

CHAPTER 11
History

CHAPTER 12
The Shadow of Katyn

CHAPTER 13
Vorkuta

CHAPTER 14
The Odyssey of Andrei Poleshchuk

I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of institutions that provided me with support: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Kathryn W. Davis Foundation (now the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation), the William H. Donner Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation. In addition, I received support from the Hoover Institution, where I was a research fellow from 2003 to 2008. I would like to express my personal thanks to Daniel McMichael, Michael Gleba, Nadia Schadlow, Marin Strmeki, Diana Davis Spencer, Abby Moffat, Curt Winsor, Ingrid Gregg, and John Raisian. This book could not have been written without this timely and generous assistance.

I am currently affiliated with the Hudson Institute and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). I would like to thank Kenneth Weinstein, the president of Hudson, and Amir Pasic, the director of the Foreign Policy Institute at SAIS, for their encouragement and help.

In Moscow I benefited greatly from the assistance of the Memorial Society, in particular Arseny Roginsky, Yelena Zhemkova, Irina Flige, Boris Belenkin, Alexander Daniel, Leonid Novak, Nikitia Petrov, Alexei Korotaev, and Marina Grant.

The staff of the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, helped me to find needed materials both when I was a visiting professor at the university in 2008 and after my return to Washington. I am also grateful to the research staff of the Hoover Institution Archives for their help.

Andrew Nagorski, Gershon Braun, my sister Beryl Satter, and my sons Raphael and Mark read early versions of the manuscript and provided helpful suggestions and comments. Olga Printseva took time from a busy schedule to help me with the bibliography and notes.

IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO,
AND IT NEVER HAPPENED ANYWAY

In spring 1989 a group of students from the Memorial Society entered a pine forest near Barnaul in western Siberia carrying shovels and tarpaulin bags. They were seeking the site of a mass burial ground of Stalins victims. There had long been rumors about burial pits in the area. But before perestroika, few had the courage to search for them.

It was a cool, windy day. The students ascended a steep incline near the walls of the old city prison. In the winter, the forest is blanketed with snow, but the spring reveals depressions in the earth created as bodies buried just beneath the surface decompose. The students reached an area of sparse trees. There were several dozen such pits, twenty-five to thirty-five feet in diameter and about one and a half feet deep. They chose a pit in the center and began to dig. The shovels soon hit bones. The members of the group, which included Vladimir Ryzhkov, a future liberal member of the State Duma, opened a mass grave containing the remains of ten to twelve persons and the rotting remnants of shoes and clothes. In the back of the skulls were visible the holes from bullets. There were several Soviet coins from the 1930s. Some of the victims were barefoot.