Karl Schl - Moscow, 1937

For Anya, our Muscovite, and for the indomitable members of Memorial

Ever since my first encounter with the world of Soviet Russia, and indeed ever since I began to think politically, I have known that I would write this book. It is not possible to talk about Russia in the twentieth century, and even present-day post-Soviet Russia, without coming up against the caesura invoked by the term 1937. All lines of inquiry in my previous writings whether they focused on St Petersburg as a laboratory of modernity, the Russian experience of exile in Berlin between the wars, or the rebirth of Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union somehow or other and at some point or other inevitably led back to the time and place of the radical and irreversible rupture in the third decade of the twentieth century.

I was still at school, at the beginning of the 1960s, when I heard Yevgeny Yevtushenko recite his poem The Heirs of Stalin. Even for people unfamiliar with the whole history, the verses gave expression to something sinister, ominous and opaque that must never be allowed to recur, a catastrophe that had befallen a people and a nation. This was repeated over the years and developed into a leitmotif. In the circle of acquaintances to which I subsequently belonged in Moscow there was no one whose family did not contain a victim: relatives that had disappeared, children who did not know when and where their fathers had been shot, and families scattered throughout the Soviet Union during those years. The traces of violence, misfortune and arbitrary rule were everywhere to be seen. And yet, right to the very end of the Soviet Union, there were no memorials to commemorate the dead and to give the collective trauma a public face.

In West Germany and West Berlin, where I began my studies, there could be no question of a lack of information or a general silence on the subject. Long before Alexander Solzhenitsyns monumental attempt at an artistic depiction of the Gulag Archipelago, there were major accounts of it. We need think only of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulskis report on his odyssey through Stalins prisons, of Arthur Koestlers response to the shock produced by the Moscow show trials in his novel Darkness at Noon, of the shattering memoirs of Evgenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam. Robert Conquests account of the Great Terror had likewise appeared as early as 1969 and was soon followed by Roy Medvedevs insiders view of the history of Stalinism.

Nevertheless, the historic catastrophe and the human tragedies of the Soviet Union never received the attention and interest that might have been expected from a public that had been exposed to the horror of the crimes of National Socialism. The asymmetry was very striking. A world that had taken to heart such names as Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz had trouble in memorizing names like Vorkuta, Kolyma or Magadan. People had read Primo Levi but not Varlam Shalamov. Thus Stalins victims died a second death, this time in peoples memories. They vanished in the shadow of the crimes of the century committed by the Nazis; they were lost to view by the side of the countless victims in the Great Patriotic War. They fell by the wayside in the ideological skirmishes of the Cold War, in which a fact could not be accepted as true if the applause came from the wrong side, and where after 1945 the swiftly restored anti-totalitarian consensus against communism frequently blinded the public to the fact that education about their own totalitarian past was far from comprehensive. The victims of that other collapse of civilization disappeared finally behind the wall of silence that had fixed the division of Europe for half a century. In this way, no sooner was the question of the victims of Stalins dictatorship broached than complex rationalization processes led to a curious lack of interest and even indifference.

However, Moscow in 1937 is one of the key settings of European history. It is not situated somewhere or other but on a fault line of European civilization. The dead of 1937 are the contemporaries of a century of extremes that knows no frontiers. This is why Moscow in 1937 must form part of our mental processes when we inquire into the meaning of the twentieth century for European civilization.

This became clear at the latest by the time of the demise of the Soviet Union, since that demise has been accompanied by a fundamental struggle to recapture our historical memory. The Soviet topography of terror was charted for the first time; for the first time the names and portraits of hitherto nameless victims were published and memorials were erected. This process is far from complete, and will only be completed if and when in the not too distant future Lubianka, that symbol of infinite contempt for human beings and murderous violence in the centre of Moscow, is transformed into a museum and a place of remembrance.

It must be said that this book is a latecomer when you consider the vast stream of sourcebooks, memoirs and new research on this subject. But in fact it may actually have come too soon, if we remember that it involves disentangling one of the most perplexing knots of recent European history. If its publication has taken so long in my own case, this is not because of any intellectual inhibition on my part, but rather because of the helplessness I felt in the face of a historical event in which all simple distinctions and causal relationships seem to evaporate. Never before have I felt so strongly that language fails to do justice to the monstrous events of the age. Never before have I been as acutely conscious of the limits of historical discourse as in the present endeavour to bring together the extremes of the terror and the dream in a synchronous narrative. But one must perhaps have been rendered speechless in order to be at all able to start work on this labour of reimagining the past.