Soviet leaders struggled to confront the memory of the repressions on two occasions.  First, in the period immediately following the death of Stalin, and second, three decades later, in the final years of the Soviet Union.  In Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Kathleen Smith argues that on both occupations Soviet leaders hoped that the past could be examined in limited ways to move society forward.  In both periods, conservatives lamented efforts to shine light on the dark spots of the Soviet past, fearful that they or the institutions they administered would be implicated in any fuller accounting of the past.  While conservatives gained the upper hand for most of the history of the Soviet Union, they were never able to silence those who sought to speak out about the injustices of the past and present.  Yet at the very moment that truth telling gained state sanction and unprecedented momentum, the Soviet Union collapsed.  In terms of the media and political participation, the Russian Federation that succeeded the Soviet Union was a dramatically freer and more open society.  But the failure to confront the past deprived the Russian Federation and its people of a vital resource to resist the return to authoritarian rule.  

The repressions is an amorphous term that refers to the human dislocation, famine, and loss of life inflicted by the Soviet state on its people.  It is a term that has antecedents in the Lenin years but is typically restricted to the policies and rule of Stalin.  The classic understanding of the repressions evokes Stalin’s rein of terror  during the 1930s when millions were either executed as enemies of the state or deported to a far flung nextwork of forced labor camps commonly known as the Gulag Archipelago. Yet the repressions went far beyond this conventional understanding.  It is a term which also includes widespread famine, class warfare, and deportations that accompanied collectivization—the eradication of traditional small peasant farms and their replacement with large, mechanized, state-run collective farms.  It is a term that includes a wide variety of ethnic groups, deported to distant regions of the Soviet Union, because of their suspected disloyalty.  To the present day, there is no agreed upon number of victims of the repressions.  Izabella Tabarovsky, of the Kennan Institute, describes Stalin’s repressions as “possibly the largest and least understood crime of the twentieth century.” The fears and suspicions that afflict Russians today, Tabarovsky argues, are connected to the unresolved trauma of the Soviet past.  

Kathleen Smith describes the initial reaction of Soviet leaders to Stalin’s death as one of fear and trepidation.  Bracing for a potential popular backlash, they placed the army on high alert.  When the reaction was the hoped for one of shock, grief and sorrow, Soviet leaders embarked on what Smith labels as a policy of “silent destalinization.”  The state media stopped paying regular homage to Stalin’s greatness as the cult of personality was wound down.  Soon, no mention would be made of Stalin’s birthday.  To safeguard themselves and to make a public statement about the end of the politics of mass terror, Soviet leaders ordered the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, long-time head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who was condemned and later executed for a mix of real and fabricated charges.  Despite Beria’s conviction, millions continued to languish in the sprawling network of forced labor camps commonly known as the Gulag.  

Monuments have no magical powers, even if one could be placed in front of every prison and mass grave, but civic involvement in governing the public realm does preserve private memory as an alternative to official propaganda.  Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR. 

Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, believed that for the Soviet Union to move in a new direction, it was necessary to criticize the Stalinist past. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev denounced the excesses of Stalin’s personality cult and use of terror as a “violation of collective leadership” and a break with Lenin’s use of “persuasion” instead of force.  Smith notes that while Khrushchev denounced the repressions, he diminished their scope and scale and cast the Communist Party as the greatest victim. At the same time he deflected responsibility from the party by arguing that Stalin kept them in the dark, exploited their trust and confidence, and used the politics of fear to silence those even in his closest circles. In a concession to conservatives, still fearful of the possible ramifications of any admission of guilt, Khrushchev gave the speech to a closed session of the congress without discussion, as such it became known as the “Secret Speech.” 

While Khrushchev never initiated any far reaching institutional reforms, he did shatter the notion of party infallibility and ushered in a period of openness and critical reflection known as the Thaw.  The Thaw reached its peak, according to Smith, in the period between 1961 and 1962, when authors like Alexander Solzhenitsyn were allowed to publish accounts about the experience of life in the Gulag.  But these treatments of the past had their limits.  They were supposed to be constructive assessments that would help move society forward rather than scathing indictments of the entire Soviet establishment.  While Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, may have conveyed the horrors of the Gulag, it did so by featuring the noble qualities of the Russian everyman.  Perhaps for the same reasons, when the millions of forced laborers were finally released from the Gulag in the years following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, they were not encouraged to talk about their experience.  While several hundred thousand Gulag prisoners were rehabilitated, the convictions remained in place for the vast majority and continued to stigmatize returnees and their families.  

With Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, conservatives finally gained the upper hand and maintained it for most of the remaining years of the Soviet Union.  Under Leonid Brezhnev, who rose to the top leadership position and retained it until his death in 1982, the number of rehabilitations shrunk to a trickle.  While the party never reversed its earlier decisions, destalinization fell out of favor with the authorities.  Instead of mass terror, the state relied on selective imprisonment, commitment to mental heath asylums, or exile to silence its critics.  Yet even during the Brezhnev era, sometime referred as “The Freeze,” efforts by intellectuals and activists to criticize the past never ceased.  Relying on the privacy of kitchen table conversations, underground self-publishing or “Samizdat” press, and outlets through the foreign press or radio stations such as Radio Free Europe or Voice of America that could broadcast back into the Soviet Union, they continued to disseminate their work.  In fact, when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago, a much more comprehensive critique of the Soviet system, he was sentenced to exile not only for the content of his work but because he leaked it to the foreign media.  

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin, his intention was not to open the floodgates to the past.  But by loosening the reins of control, and like Khrushchev, through his convictions about the possibilities of reform and renewal through constructive criticism, he inadvertently unleashed a tidal wave of popular memory. The memory boom under Gorbachev went far beyond anything experienced during the Khrushchev era.  Although unsanctioned and at the mercy of party support, Gorbachev’s reforms sparked an explosion of clubs specializing in everything from sports to the environment.  In the realm of history, the Memorial Society (later known as Memorial International) became the most prominent organization seeking to preserve the memory and seek justice for the victims of the repressions.  Because of its decentralized structure, Smith notes, Memorial’s members could focus their energy and resources on whatever issues mattered most in their locality.  

In Moscow, Memorial organized a “Week of Conscience” exhibit (see header photo).  Smith comments that the organizers plastered the walls of a small worker’s club with all kinds of material people had sent to Memorial—letters with their family stories, photos of victims, examples of Samizdat literature.  Smith adds that the exhibition even included a wheelbarrow, like those used in the Gulag, which visitors filled with donations to fund the construction of a memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repressions.  It was envisioned that this memorial would be in a centrally located area with special significance.  In Moscow, the Memorial Society placed a boulder from the Solovetsky Islands, the location of the first Soviet concentration camp, opposite the infamous secret police headquarters as a placeholder for a future memorial that was never built.  

In contrast to the Khrushchev era, the memory boom under Gorbachev was tinged with nationalism.  The airing of crimes from Stalinist past, such as the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the annexation of the Baltic states, fueled growing centrifugal forces within the Soviet Union.  Unable to keep pace or control the forces he had set in motion, Gorbachev and ultimately the entire Soviet Union, were swept away in a failed August 1991 hardliner coup to return to the past.  Boris Yeltsin, who emerged as the head of the newly created Russian Federation, the core and largest part of the old Soviet Union, had an opportunity to build on this grassroots memory movement to put the new regime on a more democratic footing.  

Smith cautions that the freedoms of association, press, and speech that existed during the Yeltsin era are worlds removed from those of Russia today.  She adds that while the West could certainly have done more to smooth the transition to democracy, only Russians could do the work of confronting the past and paving the way for a more democratic future.  Yeltsin’s failure to seize the moment to draw a line between the Soviet past and the Russian Federation, to initiate institutional reform or some form of transitional justice, did much to facilitate the rise of Putin’s authoritarian regime and the kind of militaristic zeal we see in Russia today.