Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History, recipient of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, reported on the generation of Russians born in the early 1980s who told her “what it was to grow up in a country that was opening up and to come of age in a society shutting down.” Just as these Russians were finally getting answers to questions about the terrors inflicted by Soviet regime on its own people, Vladimir Putin began his crackdown on political dissent and blocked access to government archives.
Gessen continues, “The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how. The regime aimed to annihilate personal and historical memory and the academic study of society.” The Future Is History integrates historical narrative, long form journalism, and suggestive digressions into an engaging text loyal to its moral urgencies.
Now, in Never Remember, Gessen offers nine linked essays specifically about the erasure of memory, the disabling of a people’s ability or desire to recover it, and the arduous trek toward the truth. But first, she establishes the scope of the violence:
Between the early 1930s and the late 1950s tens of millions of Soviet citizens and thousands of foreigners were incarcerated and the hundreds of camps, prisons, and colonies that made up the Gulag. Millions died … The terror killed people who belonged to the Party and those who objected against it, those who were deemed unreliable because of their national or class provenance and those who transgressed against increasingly stringent rules. But most of all, it killed people without rhyme or reason. The Soviet killing machine was the biggest in a century of killing machines, and the most effective because it inspired fear in an entire population, which knew: no one was exempt.
As Gessen notes, post-war Germans confronted the crimes of Nazi Germany but only because the Allies imposed a process of confrontation with the evidence. But the Gulag’s camps, run by Soviet administrators, were filled with Soviet people who simply disappeared. The horror stayed in-house and was shunted to the darkest recesses. Yet the first person she goes searching for in Never Remember is the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who vanished from Hungary on January 17, 1945. Wallenberg had used his influence to create safehouses for and issue passports to Jews. Having examined documents in the Jewish Museum in Moscow and other institutions, Gessen must conclude that the location and date of Wallenberg’s death remain a mystery. If a prominent Swedish diplomat’s death can’t be verified, how will an ordinary Russian find out where the body of her father is buried?
What Gessen does find are statues. Depending on whether it was a time of historical revision or brutal repression, the statues of various figures were erected in public places or removed to back lots. These “open-air warehouses,” she says, reflect “a time when Russia had turned away from the project of examining its past. The new attitude toward Soviet history was one of nostalgia. The treatment of ‘monumental propaganda’ was a preview of Russian propaganda to come: Its guiding principle is one of cacophany. Everything means nothing and something. Nothing is morally clear … Any story can be spun, but no one story … can take hold.” And also: “It is the nature of propaganda to try to be ubiquitous.”
The comparison between Putin’s communications strategy and Trump’s tweet storms becomes unavoidable, not that Gessen ever names it. But her prose is made tense by the present site of its speaking. The assault on memory, the scheduling of lies, and the kidnapping of language result in the erosion of democratic values.
In “The Bodies in the Forest,” Gessen follows those thousands of people who have made efforts since the mid-1950s to discover what happened to their relatives and friends. When perestroika and glasnost sprung up during the political thaw of the 1980s, Memorial Societies were established to aid in the search. One trail of rumors and puzzle pieces led to Solovaki (Solovetsky Islands), an archipelago in the White Sea 200 kilometers northwest of Arkangel’sk. Gessen takes us to the site of burial at Sandarmokh – as many as 9,000 bodies were dumped in mass graves. She was there on October 27,1997, at a commemorative ceremony with the survivors.
Gessen also made a trip to Kolyma, favored by Stalin for his most notorious Gulag camps. Here in Russia’s easternmost lands, Gessen visited in 1999 with a geologist named Inna Gribanova. “There was talk of creating a museum at Butugychag,” she writes. “Gribanova was opposed. Why spend money on a place no one was ever going to visit … She was concerned with something else: bones. She heard from people, and then went and saw for herself, that there were human bones strewn everywhere over the former camp grounds.” When Gessen recently returned there, each of the persons she interviewed for her essay were later interrogated by Putin’s secret police.
Gessen’s plaintive reporting is framed and enshadowed by Misha Friedman’s somber black-and-white photographs. The remnants of the Gulag are rotting away – yet strangely persistent in places while engulfed by the vast spaces of Siberia – and the vast melancholy of Gessen’s essential writing. At one point, she quotes Milan Kundera from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — “They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past …” I was reminded of another statement by Kundera from one of his essays, a notion that must haunt even a most committed journalist like Gessen:
Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressability (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.
[Published by Columbia Global Reports on March 20, 2018. 159 pages, $27.99 hardcover/$24.99 e-book]