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For more than 20 years, one organisation has been chronicling in detail Stalin's mass terror. In Vladimir Putin's bling-charged autocratic Russia, that is no easy task. The offices of Memorial are regularly raided by so-called tax inspectors and other assorted thugs. But its groups of volunteer archivists and historians plug away in a society increasingly eager to "move on" and impervious to state-sponsored violence.
- The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin
- by Stephen F. Cohen
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- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
- Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
Russia's seeming inability to come to terms with its past, particularly the butchery of the Stalin era, is the theme of Stephen Cohen's commendable new book, The Victims Return. Cohen has visited and worked in the country from Brezhnev's time of "stagnation" to the present day. He came to know some of the offspring of the "zeks" – the millions taken away to labour camps, most of whom were either shot or died under the harsh conditions.
Thanks to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eugenia Ginzburg and others, the horrors finally became known to all. Cohen's book is not a history of the camps, but a history of the survivors and their legacy. Why was it that many surviving inmates subsequently joined the Communist party or tried to do so? "For some… membership was mainly a way of obtaining a better apartment, job, pension and other state benefits," Cohen writes. "For others, it was an affirmation of complete exoneration."
The prospects for rehabilitation – even the barest sign of acceptance: the right to live in Moscow or Leningrad, for example – depended on each regime that followed Stalin. For a brief spring under Nikita Khrushchev, victims, or the sons and daughters of victims, found themselves accepted again, some even gaining high political office. The Soviet leader took huge political risks in repudiating his predecessor. In so doing, he was not only undermining the ideological underpinning of the state but challenging pretty much everyone in any position of authority. Cohen quotes Khrushchev as saying: "I have blood on my hands up to my elbows."
Once Khrushchev was seen off, Brezhnev rehabilitated Stalinism. Cohen quotes a senior Kremlin official of the time as instructing historians: "All – and I repeat all – stages in the development of our Soviet society must be regarded as positive."
It fell to Gorbachev to try to complete Khrushchev's work. In two years, he exonerated more than a million people. Cohen describes how important these letters were to families still craving acceptance half a century later. In 1988, the Memorial Society was established. Endorsed by Gorbachev, it sought to identify and commemorate the dead, but also to help the dwindling number of survivors. As once-closed cities were being opened, so information about the past came to light in newspapers and even on state-run television.
After 1991, and the formal demise of communist power, all remaining victims were rehabilitated. "The state that had raised, arrested and then liberated Stalin's victims ceased to exist," Cohen observes. In the chaotic but invigorating first years of Yeltsin, when the old rules were torn up, this thirst for historical accuracy continued. As Cohen points out, the economic theft that took place in the 90s led to a desire for order and the arrival of Vladimir Putin in 2000.
Yet Cohen's bizarre indulgence towards Putin, both in this book and in his jounalism, detracts from his authority when talking about dissent and human rights. Yes, Solzhenitsyn was given a quasi-state funeral. Yes, in a small number of highbrow papers with low circulations, a modicum of criticism is aired. But Putin's grappling with the past is not "contradictory", as Cohen asserts. It is worse than that. Russia is locked in historical denial – made smoother by sushi, Cartier and private jets – at least for some.
John Kampfner is the author of Blair's Wars and Freedom for Sale
Comments
10 June 2012 12:53AM
‘Yet Cohen's bizarre indulgence towards Putin’
Thank you John Kampfner for catching not so loyal employee of British propaganda entertainment industry.
10 June 2012 6:23AM
Naah, John Kampfner, you're confusing denial with Stockholm syndrome - of those old enough to experience the Soviet Union, yet still too young to die. Communists here don't deny anything backed by documents. What they do is insisting that sacrifices are necessary. The same old generation tries very hard to convince their grandchildren (bypassing a generation here) of Stalin's necessary evil to maintain order.
The best way to defeat Stalin is to ensure that what the old people regard as disorder and chaos (sushi, Cartier and private jets) are accessible to many youth, that it can be regulated and doesn't harm. Remember Pink Floyd's The Wall and the teacher mentioned in it? Wasn't that how 'Western' values conquered post-WW2 Europe?
So, how do we regulate this elephant-in-the-room of yours and let the youth of urban and rural poor appreciate Cartier and private jets, and differentiate fresh sushi from frozen fish? So far, through criminal and corrupt channels. This is where Putin's so called regime is weak. Yes, Russia has problems, but you shouldn't be an amateur, John Kampfner. It's not about denial.
10 June 2012 7:06AM
With all my respect to the Stalin's personal achievements including the leadership in GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR (or WWII) I have personal ordeal that includes my beaten and shoot Grandfather, little Mother in jail with the Grandmother on daily interrogations, orphanage for aunt and auntie and nice but distant Novosibirsk exile for home. But though Stalin could be blamed for the whole I am averted that the actual murderers and jail guards, evil informers-slanderers, small party leaders - the cruel cowards and the rest of scum that raised to power these days got never charged. There were never Nuremberg for them though many should be hanged for millions of dead, for millions of crippled lives and people dreams that were never realized.
10 June 2012 7:32AM
"uncle and aunt" I meant. sorry for typo.
I hope all the Stalin's hangmen are in Hell
10 June 2012 10:03AM
My mother's family also endured deportation to Northern Kazakhstan, 10 years jail (my unkle) and heaps of hardship... Curiously, they never held it against Stalin, and thet weren't brainwashed.
Do you really think that millions of NKVD officers, informers, etc. should have been shot to avenge millions dead or affected by them? Certainly, many of those deserved it, but we would have repeated the horrors of 1937 trying to witch hunt those who colaborated with Beria.
10 June 2012 1:44PM
What about that other country that is locked in historical denial? The story of British slavery is one of the greatest untold stories in UK history. It's a subject people don't talk about, with most Brits knowing more about slavery in the Deep South of the US.
Yet, there are a lot of British aristocratic families that owe their wealth to this repugnant trade. The British rentier class that made its riches from slavery has no interest in exposing this part of British history, in fact a few of them are so close to the British government that even British Labour PM, Tony Blair, refused to apologise for slavery.
BBC: 10 things about British slavery
10 June 2012 10:20PM
article : "Russia's seeming inability to come to terms with its past, particularly the butchery of the Stalin era, is the theme of Stephen Cohen's commendable new book, The Victims Return."
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hehe...what a desire of some western "writers" for Russia to be Stalinist (so that to have it as a permanent "boy for beating up" )...Funnily that even in Soviet times after famous Khrushchev speach of 1956 and execution of all the top leadership of Stalinist NKVD-KGB (including Beria and all his deputies - 9 KGB generals alltogeather) for crimes of "purges" and Gulag - after 55 years - they still claim that Russia somehow in love with Stalinist reprssions - its not enough for them that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Medvedev and Putin REPETEDLY called Stalin's actions as crime against peoples , they still want just WANT Russia to be Stalinist so that they can have it as "legitimate" target of their hate...hu !!!
10 June 2012 10:30PM
well, brits liek it others to be bad guys - they like to remind everybody about Holodomor, but forget about artificial famine they "doctored" in Bengalia that costed lifes of 3 milion locals in 1942-43, they like to talk about Chechnya, but forget about massacre of several millions Mau-Mau rfebels in Kenia in 1954 and Gulag system they implemented there, threy forget that British Empire was a segregational and racist system where citisens in India never had the same rights as citisens in Britain (it is in contrast to Soviet Empire where ALL were equal - even in poorty and despair) etc.etc. They (Brits and Americans) will never change...but we should know who they are.
10 June 2012 10:47PM
article : "Once Khrushchev was seen off, Brezhnev rehabilitated Stalinism
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but that above is blunt lies. Brezhnev NEVER rehabilitated Stalinism - my childhood was those Brezhnev years - Stalin's name was forbidden even to pronounce in schools or in press...Every Russian of my age knows that
10 June 2012 11:02PM
article : "Russia is locked in historical denial "
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denial of what? that Stalin commited mass crimes? - Putin stated it several times - here is one of exact quotations :
""There was repression. This is a fact. Millions of our citizens suffered from this. And this way of running a state, to achieve a result, is not acceptable. It is impossible.
Certainly, in this period we encountered not only a cult of personality, but a massive crime against our own people. This is also a fact. And we must not forget this." -Vladimir Putin
May it be that those are some propaganda people in the west who are in denial of something about Russia, eh?....
11 June 2012 12:09PM
No.
Greatest slavers in the world?? The Arabs. That Great Britain did more than any other country in the world to eradicate and abolish the slave trade is an extremely well substantiated and documented fact.
Ah so the fact that there was a World War going on, that, there had been a succession of poor rice harvests since 1940, that the traditional rice growing areas in Bengal had been virtually wiped out by three cyclones and that Bengal's main source of imported rice - Burma - was occupied by the Japanese had nothing to do with it??
Several millions massacred eh?? Bit difficult to swallow when you consider that the population of Kenya was only around 7 million people at the time. I think it was roughly 70,000 Kenyans imprisoned, 12,000 Mau-Mau rebels killed.
To ABOCbKA & rexo ever heard of the crime of "democide"?? It describes the willful and deliberate killing of ones own citizens by a State or regime. "Democide" does not include those killed in time of war. The list of Top Ten Democides in History going back to Genghis Khan account for the deaths of 189million people all killed by their own rulers.
In that Top Ten List there is not one single British Prime Minister or one single US President. There are, however, four Communist Leaders mentioned and they collectively account for 122million out of the 189million total - Pretty good going don't you think?
The greatest democide in the history of the world was Chairman Mao, the person who comes second top of that "Top Ten" List is Joseph Stalin.
11 June 2012 3:22PM
Gamebird: "I think it was roughly 70,000 Kenyans imprisoned"
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"Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them
New evidence of British colonial atrocities has not changed our national ability to disregard it
George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012
There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.
Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".
Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.
Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a HALF MILLION people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.
The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.
Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.
Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice.
11 June 2012 3:28PM
in previous post I tries to stress with capital letters the numbers, but stressed only partg of the figure - if you read the text - it is the following : "Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the ENTIRE population of ONE AND A HALF MILLION people"
so as you see I stressed only "half" instead of ONE AND A HALF !!!
here is the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities
11 June 2012 3:47PM
Gamebird wrote : "To ABOCbKA & rexo ever heard of the crime of "democide"?? It describes the willful and deliberate killing of ones own citizens by a State or regime."
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oh, thank you for explanation - am I right that you mean this below? :
from TIME magazine
"In 1943, some 3 million brown-skinned subjects of the Raj died in the Bengal famine, one of history's worst. Mukerjee delves into official documents and oral accounts of survivors to paint a horrifying portrait of how Churchill, as part of the Western war effort, ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia. And he did so with a churlishness that cannot be excused on grounds of policy: Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet. (See the top 10 weird government secrets.)
British imperialism had long justified itself with the pretense that it was conducted for the benefit of the governed. Churchill's conduct in the summer and fall of 1943 gave the lie to this myth. "I hate Indians," he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for "breeding like rabbits."
As Mukerjee's accounts demonstrate, some of India's grain was also exported to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to meet needs there, even though the island wasn't experiencing the same hardship; Australian wheat sailed past Indian cities (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans; and offers of American and Canadian food aid were turned down. India was not permitted to use its own sterling reserves, or indeed its own ships, to import food.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html#ixzz1xUoZO3Kf
11 June 2012 4:14PM
Gamebird wrote : "The list of Top Ten Democides in History going back to Genghis Khan account for the deaths of 189million people all killed by their own rulers.
In that Top Ten List there is not one single British Prime Minister or one single US President."
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may it be because those lists were written in UK or USA? You see, it is well known that only in USA about 12 million Indians (first nations people) were exterminated and about 20 million black slaves were killed both while transporting across Atlantics, then on the territory of USA while being transported to plantations and also those killed on plantations - we don't even mention here numbers killed by Brits in east-India - it is once you mentioned that there were no American Presidents in your lists that I mention situation in USA - you may say it was 19 centuy, right?- but, come om - you started with Gengiz Khan, right?....If your country has big population then even number of victims of trafic incidents every year may be bigger then casualties of some wars in betveen smaller countries - so if you want your statistics to be REAL, you should estimate PER CAPITA (or % of entire population) of deaths - in this rspect, well, US Government exterminated 90% (!!!!!) of population of first nations - how about that? Also why you bring Stalin here - my posts are exactly about the fact that Stalin was condemned in Russia (but some westerness don't like it because it doesn't give them opportunity to accuse Russia in supporting atrocities) - in contrast to that you are in denial of your own history and bring here those lists of "demosiders" in which you include everybody (including Gengiz-Khan - poor peacefull Mongols from Ulan-Bator are now supposed to to be bashed, right?), but you deliberatelly don't include your own leaders in your listrs that you are doctoring for your propaganda reasons.
11 June 2012 4:39PM
Gamebird wrote : "In that Top Ten List there is not one single British Prime Minister or one single US President.
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I googled a bit more specially for you so that my figures were not based only on my words, but have some schollar evidence - here is what I googled:
Estimates:
Two studies have been conducted that attempt to number the natives killed by the United States. The first of these was sponsored by the United States government, and while official does not stand up to scrutiny and is therefore discounted (generally); this estimate shows between 1 million to 4 million killed. The second study was not sponsored by the US Government but was done from independent researchers. This study estimated populations and population reductions using later census data. Two figures are given, both low and high, at: between 10 million and 114 million Indians as a direct result of US actions. Please note that Nazi Holocaust estimates are between 6 and 11 million; thereby making the Nazi Holocaust the 2nd largest mass murder of a class of people in history.
REF:
American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992)
God, Greed and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the Centuries: Grenke (New Academia Publishing 2006)
Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies: Cesarani, (Routledge 2004)
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_Native_Americans_were_killed_by_the_US_government#ixzz1xV0sew00
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also I have a question to the author of this article - do you have plans , sir, to write for us the same kind of review to those books mentioned above about atrocities in USA or in British colonies, or it is not your intention....and why...Thank you in advance for your kind answer.
12 June 2012 10:36AM
The article mentions
.
Just how many countries are able to come to terms with their past?
Does the author consider that the UK has come to terms with its own history? As opposed to continuing to cling to notions of its own importance thanks to us once having had the largest empire the world has ever seen?
12 June 2012 6:29PM
It is all very sad though Rexo though thanks for thorough insides as to remember is one way to try to avoid it in the future but chances are scarce... .