Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

During Yeltsin’s years in power, the Russian government did almost nothing for the still-living victims of Stalin’s regime or to commemorate those who had perished in the Gulag. On October 30, 1999 (the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Persecution in Russia), Moscow Memorial summarized the situation. In the last ten years, there has been no serious government help for the victims; the full list of names of the arrested, imprisoned, and executed persons was not disclosed; the KGB/FSB archives continued to be closed to independent research; the location of only 20–30 percent of the mass graves of the executed was officially released; no memorials to the victims of the terror were erected; and no information about the Soviet terror was included in textbooks on Russian history. 48Memorial’s final conclusion: “On the whole, the authorities do not pay any attention to the problems of the totalitarian past.”

The National Memorial in remembrance of Stalin’s victims that was planned in 1989–1990 has never been built. I doubt it ever will be. On the contrary, under Putin, for the first time since his death in 1953, Stalin was commemorated by a plaque attached to a wall at the Kremlin Palace in Moscow. 49Simultaneously, a special 100-ruble coin with the faces of the “Big Three”—Stalin, former U.S. president Harry Truman, and former British prime minister Winston Churchill—was minted. 50It is not surprising that Russian human rights activists were extremely concerned. Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the democratic party Yabloko, wrote on January 30, 2001:

The most characteristic trait of today’s government, which it unabashedly demonstrates, is the absence of any notion of the value of human life, any idea that there are inalienable rights and freedoms. It is senseless to try to explain this to the authorities: They don’t allow these simple ideas into their consciousness… 51

The foundation of a new political system is being laid—a twenty-first-century national socialism. There is no guarantee that in this neo-Stalinist Russia, controlled by secret services and the military, new “Mairanovskys” and “Muromtsevs” will not test on humans—for instance, on the Chechen rebels or other targets—the sophisticated chemical compounds and genetically engineered biological products developed with the help of scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

1. Josephson, Paul R., Totalitarian Science and Technology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996); Krementsov, Nikolai, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Tolz, Vera, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionals and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Roberg, Jeffrey L., Soviet Science Under Control: The Struggle for Influence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Kolchinsky, Eduard I., V poiskakh sovetskogo “soyuza” filosofii i biologii [In Search of the Soviet “Union” Between Philosophy and Biology] (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999) (in Russian); Romanovsky, Sergei I., Nauka pod gnyotom rossiiskoi istorii [Science Under the Pressure of Russian History] (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo St. Petersburgskogo Universiteta, 1999) (in Russian).

2. Kandel, F., Essays on Events in the History of Russian Jews (Until the Second Part of the Eighteenth Century) (Jerusalem: Tarbut, 1988) (in Russian).

3. See documents from the Police Department Archive currently kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, published in Volkov, A. V., and M. V. Kulikova, “Rossiiskaya professura: ‘pod kolpakom’ u vlasti” [Russian Professors: Under surveillance of the authorities], Vestnik Instituta Istorii Estestvoznaniya i Tekhniki 2 (1994): 65–75 (in Russian). The similarity between the Police Department documents and those from the VCheKa/KGB files is striking.

4. See, for instance, Chapter 4 (“The Bolsheviks and the Intelligentsia”) in Koenker, Diane P., William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 239–318.

5. See, for instance, Heller, Mikhail, and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, translated from Russian by Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit Books, 1986), pp. 114–136, 211–221.

6. Kokurin, A. I., and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka: VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB, 1917–1960, Spravochnik [Lubyanka: VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB, 1917–1960, a Reference Book] (Moscow: MFD, 1997) (in Russian).

7. Smirnov, Mikhail B., ed., Systema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1960: Spravochnik [The System of Correction Labor Camps in the USSR, 1917–1960: A Reference Book] (Moscow: Zven’ya, 1998) (in Russian).

8. Petrov, Nikita V., and Konstantin V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941: Spravochnik [Who Directed the NKVD, 1934–1941: A Reference Book] (Moscow: Zven’ya, 1999) (in Russian).

9. On Lysenko, see, for instance, Medvedev, Zhores A., The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Popovsky, Mark, The Vavilov Affair (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984); Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1986); Graham, Loren R., Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 102–156; and Soyfer, Valery N., Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, trans. L. Gruliow and R. Gruliow (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

10. About Memorial and its work, see Adler, Nanci, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993); Hochschild, Adam, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York: Viking, 1994), pp. 17–20, 24–27, 40, 121, 139.

11. GULAG is the Russian acronym for the Main Directorate of [Labor] Camps, Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, within the OGPU (i.e., United State Directorate under the Council of Commissars, or SOVNARKOM), which in 1934 became the NKVD (Commissariat of Internal Affairs). The GULAG system of labor camps was established on April 25, 1930, for economic purposes, i.e., as a source of slave labor. It united separate systems of camps and prisons that existed under the OGPU and NKVD. Later, many additional separate systems of labor camps were created within the NKVD, which in 1946 became the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs): the Main Directorate of Camps for Railroad Building, the Main Directorate of Camps for Roads Building, the Main Directorate of Camps for the Mining and Metallurgic Industry, the Main Directorate of Camps for Logging, the Main Directorate for Building at the Far North (Dalstroi), etc. Practically all types of Soviet industry had their own systems of labor camps (see details in Jacobson, Michael, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Camp System 1917–1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993); Jacobson, M., and M. B. Smirnov, “Systema mest zaklyucheniya v RFSR i SSSR, 1917–1930” [The imprisonment system in the RSFR and USSR, 1917–1930], in Smirnov, Systema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei, pp. 10–24; Smirnov, M. B., S. P. Sigachev, and D. V. Shkapov, “Systema mest zaklyucheniya v SSSR, 1929–1960” [The imprisonment system in the USSR, 1929–1960], in Smirnov, Systema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei, pp. 25–74; Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, pp. 76–142. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his book The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the word “Gulag” became a generic name for the whole system of slave labor of political prisoners in the Soviet Union.