moral lessons drawn from life and class hatred for his prisoners:
What is Soviet power, I ask you? It is an organ of coercion! Understand? Say, for example, we are sitting here and talking, and two policemen knock at the door: ‘Come with us!’ they say. And that’s that! That’s Soviet power! They can take you away and put you in prison – for nothing. And whether you’re an enemy or not, you won’t persuade anybody of your innocence. That’s how it is. I get orders to guard prisoners. Should I believe these orders or should I believe you? Maybe I feel sorry for you, maybe I don’t, but what can I do? When you kill a pig you don’t feel sorry for it when it squeals. And even if I did feel sorry for somebody, how could I help them? When we were retreating from the front in the war, we had to abandon wounded soldiers, knowing they would die. We felt sorry, but what could we do? In the camp I guarded mothers with sick children. They cried and cried. But what could I do? They were being punished for their husbands. But that was not my business. I had my work to do. They say that a son does not answer for his father, but a mother answers for her husband. And if that husband is an enemy of the people, then what sort of son could the mother be raising? There were lots of children in the camp. But what could I do? It was bad for them. But maybe they were better off without mothers like that. Those enemies were really parasites. They had trips abroad. They were always showing off, with their music and their dachas and their finery. And the poor people were hungry, they had no fat, they lived worse than animals. So who’s the enemy of the people? Why should I cry for anyone? Besides, my job did no one any harm. I did a service for the government.47
Ivan Korchagin, Karaganda, 1988
During the period of glasnost in the late 1980s, when the role of the Gulag administrators began to be debated in the public media, many former guards wrote letters to ex-prisoners asking them to confirm for the historical record that they had been kind and decent to them in the camp. One such guard was Mikhail Iusipenko. Iusipenko was born in 1905 to the family of a landless labourer in Akmolinsk. He had only three years of rural schooling before the outbreak of the First World War and the departure of his father for the army forced him to go out to work. His father never returned from the war. During the 1920s, Iusipenko worked as a farm hand to support his mother and his younger brothers and sisters. He lost his wife and their two children in the famine of 1931. From 1934, Iusipenko was a Party worker in Karaganda, the administrative centre of the Gulag camps in Kazakhstan. He was soon recruited by the NKVD, which appointed him the Deputy Commandant of the ALZhIR labour camp near Akmolinsk. During his five years at the camp, from 1939 to 1944, Iusipenko allegedly raped a large number of the female prisoners, but there was no criminal investigation of his activities, only lots of rumours, which, it seems, began to trouble Iusipenko in the years of the Khrushchev thaw. Between 1961 and 1988, Iusipenko wrote to several hundred former prisoners, including many children of the women who had died since their release from ALZhIR, asking them to write a testimonial about his good conduct. He received testimonials from twenty-two of these women, who wrote to say that
Mikhail Iusipenko, Karaganda, 1988
they remembered him as a kind and decent man, certainly compared to many of the other guards at the ALZhIR labour camp (several of these testimonials were written by women who were said to be among his rape victims). In 1988, after an article about the ALZhIR camp in the newspaper
Many former Gulag officials invented similar myths about their past. Pavel Drozdov, Chief Accountant of the Planning Section and Inspector of the Dalstroi Gulag complex, was arrested in 1938 and later sentenced to fifteen years in the labour camps of Magadan. After his release in 1951, he remained in Magadan as a voluntary worker, and was soon joined by his wife and son. According to the story Pavel told his son, the former Gulag chief had been nothing but a humble specialist with no real authority in the Dalstroi Trust, which managed the camps. The tale had an element of truth in so far as, after the arrest of his patron Eduard Berzin, the head of the Dalstroi Trust, in 1937, Pavel had been demoted to the rank of simple accountant – his own arrest following shortly thereafter. Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, Pavel began to carry out research for his memoirs of the Dalstroi Trust. His aim was to honour Berzin’s memory by presenting him as a visionary economic reformer and as a humane and enlightened man. But some of Pavel’s correspondence with former Dalstroi prisoners disturbed him deeply. He had not realized, or had somehow banished from his mind, the full extent of the human suffering over which he had presided in the Planning Section of the Dalstroi Trust. Pavel had a series of heart attacks. On medical advice, he gave up writing his memoirs. The truth about his past was too upsetting to confront. Pavel died in 1967. His son continues to believe that his father was a blameless bureaucrat, a mere accountant in the Dalstroi Gulag complex at a time when Berzin ran it ‘in a relatively humane and progressive way’, who fell victim to the Stalinist regime.49
The intermingling of myth and memory sustains every family, but it played a special role in the Soviet Union, where millions of lives were torn apart. Psychoanalysis suggests that trauma victims can benefit from placing their experiences in the context of a broader narrative, which gives them meaning and purpose. Unlike the victims of the Nazi war against the Jews, for whom there could be no redeeming narrative, the victims of Stalinist repression had two main collective narratives in which to place their own life-stories and find some sort of meaning for their ordeals: the survival narrative, as told in the memoir literature of former Gulag prisoners, in which their suffering was transcended by the human spirit of the survivor; and the Soviet narrative, in which that suffering was redeemed by the Communist ideal, the winning of the Great Patriotic War, or the achievements of the Soviet Union.
The Gulag memoirs published in the decades after Khrushchev’s thaw have had a powerful impact on the way that ordinary people remember their own family history in the Stalin period. Their influence has rested partly on the way that trauma victims deal with their own memories. As psychoanalysts have shown, people with traumatic memories tend to block out parts of their own past. Their memory becomes fragmentary, organized by a series of disjointed episodes (such as the arrest of a parent or the moment of eviction from their home) rather than by a linear chronology. When they try to reconstruct the story of their life, particularly when their powers of recall are weakened by old age, such people tend to make up for the gaps in their own memory by drawing on what they have read, or what they have heard from others with experiences similar to theirs.50 In the opening pages of his memoirs, written in the 1970s, Alexander Dolgun, a US consul clerk arrested for ‘espionage’ in 1948 and imprisoned in a labour camp in Kazakhstan, explained these lapses in his memory:
Most of my story is what I actually remember, but some is what must have been. There are episodes and faces and words and sensations burned so deeply into my memory that no amount of time will wear them away. There are other times when I was so exhausted because they never let me sleep or so starved or beaten or burning with fever or drugged with cold that everything was blurred, and now I can only put together what must have happened by setting out to build a connection across these periods.
Although he claimed to have an ‘extremely good memory’, Dolgun had ‘absolutely no recall’ of a two-week period between leaving Moscow on a convict train and starting work in a stone quarry in the camp in Kazakhstan.51
To fill these gaps people borrowed from each other’s memories. Many of the scenes described by amateur memorists of the Stalin period bear a striking resemblance to scenes in well-known books about the Terror such as Yevgeniia Ginzburg’s
