The Whisperers

Archipelago (1973). Though both of these books, originally published in the West, did not officially come out in Russia until the late 1980s, they circulated widely through samizdat long before, helping to give rise to a boom in amateur memoir-writing from that time.* It is not clear if the scenes that figure in these memoirs represent a direct memory, as opposed to what the writer surmises took place or imagines ‘must have happened’, because others wrote about such episodes. Irina Sherbakova, who interviewed many Gulag survivors in the 1980s, suggests how this borrowing of memories occurred:

Over many decades, life in the Gulag gave birth to endless rumours, legends, and myths, the most common being about famous people – long believed to have been executed in Moscow – who were said to have been seen by someone in some far distant camp somewhere. There were constantly recurring themes and details in such stories. For example, at least four women described to me exactly the same scene: how, many years later, when they were able to look in a mirror again and see themselves, the first image they saw was the face of their own mother. As early as the 1970s, I recognized incidents recounted to me orally that exactly matched scenes described in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or in other printed recollections. By now [in 1992] story-telling about the camps has become so general that recording oral memory has become much more difficult. The vast amount of information pouring out of people often seems to happen through an immolation of their own memories to the point where it begins to seem as if everything they know happened to them personally.52

Many Gulag survivors insist that they witnessed scenes described in books by Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov, that they recognize the guards or NKVD interrogators mentioned in these works, or even that they knew the writers in the camps, when documentation clearly shows that this could not be so.53

There are a number of reasons why Gulag survivors borrowed published recollections in this way. In the 1970s and 1980s, when books like The Gulag Archipelago circulated in samizdat, many victims of Stalinist repression identified so strongly with their ideological position, which they took to be the key to understanding the truth about the camps, that they suspended their own independent memories and allowed these books to speak for them. The victims of repression frequently lacked a clear conceptual grasp of their own experience, having no structural framework or understanding of the political context in which to make sense of their memories. This gap reinforced their inclination to substitute these writers’ coherent and clear memories for their own confused and fragmentary recollections. As one historian has observed from the experience of interviewing survivors of the Great Terror:

Should you ask the seemingly straightforward question ‘How many people did you know who were arrested in 1937?’, the response would probably be one of wide-eyed amazement, ‘Haven’t you read Solzhenitsyn? Don’t you know that everyone was arrested?’ If you continue with: ‘But were any members of your family arrested?’, there may well be a pause… ‘Well, no, not in my family, but everybody else was.’ Then you ask: ‘How many people were arrested in the communal apartment you lived in?’ There’s a very long pause, followed by, ‘Well, hmm, I don’t really remember, but yes, yes there was one, Ivanov, who lived in the room down at the end, yes, now I remember.’54

This example shows why oral testimonies, on the whole, are more reliable than literary memoirs, which have usually been seen as a more authentic record of the past. Like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable, but, unlike a book, it can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones.

The published Gulag memoirs influenced not only the recollection of scenes and people, but the very understanding of the experience. All the memoirs of the Stalin Terror are reconstructed narratives by survivors.55 The story they tell is usually one of purgatory and redemption – a journey through the ‘hell’ of the Gulag and back again to ‘normal life’ – in which the narrator transcends death and suffering. This uplifting moral helps to account for the compelling influence of these literary memoirs on the way that other Gulag survivors recalled their own stories. Ginzburg’s memoirs, in particular, became a model of the survivor narrative and her literary structure was copied by countless amateur memoirists with life-stories not unlike her own. The unifying theme of Ginzburg’s memoirs is regeneration through love – a theme which gives her writing powerful effect as a work of literature. Ginzburg explains her survival in the camps as a matter of her faith in human beings; the flashes of humanity she evokes in others, and which help her to survive, are a response to her faith in people. In the first part of her memoirs, Into the Whirlwind, Ginzburg highlights her work in a nursery at Kolyma where caring for the children reminds her of her son and gives her the strength to go on. In the second part, Within the Whirlwind (1981), Ginzburg is transferred from the nursery to a hospital, where she falls in love with a fellow prisoner serving as a doctor in the camp. Despite the anguish of repeated separations, they both survive and somehow keep in touch until Stalin’s death; freed but still in exile from the major Russian cities, they get married and adopt a child.56 This narrative trajectory is endlessly repeated in the memoir literature. The uniformity of such ‘family chronicles’ and ‘documentary tales’, which are virtually identical in their basic structure, in their form and moral tone, is remarkable and cannot be explained by literary fashion on its own. Perhaps these memoirists, who all lived such extraordinary lives, felt some need to link their destiny to that of others like themselves by recalling their life-story according to a literary prototype.

The Soviet narrative offered a different type of consolation, assuring the victims that their sacrifices had been in the service of collective goals and achievements. The idea of a common Soviet purpose was not just a propaganda myth. It helped people to come to terms with their suffering by giving them a sense that their lives were validated by the part they had played in the struggle for the Soviet ideal.

The collective memory of the Great Patriotic War was very potent in this respect. It enabled veterans to think of their pain and losses as having a larger purpose and meaning, represented by the victory of 1945, from which they took pride. The historian Catherine Merridale, who conducted interviews with veterans in Kursk for her book on the Soviet army in the war, found that they did not speak about their experiences with bitterness or self- pity, but accepted all their losses stoically, and that ‘rather than trying to relive the grimmest scenes of war, they tended to adopt the language of the vanished Soviet state, talking about honour and pride, of justified revenge, of motherland, Stalin, and the absolute necessity of faith’. As Merridale explains, this identification with the Soviet war myth was a coping mechanism for these veterans, enabling them to live with their painful memories:

Back then, during the war, it would have been easy enough to break down, to feel the depth of every horror, but it would also have been fatal. The path to survival lay in stoical acceptance, a focus on the job at hand. The men’s vocabulary was businesslike and optimistic, for anything else might have induced despair. Sixty years later, it would have been easy again to play for sympathy or simply to command attention by telling bloodcurdling tales. But that, for these people, would have amounted to a betrayal of the values that have been their collective pride, their way of life.57

People who returned from the labour camps similarly found consolation in the Stalinist idea that, as Gulag labourers, they too had made a contribution to the Soviet economy. Many of these people later looked back with enormous pride at the factories, dams and cities they had built. This pride stemmed in part from their continued belief in the Soviet system and its ideology, despite the injustices they had been dealt, and in part, perhaps, from their need to find a larger meaning for their suffering. In Within the Whirlwind Ginzburg recalls her impression on her return to Magadan, a city which was built by her fellow prisoners in the Kolyma camps:

How strange is the heart of man! My whole soul cursed those who had thought up the idea of building a town in this permafrost, thawing out the ground with the blood and tears of innocent people. Yet at the same time I was aware of a sort of ridiculous pride… How it had grown, and how handsome it had become during my seven years of absence, our Magadan! Quite unrecognizable. I admired each street lamp, each section of asphalt, and even the poster announcing that the House of Culture was presenting the operetta The Dollar Princess. We treasure each fragment of our life, even the bitterest.58

Norilsk, July 2004

In Norilsk this pride continues to be strongly felt among the older segments of the city’s population (approximately 130,000 people), which consists largely of former Gulag prisoners and their