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By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, September 24, 2002; Page A01
MOSCOW -- In August 1942, 16-year-old Aldona Voldynskaya was taken from a
Soviet orphanage by Nazi troops and put to work unloading trucks in Germany.
This summer, 60 years later, the German government sent her checks totaling
$2,245 by way of apology for the horrors she endured.
She is still waiting, however, for her own country to make amends.
Like perhaps thousands of Russians still alive today, Voldynskaya suffered
less at Adolf Hitler's hands than at those of the Soviet Union's great
dictator, Joseph Stalin. The KGB secret police executed her father in 1938,
then arrested and imprisoned her mother in a work camp. At age 11,
Voldynskaya was sent to an orphanage for children of "enemies of the people"
until German invaders seized her five years later and shipped her west. When
she returned home after the war, Stalin's police jailed her for concealing
her parents' arrest records.
Russia's redress for the horrors endured by Voldynskaya and others
persecuted under Stalin is a $3 monthly stipend and certain discounts on
rent and utilities. Beyond that, three decades of death and suffering have
been largely relegated to the past, and Stalin's image has even been
somewhat refurbished.
In contrast to Germany's public repentance over Hitler, Stalin still gets a
pass in this huge and long-tortured nation, 49 years after his death ended
the 20th century's longest reign of terror and more than a decade after
Russia abandoned communism and secret police to pursue democracy and the
rule of law. There is no national museum to document the history of Stalin's
crimes. According to Memorial, Russia's leading human rights organization,
official records prove that at least 1 million people were executed for
political offenses, and at least 9 1/2 million more were deported, exiled or
imprisoned in work camps between 1921 and 1953.
Moscow's monument to the victims -- a stone from a prison camp -- is so
modest that few passersby even notice it in a tiny park across from the
former KGB headquarters in downtown Moscow's Lubyanka Square. Access to the
KGB files remains so strictly controlled that even survivors of gulag camps
cannot discover who betrayed them.
Some scholars suggest Russia is too chaotic, degraded and impoverished now
to draw too much attention to the savagery of the leader who once led it to
military and industrial greatness. Others, like Alexander Yakovlev, a former
Politburo member, worry deeply that the lack of contrition means that human
rights is still a foreign notion to the average Russian. They worry that
future Russians might be blind to the narcotic effect of power, whether
wielded by another tyrant or by a Kremlin risen again on the world stage.
Officials of Memorial, initially founded to commemorate victims of political
repression, see in Russia's failure to face Stalin's crimes the seeds of its
blindness toward the documented atrocities of its troops in the war in
Chechnya.
"It is so typical of Russians that people can get very upset when one person
dies, but when millions die, they are indifferent," said Yakovlev, one of
the leading figures behind the economic reforms of perestroika and now the
head of a state commission to clear the names of those persecuted under
communism. "This is thick skin, and I think this is scary. People do not
seem to care whether we confront this chapter of our history or not."
'Proud of Their Heroes'
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin both
denounced Stalin, Yeltsin perhaps most vehemently in 1996 when Communist
Party leader Gennady Zyuganov mounted a strong challenge for the presidency.
But under President Vladimir Putin, the pendulum has swung toward the view
that Stalin deserves some measure of honor.
Putin has authorized the issuance of 500 special silver coins bearing
Stalin's portrait and unveiled a plaque honoring Stalin for his military
leadership. He told Polish reporters this year that though Stalin was a
dictator, "it would be silly to ignore" the fact that he led the Soviet
Union to victory in World War II.
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB, appears to
have taken its cue from its old boss. Last December, Putin, who directed the
FSB from 1998 to 1999, hailed the history of Russia's security services,
saying Russians "should, without shame, be proud of this history, be proud
of their heroes and their achievements." The agency's new calendar shows the
KGB headquarters and Lubyanka Square as they looked in communist times, with
a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, in
the center.
There are limits, however, to the Kremlin's acceptance of the seamy Soviet
past. This month, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov suggested that the 14-ton statue
of Dzerzhinsky, torn down in 1991, be re-erected in the square. A top
Kremlin official objected, saying such a move would be unacceptable to most
Russians.
Still, it is hard to say that Putin doesn't reflect a certain nostalgia
among the Russian people for Stalin, a ruler whom communist propaganda had
elevated to demigod status by the time of his death.
In an opinion poll one year ago, more than half of all Russians surveyed
viewed Stalin with ambivalence or as a positive force; only one-fourth said
he did more harm than good. Communist politicians, the biggest bloc in the
Russian Duma, openly praise Stalin, claiming the mass arrests and executions
under his rule have been vastly exaggerated.
Mark Kramer, director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, says
Russia is not the only nation reluctant to confront a painful past. French
citizens avoid a close look at the Vichy period; many Austrians pretend
their country was a victim of Nazi aggression; Japan often plays down
atrocities of troops in China, Korea and Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s;
and until 30 years ago, the United States ignored slavery in its
reconstruction of colonial life in Williamsburg.
Still, Kramer argues, Russia is particularly unwilling to analyze the years
of terror because its political leaders are Soviet offspring. Although he
condemned Stalin, Yeltsin headed the Communist Party in Sverdlovsk and
Moscow before he became president; Putin worked for 15 years as a KGB agent.
Another explanation is that the Soviet Union's peaceful collapse spared
Russians the painful historical reckoning Germans faced when they lost World
War II and were forced to endure the Nuremberg trials. In Russia, no one
complicit in Stalin's crimes ever stood trial. The Communist Party's
responsibility was briefly aired in Russia's constitutional court in 1992
after Yeltsin tried to ban the party, but the court did not try to assess
guilt.
No Self-Examination
Arseny Roginsky, chairman of the board of Memorial, said activists shunned
trials because many key players in Stalin's massive machine were dead by
1991, and the rest were old. The complicity of millions of ordinary Russians
who informed on their neighbors under withering state pressure also made it
hard to single out villains.
Nor did Russia create a powerful truth-finding commission to document and
draw lessons about the gulag era, as a panel in South Africa did in its 1998
report on 35 years of abuses against blacks. While Yakovlev's commission
gained access to many such documents, it has focused mostly on clearing
victims -- 4.5 million of whom have been rehabilitated -- not on fingering
the guilty.
Now Roginsky says Russia's lack of self-examination was a historic mistake.
"We were fools," he said. "If we had 10 or 20 hearings on such criminals,
then people would have thought about it. But all this discussion at the end
of the 1980s was thrown to the back of people's minds, and then it
disappeared altogether.
"Today, only rare people think about the past."
Yuri Pivovarov, a political science scholar with the Russian Academy of
Sciences, said that neither Russia's leaders nor its people want to look
back. "They think that all this is in the past, and let's not think about
these dark pages of our history. Let's just stick to the concrete tasks of
today," he said.
"People simply do not know their own history," he said. "And that means they
are completely disarmed against any potential dangers."
Efforts to Remember
A few activists, mostly Western-financed, struggle against the tide of
forgetfulness. In Moscow, an 82-year-old historian is trying to turn a
decrepit office building into a museum to Stalin-era victims, and has won
permission from the city to take over a few rooms.
Some gulag exhibits are on display at a museum in western Moscow dedicated
to Andrei Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist
sent into internal exile in 1980. Next to them are blown-up photographs of
civilians killed in Russia's long-running war to subdue the separatist
region of Chechnya.
Yuri Samodurov, the museum's director, said he tried for 12 years to
persuade the Russian government to open a museum to victims of the gulag. He
finally concluded that the government was simply too riven to make a
statement about the past. "Our state has not decided who it wants to be," he
said.
And not just the state. Tatyana Kursina, 53, a former teacher from the Ural
Mountain city of Perm, seeks with her husband Viktor Shmirov to turn one of
Stalin's last labor camps, Perm-36, into a national museum. With $250,000
from Western foundations, they have restored two barracks and scavenged the
ruins of the infamous Kolyma camp, in Russia's far northeast, for tin cans,
tools and other artifacts used by prisoners.
This is a personal crusade: Kursina's mother was a girl when her family was
forced off its land and exiled. Her father, like 1.5 million other Russian
soldiers captured by the German army in World War II, was treated as a
pariah after the war by Stalin's party bureaucrats and forced to work in a
chemical factory far from his home.
But Kursina cannot talk to her 81-year-old mother about her work. Despite
her family's history, her mother still supports the Communist Party and
considers Stalin a great leader.
"She doesn't believe that so many people were in camps. She thinks it is
falsification and exaggeration," Kursina said. "Unfortunately, in our
country, no one has been able to call black, black. So people can choose to
see what they want to see."
Lack of access to KGB files has helped blur the picture. In Germany, a 1991
decision to open the files of the Stasi, the East German secret police,
kicked off a painful reappraisal of the country as a communist state.
Neighbors, friends, even spouses were exposed as spies. Files on all public
figures were opened.
In Russia, victims of political repression and their relatives can peruse
parts of their own files, but many say they find little that is revealing.
Names of the informers who fingered them remain secret. Files on public
figures are open only to their close relatives. Private researchers can gain
access only with the approval of the FSB.
To some victims, like Aldona Voldynskaya, Germany's program to compensate
Russians who suffered from Nazi abuses only highlights the lack of atonement
in Russia.
Now 76 and nearly blind, Voldynskaya recounted her trip from Soviet
orphanage to German camps to Soviet prison in two days of interviews in her
neat, modest Moscow apartment. Her strongest memories are of the orphanage
outside Kirovograd, in the center of then-Soviet Ukraine, for children of
enemies of the people.
"It was the most horrifying place I have ever seen in my life. We were
starving there," she said.
Today she goes from school to school in Russia, trying to educate children
about the sufferings of her generation. But until perestroika dawned in the
1980s, she said, she was afraid to speak about why she was banished to the
orphanage, about her parents' arrests or about her six-month incarceration
in a Soviet prison.
"Can you imagine when you are silent for 50 years?" she asked, poring over a
few faded photographs of her youth through her thick glasses.
In 1991, invited by city officials in Bonn to recount her story to Germans,
she described for schoolchildren her three years in German camps, where she
endured forced sterilization, hunger and disease after Nazi troops conquered
the village where the orphanage was located. Afterward, she said, one German
boy approached her and told her: "Please forgive us." When she asked whether
he had relatives among the Nazis, he answered: "No. But still we are to
blame."
"Russians will never say that," she said.
The original article can be found on:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57580-2002Sep23.html
For personal and academic use only, not for distribution.
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