Re-writing history is an essential part of Russia’s drive to restore its lost status, but democracy activists have questioned whether the Kremlin’s History Commission is really needed to discover the truth about its Soviet past.
“There are lots of debates in our party, United Russia,” says pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov. …..“Regarding Stalinism, there are some things we are very proud of, like victory in the war, whilst other things we are very ashamed of.”
Markov was speaking with British journalist Ben Judah who went searching for survivors and remnants of the gulag:
When I finally reached Magadan, I hunted for days for a survivor. “I’m sorry, they are all dead,“ was the refrain. With male life-expectancy in Russia a mere 58, I should not have been surprised, but I was devastated. Only hours before my flight back to Moscow, I called Miron Etlis, the rector of the local university. With an unmistakable Yiddish accent, he croaked: “The survivors are almost all dead-but I was in the Gulag. I can try and explain.” I rushed round. He was little and 80. His eyes were dark-brown pools. This was my last chance. He pointed at a photocopied picture of himself embracing Solzhenitsyn. ”I was in the same camp as him. I was in 555, between 1953 and 1956. He described the camp perfectly in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. That was my life.”
Like many survivors, the energy that pulled him through had yet to burn out. “I had good friends there, in the Gulag, only now are we dying. I was arrested on the day Stalin died. Ironically, people were crying for him but I felt resigned. I was accused of ‘Jewish Terrorism against Soviet Power’.” He chuckled. “I was transported by train, and left, like many of my generation, with a belief that a universal morality exists, but also with a deep fatalism.” He drifted off into a discourse on Jewish intellectualism and his friends in Alaska. I pulled him back. “You see…I think about it, but I can’t every day. I can’t live like that, even now.” I pushed him to talk, asking a question I would never dare ask my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor: “How does it feel, knowing that you were a slave?” He averted his eyes, went quiet. I had gone too far.
Judah recounts his search in the British magazine Standpoint.
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