336 pages, Free
Press, ISBN-13: 978-0684827766
You’ve
heard of repressed memories, right? Y’know, those memories that have been
unconsciously blocked due to the memory being associated with a horrible trauma?
There was a rash of these things in the States several years ago as adults
stepped forward to claim abuse when they were kids that they had forgotten, or
repressed. Ever wonder what would happen if such a phenomena occurred on a
nationwide scale? No need to speculate, as it did occur in the former Soviet
Union, as the memories of decades of terror and suppression have seemingly…disappeared.
In Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the
Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime, Vitaly Shentalinsky has ploughed
deep into KGB archives searching for official documents about the mysterious silencing
or outright disappearances of a whole generation of soviet writers. Men and
women, such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Mikhail
Afanasyevich Bulgakov, Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam, Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, Boris
Pilnyak, Andrei Platonov and Nina Gagen-Torn being among the best known
victims, though by no means all of them (and forgive me, but I really dig
Russian patronyms).
The
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its unchallenged power, attempted to
collectivized everything – even literature – by installing a state controlled
Writers Union, which created its own Gulag: those writers who were considered
critical of the regime or didn't follow the official line, were literally
(executed) or figuratively (publication interdiction) eliminated. Shentalinsky provides
extensive (perhaps too extensive) biographical
notes on each writer, but then how could he not? He wants them all to be
rediscovered and remembered. Meanwhile, the importance and nature of the
recovered documents themselves vary tremendously, including as they do diaries,
letters, and interrogators’ reports. Isaac Emmanuilovich’s file is compelling
because it is unusually comprehensive and reveals how Babel first succumbed to
his interrogators’ demands and later attempted to save those whom he had implicated,
while the ethnographer and poet Gagen-Torn “seemed to soar above all the horror
of the camps” in the words of one who suffered alongside her. Amongst some of
the most painful reads are the forced written confessions of the authors; while
they were promised a free leave if they avowed to be traitors, after their
confession what they got instead was a bullet in the back of the neck
(Shentalinsky even found the exact dates of their executions). Other chilling
episodes includes the murder of Andrés Nin Pérez, the leader of the Partido
Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or POUM, as well as some dreadful stuff featuring
Maksim Gorky, a servile mouthpiece for Stalinism during the Kulak liquidation whose
son, nevertheless, was still murdered as a dire warning that his position was
far from safe.
This
depressing book is a must for all those interested in the history of the USSR
and, more specifically, in its treatment of literature and its status within
the totalitarian State. Shentalinsky’s journalistic narrative moves freely
between personal narrative – his attempts to start up the commission; his
accounts of working with intriguing KGB archive personnel; his visits to Gulag
sites – and chapters focusing on the fates of individual writers. There can be
doubt that poet Shentalinsky has undertaken a meaningful and monumental task in
heading the commission to recover previously secret documentation pertaining to
writers interrogated, imprisoned, and murdered by the KGB, and his findings are
horrifying, as about two thousand writers were arrested over the life of the Soviet
horror, while more than fifteen hundred of those died in prison or work camps.
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