In a Time of Change
Chiesa, Giulietto & Medvedev, Roy
We are pleased to print below a chapter from Time of Change, by Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa (translated from the Italian by Michael Moore), a richly detailed account of the Gorbachev years...
...On 14 December a team of technicians installed a telephone in Sakharov's apartment...
...Now he lives and works in London...
...Of the dead, about 90 percent had been arrested in the 1930s and of course were already dead at the time of rehabilitation...
...Later on, Stalin sought consultation with Tarle on certain problems of history...
...Yet it is no secret that almost everywhere these elections were pure formalities, and everything had already been decided beforehand in the office of the local first secretary...
...You can see the conflicts with the naked eye...
...There were even those who called Sakharov a "traitor" —a shameful accusation...
...The army would have had more cadres...
...For example, Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov's wife, had been arrested and sentenced in 1949...
...Zdradovsky took part in meetings with the minister while the NKVD guard waited for him outside the office door...
...In these cases the files were carefully examined and the decision to rehabilitate was made only after an interview with the prisoner...
...Every wave of rehabilitations has been preceded by a bitter struggle, just as the preceding waves of illegal repressions were themselves expressions of violent cycles of party in-fighting...
...Those who had collaborated with the Germans as prison guards were not released...
...Stalin had ended the tradition of holding these intermediate conferences with limited powers in the interval between congresses with broad powers and of renewing the membership of the ruling bodies...
...Despite all this, General Apanashenko is almost unknown in the Soviet Union...
...had been rigged...
...In today's encyclopedias you will definitely not find the term kulak, never mind podkulachnik, although these labels were the reasons millions of peasants were deported or died...
...So a film shown at the Moscow theaters could be blocked in the Ukraine, as happened to the satiric film Garazh [The Garage] by Eldar Ryazanov...
...The new editor-in-chief, Vitali Korotich, and the new editorial staff turned Ogonyok into one of the most interesting magazines...
...R.M...
...R.M...
...However, as you can imagine, in the Politburo there were hesitations and even resistance...
...In short, he acknowledged that the trials of Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, Radek, et al...
...He had a more "traditional" training...
...Today most journalists contest the validity of the "dekulakization...
...But I would like to linger for another moment on the rehabilitation of Bukharin...
...Most were rehabilitated without reservations, the only exceptions being members of opposition groups—the so-called Trotskyites, the Bukharinists, and so on...
...With regard to former prisoners of war, simple soldiers were immediately released and rehabilitated, while officers were released without rehabilitation...
...R.M...
...These cases were considered part of history, so the entire truth had to be known about them...
...But grandparents and cousins were not considered close relatives...
...The first 1987 issues of our "thick" literary magazines began to publish antiStalinist works such as Anna Akhmatova's Requiem and Aleksandr Tvardovsky's Po Pravu Pamyati [By Right of Memory...
...But it never happened...
...It has taken place in different ways during the various political phases—and not by accident...
...Today there are millions of Soviets interested in rehabilitation for countless reasons, but I think that the crucial point is more political than legal...
...Dozens of people took part in the work group because there were thousands—no, millions—of cases to review...
...This is why there was a fairly complex "procedure" from 1954 to 1956...
...It is impossible to list them all...
...In 1954 my father was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR because of the "inexistence of a crime...
...Obviously, our legal handbooks don't even contain the terms "enemy of the people," "saboteur," and "rootless cosmopolitan" — all words that unfortunately weighed heavily on people's lives...
...R.M...
...I personally find this the most reasonable of the various proposals...
...The issue was confronted repeatedly by the leadership, but in the end the novel was not published in the USSR...
...Because of my manuscript on Stalinism (which still hasn't been published), I was expelled from the party and lost the right to practice my profession in Soviet institutions...
...Since then each of the ex-prisoners has taken different stances...
...R.M...
...Posthumous rehabilitation only began when the relatives of the deceased applied for it...
...You can find entries for "amnesty," "pardons," "cessation," and "appeals," but there is nothing under "rehabilitation" —either here or in the huge volume of comments on the civil and penal codes of the Russian Federal Republic...
...Western observers often fail to understand why major political leaders follow the destiny of a literary work so closely...
...More than a decade ago his novel Tyazholy Pesok [Heavy Sand], on the plight of the Jews in Nazi-occupied territories, was published both at home and abroad...
...To me this period instead seems to mark the beginning of a considerable opening toward freedom of transit for Soviet citizens...
...They were immediately released, but not rehabilitated...
...When the first rehabilitations began under Khrushchev, there was immediate opposition inside the Politburo...
...But many of the intelligentsia saw it...
...On 16 December Gorbachev telephones Sakharov personally to inform him that his exile was over and that his wife Yelena's five-year sentence had been pardoned...
...Medvedev is, of course, the distinguished Soviet historian, author of Let History Judge, a scathing account of Stalinism, and now a member of the Soviet parliament...
...Ligachev had been an energetic supporter of the fight against corruption, and defended perestroika and economic reform...
...After which came a return to normal life...
...On my desk lies a copy of the Legal Encyclopedia recently published in the USSR...
...Yes, we could say that...
...Almost all the members of the Politburo supported its publication, including Yegor Ligachev, whom many had superficially considered one of the most conservative members of the party leadership...
...Sofronov is a poet and playwright, even if no one has produced his plays for a long time and everyone has forgotten his poetry...
...In this way new decisions were made concerning rehabilitation procedures...
...Everyone knows how ferocious and large-scale the 1937 repressions were, but not everyone remembers that in January and February of 1938, after the Central Committee plenum, articles that harshly criticized the "slanderers" and "informers" appeared in the press...
...she was released the day of Stalin's funeral...
...G.C...
...Molotov, Kaganovich, and Kliment Voroshilov did not want millions of people to 322 • DISSENT In a Time of Change return from the concentration camps, nor did they appreciate the risk of a reexamination of the procedures that had led an even greater number of people to their deaths...
...Many of those rich farmers were frightened by the emergency confiscation of wheat, and had already abandoned the fields in 1927-28...
...The facts would prove that this new 316 • DISSENT In a Time of Change situation would make life difficult for many officials in the intermediate and lower nomenklatura, who had already been upset by the waves of changes both before and after the Twenty-seventh Congress...
...After the Twentieth Congress the situation changed substantially...
...You have to remember that in the USSR we have individual spheres of local autonomy...
...It was very difficult to be silent about his work, and many of us read the manuscript for Children of the Arbat...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 325...
...But that statement could not count as a formal rehabilitation...
...The prisoner was called before an official of the NKVD, who informed him of his upcoming release and asked him to sign a declaration promising not to reveal what he had seen in the camps since it would be a "state secret...
...One of the main characters was Stalin, whose personality Bek describes with extraordinary accuracy...
...Druzhba Narodov changed its policies and as a result changed its reputation without substantially modifying its editorial staff...
...Hopefully, the historical truth will be reestablished in all of these cases...
...On the foundations of the NEP the country could have grown and developed much more efficiently not only in agriculture but in industry...
...December 1986 was full of events...
...The article on the eightieth anniversary of Brezhnev's birth was definitely a further step in the criticism of the past...
...their relatives each received a certificate along with two months' wages as a form of compensation...
...I think that Gorbachev had raised the problem of Sakharov's return to Moscow earlier than this...
...G.C...
...The authority of some magazines grew so rapidly that it caught even the political leadership by surprise...
...Those signing included Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Fasil Iskander, Andrei Voznesensky, Veniamin Kaverin, Bulat Okudzhava, Sergei Antonov, and many others...
...R.M...
...To Mikoyan's credit, he proposed that the rehabilitation procedures for "ordinary" prisoners be simplified...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 315 In a Time of Change to three months, more than two hundred political prisoners were released, pardoned, and given amnesty, many of whom were well known abroad and among the intelligentsia...
...Who knows why, but Stalin was dissatisfied with the membership of this imaginary "counterrevolutionary government...
...G.C...
...From the end of 1956 to the spring of 1957, they examined the personal files of every prisoner without exception—an enormous task...
...The process began before the congress, almost immediately after Stalin's death...
...This weakened defenses against Japan...
...Immediately after the end of the war almost all the inhabitants of these "special" villages were granted equal rights with residents of "normal" villages...
...Sakharov's release made a return to the past even less likely: this was the most important fact...
...The press had even printed its membership, in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was entrusted to the well-known historian and academician Tarle...
...The novel was published in 1987 by Znamya and in the popular series Roman Gazeta...
...Later we will get back to the problems of revising Soviet and party history...
...Many examples affect me closely...
...The film was shown only at the Domkino [Cinema Union Building] or at individual clubs...
...if not, I'll pardon him...
...Even though more attempts were made in 1986...
...This represented an important extension of democracy to the workplace...
...A few copies of the proceedings of that meeting exist, and I have one in my library...
...But Sakharov's release also had a huge impact on domestic life...
...I don't know on what basis Stalin decided to free Kavtaradze...
...he spoke three times to criticize Star Wars...
...At the same time, however, a new restrictive clause was introduced that prevented a foreigner with a tourist visa from applying to marry a Soviet citizen...
...Almost every member of the Politburo had relatives, friends, and collaborators in jail...
...The film caused a sensation in Georgia, where there was still a true Stalinist cult, especially in the villages...
...The dissidents and émigrés reacted differently to his conduct...
...When the German troops approached Moscow, Stalin gave the order to transfer many divisions from the Far East, which were stationed there in expectation of a Japanese attack...
...Novoye Naznacheniye was written in the early 1960s...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 321 In a Time of Change Some events are not so well known, such as two examples of mass rehabilitation that took place during World War II...
...It seemed impossible that the film could be circulated to the greater public...
...G.C...
...His proposal raised objections in judiciary circles, but Khrushchev supported it...
...Completely different was the behavior of Anatoli Sofronov, editor-in-chief of the weekly Ogonyok since 1953...
...There were no statistics, but the figure of three to four million is considered reliable...
...But Stalin had no other choice...
...R.M...
...The "conservative turnabout" was already underway, and there were even some who wanted to rehabilitate Stalin...
...A reality emerges from the novels of Mozhayev, Belov, and Antonov —and from many articles describing the situation in the 1920s—of an effective and rapid growth of agriculture between 1926 and 1928...
...G.C...
...Also two million Volga Germans...
...Initially, the director himself brought four copies of the film to Moscow...
...According to data I have available, up to the beginning of 1956, that is, before the Twentieth Congress, from twelve to fifteen thousand people were rehabilitated...
...But their freedom was short-lived: both were rearrested, this time along with Beria himself...
...The huge potential of the Russian farmlands was just beginning to reveal itself, giving the country an abundance of produce it had never before seen...
...In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia you can find "rehabilitation," but not as a legal term...
...Gorbachev's proposals restored the system for electing party leaders that had existed in the 1920s but had been canceled by Stalin...
...Justice must be rendered to many innocent people—the list of whom grew longer during the Brezhnev years...
...Not only could you return to the USSR more than once a year, without limitations, but you could also be invited by distant relatives...
...The new rules on entering and leaving the country that took effect on 1 January 1987 eliminated numerous previous limitations...
...It would have been very difficult for Hitler's party to triumph in 1933 if the fight between Germany's Communists and Social Democrats had not been set off by Stalin's orders...
...At least in that phase...
...G.C...
...R.M...
...Sakharov came back on 23 December, and was received at the Yaroslaysky train station by more than two hundred foreign correspondents...
...Many people had been awaiting that decision...
...Still others wrote that it favored only the emigration of Jews, which in fact grew noticeably during 1987...
...Equally huge was the success of the feature film Legko Li Byt Molodym...
...Later on I believe Ligachev manifested his limits: inability to understand the rapid changes that were taking place, difficulty in learning from developments in the situation...
...Gorbachev reopened the rehabilitation process with his speech in honor of the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution and the announcement that there was a special commission of the Politburo at work...
...In short, a different line of conduct might have prevented World War II...
...First of all, prisoners who had been sentenced for criticizing Stalin were automatically released, as were those who had already served their sentences (there were thousands of these in the camps...
...Tvardovsky enthusiastically accepted the novel...
...A committee to investigate Stalin's crimes had already been formed before the Twentieth Congress, and was initially presided over by Molotov...
...Obviously, all of the "members" of this "government" were arrested...
...Another important proposal that the plenum finally approved was one to announce an All-Union Conference on Party Organization at the end of June 1988...
...This was the tragedy that changed the course of my life and my ideas about society...
...Repentance had had a troubled history...
...His position on these subjects had also long been well known...
...As I said, official statistics do not exist...
...Another equally unique example: In 1942 there was a danger that epidemics would break out in the overcrowded cities of the Urals and Siberia...
...The editor-in-chief explained that the novel was very good, but the figure of Stalin as portrayed was totally unacceptable...
...The protagonist was a people's commissar in the Stalin era...
...Something in this direction was done in 1987, but it was only a first step...
...Ligachev has slower reflexes than Gorbachev and his collaborators...
...From 1945 to 1952 he served as Soviet ambassador to Rumania...
...He made a name for himself in the fight against alcoholism and against the so-called "unearned income...
...Approximately twenty thousand others were posthumously rehabilitated...
...Finally, an examination of all the remaining prisoners followed, which was also simple and quick...
...In a 1962 All-Union meeting of historians, Boris Ponomaryov, secretary of the Central Committee at that time, answered a question by saying, "Comrades, if you read the materials of the Twentieth and Twenty-second Congresses carefully, it will become clear to you that neither 324 • DISSENT In a Time of Change Bukharin, nor Zinoviev, nor Kamenev, nor Rykov was a spy or enemy of the people...
...Moreover, the previous rules applied only to the "closest" relatives—parents and their children, brothers and sisters...
...Bukharin, Pyatakov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, and Aleksei Rykov were fully rehabilitated in this new wave, but the problem of Trotsky remains open...
...He kept working, and in the 1970s he finished the second and third parts of his great novel...
...The magazines in Moscow, Leningrad, and Rostov almost competed to publish ferociously critical novels and short stories by Vladimir Dudintsev, Daniil Granin, Vladimir Tendryakov, Sergei Antonov, and Boris Mozhayev...
...Yet this new wave of rehabilitations is the result of a heated political battle...
...The first was made up of high-ranking leaders...
...There were divergent points of view...
...G.C...
...The plight of Rybakov's novel showed how deep the 1987 changes were...
...Resistance to the rehabilitation of Bukharin was also a sign of the resistance to perestroika...
...First arrested in 1958, he spent most of his adult life in prison, camps, and exile...
...In fact, many hardworking average farmers who had achieved relative comfort through their labors in the NEP years were defined as kulaks between 1929 and 1932...
...Exactly, The magazine Druzhba Naradov refused to publish the novel for the second time in its history...
...The commission had to decide a huge number of cases...
...R.M...
...Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who hadn't been arrested but was "under investigation" at the headquarters of the Urals military recruitment center, was exonerated of all charges...
...He asked for an audience with Gorbachev, but was turned down...
...I would, however, like to add something...
...Rybakov did not give up...
...Bek was one of our best writers...
...What were Gorbachev's proposals for reforming the way that political and economic cadres were elected...
...It is true that de-Stalinization started immediately after Stalin's death...
...He took part in a public discussion on nuclear reactors, proposing that they be built underground...
...There had been numerous conferences and congresses in the 1920s, but in the twenty-three years after 1931, one can count only three party congresses and one conference, the eighteenth, held in March 1941...
...yet it still came as a surprise to most of us...
...In this respect, Gorbachev's speech for the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution represented a compromise between two opposing objectives: to reevaluate the NEP but to justify the collectivization of the countryside...
...He spent his nights in the Butirskaya prison and in the mornings he was taken to his job at the Ministry of Health...
...G.C...
...he had opposed the SDI from the beginning, and made it known...
...This showed once again how incomplete and inadequate even the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses' denunciations of Stalin's crimes had been...
...The revision is unquestionably moving far beyond that point...
...it was examined, checked and double-checked by special investigators...
...R.M...
...His candidacy was eliminated twice, and the case was only resolved when [editor-in-chief] Baklanov threatened to quit unless he was joined by Lakshin...
...However, in the Urals, in Siberia, in the Far East, and in northern Kazakhstan, there were many "special settlements," where the families of the so-called kulaks lived...
...Yuri Trifonov's novel Ischeznoveniye [The Disappearance] (on the repressions in the 1930s) and Anatoli Pristavkin's I Nochevala Tuchka Zolotaya [And a Golden Cloud Spent the Night] (on the deportation of the Moslems from the Northern Caucasus) gained widespread attention...
...Many cultural figures considered cautious or even conservative lined up behind perestroika...
...The commissions consisted of three members: a representative of the Prosecutor's Office, a party official, and an ex-convict reinstated in the party...
...G.C...
...At the end of the war it was the turn of the scientist S. Korolyov, together with a group of researchers who later helped create the Soviet atomic bomb and atomic missiles...
...The Twentieth Congress had dated Stalin's main crimes after 1934...
...A state with any self-respect would have gone through all the rehabilitations systematically, regardless of applications...
...Instead, it was published abroad in Russian...
...There were poems by Anatoli Zhigulin, Boris Chichibabin, Olga Berggolts, Boris Slutsky, and Nikolai Gumilyov...
...I remember because his appointment was surrounded by a private battle...
...He describes his experiences in My Testimony (1969) and From Tarusa to Siberia (1980...
...The USSR's Academy of Sciences was boycotted by all the most important American and West European scientific associations...
...The Supreme Court of the USSR publicly declared that the "right-wing Trotskyite bloc" had never existed, that the investigation and the trial had been fabricated and conducted with "inadmissible methods...
...Trotsky too was sentenced to death in absentia three times—and this sentence was carried out by a special group of the NKVD...
...The new change was significant...
...But we should mention that after the January plenum the publication of important articles and essays, as well as the showing of bitterly critical films, came out of an extended and often dramatic struggle...
...R.M...
...The prototype that inspired Bek was Ivan Tevosyan, the people's commissar for the steel industry...
...Albert Belyayev is a clear example...
...G.C...
...Was there a formal procedures for rehabilitation...
...In April the first installment was published by none other than Druzhba Narodov, where in the meantime the editorinchief had been replaced...
...So how many people were rehabilitated during Khrushchev's time...
...Famous actors, directors, heroes of the Second World War, and many others were also rehabilitated...
...They would only be exhumed on the request of a wife, a mother, or a child...
...The action takes place in 1933 and 1934, and for the first time we can read a broad and truthful fresco of the life of the country and of the Kremlin during a period of dramatic changes...
...A few months later, starting in March 1938, a new wave of repressions began that sent two or three million new "enemies of the people" to the camps and prisons...
...His Volokolamskoye Shosse [The Volokolamsky Highway] is known all over the world and is considered one of the best novels about World War II...
...Now it was almost impossible to buy it at the newsstands, even 318 • DISSENT In a Time of Change though more copies were printed...
...At the same time, millions of peasant families were ruthlessly deported, being absurdly equated with the category of "rich farmers...
...Let me take a short step back...
...This in fact represented their rehabilitation...
...Millions of statements started arriving in government offices from the prisoners' families...
...The rehabilitations were interrupted in the 1970s, thereby excluding many innocent people who had taken part in various opposition and "deviant" groups in the 1920s, thousands of specialists and engineers who had been denounced in the years 1928-32 for "sabotage" and "members" of nonexistent parties created by the imaginations of Stalin, Genrikh Yagoda, and Andrei Vyshinsky...
...G.C...
...This was one of its more loathsome features...
...As a result, some party members who had already been arrested were released and even readmitted to the party...
...Bukharin and the others were not readmitted to the party, and their relatives did not receive either moral or material compensation...
...This led to their rehabilitation after the invalids and wounded began to return from the front back to the "special settlements...
...The trial against the accused never took place, and Tarle, along with the other scientists, was able to return to work...
...Sakharov took an active part in the international forum held in Moscow in February 1987...
...In other words, a kind of "automatic persecution" had reigned...
...In his official speech on 6 November 1986 he had strongly defended perestroika, and I believe he was not just limiting himself to expressing the Politburo's point of view: he was speaking in his own name...
...R.M...
...Over the course of a few months, amid obvious difficulties, the trial proceedings of 1936, 1937, and 1938 were reviewed...
...The campaign in those years was not without its contradictions, but they did not necessarily have to be overcome through violence and a "second revolution...
...It would grow to its highest point in the early months of 1988, with the reinvestigation of the trials of Nikolai Bukharin and of Zinovi Kamenev, Aleksandr Zinoviev, Grigori Pyatakov, Karl Radek, et al...
...Gorbachev also proposed putting an end to the system of having only one candidate in the elections for the soviets, elections that had been discredited for having no "possibilities of choice...
...Another day went by and Yuri Marchuk, the president of the Academy of Sciences, arrived in Gorky to discuss Sakharov's return to work in Moscow's scientific community...
...The first rehabilitations began in those same days...
...From January on, the mass media had an enormous impact on public opinion...
...Later on he became one of the founders of the International Fund for the Survival and Development of Humanity, and as such met with Gorbachev...
...How many came back home from the camps...
...The same happened for famous party representatives such as Fyodor Raskolnikov, Nikolai Krestinsky, and many others...
...Often new instructions and legislative bills are published only in specialized periodicals, and few people know of their existence...
...His victory helped to change the political atmosphere in the Soviet Union, as well as to score an important success for Mikhail Gorbachev's politics and prestige...
...Even for a party rehabilitation every "case" took one or two years...
...The Crimean Tartars were legally rehabilitated only in 1967, although they were not allowed to return to their native land...
...many considered it a step backward, while others considered it a progressive move...
...Could you talk about Tenqiz Abuladze's film Repentance...
...The Red Army suffered huge losses in the first months of the war...
...Equally pro forma were the elections of department heads at institutes of higher learning, as well as the posts of president and vice president of the USSR's Academy of Sciences...
...Attempts were made to destroy the film...
...In one sense these partial rehabilitations served the purpose of emphasizing Yezhov's responsibilities and of strengthening the faith of millions of men hit by the repression under the "just" guidance of Stalin and the new people's commissar, Lavrenti Beria...
...Many people believe that the Twentieth Congress began the rehabilitations and deStalinization...
...There is no legal procedure for rehabilitation...
...He had always been one of the most assiduous conservatives and was justly considered an outright Stalinist...
...These problems have occupied a prominent position in the life of our society...
...As recently as the spring of 1986, after Yelena Bonner's return from the United States, a more rigid isolation was imposed on Andrei Dmitrievich...
...Sakharov immediately announced his support for glasnost and democratization...
...In December too a new series of laws on emigration was approved...
...for years he headed the literary sector of the Central Committee, where he was considered a very conservative functionary (and no less conservative a writer...
...But the main literary event of 1987 was the publication of Anatoli Rybakov's novel Children of the Arbat...
...For example, it includes three million Moslems from the northern Caucasus: Chechens, Ingushi, and Kalmyks...
...This chapter appears with the kind permission of Pantheon Books...
...Gorbachev insisted that a special session of the Supreme Court of the USSR be held at the beginning of February...
...He criticized Reagan's policy on the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...During the same years thousands of previously exiled peasant families were authorized to return to their native villages...
...In order to appreciate the significance of this rehabilitation, just compare the data...
...Exactly...
...By contrast, in 1987 when cultural developments sped up, Ligachev clearly showed himself more inclined to support the cautious Pravda than Ogonyok...
...The Kremlin doctors' group was rehabilitated, after their January 1953 arrest on 320 • DISSENT In a Time of Change charges of being "spies for the United States and Israel...
...The novel was read by Gorbachev's personal assistants, and the decision was finally made to publish it, but with a few small cuts...
...R.M...
...In 1944 we suddenly read that he had been appointed deputy minister of foreign affairs for the USSR...
...R.M...
...After Khrushchev's report at the Twentieth Congress it was already clear to every thinking person that the trials in the 1930s had all been rigged...
...For example, a Soviet citizen living abroad used to be permitted to come back to the USSR to visit his relatives only once a year—an absurd law...
...Their children were not drafted, and they were not to be trusted—until 1942, when Stalin gave the order to conscript them too...
...But this figure includes other categories, and not just political prisoners...
...G.C...
...I hope that we don't have to wait another twenty to thirty years for these decisions...
...After the war, prisoners who had survived Hitler's camps (where about five million died) were subject to special investigations for "tendentiousness" in Stalin's concentration camps...
...What was it...
...Later Nikolai Shchvernik became the head, even when it split into two groups: a political commission at the Central Committee and a work group...
...There were numerous uprisings in 1955...
...G.C...
...Aleksandr Tvardovsky had announced its publication in Novy Mir...
...In many cases it was simply the tyrant's whim: "If I want, I'll sentence him...
...General Apanashenko had been given a free hand directly by Stalin in 1941-42, and he ignored the NKVD's protests...
...At this rate rehabilitation would have taken hundreds of years, since in 1955 there were no fewer than eight to ten million political prisoners in the camps...
...Marchenko's death was not due just to the deprivations he had suffered in the labor camp, but allegedly to the cruel violence of his investigators in early 1986...
...How many people were rehabilitated then...
...The first year after the dictator's death saw the posthumous rehabilitation of Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksis Kuznetsov, former members of the Politburo, along with a good many of the Leningrad party officials who had been suppressed in 1949-50 during the socalled "Leningrad affair...
...the second was mainly functionaries from the Party Control Commission and from the central apparats...
...R.M...
...Is It Easy to Be Young?] by the Latvian director Yuri Podnieks...
...Vladimir Lakshin, who in my opinion is out best literary critic, was appointed first deputy editor...
...What happened after Khrushchev was ousted...
...On Brezhnev's initiative, for example, the Uzbek party leaders who had been shot in 1937 were rehabilitated, like Kamil Ikramov and Faizullah Khodzhayev...
...There was a discussion in the Federal Prosecutor's Office, where Rudenko was the chairman...
...Sakharov had become a symbol, and no one could believe Gorbachev's democratic intentions as long as Sakharov remained in exile...
...In 1957, for example, marshals and generals who had been killed in the 1930s were rehabilitated: Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Vasili Blyukher, Aleksandr Yegorov, Iona Yakir, Jerome UboSUMMER • 1990 • 323 In a Time of Change revich, and so on...
...The proliferation of thousands of informal groups throughout the country was also the result of a new orientation in the central newspapers...
...Yet Belyayev was the same one who, obviously on Suslov's orders, arranged the 1970 firing of Tvardovsky from his position as editor-in-chief of Novy Mir...
...It had been shot a few years earlier, but it was immediately blocked by the censors...
...G.C...
...My father, a commissar in the Red Army, a political official, and a teacher of philosophy at the Military Academy, was arrested in 1938 and died on the golden sands of the Kolyma River in 1941...
...But the country's epidemiological services had also been dismantled by the repressions, so it was decided to free many specialists, the most famous of whom was P. Zdradovsky.They brought him back to Moscow, but they forgot to rehabilitate him...
...However, I must specify that the rehabilitations did not begin after Stalin's death—there were also some while he was still alive...
...When Hitler invited the Japanese leaders to take advantage of the troop withdrawals on that front and unleash an attack from the east, the Japanese replied that the information supplied by their secret services indicated no weakening in the defenses: all of the Soviet divisions had kept and even reinforced their positions...
...There were not only the living, still in the camps: there were also the dead...
...However, the next twenty years were certainly not years of justice...
...I would like to add that in Germany the small farmer would not have been as terrorized as he was...
...In the fall it went on television at the explicit direction of the local party, with the support of Shevardnadze...
...R.M...
...This pressure from below was augmented by the pressure from Khrushchev, Anastas Mikoyan, and other leaders at the top...
...But there was also a political calculation: the rehabilitation of a percentage of peasants who had been unjustly sentenced in a certain sense legitimized the acts of the powers and justified the even more ferocious repression of the kulaks...
...Neither poem had previously seen the light of day, even though they had been written in the 1960s...
...G.C...
...Ens...
...For example, it is known that kolkhoz chairmen have always been elected at the general meetings of members...
...Even in the past Sakharov had never declared himself an organizer of the dissidents...
...In short, the fate of these men continued to be a "blank page" in Soviet history...
...Gradually, the limits on rehabilitation were lifted...
...Here instead I would like to examine the question of rehabilitation from a historical perspective, and partly from a legal perspective...
...finally, it was sent to the Supreme Court of either a republic or of the USSR...
...he always spoke for himself...
...The issue closely concerns many Soviet citizens...
...I believe that this development was hastened by the death of Anatoli Marchenko* in the Chistopol prison...
...His participation in public life grew quickly, and not only through articles and interviews...
...An acquaintance of mine who was on one of these "troikas" told me that they spent an average of ten minutes on each file...
...During this phase I think that about 80 percent of all political prisoner left the camps...
...But in 1986 Ligachev supported all of the most important cultural events: Mikhail Shatrov's plays Diktatura Sovesti [The Dictatorship of Conscience] and Serebryanaya Svadba [Silver Wedding], and the film Repentance...
...But at the same time, he continued to work as a theoretical physicist and as an astrophysicist, holding seminars at the Academy of Sciences...
...He was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to a long prison term...
...When ten years ago Bukharin's son wrote his letter to Enrico Berlinguer (the late secretary of the Italian Communist party) and the campaign for Bukharin's rehabilitation assumed an international character, the Soviet press maintained complete silence...
...These rehabilitations continued past 1957, until Khrushchev made his exit in 1964, and even afterward...
...Each of these events is a story in itself...
...Works SUMMER • 1990 • 317 In a Time of Change began to be published by deceased or émigré writers, such as Andrei Platonov, Georgi Ivanov, and Vyacheslav Khodasevich...
...One enlightening example: Aleksandr Bek's novel Novoye Naznacheniye [The New Appointment...
...In fact, the new policy of glasnost had lessened the bitterness of Sakharov's conflict with the previous party leadership...
...The relatives of generals and marshals, ministers, and members of the Central Committee began to return from the camps...
...For the moment, I cannot stop to consider Marchenko's plight...
...Over a period of two * Marchenko (1938-86) was active in the human rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s...
...Yet this is precisely what allowed him to win an important moral and political victory for all of us...
...After the 1939-40 war between the Soviet Union and Finland—a war that demonstrated the military leaders' weaknesses— Stalin authorized the rehabilitation of tens of thousands of Red Army officials, many of whom later distinguished themselves in World War II...
...R.M...
...Academician V. Tikhonov has proved that the increase in the number of rich farmers at the beginning of the century, and against which Lenin hurled himself so harshly (and not always justifiably), had already been halted in the years of the Civil War...
...In 1956 he was also rehabilitated by the party and posthumously readmitted into its ranks...
...Although they were among the most famous representatives of the party and of the October Revolution, no one could write and publish works about them...
...This is the case of S. Kavtaradze, a noted Bolshevik from the Caucasus who had held important posts in the Supreme Court of the USSR and in the Attorney General's Office...
...For example, the OGPU (Organization for State Political Leadership) had fabricated the case of a clandestine counterrevolutionary "government...
...R.M...
...The Soviet press in fact stopped describing Bukharin, Rykov, and the others as "spies for the Western secret services," "saboteurs," or "enemies of the people...
...This dealt an especially strong blow to Stalinism...
...Almost the entire Writers' Union then defended the novel and the author's right to choose his own prototypes, especially considering that the protagonist was named Onisimov and not Tevosyan...
...In order to fill in the gaps in his defensive lines in the Far East, General I. Apanashenko, commander of the Far Eastern Front, drafted not only the inhabitants of those regions but also a number of the prisoners from the Kolyma and Siberian camps...
...And this was not just a blow to ideology—the rehabilitation of Bukharin served the debate underway on economic reform...
...For example, it is well known that between 1929 and 1933 millions of peasants were accused of being kulaks or podkulachniks and deported to the northern and far eastern regions...
...G.C...
...How did the magazines and their editors change in these months...
...Yet the novel could not be published in 1985 or 1986...
...Sakharov and his wife were not in good health...
...Between 1928 and 1931 thousands of individuals were arrested on charges of "sabotage," "nationalism," and "counterrevolutionary activity...
...More than twenty divisions were transferred from the Far Eastern Front to the German Front in 1941-42...
...Chiesa has served as Moscow correspondent for L'Unita, the daily paper of the Italian Communist party (now changing its name...
...The political price the Kremlin was paying for Sakharov's internal exile was clearly too high and no longer justifiable...
...When he left the apparat and was appointed editor-in-chief of Sovetskaya Kultura, he turned the newspaper into a leading publication for perestroika, for criticism of Stalin, and for support of cultural pluralism...
...It caused serious damage to our study of history...
...Together we fight as hard as we can for his rehabilitation, and together we are working to effect a change in the USSR's political and social situation...
...Superficially...
...Even before his death people judged him harshly—only the officials continued to praise him, but their only motivation was career concerns...
...Attempts at forming a cult of Brezhnev failed to penetrate the mass consciousness...
...Yet there had not been many good films made recently...
...This is how changing the head of a magazine like Ogonyok or Moskovskiye Novesti became more important than replacing the first secretary of the Kursk or Orel region...
...The first dealt only with the most important party and state leaders...
...G.C...
...Repentance, however, was authorized for general release in Moscow and Leningrad at the end of January and had an exceptional public success...
...see Joanne Barkan's article, p. 297...
...Without stressing the horrors, the writer created a psychologically exact and historically reliable portrait of Stalin preparing what would later be called the Great Terror...
...During the war A. Tupolev was rehabilitated, along with a group of military planners...
...Another unsolved problem is tied to our relations with Poland: I am referring to the eight to ten thousand officers in the Polish Army shot to death in Katyn...
...A huge chapter must be opened up on prisoners of war...
...When a prisoner died in the camps, his files were transferred to a central office in the NKVD, archived under the heading "Keep Forever...
...Instead, between 1929 and 1932 we witness a violent break with the natural processes of the farmlands, the destruction of the productive forces, the liquidation of the most efficient farm enterprises, and the wholesale slaughter of livestock and horses...
...Once these two categories had been taken care of, they dealt with the rehabilitation of former party members...
...The same could be said about the labor collectives' elections of managers at every level of their enterprises...
...On 15 December the guards were removed from around his house...
...Could you comment on the liberation of Andrei Sakharov from his Gorky exile...
...If anything happened to them while they were still in exile, the reputation of the new Soviet leader would be irreparably stained...
...Thus, a hundred commissions were created, one for every main camp, with the power to grant pardons and rehabilitations, a prerogative of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet...
...For the first time in our literature the figure of Stalin was placed in the center of a novel...
...Many had earned medals and honors, and were no longer willing to submit to the orders of the spetsposeleny [special settlement] commanders...
...these were the first to be rehabilitated, including Khrushchev's daughter-in-law, Lazar Kaganovich's brother, Otto Kuusinen's wife and son, and the wife of the army general Andrei Khrulyov...
...The Sakharovs were close to him and to his wife, Larisa Bogoraz...
...In Georgia they had already shown it on television...
...But Tevosyan's family rebelled against the publication...
...His first interview with an American television correspondent was actually broadcast to the United States from the Ostankino studios...
...The ensuing debate has already greatly exceeded the bounds of this compromise...
...In the West discussions raged over the meaning of this new measure...
...Under his direction the readership of Ogonyok had plummeted, and 50 percent of its copies were sent to the pulping plant or sold at one-half or one-fourth the cover price...
...The editorial staff of Znamya was also changed...
...And what forms did this process take in the courts and in the party...
...The eightieth anniversary of Brezhnev's birth was "celebrated" with an article in Pravda that was in truth not at all celebratory...
...Each "case" with all its related depositions and information had to be requested from the KGB prosecutor's offices...
...In reality, it wasn't quite that way...
...At the same time, he called for the release of all political prisoners and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan...
...Sofronov had no intention of "restructuring," and therefore had to be replaced...
...Every "wave" of repression that had taken place since the late 1920s had been accompanied by partial rehabilitations...
...Aleksandr Bek saw the foreign edition only three days before his death in 1972...
...The wave of rehabilitations began with a leap in the quality of the criticism of Stalin and Stalinism effected at the January plenum...
...There were various reasons, from the interest of relatives to the protests of the exiles themselves to later verifications by the authorities...
...There is another example of mass rehabilitation...
...It's a very strong antidictatorial, antitotalitarian, antiStalinist film...
...I think there were about eighteen million people, about ten million of whom were rehabilitated posthumously...
...Rybakov is a well-known writer in the USSR, the author of splendid books for young people, and honored by state prizes...
...G.C...
...Finally, you could obtain a visa to go abroad, even for tourism, with the invitation of a simple acquaintance...
...I learned of the new rules on freedom of transit only by reading about them in Golos Rodini [Voice of the Homeland], a newspaper for former Soviet citizens that is distributed abroad...
...Novy Mir already had the printer's galleys ready...
...But the forms are one thing, the contents another...
...G.C...
...Nineteen eighty-seven is also the year in which the question of "rehabilitations" was SUMMER • 1990 • 319 In a Time of Change reopened...
...I am not familiar with this rule...
...The president of the Council of Ministers, Aleksei Kosygin, who had himself been a people's commissar in Stalin's time, stepped in...
...Millions of poor and average peasants were persecuted or starved to death...
...The electoral system could be good in theory but end up being terrible in practice...
...When Yezhov was dismissed as head of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for the Interior) and arrested, once again thousands of people were freed...
...The NEP brought about this effect by providing incentives for family farms and for every type of cooperative...
...My brother was illegally tried and deprived of Soviet citizenship for having fought against Trofim Lysenko's abuses and for democracy in the sciences...
...This was immediately followed by a rapid series of events...
...The audience watched it in shock, in tears...
...The first part of the novel had already been finished in the mid-1960s...
...Stalin's repressions were arbitrary, but the rehabilitations were equally so...
...This was a direct provocation against Beria, who rapidly succeeded in procuring the rehabilitation of Viktor Abakumov and Rukhadze, his collaborators at the Ministry for State Security (MGB...
...Therefore, my brother, Zhores, and I were no longer sons of an "enemy of the people...
...R.M...
...However, later on, a certain percentage of valuable specialists were released both as a result of the interventions of the organizations with which they worked and, in special cases, as a result of orders from Stalin himself...
...After the Twentieth Congress the situation changed rapidly, and unrest grew in the camps...
...You could say that he was responsible for some of the most negative forays in this area...
...It had already been at the Georgia cinemas in the summer of 1986...
...In literature, by contrast, there was a huge "reserve...
...The mechanisms that had been activated continued to function, but more slowly...
...We are pleased to print below a chapter from Time of Change, by Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa (translated from the Italian by Michael Moore), a richly detailed account of the Gorbachev years in the Soviet Union...
...R.M...
...A good share of the transformations planned by perestroika are in part a reproposal of the methods of the NEP [New Economic Program] for our own times...
...G.C...
...We've already spoken about Repentance and Children of the Arbat but what about Tvardovsky's Po Pravu Pamyati or Akhmatova's Requiem, which appeared only after twenty years of struggles...
...At first, Bukharin's rehabilitation had been scheduled for late December 1987, but for unexplained reasons it was postponed to May 1988...
...You can imagine the strangeness with which this all happened...
...The request was supported by Aleksandr Yakovlev, at that time secretary of the Central Committee, and by other officials of the partially renewed party and apparats...
...Today this periodization has been soundly criticized in the fields of literature, political journalism, and, to some extent, history...
...In the summer of 1942 practically all of the men from Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan were in the army...
...In the fall of that year a good-sized group of writers sent a letter to the Central Committee firmly requesting that the previous decisions be reconsidered and that the novel be published...
...These were innovative and welcome proposals, but still did not constitute a revolution...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
