The Union: Haunted By History's Horrors

For almost 50 years there were whispered stories about black vans that drove every night into a fenced enclosure in the Kurapaty forest, about gunshots and screams waking villagers who lived nearby. But not until last spring did the full horror begin to be known. Workers digging a trench for a gas pipeline through the forest near Minsk came across a heap of human skulls pierced by bullets from Nagant revolvers fired at close range. The prosecutor of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic set up a commission to investigate the murders. Last July more skulls and bones were unearthed, along with paraphernalia of everyday life -- remnants of packed lunches, purses filled with kopecks -- indicating that the people had been snatched from their daily routines to be shot. With that, the truth became clear: from 1937 until the approach of Nazi invaders in 1941, Joseph Stalin's secret police had used the Kurapaty forest as a killing field. Estimates of the number of men and women buried there range from 30,000 to more than 200,000.

It is not by chance that the excavation in Kurapaty and a search for other mass graves in the Minsk area and the Ukraine are occurring now. The exhumation constitutes a precise visual image of the Soviet Union's efforts to confront the horrors of its past. With Mikhail Gorbachev's approval, Soviet historians, scholars and journalists are metaphorically digging up evidence of Stalin's crimes and exposing those crimes in all their ghastliness to the light of day.

Rewriting history has long been a tradition among Soviet leaders. Stalin revised a history of the Communist Party to puff up his role in the Bolshevik Revolution. Nikita Khrushchev began the deflation of Stalin; Leonid Brezhnev converted Khrushchev into a nonperson; Gorbachev in turn has depreciated Brezhnev, causing his name to be removed from factories, cities and streets. As the joke goes, the Soviet Union is the only country in the world with an unpredictable past.

Stalin's ghost is the most formidable opponent of almost every change that Gorbachev is trying to effect. It was Stalin who established the system of collective farms and the stifling central control of industry that Gorbachev is attempting to break up. And it was Stalin who punished independent thinking with such savagery as to smother the creativity of whole generations.

Thus the discrediting of Stalin and his policies is virtually a precondition for any sort of reform. Vladimir Lakshin, deputy editor of the monthly Znamya, explains, "History concerns what is going on today and not just the past. We are not simply talking about Stalin but of a form of Stalinism that is so much a part of the flesh and blood that people are incapable of thinking in any but a Stalinist way. We have to get that out of our system."

Gorbachev's opponents are equally aware that much is at stake. The Soviet tradition of unity among all leaders still forbids any direct criticism of Gorbachev's policies. Such debate as does occur is carried on in Aesopian language, and history is currently the favored supplier of code words. Thus when Yegor Ligachev and other conservatives cry that denunciations of Stalin are shaking people's faith in the Soviet system, they are really saying that perestroika and glasnost are going too far. Gorbachev's partisans get the point, and respond with redoubled attacks on Stalin and his admirers today.