The Union: Haunted By History's Horrors

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More than political expediency seems to be involved, however, in the present re-examination of Stalin. Journalists and scholars seem genuinely eager to drop their traditional roles as perpetuators of useful historical myths and instead tell the painful truth. Gorbachev gave the signal in a February 1987 speech inviting them to fill in the "blank spots" in Soviet history, and writers have responded with everything from weighty historical tomes to popular entertainments.

In one sci-fi movie, Mirror for Heroes, a modern time traveler finds himself condemned to relive endlessly one day in the Stalinist past. Such periodicals as Ogonyok and Moscow News churn out article after article attacking Stalin or rehabilitating his victims; even Leon Trotsky, Stalin's archenemy, can be portrayed with some sympathy. Excerpts from Let History Judge, a scathing work that historian Roy Medvedev published in the West in 1971, have begun appearing in the Soviet press, and the entire book is scheduled for publication late this year. The book argues that the Gulag's supposed labor camps were often really death camps set up by Stalin to kill prisoners through hard labor, starvation rations, harsh climate and lack of medical attention. Medvedev is also speaking out through interviews. In one, he put the number of Stalin's victims at 40 million, of whom 20 million died. Gorbachev, in a November 1987 speech, spoke only of "thousands" of victims. (An expanded and & updated version of Medvedev's book will be published in the U.S. by Columbia University Press next month.)

At least two institutions are dedicated to examining the bitter truth about the past. A Politburo commission formed by Gorbachev has rehabilitated such figures as Nikolai Bukharin, shot after a frame-up show trial in 1938. A rapidly growing group called Memorial aims to build a monument to Stalin's victims and establish an archive and research center to document his crimes.

Memorial's members include such prominent intellectuals as poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, historian Medvedev and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, who serves as the group's honorary chairman. But its most important role is to provide an outlet for the grief and pain that victims of Stalin and their relatives have long had to keep to themselves. A steady stream of visitors from all over the Soviet Union seek out Memorial's cramped Moscow office. Many are elderly women who wait for as long as an hour and a half -- as if "they were lining up to buy sausage," says a Memorial volunteer. One woman, hands trembling, offers to donate a ring that her husband fashioned for her in the prison camps out of a bolt nut. Another, barely keeping back tears, asks for advice about how to discover what happened to her father. She had thought he died of pneumonia in a labor camp in the early 1950s, but has recently heard that he was shot in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison.

There are signs that the revision of history is going further than Gorbachev ever bargained for. Some members of Memorial and other intellectuals have begun calling for a public trial of Stalin, a move that might raise questions embarrassing to the Communist leadership. Still, as Belorussian writer Alexander Adamovich says, "had there not been a trial at Nuremberg, Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz or Buchenwald might have been denied by later generations. Our history must also have a legal foundation based on solid documentation."