Stalinist era

The Stalinist era is presented as more than a period of repression: it is a system that tried to make repression disappear from public memory, and to make people accept an official account of reality in place of what they had witnessed. The book links that history to the ordinary institutions and family circumstances surrounding Eduard Limonov, then follows its attempted reversal under glasnost, when suppressed accounts and the names of victims returned to public life.

A system of supervision

The book traces the logic of Soviet oversight back to the civil war after the Revolution. Leon Trotsky, commanding the Red Army, had to employ professional officers and weapons specialists from the imperial armed forces, men regarded as bourgeois and potentially unreliable. Political commissars were assigned to monitor them, countersign their orders, and shoot them if they resisted. This arrangement became the principle of double administration: one person performed a task while another ensured that it conformed to Marxism-Leninism. The logic expanded beyond the army, producing successive layers of supervision in which one overseer required another overseer above him.

The system’s reach did not mean that every official personally committed acts of terror. Venyamin Savenko, Limonov’s father, is described as a modest cog in the machinery: his work involved supervising, controlling, and reporting. During the war he served as a simple NKVD orderly stationed in front of a factory. Later, as a junior lieutenant, he organized cultural and leisure activities for soldiers, including dance parties on Red Army Day. He played guitar, liked to sing, and polished his nails with clear varnish. The contrast between his modest duties and the larger apparatus matters: the book distinguishes participation in a pervasive system of control from a claim that every functionary was himself a brutal persecutor.

Decades later in Paris, Limonov liked to announce that his father had been a Chekist, knowing the claim would darken the atmosphere. After enjoying its effect, he would qualify it by saying that his father had basically been a gendarme. The narrator’s account of Venyamin’s actual assignments complicates both the ominous label and the attempted deflation. The language of state security carried a powerful charge, but his father’s history also consisted of routine supervision and the cultural work of a junior officer.

Repression and the suppression of memory

The era’s violence is described alongside the effort to deny that it happened. Collectivization, the killing and deportation of millions of kulaks, the famine organized by Joseph Stalin in Ukraine, and the purges of the 1930s are presented as events that official history erased. Children who were ten in 1937 could know that people had come in the night to take their fathers away and that those fathers never returned. They also learned that speaking about it was dangerous, particularly for children of people branded public enemies. Silence became a survival practice, and the wider population was expected to behave as if the events had never occurred, learning instead from the Short Course compiled by Joseph Stalin.

The book makes that imposed forgetting concrete through the treatment of reference works and literature. After Beria was disgraced and executed, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to cut out the article praising him and insert one of equal length on the Bering Strait. The alphabetical sequence remained intact while the person who had occupied that place in public knowledge was made to seem never to have existed. After Khrushchev’s fall, copies of New World in libraries were altered to remove One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In each case, control of the record extended beyond censorship of new writing: it required the physical revision of books already in circulation.

The book presents this as an assault on reality, not merely on particular accounts of it. The party required people not only to repeat official claims but, over time, to believe them. That effort generated the grotesque contradiction at the center of Soviet experience: poverty, brutality, and inefficiency could be officially represented as social achievement. The attempted rewriting of history and the coerced acceptance of falsehood made the system both monstrous and, in its bureaucratic absurdity, grotesquely comic.

Glasnost and the return of the past

The reversal began with the unexpected freedom to write history differently. The narrator emphasizes that during the six years after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary, the Soviet Union was swept by a transformation that Gorbachev himself had not set out to produce. In an essay published in 1986, the narrator had already recalled the replacement of Beria’s encyclopedia entry with the Bering Strait article. But the public opening of historical discussion gathered force later, when Gorbachev used the word glasnost, meaning transparency, during an address marking the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution. He spoke of filling in the blank pages of history and acknowledged hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism; the book stresses that the actual toll ran into the tens of millions.

From 1988, books formerly available only to intellectuals through samizdat or smuggled foreign editions began appearing publicly. Large print runs sold out, and readers queued at kiosks from dawn. The reading rush moved from Doctor Zhivago to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, then to Orwell’s 1984 and works by Robert Conquest on collectivization and the purges. The sudden scale of this appetite suggests that the suppressed past had not simply vanished: access had been denied, and readers were ready to reclaim what had been withheld.

A group of dissidents founded the Memorial Society under the patronage of Andrei Sakharov. Its work was to identify victims who had been killed and then further erased by being removed from public memory. At first the group hesitated to use the word millions. Once it did, the number seemed to many people less like a new claim than something they had been waiting for permission to say aloud. Public discussion also began to make comparisons between Hitler and Joseph Stalin commonplace. The rapid change in what could be said is underscored by the official rehabilitation decree: Alexander Yakovlev explained on television that it was not an act of clemency toward the persecuted but an expression of repentance by those who had stayed silent and looked away.

The era’s later political meaning

The book connects the Stalinist past to an ongoing struggle over who may define the country’s history and moral inheritance. The public recovery of names and testimony challenged the official habit of treating victims as though they had never existed. Yet the past does not return as settled consensus. It reappears in later political arguments, where accounts of Soviet power, national identity, and the costs of the Soviet Union’s collapse continue to be contested.

That conflict is also visible in the narrator’s changing judgment of Limonov and his political milieu. After discovering that Anna Politkovskaya had defended National Bolshevik militants imprisoned for occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices, the narrator was struck by the distance between his own image of Limonov as a fascist leader and Politkovskaya’s description of the militants as courageous people who offered hope for their country’s moral future. The importance of this discovery lies in the reversal of perspective: the opposition to a post-Soviet government could not be understood simply through the labels attached to it. The Stalinist legacy remained active in arguments about memory, political legitimacy, and the meaning of resistance, even when those arguments involved people whose views the narrator found disturbing.