Suppression of historical memory in the Soviet Union

The suppression of historical memory in the Soviet Union was a political practice of making the past disappear twice: first from public records and institutions, then from the shared account people were permitted to tell about their own lives. Its force lay not only in censorship but in the demand that citizens accept an official history that contradicted what they had witnessed. The emergence of glasnost and public remembrance reversed that demand with extraordinary speed, exposing how much of Soviet life had depended on silence—and how contested the recovered past would remain.

Rewriting the Record

The book gives this process a concrete image in an essay Emmanuel Carrère published in 1986, before he sensed what was about to unfold. Its title, The Bering Strait, referred to a story he had heard from his mother about the aftermath of Beria’s execution. Subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were instructed to cut out the article praising Beria and replace it with an article of equal length on the Bering Strait. Alphabetical order remained intact; the person and his history were made to vanish. The replacement did not merely correct a reference work. It enacted the official fiction that Beria had never existed.

The same logic shaped the fate of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. After Nikita Khrushchev’s fall, libraries had to remove the work from old copies of New World. A text once made public could thus be made absent again, as though its publication and the political moment that had allowed it had not occurred. The book links such revisions to a larger totalitarian demand: people were not only expected to repeat what authority said, but to train themselves to believe it, even when it contradicted what they could see.

That demand reached beyond printed pages into family life. The collectivization of land, the killing or deportation of millions of kulaks, the famine organized by Joseph Stalin in Ukraine, and the purges of the 1930s were excluded from the permitted national account. Yet children who were ten in 1937 knew that people had come one night to take their fathers away, and that those fathers never returned. They also learned that speaking about it was dangerous, especially for the children of people branded public enemies. Silence became a practice passed between generations: families knew what had happened, while the country behaved as if it had not.

Glasnost and the Return of the Past

The turning point described in the book was not simply a change in government policy but a sudden permission to write history differently. Six years after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary, the disappearance of both the Communist Party and the Soviet Union had been almost inconceivable. Carrère stresses that the force that swept through the country was the freedom to write its history as people saw fit. Gorbachev’s glasnost address, delivered at a gathering marking the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, announced an intention to fill in history’s blank pages and acknowledged hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism. Carrère notes that the actual numbers ran into the tens of millions. The gap between the official figure and the scale of the crimes showed how far the recovered record still had to reach.

The public effects became visible from 1988, when books previously available only to intellectuals through samizdat or smuggled foreign editions began appearing openly. New works came out week by week in large print runs that sold out immediately. Readers queued at kiosks from dawn and read in the subway, on buses, and even while walking. For a week, Moscow was absorbed in Doctor Zhivago; then readers turned to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, George Orwell’s 1984, and the histories of collectivization and the purges by Robert Conquest, whose account had previously been dismissed by fellow travelers in the West as the work of a CIA agent. The change in circulation mattered: material that had been hidden or restricted became a subject of ordinary public conversation.

Under Andrei Sakharov’s patronage, dissidents founded the Memorial Society to name victims who had been killed and then erased from memory. Its work answered a wish expressed by Anna Akhmatova in Requiem: that the dead be called by name. At first the society hesitated to use the word millions. Once it did, the number seemed to many less like a new claim than something they had been waiting for permission to say aloud. Parallels between Joseph Stalin and Hitler became common in public debate. A formerly suppressed history was no longer only an archive of individual suffering; it was becoming a language with which people could judge the political order that had produced it.

From Official Acknowledgment to Public Reckoning

The change in what could be said reached the state itself. At the bicentennial of the French Revolution, less than two years after Gorbachev’s glasnost address, his principal adviser Alexander Yakovlev spoke publicly of Vladimir Lenin as the first politician to use the term concentration camp. In a separate televised explanation of the decree rehabilitating those persecuted since 1917, Yakovlev rejected the Party’s presentation of rehabilitation as clemency. He described it instead as repentance, including repentance by people who had remained silent and looked away. Within less than two years, an official account that had begun by acknowledging hundreds of thousands of victims had moved toward recognizing the regime’s criminal history and the complicity of silence.

This reversal did not mean that the past had become settled. The book sets public recovery of memory beside the feelings of people whose childhoods belonged to the Soviet Union and whose adolescence and adult lives unfolded after its collapse. Zakhar Prilepin’s provincial friends remembered Soviet childhood as a time when things made sense, when there was little money and little to buy, and when a boy could admire a grandfather for being the best tractor driver in his collective farm. They also remembered the humiliation and poverty that followed for parents who had once been modest but proud. Their tenderness toward childhood did not erase the violence and historical concealment described elsewhere; it showed how personal memory could preserve attachments that a moral reckoning with the state did not simply dissolve.

The later political appeal of Vladimir Putin likewise depended, in Carrère’s account, on refusing to treat seventy years of Soviet life as worthless or indistinguishable from Nazism. Putin’s government could instruct textbook writers to stop teaching what it considered bad things about Joseph Stalin, even as the country’s earlier opening had brought suppressed crimes into public view. The contrast gives the history of memory suppression an unfinished ending: once the state’s monopoly over the past breaks, remembrance can expose crimes, restore names, and enable repentance, but it can also become the ground on which competing accounts of Soviet experience struggle for authority.