Past & Present

The concept of a public memory is an intriguing one, if slippery. Russia scholar Stephen Cohen wrote recently about the polarizing effect of Stalin’s memory, especially while the Soviet era lumbered on after Stalin’s death in 1953. There were millions of survivors of the gulags called zeks, and they were obviously bitter, and some made their way back into government, and this explains the sincerity of Nikita Khrushchev –a repentent enabler of Stalin’s purges, especially in Ukraine —  when he sought to “destalinize” the U.S.
S.R.

It involved a “movement of the heart,” as Solzhenitsyn and other victims concluded, which had been influenced by “Khrushchev’s zeks.” How else to explain his astonishing proposal, at a Party congress in 1961, to build a national memorial to Stalin’s victims?

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