The tragic scope of the Stalin era left virtually no one untouched.  From the millions who died of starvation due to agricultural collectivization in the early 1930s, to the twenty million who died from the Great Terror of the late 1930s, to the twenty-seven million who died in World War II, nearly every family had someone who died in the gulag system or in World War II.  The range of feelings about that time naturally varied greatly.  Some ex-gulag prisoners were unwilling to meet and talk about their experiences (Hochschild 278).  Others spoke out passionately and angrily almost having a need to find someone to blame for all of these atrocities.  In 1990 as the fiftieth anniversary of the German invasion was approaching, newspapers began to question how it was possible that Russia was allowed to suffer more than five time the war deaths of the other allied nations (Hochschild 192).  The anger in people’s voices was palpable.  One man wrote to the historian Sergo Mikoyan, who was the son of a former Politburo member, stating that Mikoyan should not be allowed to write history but should be in prison for all of the crimes committed by his father (Hochschild 117).

Khrushchev, who took over the Soviet leadership after the death of Stalin in 1953, was the first to honestly deal with the errors of the Stalin era.  In his ‘secret’ speech given behind closed doors to the Soviet leadership in 1956, he spoke openly about the errors and excesses of Stalin’s era.  Shortly after the speech, the number of gulag and Great Terror victims who had been officially rehabilitated jumped from 7000 to nearly nine million in a matter of weeks (Service 345).  Nearly forty years later in post-Soviet Russia, the job of rehabilitating the victims was far from finished. Organizations such as Memorial were established to uncover the memory of the past and set the record straight by collecting stories of past atrocities and connecting families with their missing history.  Even the KGB had officers assigned to scour the thousands of gulag victim files and try to notify family members of what actually happened to their relatives (Hochshild 159).  In post-Soviet Russia, it was as if the whole society was in need of rehabilitation.  The victims, the conspirators, the secret police and the common man were all involved in this human drama.  It was as if modern Russia could not move on without coming to terms with its conflicted past.  Often times, this was difficult if not impossible to do.

One case in point would be the story of Sukhanova.  She was the daughter of the doctor Stephen Morton who rose in rank of the secret police in the 1930s and was eventually put in charge of the prison camp Kalpshevo on the Ob river.  In 1979, the river eroded thereby opening a mass grave which revealed thousands of well preserved gulag victims who had been shot in the head (Hochschild 199). Sukhanova remembers her father as a loving man whom she respected.  Yet she knows she could not turn a blind eye to the horrors of Kalpshevo.  But how is one like Sukhanova supposed to reconcile these two?  Could she possibly have loved both a loving father and a mass murderer?  Wilhelm Fast, a member of the regional Memorial organization where Sukhanova lived, had similar conflicting feelings when hearing Sukhanova talk about her father.  Fast had family members likely ordered shot by Sukhanova’s father.  Fast knew he could not logically blame her for his father’s actions, but this religious man was conflicted with feelings of anger in her presence (Hochschild 222).

This story underscores the complex difficulties of the Russian people understanding just who they are in light of the tragedies of the past.  Hochschild questions whether “[Russians should] see themselves only as victims, or as both victims and executioners” (Hochschild 140)?  Perhaps both.  Sukhanova criticized her father’s role but added that there was likely nothing that could have been done (Hochschild 214).  This is most likely the reality of the situation.  An official during the Great Terror who refused to carry out the sentences against the ‘enemies of the people’ would have found himself to be disposed of only to have someone else’s father take his place.  This is the reality that has stigmatized more than two generations.  Nothing was done to stop the abuses of the Stalinist years and nothing could have been done to stop the abuses of the Stalinist years.  It is what it is; people now have to cope with it.  Though most may lament the past and try to make some sense out of a seemingly senseless situation, there are those who continue to long for the Stalin era.