Letter Nine

On historical memory and the inevitability of repentance

Dear Madam,
This letter could have three titles: “Seven Questions”, or “How are Kazakhs and Germans alike”, or “Reflections after visiting ALGERIA”. Just don’t think that I visited a country that was once a colony of my country. Nostalgia for the empire that gnaws at so many Russians died long ago in me. God willing, these phantom pains will die out in a generation or two, but for now they ache and do not contribute to the health of your country. However, this is a different topic...
26th point
I hope you will forgive my discourtesy, but I cannot help but ask: do you know what ALGERIA is? If you know the answer to my question, it only means that you are incomparably more educated, more erudite than the overwhelming majority of your fellow citizens: no matter how many times I asked this question, no one answered.
So: ALZHIR means the Akmola camp for the wives of traitors to the motherland. It was located 37 kilometers from Astana, in a village that was then called “26th point”, and now Akmol. And they sat there... Let me quote from a coded telegram from the head of the Gulag, M. Berman, dated July 3, 1937: “In the near future, the families of executed Trotskyists and right-wingers, approximately 6-7 thousand people, mostly women, will be condemned and must be isolated under especially enhanced conditions of the regime. … I propose to urgently work on the issue of organizing a concentration camp in Narym and Kazakhstan...” (Reference: in the Kazakh steppe, summer is accompanied by clouds of blood-sucking insects and forty-degree heat, while winter is accompanied by forty-degree frost and sandstorms). „

The overwhelming majority of those who lead the country are Soviet people. They are a product of the Soviet system. It is impossible for them to admit that the society in which they lived and grew up, the society of their youth, was criminal. But you have to admit it. Repentance is inevitable - not because it is moral, not because it is right, but because without it Russia has no bright future

“The camp was opened at the beginning of 1938, and about 8 thousand people were imprisoned there. Among them were children of preschool age, there were old people, but mostly they were women.
You know, you read the lists of prisoners and you are taken aback. Meet:
Messerer-Plisetskaya, Rakhil Mikhailovna, mother of Maya Plisetskaya;
Ginzburg, Evgenia Semyonovna, mother of Vasily Aksenov;
Solomyanskaya, Liza Lazarevna, mother of Timur Arkadyevich Gaidar.
“Old news,” you say? Then add also “forgotten” - at least in Russia. But, fortunately, the world is not limited to Russia.
Go, Chere Madame, to Kazakhstan, visit the former “26th point” there, and you will be shocked by the memorial erected in memory of those who served years in ALGERIA, those who were shot, those who died of cold, hunger and unbearable conditions . You may be amazed by the fact that the memorial was erected by the government of Kazakhstan, that the initiator of its creation was the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Quite recently, another memorial was opened, more precisely, the KARLAG Museum in the village of Dolinka - 40 kilometers from Karaganda - and again this is Nazarbayev’s initiative.
Unanswered questions
I must admit that Nazarbayev is not the hero of my novel, nor, indeed, are the significant majority of the current presidents of your former Central Asian republics, who are surprisingly similar in their habits to the bais who ruled in those parts before the Soviet regime. But the fact that the autocrat, the “eternal” president of Kazakhstan insisted on creating a memorial museum of just this kind turned out to be a completely unexpected thing for me and gave rise to questions in my old head that I would be happy to brush aside, but it doesn’t work out.
Question one. Why does the President of Kazakhstan consider it necessary to perpetuate the memory of murdered, tortured, completely innocent women, small children and old people?
Question two. Why does he, a man of the flesh of the Soviet system, consider it important to remind the citizens of his country about the grave, vile crimes to which they, the current Kazakhs, have nothing to do?
Question three. Why did the German authorities consider it necessary to turn former concentration camps into memorial museums, where they are required to bring children from all schools in the country and explain to them the responsibility of the German people for those horrors that are now long past?
Question four. Why do they, the Germans, not let anyone in the country forget about what happened?
Question five. Why do they insist that not only Hitler, not only the Nazis, but the entire German people are to blame?
Question six. Why is there nothing similar in Russia?
Question seventh and last. Why didn’t any of the Russian presidents consider it necessary to do anything similar: Yeltsin, Putin, Medvedev?
Do you, Madame, have answers to these questions? And do readers have them? Just don’t rush to answer that yes, there is. Because these questions require serious thought. But if you are still ready to share your thoughts on this topic, then I will be glad, because I don’t have an answer. There is only an assumption, and even then it concerns only the last two questions.
Hard Confession
Let us realize that the overwhelming majority of those who lead your country are Soviet people. They were born and raised in the USSR. They went to Soviet kindergartens, where they were taught to march, where they were read poems about little Volodya Lenin; they went to Soviet school, where they became young pioneers, always ready for the cause of Lenin-Stalin; they joined the Komsomol, and then the CPSU. They are a product of the Soviet system, and this applies not only to those who are usually called soviet in liberal circles, this applies to everyone.
It is impossible for them to admit that the society in which they lived and grew up, the society of their youth, was criminal; it is impossible to admit that in essence it was no better than the Nazi one, and that Stalin was no better than Hitler.
Of course, you have to admit it. Not in a hurry, in passing, but thoroughly. Repentance is inevitable - not because it is moral, not because it is right, but because without it Russia has no bright future.
And I do not exclude the fact that Nursultan Nazarbayev understood this in relation to his own country, just as several generations of leaders of the German people have understood and understand this.
With sadness and deep sympathy,
Your faithful servant,
Voltaire