The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review Terror, Rehabilitation, and Historical Memory: An Interview with Dmitrii Iurasov Author(s): Stephen Kotkin Source: Russian Review, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 238-262 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/130697 . Accessed: 24/09/2011 19:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Blackwell Publishing and The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Russian Review. http://www.jstor.org Terror, Rehabilitation,and istorica Memory: An Interview with Dmitrii Jurasov STEPHEN KOTKIN D mitrii Iurasov, a founding member of Memorial, a nonstate association (neformal) dedicated to reviving the country's historical memory and preventing the resurgence of mass state repression, travels around the Soviet Union giving lectures to packed auditoriums on the events of the terror. As such, he serves as the de facto liaison between Memorial in Moscow and the more the fifty affiliates in cities as far away as Magadan and Vorkuta. To a great many people, he is Memo- rial's public face. Iurasov, who turned twenty-seven in 1991, was twelve years old when he began to study what he calls "the repressions." Since that time he has compiled a file from archival and published sources that currently contains a quarter million index cards, each with data on the life and fate of a particular "victim." Only the Scientific Information Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs has a more substantial record of the people who, in Memorial's formulation, were "subjected to state terror." When asked to write an article about Memorial and his involvement in it, Iurasov preferred that it be done as an interview. What follows is a slightly abridged translation of Iurasov's responses to questions put to him over the course of several days during a visit he made to the United States in the fall of 1990.1 Iurasov speaks in a extremely loud voice and evinces what many take to be a disarming degree of self-assurance. He also possesses something of a photographic memory. His narrative of the formation of Memorial-a story that remains in dispute among the various founders and early participants-can only be considered 1 Iurasov's trip, funded by Soros and the Ford Foundation, was organized in connection with the Harriman Institute's Project on Contemporary Informal Politics in the Soviet Union. Those of us connected with the project, which is directed by Mark von Hagen and Stephen Kotkin, are preparing the publication of a series of volumes about and by Memorial. An archival repository for materials gener- ated by Memorial and other nonstate associations has been established at Columbia University by Eugene Beshenkovskii. The Russian Review, vol. 51, April 1992, pp. 238-62 Copyright ? 1992 by The Ohio State University Press An Interview with Dmitrii Iurasov 239 a partial one, if only because he has been almost exclusively involved in research- related activities rather than in matters of Memorial's organizational structure or political battles. But precisely for this reason his perspective is unique among Memorial's leading members. No one alive today knows more than Iurasov about the technical aspects of terror and rehabilitation, except for the still largely invisible functionaries of the repressive "organs" themselves. Iurasov demonstrates that, however "inefficient" and "arbitrary," the apparatus of repression operated through intricate, cumber- some juridical procedures that need to become part of our understanding of the terror and, more broadly, of Stalinism. [SK] Question: What is Memorial, and when and how was it formed? Answer: Memorial is an all-union voluntary organization dedicated to historical and educational work. It arose in 1987, in the period when the entire society was gripped by so-called perestroika. The movement was founded by a few individuals, ages twenty-five to thirty-five, who formed an "initiative group" to fight for the construction of a monument to the victims of the Stalinist repressions. In late November 1987, not long after Gorbachev's speech on the seventieth anniversary of the October coup d'etat, our group went to the Arbat [a recently established pedestrian mall] armed with signs and slogans to demonstrate. One of the signs carried words from Gorbachev's speech, that "the Stalinist repressions were a crime that cannot be forgotten or forgiven." Our goal in going to the Arbat was to collect signatures to give the Supreme Soviet, demanding a monument or memorial complex dedicated to the victims of Stalinism. We managed to remain on the street for thirty minutes, until the police came, confiscated our petitions and signs, and arrested the initiative group for "disturbing the peace." Seven people, the ones carrying signs, were arrested: Iurii Samodurov, Dmitrii Leonov, Lev Ponomarev, Aleksandr Veisberg, Vladimir Lysenko, Nikolai Starkov, and Elena Zhemkova. I was not arrested; I was collecting signatures among the crowd, not carrying signs, so the police didn't notice that I was one of the demon- strators. They found me later, but since people testified that I hadn't carried a sign, I was let go after having been assessed a small fine, which was collected at my place of employment. Everyone else was given a court date. From this moment, Memo- rial existed: we had publicly stated the fact and purpose of our existence. After the incident on the Arbat, we began to collect signatures, not on the street, but in institutes and offices. Within a half-year, by June 1988, we had a remarkable number of signatures-forty-eight thousand. We asked Iurii Afanasev, the rector of the Historical-Archives Institute, to present them at the Nineteenth Party Confer- ence called for July 1988. Afanasev was a delegate, and he carried out our request. With little resistance, the conference adopted a resolution to create a memorial in the city of Moscow. A bank account was opened for people to make contributions to pay for the cost of construction. Money started coming in immediately. It soon became clear that we would have a memorial, although not necessarily right away. We were interested in a thorough, irreversible de-Stalinization of the country. The authorities agreed without hesitation to allow a memorial-this fact 240 Stephen Kotkin itself, that what we were fighting for was agreeable to the authorities, was an indication of the need to widen our activities. We turned our attention and energies to creating a grassroots movement as a step toward the creation of real guarantees against re-Stalinization. For us this meant educational work with the masses-the creation of an archive, the publication and dissemination of information. We were determined to become a safeguard against re-Stalinization, and that meant oppos- ing antidemocratic tendencies wherever they appeared, whether in laws, speeches, or actions of the authorities. Our next task was to create a permanent organizational structure. A preparatory conference in that direction was called for October [1988]. We found sponsors among some of the existing organizations of the intelligentsia-the theater union, the union of architects, the filmmakers union, but not the writers union-and with their help we obtained temporary office space and were able to organize our conference. Prominent intellectuals-Iurii Afanasev, Andrei Sakharov, Vitalii Korotich, Ana- tolii Rybakov, Iurii Kariakin, Ales Adamovich, and Evgenii Evtushenko-were named to the presidium and ruling council of the organization. Additionally, a work- ing collegium of fifteen people was also formed to attend to operational matters within Moscow. All told there were around seven hundred delegates, representing forty-two cities. We all considered the preparatory meeting a resounding success. To incorporate our organization legally, we next moved forward on holding a constituent assembly, which took place in January 1989 at the Palace of Culture of the Moscow Aviation Institute. It was attended by approximately one thousand delegates, and by many foreign and Soviet correspondents. In addition to settling our organizational structure, we announced two immediate goals: (1) the return to Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and the publication of his Gulag Archipelago in the USSR; and (2) the freeing of all political prisoners held in the Soviet Union. There had been an "amnesty" in spring 1987, during which over 150 political prisoners were released, but those released were not "rehabilitated" and many others were not freed. We wanted every political prisoner released and the state to admit the unlawfulness of having arrested them in the first place. Thus, although we set out as an expressly nonpolitical movement, we were already deeply involved in contemporary politics, and not simply doing historical work. In fact, we had married the restoration of the country's memory in the present to the issue of the country's future development so that the past would not be repeated. For us the past was significant in itself, but even more so as an aid for the future. Q.: How conscious were people at the time of the various dimensions and repercus- sions of Memorial's activity? A.: We were becoming more conscious of the political meaning of our work for the present, but much was still unclear.