'The Dead Are Speaking'

On July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued Order No. 00447, signed by Stalin and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, which mandated the round-up of “ex-kulaks” and other “anti-Soviet elements,” including former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. Local police officials competed to exceed the official quotas. This was the formal start of “The Great Terror,” as identified by Robert Conquest. By November 1938, roughly 1.3 million had been arrested, of whom at least 700,000 were executed. The rest were sent to the Gulag. What can be stated with reasonable confidence is that Stalin eventually murdered as many as 60 million people. 

The statistics leave one numb and uncomprehending. The recent vogue for socialism and like-minded tyrannies in the U.S. recalls an observation in the second volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), one of the essential books of the last century: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. The Russian poet Lev Ozerov (1914-96) writes in a 1962 poem translated by Robert Chandler:

 

“The dead are speaking. Without full stops.

Or commas. And almost without words.

From camps. From isolation cells.

From buildings as they blaze.

The dead are speaking. A letter. A will.

Diaries. Exercise books from school.

On rough pages of uneven brick—

the cursive of a hurrying hand.

With slivers of tin on a bed-board,

with shards of glass on a wall

or a thin stream of blood on a barrack floor,

life signed off as best it could.”

 

[Ozerov’s poem is collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, 2015.]