Memories from the time of Stalin

I am reading interviews about Soviet repression that the Russia Memorial (with assistance from Orlando Figes) gathered.Memorial, controversial in Russia (Vladimir Putin suppressed Memorial, but its archives are preserved outside the Russian Federation), is both an organization and an effort by Russians to tell the stories of those repressed by Communism through interviews with survivors. Most interviews are as yet untranslated, but those available in English still bring one to one’s knees.

I am at an age and in a circumstance where I can review the era in which I lived and my role in it. I live now in Madison, Wisconsin, one of those peculiar American enclaves that has attracted unadventurous intellectuals seeking secure enclaves in which to live while applauding murderous monsters wreaking havoc in lands and among peoples far, far away. Madison (and Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and lower west side Manhattan) was a world incomprehensible to me in 1965.

I started to read these remembrances (Всмоминания) to create the emotional landscape of Ekaterina Soroka and Danton Larionov, two of the four main figures in “The Executioner’s Son,” the Soviet mass murder obscured by Nazi mass murder. As I edit this post in November 2025, Democratic Socialism, at another time in the distant past, Communist fellow travelers (“What is Communism, really?” a democratic socialist inquired of Lenin. “Communism is socialism in a hurry! he is reported to have quipped.)