I am reading interviews about Soviet repression, which Russia Memorial  (with assistance from Orlando Figes) had gathered. Memorial, controversial in Russia,  which Vladimir Putin has now suppressed (the documentation is preserved outside of the Russian Federation) is both an organization and an effort by Russians to tell the stories of those Communism ‘repressed’ (polite term for murder) through interviews with the survivors. Most interviews are yet to be translated, but those available in English still bring one to ones knees.

I am at the age and 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 and Berkeley and lower west side Manhattan) was a world incomprehensible to me in 1965; that time remains incomprehensible today.

I started to read these remembrances (Всмоминания) in order 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 a Communist, a democratic socialist inquired of Lenin? Communism is socialism in a hurry!) We each have our moments of idiocy, some more than others.

(Context. Lenin’s line that “communism is socialism in a hurry” appears in commentary and recollection rather than a single canonical text)