Journey into the Soviet past

In August 2011, the historian Nicolas Werth, his daughter Elsa and two activists from the Memorial association went to the Russian Far East, “ in the footsteps of the Gulag “. This journey inspired Nicolas Werth to write a clear and strong story, as far from the “ returns ofUSSR » of the Soviet period as well as the metaphysical wanderings of a Sylvain Tesson in search of the eternal “ Russian soul » in the vastness of Siberia.

It is immediately a raw portrait of contemporary Russia that emerges over hundreds of kilometers traveled, in crowded collective minibuses, in trucks on muddy tracks, in rubber dinghies on swollen rivers, on foot in swampy forests. or in cities littered with industrial waste. Isolated from both the West and the East by geography and climate, the Magadan peninsula was, from the 1930s to the 1980s, developed under perfusion by Soviet power, before being brutally abandoned. No more hospitals or schools, but brand new Orthodox cathedrals, disappeared villages, covered by forest, devastated suburbs, destroyed industries replaced by commercial traffic monopolized by Chinese immigration: the scene set by the traveler is rather sinister.

Forgetting the Soviet past ?

The human toll does not seem any less critical. Concerned about economic survival, young and old try to forget what, in their daily lives, bears constant witness to the Soviet past, and throw themselves – when they can – into the consumer society. Conversely, for Nicolas Werth, who on this occasion sows a few autobiographical white stones, there is no solution of continuity between present and past. The wooden canteens and the monotonous decor of the “ khrushchevki “, these small five-story buildings built in the 1950s and 1960s, the greenish walls and neon lighting, the smells of cigarettes and kasha are an opportunity for him to evoke the successive layers of his Soviet experience: the first trips with his father, the journalist Alexander Werth, the stays as a French reader in Minsk and Moscow and as cultural attaché during the perestroika, then work missions, which have become more frequent with the opening of archives since the 1990s.

If, for the author and his companions, everything evokes the history of XX^e century, this is not the case for the youngest of their chance interlocutors, such as these waitresses at a Pizza-Hut taking the “ Gulag » for a rock group… Without going as far as such amnesia, the dialogues reported in the story demonstrate a reluctant and ambiguous relationship to the Soviet past, particularly sensitive in this region deeply marked by political violence. Because the development of Kolyma cannot be understood without the establishment, from the 1930s to the 1950s, of a system that was both repressive and industrial. Placed directly under the orders of Stalin, the administration of “ Dalstroy » exploited the riches in gold, cobalt, tin, tungsten and uranium, but also in coal and wood of these spaces twice the size of France, at the cost of the forced labor of millions of deportees, grouped in an archipelago of camps.

Many Russians try to remember only the glory days of Soviet power from this era, rejecting any mention of the Gulag as a Western plot, or even putting back on its pedestal, as in the town of Yagodnoye, the statue of Lenin felled in the 1990s. Others, on the other hand, try as best they can to confront this repressed history. This book is for Nicolas Werth the opportunity to pay a beautiful tribute to the activists of the Memorial association, to his traveling companions Irina Flige and Oleg Nikolaiev, as well as to all the action of this NGO created at the end of the 1980s to document the Soviet concentration camp system, but also, inseparably, to defend civil rights in contemporary Russia.

This story is also striking by the evocation of the “ humble obstinacy » of all those who fight alone against oblivion, such as the plumber Ivan Panikarov touched by the stories of the former Gulag and collecting their traces, the director of the Debin hospital creating a small museum from odds and ends and preserving the room where the writer Varlam Shalamov lived, the worker Pavel illegally placing a memorial stone after the discovery of a mass grave under a road under construction, or the entrepreneur Vladimir Naiman, convinced of carrying out a divine mission by planting crosses on the graves of the deportees, the zeks.

From archive to testimony

Nicolas Werth has established himself as one of the best connoisseurs of this tragic history, tirelessly exploring and publishing the archives opened after the disappearance of the Soviet state. This trip is an opportunity for him to return to Soviet repression, the mass executions of the “ Great Terror » of 1937-1938 and the concentration camp system which directly affected one in six Soviet adults.

“ After all these years studying the Gulag, I wanted to go there, try to approach differently these places »: his book is also a lesson in method on the way in which the testimony of objects and men confirms, but also completes, the knowledge from the Moscow archives. Standards, lists, planning deliver largely bureaucratic information. The meticulous work of memory activists makes it possible to bring back the daily life of the Gulag, the “ pocket culture » objects cobbled together by each person, tools, individual files found in abandoned camps, or even cartridge cases testifying to the zealous implementation of the execution quotas requested by Stalin.

This additional documentation only takes on meaning through the stories of the last witnesses. The encounters and stories intertwined by Nicolas Werth provide an understanding of the state violence which massively affected former prisoners of the Second World War, populations subjected to German and then Soviet occupation in the Baltic countries and Ukraine, but also THE “ kulaks » and all those who, in order to survive, escaped the merciless discipline of work by pilfering or leaving their jobs.

The voices of the oldest, who remained in Siberia by necessity or by choice after the end of their sentence, those of the “ children of the Gulag » with genealogies laden with drama, had to be collected. This trip thus contributes to the project of “ virtual museum » carried by Memorial, which echoes the recent survey « European Memories of the Gulag “, devoted to the deportation to the Soviet Union of citizens belonging to the annexed, occupied or “ released » by the Soviets before and after the Second World War, based on numerous filmed testimonies.

Mass murders and the trace paradigm

Archives and witnesses provide insight into a past whose material traces are fading. Throughout their journey, in search of a few camps among the hundreds that made up the Kolyma archipelago, Nicolas Werth and his companions discovered a landscape made of remains of barbed wire, worm-eaten planks, abandoned hospitals from which rusty carcasses of beds emerge. , industrial equipment completely dismantled to recover every last gram of metal.

Some places remain visible, such as the “ children’s cemetery » of the Elguen women’s camp, where 5,000 deportees lived with their children, placed at two years old in the orphanages of the NKVD. But others are now completely covered by vegetation: “ The Kolyma landscape has eliminated its past “. However, this past permeates every place where the deportees and their guards passed and lived, towns, stations, ports, roads, forests, forming “ an invisible, indescribable totality, whose traces are everywhere and nowhere at the same time “.

These landscapes of disturbing beauty are evoked by the photos in the central notebook of the book. They are, for the author, an opportunity for a meditation on the erased memory of tens of thousands of deaths of hunger, exhaustion or under the bullets of the NKVDmost of whom disappeared without burial, buried in swamps or in mass graves hastily dug when the Siberian soil thawed. To think about radical evil, Werth calls on the stories, poems and memories of Evguenia Guinzbourg, Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (even if the latter did not experience Kolyma), but also Primo Levi. The latter helps the historian of the Soviet camps to think about the “ gray area “, a porous border that separates and connects both masters and slaves, a notion particularly relevant in theUSSR Stalinist regime where everyone faced the risk of being arrested at any time.

It is again Chalamov and Levi who accompany the reflection on the individual and humanity at the heart of dehumanizing mass violence. Finally, a comparison of the experience of the survivors emerges: guilt-inducing among the deportees of the Nazi camps, it seems more serene among the former members of the Soviet camps, undoubtedly, according to Nicolas Werth, because the harshness of their experience was, little by little little, “ dissolved in a life of harshness “.

Perhaps scalded by the controversy which followed his participation in the Black Book of Communismperhaps simply wishing to stick to his project of writing a travel diary, Nicolas Werth does not carry any further a comparison of totalitarianism and concentration camp systems, although present implicitly throughout The Kolyma road, book haunted by the question of testimony and the erasure of traces.