Writing about the Nazi Holocaust and about Stalin’s terror

By Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny

(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)

Nazi holocaust and Stalin’s terror are the greatest massive crimes against humanity in the last century. The first took the lives of 6 million Jews within 6 years, the other, by reliable estimates, about 20 million Soviet citizens (and an uncertain number of foreigners) of various national and class background within a quarter of a century. From a logical point of view the second deserves as much historical memory and representation as the first. However in reality that is not the case. More so, most of our contemporaries do not even see a connection between Hitler and Stalin and, while preserving active memory of the Holocaust, prefer to forget Stalinist terror. I think there are two factors which can explain this.

First, the Nazi regime was vanquished and completely dismantled. All its archives and other materials were made publicly available. Besides, Auschwitz and Dachau were taken over by enemy troops, and what was happening there became public terrifying knowledge (though even in this case there are Holocaust deniers). Nothing like that happened in post-Soviet Russia. The KGB archives were opened only partially and in the mid-90's were closed again. No surprise - many people in authority at that time were former Soviet officials, who for understandable reasons were not interested in complete disclosure of the dark parts of Soviet history. Around then the campaign for so-called “national reconciliation and concord” started under the motto “not everything was bad”. This attitude reached its peak in recent years under the Putin-Medvedev government. It made it known to the international community that it would regard the mere comparison between Nazism and Communism as an act of hostility towards Russia, which most of the Western public prefers not to engage in. There are notable exceptions, for example Gulag: a History by Anne Applebaum and Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe by Robert Gallately.

Secondly, there was a difference in the strength of the struggle to prevent historical amnesia towards the particular tragic events. The Western Jewish community, with the support and understanding of the majority of the people, did its best, and is still doing its best, to prevent the Holocaust from being forgiven or forgotten–and rightly so. Alas, there is no equally powerful pressure with regard to the GULAG. The “Memorial” society, which is trying to describe and document Stalin’s terror, is practically marginalized by the contemporary Russian establishment.

It looks like it is proper time for novelists to explore the subject and say their word. I tried to do this in Against Destiny, whose main characters got under the wheel of history in Stalin’s time, but dared to fight back.