First of all, that's a great title for a book. And this is a very good book.

Veteran journalist David Satter explores the difficult terrain of historical memory in post-Communist Russia. He explores issues like what do with mass graves from the Stalin era (and how to find them), memorials and museums, school textbooks, and so on. The book was published seven years ago, but it anticipates what the Putin era was going to be like, especially regarding Ukraine, Georgia and Russian foreign policy in general. The current debate between Putin and Western historians over the question of the Polish role in starting World War II is anticipated in Satter's discussion of how Russians today view what they still call the Great Patriotic War.

For those of us who grew up at a time when the Soviet Union still existed, the story of the rise and fall of Russian democracy, and the marginalisation of human rights organisations, makes for a depressing read. The era of glasnost and the first years after the breakup of the USSR were in some ways a hopeful time -- but that is now all gone.

Satter chooses to end the book without offering up much hope, but he does challenge the Russians to face up to their history as other countries (such as Germany) have done. He acknowledges that this is difficult, but writes that "it is certainly well within the capacity of a nation that tried to create heaven on earth." And, he adds, "it is the only hope for a better future." ( )

Joseph Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” David Satter makes a compelling statement for the necessity of Russia to acknowledge these deaths, punish the perpetrators, and memorialize the victims of the Communist state before she is ready to turn away from “sovereign democracy” and begin the slow advancement to real democratization. It is not possible to build monuments large enough or in more public places than the ones needed to daily remind Russian citizens of their failure to hold their leaders accountable for the deaths of millions of citizens tortured and murdered by the Cheka, the NKVD, and the KGB. 5 Jan 2016 " ( )

Since I read a lot of Soviet-era history and fiction, this book intrigued me when I spotted it in a bookstore, but I ended up having mixed feelings about it. When Satter concentrates on history and journalism, he presents informative and chilling details about how contemporary Russians have responded to the horrors of Stalinist purges, executions, and slave labor. But when he ventures into speculation about the reasons for Russian lack of concern, specifically Russian "character," I found myself wishing he had stuck to what he could justify.

Throughout the book, Satter focuses on memorials to the victims of Soviet terror, specifically the dearth of them, as a proxy for Russian commitment to understanding their past. He begins with a look at efforts to memorialize in the early days after the demise of the Soviet Union, and moves on to locations near Moscow and St. Petersburg where thousands upon thousands of people were shot and "buried" in mass graves. The successors to the KGB and NKVD have been reluctant to confirm these killing sites despite pleas from the descendents of victims and the nonprofit group Memorial which accompanied Satter on many of his trips.

Satter moves on to discussions of the appeal of communism, the responsibility of the state (for "rehabilitating" previously convicted people), moral choice under totalitarianism (not a very deeply developed chapter), and the roots of the communist past, before turning to examine the Russian response to the Katyn revelations (in addition to the some 20,000 Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia who were "buried" their after their massacre, the forest also held the bodies of murdered Soviet citizens), the changes that have taken place in Vorkuta, the arctic site of one of the harshest camps in the Gulag, and the Russian treatment of a KGB agent who also worked for the CIA and was outed by Aldrich Ames.

Basically Satter's argument is that when the Soviet Union fell, Russians felt some urge to memorialize the victims of Stalinist oppression. But through a combination of the reluctance of the FSB (the KGB successor) to investigate its past, economic woes, and a Russian "preference" for a strong state, as well as the age of the descendents of the victims, they have not exhibited a strong urge for the kind of self-examination and ongoing remembrance that, say, the Germans have done for their Nazi past. Much of the book also felt repetitive. While I do believe it honors the victims to describe exactly what happened and how people have responded to this knowledge, it got a little tiresome when Satter then describes how only Memorial is interested in creating memorials and how they are thwarted. There is apparently more interest in creating monuments to the communist past than memorials to its victims.

Nonetheless, much of what Satter described was interesting. For example, in the far northern regions, where the post-Stalinist Russian government enticed miners and other workers by paying them extra, those new workers were glorified as "heroes of the North" and didn't want to think about how the regions had originally been developed by gulag slave laborers. It also seemed that when many people remembered the communist past, they were thinking of how they were taken care of as workers, and how the Soviet Union was a powerful and respected nation, and not about Stalinist terror. (In fact, in this book, Satter seems to conflate Stalinist terror with all of communism; a better subtitle would have been "Russia and the Stalinist past".) And I was discouraged to learn that Solzhenitsyn blames "the Jews" for much of the Stalinist evil.

In the end, I felt informed by a lot of the book. It's just that when I get to statements like the one I quote below, I feel uneasy about how Satter generalizes about national culture, and I sense a whiff of ideology:

"Russia differs from the West in its attitude towards the individual. In the West, the individual is treated as an end in himself. His life cannot be disposed of recklessly in the pursuance of political schemes, and recognition of its value imposes limits on the behavior of the authorities. In Russia, the individual is seen by the state as a means to an end, and genuine moral framework for political life does not exist. The result is that the weight of a lawless state apparatus is slowly destroying Russia's immense human potential, rendering the country's authoritarian stability precarious. Russia has little protection from a recurrence of murderous political fanaticism that, under normal circumstances, would be rejected immediately in the West." pp. 304-305

While much of this may be true, Satter just pulls it out of a hat. If he wanted to draw those kinds of conclusions, he should have written a different book, one that analyzed Russian political thought and behavior. These kinds of conclusions seem grafted on to a book which, in its history and journalism, tells an important and depressing tale.