The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Arutyunyan read A Steep Road,* a memoir by a woman, a historian and a loyal Party member, who was falsely accused of being a Trotskyist and spent a decade in the Gulag, followed by another in internal exile. The book was a clear-eyed catalog of human suffering: When I was young, I liked to repeat the phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” Now I could say, “I hurt, therefore I am.” . . . Back in 1937, when I first admitted my share of responsibility for all that had happened, I dreamed of redemption through pain. By 1949, I knew that pain works only for a time. When it stretches for decades and becomes a part of the everyday, it is no longer redemptive. It is simply something that turns you into a block of wood. Physical suffering drowns out the pain of inner torment. This is a horror theater in which some of the actors have been assigned to play victims and others, the executioners. The latter have it worse.