Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Part 1

Realms of Memory

The early decades of the Soviet Union were marred by massive human dislocation, terror, and loss of life known collectively as the repressions. With antecedents in the Lenin years but more closely associated with Stalin, Soviet leaders struggled on two occasions to confront the memory of the repressions. Kathleen Smith, author of Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, compares the memory politics of the Khrushchev and Gorbachev years. In many respects, Smith argues, it was the failure to come to terms with the past that opened the door to the kind of authoritarian rule we see in Russia today.