The Great Terror

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More than four decades ago, back when the Soviet Union still existed and the Berlin Wall still stood, the KGB searched the apartment of a Russian friend of mine. Inevitably, they found what they were looking for: his large collection of samizdat – illegally printed magazines and books. They pounced on the bleary mimeographs, rifled through them, put some aside. One of them held up my friend’s contraband copy of The Great Terror in triumph. ‘Excellent, we’ve been wanting to read this for a long time,’ he declared. Or words to that effect.

Nowadays, it’s difficult even to conjure up the background necessary to explain that scene. Can anyone under forty imagine a world without satellite television and the Internet, a world in which television, radio and borders were so heavily patrolled that it really was possible to cut a very large country off from the outside world? In the Soviet Union, that kind of isolation was not only possible, it was successful. Soviet leaders controlled and distorted their history so much so that their own policemen were unable to find out the truth from their own writers, in their own language. There was always a vast gap between the official versions of the past on the one hand, and the stories that people knew from their parents and grandparents on the other. That gap made people curious, hungry to know what had really happened – even people who worked for the KGB.

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