V
A few years back, I visited the GULag
Museum in Moscow. Perhaps from a
westerner’s point of view, this museum is a how a Russian museum is supposed to
look. It was cold, damp, and enclosed in
a tight concrete prison, lost in the middle of the labyrinth of Muscovian
streets. It tells the story of some of
the darkest secrets of Stalinism.
For those who are unfamiliar, between
the years of 1934 and 1940 Stalin held what became known as the Great
Purge. For those six years party members
liquidated each other in an attempt to survive the purge themselves. These were Communist party members themselves
turning each other over to the government.
Now in the USSR, contrary to popular belief, not everyone was a member
of the Communist party, so those who were not, were ironically exempt from this
great purge. By the end, nearly 1.7
million communists were sent to the GULag, of which 700,000 never
returned. This is only a brief introduction,
but we will revisit the Great Purge.
But part of the museum is dedicated to
the memory of high ranking party leaders that disappeared after the great
purge. They disappeared because after
they were sent away or killed, Stalin had important photos retouched without
them, he had their names removed from records, and in many cases he vindicated
them in events, in which they took no part.
Bukharin is a great example of
this. After his death in the purge,
records were changed vindicating him as a traitor to the Bolshevik cause. I was recently reading an old USSR
publication from 1939, where he and Trotsky were accused of fighting on the
side of the Whites during the civil war, something that couldn’t be farther
from the truth.
But my novel is about the truth of the
revolution, and while great scholarship has been done on Bukharin since his
name was exonerated by later Secretaries, like Khrushchev, the problem remains
that those closest to him, friends like Osinskii, Stukov, and Piatakov, have
all but disappeared into the vast chasm of history. Unfortunately for the historian in me, there
is a void in the historicity of adding his friends, but there is also potential
for the writer in me.
For example, with Stukov, I found a
picture of the leaders in the Left Opposition in the Communist party, which
definitely contains Stukov. A picture of
10 leaders, of which only three are known, so I picked one and named him
Stukov. Also a small biography exists of
him, just a paragraph long, but not much more besides his name popping in and
out of various records. So I will
attempt to fill the void, and whether I’m wrong or right, hopefully, I will be
close.
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