The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (54 page)

described

his

own

family’s

experiences

of

repression.

His

father’s parents came from Ukraine

and were sent to the Urals in 1934

during the collectivization campaign.

Some of his father’s siblings

remained behind, and he had aunts

and cousins in Ukraine whom he

had never met. His family was

lucky, however: at least the children

had been able to remain with family

members.

‘The state often isolated the

parents and raised the children itself.

The state wanted to create a culture

of informers,’ he said.

His

confession

unlocked

something in the other members of

the tour, and people began to

volunteer details about their own

past.

‘My

grandmother

was

also

repressed,’ said a burly man in a

blue T-shirt.

‘My family was from Ukraine

too, but was sent here,’ said a

woman in a red dress.

This is the kind of experience the

museum directors want to provide

for everyone. They want to make

ordinary people realize that the

country’s history is their history too,

and that it stretches forward to today.

As we walked out, we saw a group

of nine officers from the O M O N,

Russia’s riot police, all in uniform.

They were beginning a tour of their

own. These are the government’s

enforcers, and their image is of

mindless, brainwashed thugs. Yet

here they were, standing patiently

while a young woman explained the

repressive system of the Soviet state.

‘Those are the kind of comrades

who really need this place,’ said the

burly man in the blue T-shirt, with

an

emphasis

on

the

word

‘comrades’. Everyone laughed.

The director of the museum is

Viktor Shmurov, a heavyset man

with a salt-and-pepper beard. He is a

historian and was the first person to

spot the unique possibilities of the

Perm-36 site. Since it dates back to

the Stalin years, it has the wooden

barracks and facilities of the original

gulag camps, which is why he was

so keen to preserve it.

He and his friends, short of cash

and

building

materials,

even

managed to get the camp’s old

sawmilling

equipment

working.

They ran a timber business in the

early 1990s, ploughing the profits

back into the camp. The Russian

word for a saw bench –
pilorama
–

gives its name to the yearly festival.

‘This has been a gradual process.

We were building the museum for a

long time, and it was hard. We

wanted to present it in a positive

way,’ he said. In 2005, on the tenth

anniversary

of

the

museum’s

opening, they organized a concert.

‘I

don’t

like

speeches,

congratulations, things like that, but

we invited a lot of bards and poets to

perform. They went on to the stage,

it was a beautiful concert and that is

how Pilorama started.’

Two years later, they brought in

political experts and activists to hold

discussions and the shape of the

festival was created: music, film and

free conversation, all on a site where

previously none of these things had

been possible.

‘Here are thousands of free

people who behave absolutely as

free people,’ he said. ‘If Pilorama is

ever cancelled, it will show things

have got very bad here, something

will be rotten in Denmark. But I

have no doubt that we will

continue.’

One festival does not equal

political freedom, but it is a start. If

the winter of protests does lead to

Russia’s sclerotic politics becoming

a little livelier, it could have an

important

impact

on

Russia’s

population crisis. Estonia had similar

health problems to Russia (though

not quite as bad) when part of the

Soviet Union. After independence,

the life expectancy of the average

Estonian man initially sank, but then

soared to all-time highs. You can see

a similar pattern in other communist

countries that have joined the

European

Union:

Romania,

Hungary, Slovakia. Prosperity and

democracy does seem to be a good

way to wean a population off

massive alcohol abuse.

The Pilorama discussion sessions

inevitably focused on the winter

election season, with highly technical

statistical presentations showing how

fraud had been committed, and what

ordinary citizens could do to stop it.

The mobilization of thousands of

Muscovites to observe the polls had

forced electoral officials to behave

more

honestly,

the

experts

explained, proving it with graphs

and photographs. In the December

election, the results from Moscow

followed no conceivable statistical

logic. It was clear officials had

falsified the returns. By March,

however, the curve was almost

identical to that seen in a Western

European election. Officials had

been forced to record accurate

results. It was a heady demonstration

of the power of free citizens to affect

their own destiny.

Every one of the sixty chairs was

full, and another thirty or forty

people were standing at the back.

It is a mark of the importance of

the event that a group of young

people from a Kremlin-linked youth

group attempted to sabotage the

discussions,

asking

aggressive

questions and accusing the speakers

of serving foreign interests. Sergei

Kovalyov, a human rights veteran

who served time in Perm-36 in the

1980s, fielded the remarks with

admirable restraint, considering one

of the young men was wearing a

hammer and sickle T-shirt. I could

not help wondering what would

happen if a man of a similar age

wore a swastika into Auschwitz.

‘It would be very good if we had

decommunistication, like they have

had denazification,’ said Kovalyov

after he had finally extricated himself

from the discussion. ‘You see the

support that there still is for the

Soviet Union, and among people

that were not even born at its height.

They were all born after the death of

Stalin, and even after Khrushchev.

The oldest among them is probably

only forty. There are some people

among them you can talk to, but

their emotions keep getting in the

way.’

He was on his way to the toilet

when I interrupted him. It is a

rectangular building in the corner of

the camp, where inmates had

squatted at twelve squalid concrete

holes above a noisome pit of slurry.

I asked him if it was not peculiar to

be using the same toilet again after

all these years away.

‘That was the only toilet, and

you had to walk from the barracks

over there. It is a long way,

particularly in the cold, and many of

the old men had dirtied their clothes

before they reached it. Think how

long it would take someone if he had

a walking stick,’ he said. ‘In fact, if

you don’t stop asking me questions,

I risk the same fate.’

The popular weekly
Arguments

and Facts
had launched a publicity

campaign against Pilorama, running

an interview with a former prison

guard who rubbished the dissidents’

claims to have been treated badly

here.

Vladimir

Kurguzov

is

chairman of the Council of Veterans

of Perm-35, by which he means the

people who served as guards over

the dissidents, rather than the

dissidents themselves. His testimony

was intended to be aggressive but

was

unintentionally

rather

sad,

revealing an old man who has been

left behind by events. He boasted of

the

dissidents

he

had

jailed,

including

Kovalyov,

and

then

described seeing Kovalyov again.

‘Do you remember me?’ he had

asked. Kovalyov said he did not.

‘That cannot be. I abused you in

Perm-35 and 36, how can you not

remember your major oppressor? I

worked here for days on end,

everything came through me. So

why don’t they remember the main

monster?’ he replied. He may have

been trying to be sarcastic, but was

clearly offended by how history had

flipped round. He had been in a

position of power, and was now one

of life’s losers, while Kovalyov is

fêted around the world.

He insisted that conditions in the

camp had actually been very

pleasant, that the dissidents ate better

than most people in the country and

had had nothing to complain about.

‘They were in the warm and dry,

they ate at a table with a tablecloth,

having previously looked at a menu.

Apart from that their books were

published abroad. When they needed

new glasses, they declared a hunger

strike or refused to work. Therefore,

people did not die in our camp, like

they did in Kolyma,’ he said.

It was a telling comment, with its

total

incomprehension

of

the

motivation of people he had seen

every day for years. He seemed

unable to understand that it was the

fact of being locked up that was the

problem, not the conditions. If you

have been imprisoned for writing a

poem, no amount of tablecloths is

going to make you happy about it.

The

difference

between

this

Kurguzov and the likes of Kovalyov

is – ironically, considering the

positions they used to occupy – that

between a slave and a free man.

Kurguzov, like the young men

sent

to

disrupt

the

Pilorama

discussions, insisted that the festival

was funded from abroad (it is, in

fact, mostly supported by the local

government) to harm the image of

Russia. That is an argument that only

works if you look the wrong way

down the telescope. If you turn it

round you see, not the shameful fact

of the camp, but the heroic resistance

of the inmates. The attendees of the

festival preferred to focus on the

trust and respect among the former

prisoners, rather than the whining of

their former guards.

The festival had erected a stage

in the centre of the camp, and the

performers could look down the

length of the barracks to the front

gate. I had wondered who would

play for the finale, expecting an

earnest bard with a guitar and a

songbook of protests. Fortunately,

the organizers knew their audience

better than that, and out came

Markscheider Kunst, a Russian ska

band with a horn section exuberant

even by the magnificent standards of

the St Petersburg music scene.

Their two drummers whipped

out their irresistible rhythm, while

the saxophone and trumpet sent a

torrent of glorious brass through the

old cells, between the bars, over the

fences and into the forest beyond.

No evil spirit of the past could

withstand such joyful playfulness,

and the crowd whooped along. A

young woman at the front jumped

up and down, her long glossy dark

hair whipping back and forth in time

with the music.

They are not a political band, but

it was hard not to notice the lyrics to

their anthemic ‘Krasivo Sleva’.

‘Winter is ending, we’ll start again

from the beginning, winter is