It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter (review)

Now that Russian authorities are actively cracking down on opposition forces, David Satter's analysis of Russians' views of the Soviet past is timely. Russian society remains deeply ambivalent about the Soviet experience. Activists' efforts to get their compatriots and government to acknowledge the extent of Soviet crimes against humanity, to commemorate the millions of victims, and to advocate for human rights have been met with public indifference and official hostility. A thoughtful, rigorous, and nuanced study could shed much-needed light on how Russia's amnesia about the unsavory aspects of its recent past is related to current political developments. Unfortunately, It Was a Long Time Ago adds little new information or perspective to existing discussions of the vital issues it addresses, and even those who agree that Russia should do more to come to terms with Soviet history will find it disappointing.

The book lacks coherent structure and organization: it takes on too much while neglecting clearly relevant material. Some chapters attempt detailed accounts of the Soviet government's depredations, starting with the Red Terror but emphasizing the atrocities committed under Iosif Stalin. Rather than provide a thematic or chronological analysis, Satter alternates focus on specific episodes or individuals, such as Feliks Dzerzhinsky (first head of the Cheka secret police), the 1940 Katyn forest massacre of some 22,500 captured Polish officers and civilians, the White Sea Canal slave labor project, and the conditions in specific prison camps. Despite occasional poignant details, these discussions mainly rehash familiar material.

Elsewhere Satter deals with the contemporary situation: the Russian government's refusal to admit and condemn Soviet crimes, the reluctance of the Russian population to face up to the Stalinist terror, and the struggle of memory activists to push for a more thorough accounting of the Soviet past and for commemorations of the victims. Here, too, readers who have a passing familiarity with Russian politics today will find nothing novel. Scholars will be frustrated by Satter's reliance on anecdote and example rather than systematic research (e.g., surveys of public opinion and rigorous content analyses of history textbooks or official statements) to make his claims.

Finally, Satter aims to explain why Russia today shows little interest in acknowledging the brutal nature of the Communist regime and argues that its failure to do so undermines its progress in the area of human rights. He echoes standard claims that Russians do not value the individual, are prone to nationalistic self-delusions, and abjectly revere a domineering state. His evidence tends to be the writings of conservative past and present intellectuals, hardly adequate proof that these orientations are as widespread as he asserts. More helpful would have been a critical analysis of these wellworn stereotypes about the "Russian mentality" or a sustained and nuanced examination of the psychological, political, and economic conditions that might give rise to such attitudes among some portion of the population.

Satter makes use of standard journalistic tricks, such as real-time accounts of his meetings with activists or politicians and his trips to mass burial sites and former prison camps. Descriptions of the patterns of sunlight in the forests where he hikes in search of mass graves may help make the subject more vivid to non-specialists, but serious researchers will likely find them distracting. Moreover, several of Satter's anecdotes strike false notes. He opens with the grisly tale of a young man who ended up in the bowels of a sanitation truck after a night of drinking and some mischief and was crushed to death despite numerous pleas for help to a rescue service dispatcher via cell phone. Satter believes the story illustrates a putative indifference to human life in the Russian mindset, but in fact it reveals little more than the dispatcher's incompetence. The concluding chapter describes Andrei Poleshchuk's quest to understand the fate and choices...