| Nota de resumen, etc. |
The very scale of the Great Terror - estimates of the number who perished range from 12 million to 20 million, and between 12 million and 14 million more had been inmates in the Gulag - ensures that most Soviet people had been victims themselves or knew one. Moreover, the partial revelations of Stalin's crimes in Khrushchev's not-so-secret "secret speech" to the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956 ignited a public reckoning of sorts for several years. Yet the epic narrative of a war in which another 25 million died repulsing a vicious invader, and in which Stalin was the conquering commander, stood, and stands, as a permanent counterforce to the great sin of the Terror. Stephen F. Cohen, a professor of Russian studies at New York University, was one of the Westerners who spent time in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev days. His study of Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who was among the most prominent victims of Stalin's purge of old comrades in the 1930s, led him to Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, and to their son, and through them to other survivors of the Terror or their relatives. He finished the book more than 30 years after starting it because, he explains in "The Victims Return," he "never actually lost the uneasy feeling of having left work unfinished and obligations unfulfilled." Many of the people whose stories he tells died in the decades since he talked to them; some, like Bukharin's widow, wrote their own books. "The Victims Return" does provide a needed, well-written and compact reminder that Russia is still struggling to reconcile the conflicting narratives of the great crimes in its past, and will continue doing so long after all the victims and perpetrators - often one and the same - are gone. The very personal accounts of the Gulag victims Cohen came to know, and his summary of changing official and private attitudes toward the Terror, provide critical context for understanding Vladimir Putin's ambiguous position on Stalin, which Cohen discusses in his epilogue. "Generations have to pass and conflicting memories dim before a national consensus can develop," he writes. "Meanwhile, the struggle over the past, present and future goes on, both sides rising, falling and rising again." |
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