vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #155 / Social life / Reading article...

Ida Popova still remembers the way the morning began – Sept. 11, 1937. It was sunny, a golden autumn day in Primorye. On her way out the door to school, she kissed her father good-bye, as she did every day.

She also remembers the afternoon. As she walked back after class, she ran into her sister.

Don’t go home, her sister said. Some men are searching the house.

Popova’s father was a commander in the Reserves and a teacher by education. He had been working as the deputy director of a sausage factory. The NKVD arrested him there in front of his employees, and his family would never see him again. Popova was 7 years old. By the time she was 8, the NKVD had shot her father as an “enemy of the people.”

Popova is co-director of the Primorye chapter of Memorial, a group that is spearheading a remarkable project. While this was still a Soviet state, Memorial pried from the KGB the names of every Primorye resident executed during the Bolshevik and Stalinist terror. And it convinced first one Vladivostok newspaper then another to print the entire list of known victims, name by name. In the past six years, 3,000 names have appeared, alphabetically. They have reached the letter L.

“It’s an act of confession in my mind,” Popova said. “This country is confessing to the wrong it did.”

At a time when revelations of Soviet terror is no longer news, when the nation is distracted by its crushing economic problems, Memorial persists in its project. Once a week, Utro Rossii prints its ongoing litany of grief, “Let’s Remember Each By Name.”

Popova began her quest to obtain the names in 1989. As society became increasingly open under Gorbachev, she requested and obtained from the KGB the list of all the local victims of repression. The NKVD, predecessor to the KGB, arrested and sent to labor camps thousands of people (there are 43,000 records in the Primorye archives alone). But for the publication project, Popova and Irina Yatskova, director of the archives, wanted to print only the names of those killed. All were “rehabilitated” — declared innocent — either during the Khrushchev era or under Gorbachev. (Only a handful were rehabilitated under Brezhnev and his immediate successors.)

Written in a dry stacatto boiled down from bureaucratic records, the list carries a redolence of sorrow, of individual human lives lost. A recent entry reads:

“Lutchenko, Andrei Paramonovich, born 1903 in the village of Zharikovo in Grodekovsky County, Ussurisk area, Russian, third-grade graduate, lived in Zharikovo, accountant of the collective farm. Arrested February 28, 1938. He was accused of being a kulak who used hired labor in the past and together with his father helped the White Guard during the fight with the Soviet power during the invasion. On March 15, 1938, he was sentenced by a troika of NKVD [judges] to be shot. The execution was conducted May 21, 1938, in town of Voroshilov. Rehabilitated June 8, 1957.”

In 1991, Popova took the list to Krasnoye Znamya, a Communist Party paper whose circulation was then the largest in the krai. Though the paper was always loyal to the party line, it received orders from the federal government to publish the list. When Krasnoye Znamya gave up the task, Utro Rossii took over.

At the paper itself, the list has become an unthinking chore. An editor there said he doesn’t know why his predecessor started publishing the list, and he referred calls on the matter to Popova.

Vladivostok is still home to hundreds of victims of the societal psychosis that afflicted the Bolshevik state. “Anatoly,” now 87-year-old retired naval college instructor, spoke on the condition that he be identified by a pseudonym. He did not wish to speak for attribution to a foreign reporter.

Anatoly was a 27-year-old Pacific Fleet officer when he was arrested April 1, 1937. The NKVD had arrested two famous Revolutionary generals on charges of treason. Anatoly made the mistake of saying he thought the two men were innocent. One of his friends informed on him.

He was taken to a prison on what is now Aleutskaya Street, where he stayed for three months in solitary confinement, awaiting trial. Eventually a panel of judges sentenced him to three years in the Gulag. If it is possible to be lucky upon being sent to hell, Anatoly was lucky. Most people received a 10-year sentence.

After his court appearance, he was lodged in a camp in Second River with thousands of other prisoners. (The former administrative headquarters of the Gulag still stands, a weathered, unpainted wooden building on Russkaya Street.) Soon the guards rounded up the prisoners and put them on ships to Magadan.

Anatoly ended up in a labor camp far north on the tundra. The inmates stayed in tent barracks lined with boards. The men mined gold, dynamiting the permafrost and extracting gold-speckled sand from underneath. So many men died, Anatoly can no longer remember individual faces.

“I felt like any normal innocent person would under such circumstances,” he said. “If you take a criminal — we had a lot of criminals in our company — at least they would understand what they were being punished for.”

Not long after he got to the camp, the court summoned him back to Vladivostok. When he returned, he faced another panel of judges. “Why me?” he asked. “What did I do?’ The judges lowered their eyes as they added five years to his sentence.

Upon his return to the camp, Anatoly wrote a letter of complaint to the Supreme Court. For some reason, he received mercy rather than the wrath of the Soviet system. On Oct. 10, 1938, he was released.

Years later, in 1950, Anatoly happened across the man whose testimony had sent him to camp. They met on Leninskaya Street. The informant grinned and stuck out his hand. “He expressed joy as if he met an old friend,” Anatoly said. “I would not shake hands.”

Such stories fill shelf upon shelf in Yatskova’s archives. Periodically, agents from the FSB (formerly the KGB) bring over a new batch of files, which are open only to the victims themselves, immediate relatives, and historians. Even the agents expressed surprise at the extent of the evil.

“They were shocked themselves when they were reading ” Yatskova said. “And they have to deal with it every day.”

Yatskova’s family was not personally touched by disappearances. For Popova, it is with her every day.

After Popova’s father disappeared, her mother tried to find out what had happened. The NKVD called the woman in for questioning several times. She always stopped to tell her children good-bye, fearing she would never see them again. Popova’s mother forbade the children from ever mentioning their father or complaining to her friends that he was arrested without reason. If they were marked as “children of an enemy of the people,” it would hurt their career and chances for education. But this silence contributed to a notion Popova carried with her for a year: that her father had done something wrong.

Then her grandfather disappeared too. “When my grandfather was arrested, then I realized something was wrong,” she said, “because he was just an elderly person, and he couldn’t have done anything wrong. He was just a cab driver.”

Were 10 million people killed by their government? Twenty million? The figure of 60 million estimated by Solzhenitsyn? The answer will never be known. But for Popova, it was not enough that the state later rehabilitated her father and grandfather, and millions of others. She wanted names, printed in ink, on sheets of newsprint she could put in a folder in her bureau. She saves every page. She wants a reckoning.