Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Part 2

Realms of Memory

In Part 2 of Remembering Stalin’s Victims, Georgetown University Professor Kathleen Smith explains how a conservative backlash swept Khrushchev from power and ended the first attempt to confront the Stalinist past. While destalinization persisted in the form of the dissident movement, the nearly twenty year Brezhnev era that followed was one of official silence about the crimes of the past. It was Gorbachev’s attempt to rescue the Soviet economy that unleashed a much broader wave of popular participation in remembering the past. Conservative efforts to once again reverse course ultimately failed and contributed to the acceleration of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin, as head of the Russian Federation successor state, had another opportunity to confront the Soviet past. His failure to do so, and the general turbulence and instability of the period over which he presided, have been skillfully exploited by Vladimir Putin to return Russia to the authoritarianism we see today.