The Football World Cup 2018 kicked off on June 14 with headlines such as, “Russia lifts the iron curtain”. Writers over the ages chipped away at the Curtain to give us glimpses of what went on behind it. They also had to pay a price for it. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance, had to live in exile for years after opening up about camps of hard labour for dissidents in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago . By the time he returned to Russia, in 1994, communist rule had collapsed, but he didn’t know whether to “celebrate or weep” because of the trauma still unfolding.
After the former Soviet Union opened up, there have been many writers bringing us voices from Russia. In 1993, David Remnick, The New Yorker editor who had been posted in Russia as a reporter for The Washington Post , wrote about the collapse of the Soviet Union in Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire . For the epigraph, Remnick picked Milan Kundera’s famous quote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Over five parts, he took us through 75 years of communist rule leading up to its fall. From democratic activists to party members, Holocaust survivors, Mikhail Gorbachev, Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin, Remnick gave us a view of a turning point in history and how it impacted people: “In the Soviet Union, an empire of Holocaust survivors and the children of survivors, [a] gnawing uncertainty was the usual condition of life.” In 1993, Ryszard Kapuściński’s Imperium was published, an account of the intrepid Polish journalist’s wanderings in the Soviet Union from 1939 up to 1993, recording memories of famine, torture and massacres.
When Kapuściński arrived at Vorkuta, a place once used for “final deportation”, near the Arctic Circle, a coal miners’ strike was on. He saw a dozen miners ostensibly watching a football match on a TV screen. Nothing was visible except grains of light. Suddenly, he heard a roar, even as a side of the screen sparkled in red. “Goool! Dynamo scored.” The Polish, surprised because no sound could be heard either, asked them: “How do you know?” They retorted: Dynamo has red shirts! Making ordinary people count in the sweep of history is what these writers try to do. In 2013, Svetlana Alexievich, who later won the Nobel Prize, did the same in Secondhand Time , recounting the history of communism’s demise through voices who lived through it.
