Searching Through Documents of Suffering and Repression

One must hang the tyrannies in the tablets of history in an indelible script. Those suffering witnesses buried in the ground have also confessed to something else: the liberating power of speech and words. The Soviet Writers' Association during Gorbachev's perestroika found it appropriate to investigate the fate of a number of discontented writers from the Stalin era and afterward, and the government's treatment of them. A commission was formed for this purpose within the association. However, access to the KGB archives was essential for the investigation. The KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency established in 1954, was the heir to the Ministry of Internal Affairs during Stalin's era and its affiliated security organizations. After discussions, pressures, and negotiations, the KGB and Gorbachev only agreed to allow a representative from the mentioned commission to access the archives and study them, but public disclosure of the documents was prohibited. The KGB was also unwilling to accept any writer for this mission and ultimately agreed to Vitaly Shentalinsky. Shentalinsky's lack of fame and his calm demeanor led the KGB to consent to his mission. He was officially a member of the Soviet Writers' Association and had written one or two little-read travel books about Siberia and the North Pole, and his poetry had not gained much attention. He was also not involved in social issues and rarely commented on them. These characteristics made the KGB not overly concerned about his mission. However, in practice, Shentalinsky was more persistent, precise, and tenacious than the KGB had imagined. Intimidation, pressure, and lack of cooperation did not hinder his work. This way, he extracted many details about the death of Maxim Gorky from among thousands of documents and reports, showing that Stalin's agents did not kill him, but the doctors treating his pneumonia were instructed not to pursue treatment too vigorously. With Shentalinsky's findings, it became clear that Isaac Babel, the renowned Soviet writer (translated into Persian, including 'Justice in Parentheses' by Mojdeh Daghighi), was secretly collaborating with Stalin's agents in intelligence and espionage, but later he himself fell out of favor, was imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately faced a firing squad. Additionally, through Shentalinsky's investigation of KGB documents, we became familiar with the step-by-step persecution of Osip Mandelstam and the suffering and deprivation of this renowned Soviet poet and translator, and how Stalin personally followed up on his case with satisfaction. The often shocking details of the fates of writers and poets such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Boris Pilnyak, Andrei Platonov, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Hagen, and philosophers like Pavel Florensky, who fell victim to the intimidation and machinery of Stalin's security organization, are also owed to Shentalinsky's efforts and research. According to his account, out of two thousand discontented Soviet writers and artists, 1,500 did not survive. Shentalinsky's research collection, which includes not only the protocols of the persecution and interrogation of discontented intellectuals but also their last letters, poems, and notes, was first published in Moscow in 1995 and a few years later in Iran, translated by Gholamhossein Mirza Saleh, under the title 'Intellectuals and Gray-clad Nobles' in two volumes. This book was long on the bestseller list in France (ESCLAVOS DE LA LIBERTAD: LOS ARCHIVOS LITERARIOS DEL KGB) and found many readers in the English-speaking (Arrested Voices. Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime) and German-speaking (Das auferstandene Wort) realms. Shentalinsky also published a number of documents related to Yakov Agranov, an officer of the Stalin-era intelligence agency who played a central role in the persecution and repression of discontented writers and artists. In recent years, Shentalinsky collaborated with the Memorial Society, which investigates repressions during the Soviet era, and frequently lectured at the Gulag Museum in Moscow. His constant warning was that the indifference of a significant portion of Russian society to the crimes of the Stalin era and the efforts of these people and the current government to relativize those crimes pose a great danger to strengthening the weak spirit of democracy and upholding human values in Russian society. Shentalinsky passed away in late July this year at the age of 79 in a hospital in Moscow.