Spring 1989: a group of young students bends over their spades as they dig in a Siberian forest clearing. In shallow depressions, they quickly uncover human remains, the skulls all neatly pierced by bullet holes, the work of Stalin’s executioners. All around the small group of diggers, dozens more mass graves stretch into the forest, extending, like the old Gulag Archipelago, from one end of the former Soviet Union’s 11 time zones to the other.
The scene opens David Satter’s It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway, a sweeping study of how the former Soviet Union’s bloody past continues to poison Russia’s present and threatens to strangle the country’s future. “I know as one who stood at the edge of that cold pit that a person who sees this, forever becomes different,” recalls one of the student diggers, now a leading liberal politician. Satter’s point is that too few Russians have been willing to peer into the burial pit of their country’s own not-so-distant past. “Russia today is haunted by words that have been left unsaid,” he writes.
