In Today’s Russia, the Memory of Soviet Repression Is Threatened by Oblivion https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2016/12/in-todays-russia-the-memory-of-soviet-repression-is-threatened-by-oblivion/

December 27, 2016 | Dovid Margolin
About the author: Dovid Margolin is a senior editor at Chabad.org, where he writes on Jewish life around the world, with a particular interest in Russian Jewish history.

On February 6, 1938, the Soviet political police arrested a Moscow Jew named Solomon Levenson; he was tried, convicted, and shot—a detail his family would not learn until 2009. Levenson was one of hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalin’s Great Terror, which disproportionately targeted Jews even though historians still debate the role played by anti-Semitism in these events. Having traveled to Moscow in search of more information, Dovid Margolin—Levenson’s great-grandson—discovered that the memory of Stalinist crimes is rapidly being repressed:

I hadn’t planned to enter the building [where the Levensons had lived], but the front doors opened with only a slight tug, so I let myself in. I knocked on what I thought was the correct apartment and explained that my grandmother had once lived here and if it was okay, I would love to take a look around. Strictly speaking, Moscow is the last place in the world where strangers allow you into their apartments (Muscovites do not give directions on the street, either, insisting briskly that they have not the slightest knowledge of whatever location you are seeking), but I got lucky. The kind Jewish woman who ended up being on the other side heard me repeat my familiar-sounding name, viewed my Semitic features through the peephole, and, after unlocking multiple chains and deadbolts, finally let me in.

“This is not your grandmother’s apartment, though,” she told me. “Three generations of my husband’s family have lived here.” . . .

The woman was friendly and helpful, pointing out the places where the Soviets had built walls to split up apartments and various landmarks my grandmother had mentioned to me. But each time I brought the conversation to the central thought on my mind, Stalin’s early-morning arrest of my great-grandfather from the same musty apartment building that I found myself in, she waved it off, preferring to focus on the more pressing issues at hand.

“What Stalin?” she dismissed. “Today we have one tsar, we have Putin, that’s all. Everyone has already forgotten all the rest of it.”

I mentioned to her that it seemed to me that Russia had never made a proper reckoning of its past. “Of course. That’s because we all, probably, were caught up in this,” she answered. “I hate the subject. I don’t even like to think about it.”

Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/vaporized/article/2006014