Confabulated Memories

Story Fossils at Lake Winnipeg

Memory is a curious thing. Without it, events happen and get lost and forgotten. At a recent memorial service on the weekend, I felt connected with others in attendance because we shared memories of the deceased. And it was through the sharing that we validated not only the life of our friend but our own experiences.

Meanwhile, I’ve lived for almost four decades with a man whose various stages of brain damage have led to a confabulated past that leaves my own head spinning. I find myself isolated and alone when I realize that this man I’ve shared a home with, doesn’t share my memories. But confabulating the past doesn’t just hurt families. It seems to be all the rage now in Russian politics.

And isn’t confabulation what we fiction writers do all the time? We invent things. When we don’t know all the facts, we make stuff up. I know that with my own historical fiction I try to build on facts but create a character to personalize them. I invent lives to fit into the events. Sort of like building dinosaurs out of old bones. 

Recently, I was re-visiting a book, first published in 1947, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolavesky. (These 2 co-authors are worthy of more research!)  It’s the best source of detailed locations of the Soviet-era corrective camps I’ve come across. I wanted to find some modern images of the camps on the internet. 

Fence at Perm
Photo: Gerald Praschl, CC

The general vicinity where my mom worked in an open-pit coal mine in the Urals, back in 1947, is now touted as a place for nature-lovers to get away. It has all the modern conveniences that a gulag labourer couldn't even imagine... indoor hot tubs, showers, quaint log cabins with feather duvets and TV.  It’s almost as if what my mom told me when I was growing up ... the bugs, the hunger, the cold ... had never happened. It’s like she might have confabulated the whole thing. 

Putin demonstrates daily that confabulation is thriving in modern-day Russia. The only gulag museum in Russia, housed in Perm, in the Urals, was until 2014 under the management of Memorial, an international human rights NGO. But that truth is too hard to remember and so it's been changed. It’s like a whole country has brain damage and needs to confabulate a storyline to survive.

Perm 36 once a museum remembering the victims of the gulag, now has re-written its own story. For modern Russia, gulags have become a necessary evil that helped Russia achieve greatness. According to the new museum director, it is no longer "politically correct" to view the camps beyond their architectural layout and positive contribution to the Soviet victory. Manipulation of memory. Russia now lives in its own confabulated world. A lonely place to be.

The Unknown Gulag by Lynne Viola

Just finished reading Lynne Viola's book, The Unknown Gulag. Quite overwhelming, actually. This book is the story of the kulaks. And it's not a fictional story, it's the real story. I was afraid that reading it would put holes in my mid grade novel. I was afraid that somehow my mother's memory would prove false, or that my imagination would be weak. But except for one point - I can feel strong about my protagonist and her twelve year old view as the daughter of a kulak. (I'll talk about that one point sometime later.)

Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn opened the can of worms that was the Gulag. It was 1973 when The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West. Thirty years later, Anne Applebaum's Gulag, A History came out. That same year I was introduced to the research of Donald Miller, (who's written several books about those years in an area once known as Volhynia). His book, Under Arrest, has one of my mom's cousins on the cover. In that book my grandfather's arrest and execution is listed along with thousands of other kulaks. 

The people who have survived those decades lived in silence - afraid, always afraid. (No wonder there's so much alcoholism in Russia.) Now they're old. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it still make a sound? (or something like that).  

I'd like to recommend these books as background reading to my own little book. In Viola's conclusion, she writes: "History once denied through lies is now threatened by obscurity; forgetting has taken the place of falsification." (p. 193)

Putin, this is for you. (Ha! If only ...) I'd tell him to put real history back into his schools' history books, to rebuild his country, by facing the truth about its past. I dare him.  As Viola says, "... there are no national monuments to the kulaks. Their graves lie scattered and unmarked ... the death toll through the 1930s roughly half a million people ..." (p. 183) 

Visit the Memorial Society website to learn how the survivors of the Gulag are trying hard to keep the truth alive. Or check out the wikipedia entry and learn how Russia is still trying to keep the truth from the public. And in case, you don't have time to read the whole entry, let me mention that as recently as December, 2008, the Russian authorities removed several computer disks which contained the Memorial Society's collection of information to create a Virtual Gulag Museum online. (Now, supposedly, these computer files will all be returned.)

Still, this is all a very current issue.