Crimes of Communism: a day of remembrance” “
A project called “Memento Gulag”, aimed at dedicating a day to the memory of the victims of the Soviet gulags, has been presented by the “Committee for Liberties”, founded in Milan in 1997 by a group of intellectuals of various political and philosophical persuasions. The association’s president is the Russian intellectual Vladimir Bukovskij, leader of anti-Soviet dissent during the years of the Communist dictatorship. The chairman of the executive committee is currently Dario Antiseri, principal Italian exponent of the school of liberal political philosophy that derives from Popper and von Hayek. The project has already become operational in Italy: two bills have been presented to Parliament. Three symbolic dates for such a commemoration have been suggested: the first is 9 November, in memory of the fall of the Berlin wall; the second, the 13 April, commemorating the discovery of the mass graves of Katyn (13 April 1943) where an entire generation of Polish officers – some 22,000 were assassinated by order of the Soviets; the third is 7 November, day of the Communist victory in Russia. The duty of memory. “It’s always difficult to explain to people in the West what a gulag was and why it’s important to keep its memory alive” – says Vladimir Bukovskij. “the young generations don’t know; they live in a world that prefers to forget such crimes”. “History and memory go hand in hand” explains Stéphane Courtois, author of the “Black Book of Communism” ; the work of historical research needs to be stepped up to furnish an enormous, incontestable volume of data on the crimes of Communism. There can be no Europe without this work of memory, painful but necessary especially for the countries of Eastern Europe”. In the view of Victor Zaslawski, professor at the Luiss University in Rome, “the subjective disparity in knowledge has now been overcome; there’s great access to documentary sources, and a favourable climate for multidisciplinary analysis”. In the years of the gulag, “people preferred to suppress the experience in order to return to normal life”. “Although I have little faith in the ritualism of anniversaries, I’m convinced that we cannot be silent, that no silence is possible when confronted by the crimes of totalitarianism” explains the Italian writer Erri De Luca. “There are two ways of keeping the memory alive: rancour and piety. Rancour is an arid and infertile soil. Piety stops pointing the figure of accusation, embraces the sense of mourning and forms the human family. Memory must be supported by reconciliation and brotherhood”. Stories. Released in 1989 after 28 years of imprisonment, Pjetër Arbnori now president of former deportees in the gulags of Albania was one of the first activists of the democratic movement in Albania and one of the protagonists of the first anti-communist demonstration at Scutari on 14 January 1990 that aimed to topple the statue of Stalin. During the 1990s he was president of the Albanian Parliament. He says: “In prison I suffered the humiliation and indignity of physical and psychological torture which no any human being should have to endure. They stripped you with violence, they humiliated you in your most intimate parts”. Valerj Bujval (Belarus) recounts that 12 members of his family were killed by the “Communist repression”. “The officers of the KGB he says killed our people, our finest intellectuals, only 6 writers out of 104 survived”. Ante Zemljar, poet and president of the deportees in the Yugoslav gulag of Goli Otok, tells his story “as a partisan who saw the occupation and experienced the horrors of imprisonment and as a poet who published books without being able to sign them”.
