Wanderings about death

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

My father was pushed alive under the bus.

My father collected material for the book during the short period when the KGB archives were opened. Took copies of court cases. A topic that no one needs and even dangerous for someone, the history of repressions of the thirties regarding personal matters. Those personal files of the arrested, where denunciations with the signatures of the authors and their addresses were pinned.

Now, in the state archives, everything is already closed, the topic is sensitive, everything is prohibited from being received, and no more history of denunciations, arrests and executions can be written, since by decision from above it was no longer possible to violate the rights of the descendants of the executioners to secrecy.

But the rights of those killed in the Gulag and their relatives can be violated.

And the informers were executioners, what is there to hide.

And then, the ashes that knocked on the hearts of Vera and her father, a descendant of those executed by Soviet power, were not our ashes.

Ashes from executions were available in the Middle Ages as a result of burning bonfires and people tied to stakes.

Then he could knock on the son of the burned one in the very heart.

True, the Nazis also had ashes, but not after each person burned, but in groups, masses, in camp crematoria.

It knocks on the heart of all humanity, but when the horror is one for all, group, mass, then it somehow remains not your personal, not your own grief.

You never know, Kampuchea. There they even cut out the livers of the dead so that they would not be wasted and ate them.

You never know in Africa the president treated his foreign guests to the same thing, they say, and Soviet representatives, with whom his country struck up a cordial friendship. Afterwards, human meat was found in the palace's personal refrigerator.

And here, yes, almost 20 million died in the camps.

And what kind of ashes could be knocking in our hearts, what kind of ashes could there be in the Gulag near the Arctic Circle. Waste the wood, burn the stove on the permafrost!

They executed goons who were unfit to work in the mines, simply and also in a group - they put thirty people according to the norm in an open truck and, at an air temperature of −45°C, they drove them to their neighbors and back. And they were stored until spring with tags on their feet, due to permafrost, not being able to dig brotherly ditches.