It is the word “etap” that gets me. I know that word – I know it from Solzhenitsyn, I know it from Applebaum, I’ll probably soon know it from Shalamov. I know it from history. And there it is again, today.
Etap was the transport of prisoners from one prison colony to another. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has gone missing during her etap. After her letter from Mordovia and her hunger strike she actually was successful in getting transferred. So her transport started on October 21. Nobody knows what has happened to her since then. “Officials keep Tolokonnikova’s location secret.”
There is the term “useful idiot”, for Soviet sympathizers in the West. Defenders of the show trials, deniers of the Holodomor and so on and so forth. Even though they sometimes actually did see those things for themselves. And there always was the opposite of that, like Koestler, Arendt, Conquest. Note that I’ve mentioned three people who are immensely problematic otherwise but still indispensable as witnesses or chroniclers at least. Well, maybe Arendt not so much.
I don’t even know why I mention these things now. Not to compare or to level anything. Levelling history is of course the worst thing anyone can do. Putin is not Stalin, the Holodomor isn’t the Irish famine, Nanking isn’t Juarez, Kolyma is not Terezin. This is the one thing we have to be clear on. That’s not indifference and apathy and inhuamnity. Quite the opposite.
There is a great powerlessness I feel when thinking about these things – the great powerlessness history can make one feel in general. Because of course there is more to knowledge than just facts. I felt it reading that letter from Mordovia, and I feel it today, because of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. I don’t mean in terms of “It’s happening again”. Rather: it’s happening. But not because ’twas ever thus.