Akhmatova, like the spouses and relations of thousands of Leningraders sent to the camps, began the awful and tedious process of making the rounds of the various police offices and prisons, trying desperately to lobby the ‘organs’ – or the Kremlin in Moscow – to intervene. Like thousands of other Leningraders, she spent days and nights with her loved ones on her conscience, feeling the dreaded urgency that if only she could make one more plea, find the right official and deliver proof of innocence, or pay the right bribe to the right person, she could free her loved one from almost certain death. The truth is that the terror was not, as many believed, a miscarriage of the Soviet justice system which could be rectified by correcting a mistake. It was a preposterous human phenomenon beyond all comprehension: the combination of a mutated strain of cruelty and perversion of impersonal bureaucracy on a monstrous scale, paralleled only by the Holocaust. As Gumilev wrote:
Mama, the innocent soul, like many other pure-hearted people, thought that the sentence passed on me was the result of the court’s mistake, an accidental oversight. She could not at first imagine how far the court system had fallen.
—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 96.
It often occurs to me that passages like this say much more about the observer than about the phenomenon observed. The Great Purge is „preposterous“, „beyond all comprehension“. Killing and imprisoning millions is not something I would describe as preposterous, as silly. Saying the terror is beyond comprehension seems an easy out, a way to avoid having to examine it.
Similarly Lev Gumilyov is here quoted as saying his mother „could not at first imagine how far the court system had fallen“. To fall, of course, something must first have existed at height — „this is not who we are“.
This seems to be something Giorgio Agamben addresses in State of Exception.