When I moved to Moscow 15 years ago my apartment was close to the Novospasski Monastery, a 17th-century ensemble of buildings whose gardens ran down to the Moscow River. In summer, I went for walks there on weekends. My feeling of ease and enjoyment at having such an amenity close by was quickly shattered, writes Seamus Martin
The old buildings were in an appalling condition and parts appeared to be on the verge of collapse, but something else caused my unease. In the torrent of information that followed the opening of the Soviet archives it emerged that the monastery's gardens had been a secret burial place for victims of Stalin's great terror in the late 1930s. Trucks arrived at night loaded with bodies, most of them shot in the head. Burial parties got to work in the dark and completed their task by dawn.
Neighbours were aware of the evil acts. They saw the disturbed earth and the traces of the pits into which the bodies had been dumped, but they kept quiet. They knew that careless words could lead to a similar fate.
When I finished my term in the Russian capital, a friend who had survived the Gulags of Kolyma gave me, as a memento, a little booklet distributed in Stalin's time. It was a spying manual. Suspect words were listed. There was a catalogue of songs indicating the presence of "enemies of the people". There was no escaping the eyes and ears of the regime or, for that matter, the whim of a spiteful neighbour.
Sites similar to the monastery gardens are dotted around Moscow and other cities throughout the vast territory that once was the Soviet Union and, before that, the empire of the Tsars. But since I learned about Novospasski, the place began to exude a sense of evil I had experienced just once before. This was in Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller and Herder, landmark of Europe's civilisation.
Nearby was a place that translated prettily as Beechwood but in its original German form sent shivers down the spine. Buchenwald remained as it was in Hitler's time. The slogan Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work makes one free") stood over the gates. The scratches on the operating tables showed where experimental surgery was done; the lampshades made from tattooed human skin to please the kommandant's wife were displayed in a little museum.
At the end of the second World War, the American liberators marched Weimar's population through Buchenwald to remind them that their claims of innocence were false.
My memories of these two terrible places are fixed at different times of year. I think of the monastery and its gardens in summer, for that was when I first saw them. The concentration camp remains in my mind as it was when I visited it in a bleak winter when piercing winds whipped across the European plain. In both cases I still feel the same intense sense of evil that I did a decade or so ago.
Europe warrants the title "the Dark Continent". It was here, in the lands of civilised men and women, of great writers, artists, musicians and philosophers, that the worst deeds of the 20th century were done. Other continents had their own catastrophes. Millions died, but do the numbers matter more than the intentions of those who ordered the killings? Was Mao worse than the Rwandan racists because he had a larger population available for killing?
Was Stalin worse than Hitler? There are scorekeepers, but they disagree fiercely. Some set out to use figures for their own purposes, to rake over the ashes of the dead to make a political point. Those inclined to come up with exaggeratedly high figures usually do so out of anti-communist ideology or a sneaking regard for Hitler and Nazism. Those who opt for the ludicrously low numbers are often sneaking regarders of Stalin.
In the middle stand rigorous historians such as the late Dmitri Volkogonov, the Russian dissident writer. Recent material appears to prove him right.
The Annals of Communism, a series of books from Yale University Press, includes important material from the Soviet archives and describes its mission thus: "Documents are selected not for their support of any single predetermined interpretation, but for their historical significance or their value in deepening understanding and facilitating discussion."
Prof J Arch Getty of the University of California is the publisher's expert on Stalin's terror and his access to the archives gives him an advantage over those who have extrapolated from often unreliable and sometimes rigged census figures.
He has this to say in The Road to Terror, the relevant book in the series: "The new documentation has confirmed other aspects of the terror that I have suspected for some time. For one thing, the archival evidence from the secret police rejects the astronomically high estimates often given for the number of terror victims. Certainly, the numbers are still terribly large, and even the more modest figures from the archives do not make the terror more palatable or easy to understand. We should not need to artificially run up the score to tens of millions of victims to realise the horror of Stalinism."
Hitler and Stalin were the darkest men of the world's darkest days. Is it not time to ask historians and commentators of all hues to let the souls of the victims rest in peace?