July 9: Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, a historian who exposed Stalin's repressions, died.
On July 9, 2013, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, a writer, dissident, and historian who dedicated his life to researching Stalin's repressions, died in Moscow at the age of 93. He founded the first state museum of the Gulag history in Russia.
Stalin managed, in a historically short period of time, to take away land from the peasants, factories from the workers, and the intelligentsia's right to creativity. He deprived the people of all freedoms, even freedom of movement. This is the robbery of the century.
The son of the executed People's Commissar
Anton Antonov-Ovseenko was born in 1920 in Moscow. His father, a former nobleman, was a prominent revolutionary and one of the leaders of the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917—an episode later incorporated into Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "Good," in which the hero announces the overthrow of the Provisional Government.
From the age of four, after his parents' divorce, Anton lived with his mother, Rosalia Katsnelson. When he was nine, she was repressed as an "enemy of the people" for disagreeing with the party line; she later committed suicide in prison.
The boy spent his childhood in Pioneer orphanages: his father, then the prosecutor of the RSFSR, left the country to serve as consul general in Spain. In 1937, he was recalled, appointed People's Commissar of Justice, and immediately arrested as a Trotskyist. A year later, he was executed.
Thirteen years in the camps
Eighteen-year-old Anton was expelled from the history department of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, and his younger sister was sent to a labor camp. To graduate, he was forced to publicly disown his father—but even this didn't save him: he survived several arrests and served a total of 13 years in Soviet prisons and camps.
He received his first prison term in 1940: while working as a museum guide, he was accused of "economic crime" and sent to a penal colony for a year and a half. In 1941, immediately after his release, he received an additional two years on the same charge.
In 1943, he was arrested for a third time, accused of anti-Soviet agitation. This time, he spent eight years in camps in Pechora and Vorkuta.
In the camp, you're surrounded by philistines. They're the flesh and blood of the dozens of philistines you know who remained "free." In rare moments of satiety, all the vileness instilled in them by family, school, newspapers, "society," and the Stalinist state awakens. In their minds, sordid patriotism and chauvinism peacefully coexist with a willingness to sell out and betray their neighbors.
After liberation – the fight for truth
After his release, Antonov-Ovseenko worked as a cultural worker in sanatoriums in Crimea and Abkhazia. In 1956, he was rehabilitated and from that point on devoted his life to exposing Stalin's repressions, publishing several books.
When work was scarce at Lubyanka, the security forces would snatch anyone right off the street and then frame them. This would demonstrate that they were working, that they were exposing enemies of the people. Stalin signed these lists without hesitation.
In 1967, along with 43 Old Bolsheviks who had survived the purges, he protested against attempts to rehabilitate Stalin. In 1983, his historical study "Portrait of a Tyrant," detailing Kirov's assassination, was published in the United States. In 1984, nearly blind, he was arrested again by the KGB—charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda—and spent two years in exile near Vologda.
After perestroika, Antonov-Ovseenko published books about Stalin and Beria. He believed that in the Great Patriotic War, "the people won not thanks to Stalin, but in spite of him," and later advocated for the inclusion of a criminal offense against the propaganda of Stalinism in the Russian Criminal Code.
Ignorance and silence are Stalin's legacy
The Gulag Museum and its fate
In the 1990s, Antonov-Ovseenko led the Union of Organizations of Victims of Political Repression. He became the founder and first director of the State Museum of the History of the Gulag—and, despite being almost completely blind, he spent two full days a week at work.
In 2024, the Gulag Museum was closed, officially due to a "fire safety violation." That same year, it was renamed the Museum of Memory of the Victims of the Genocide of the Peoples of the USSR—a project of the FSB, Alexander Bastrykin, and the National Center for Historical Memory under the President of Russia. Most of the staff resigned after learning that the new exhibit would draw "obvious parallels" with the SVO.
