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Tomorrow is election day in Russia. Vladimir Putin is expected to win easily. His campaign was heavily seasoned with anti-American rhetoric and a call to restore Russian greatness.

The weakness projected by the American president is certainly a factor but there is more to it. I’d like to point your attention to the Russian people.

We in the West, especially Americans, believe there is an innate human desire for freedom. We may be overly optimistic about that. The anti-American rhetoric spewing from Putin is vintage Soviet-style propaganda—there are external enemies, the United States is meddling in internal affairs, the military must be strengthened to project Russian greatness. The Russian people are going for it despite an authentic opposition to Putin.

Why would the Russian people fall for this stuff all over again? After the 70+ years experience with Communist lies and propaganda you’d think they learned something. They haven’t. They don’t want to. They like the idea of a strong, even feared motherland, a big time player internationally. That’s why Stalin does well in public opinion polls.

From 1929 to 1953 eighteen million people passed through the Soviet Gulag. Seven million died during the artificial famine of 1932-33. At least a million were shot during the Great Terror of 1937-38. The KGB had an arrest quota. They exceeded it. Torture made it easy to get confessions and acquire “informants” who named names. There is a recorded case where the KGB made a mistake concerning two unrelated people with the same name living in the same apartment building. The KGB mistakenly arrested the person not intended for arrest. By the time they realized their mistake and returned to get the correct “enemy of the state”, the first arrestee had confessed.

Just knowing or having some vague connection to a designated enemy of the state could get you arrested. After a woman’s husband was apprehended in the middle of the night (The KGB always did their arrests during the night, robbing the entire citizenry of sleep and deepening the sense of terror.), she called her brother to tell him what happened. The brother’s response to his distraught sister was to beg her never to call him again.

The Russian people are still not taking calls from this part of their history.

To a disturbing number of Russian people, the years of Communist terror are not remembered as one of the most horrific eras of human history. To them it was more like a bad spell of weather.

The above stories are related in David Satter’s book, “It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway”.

He writes about how the attempts to memorialize that era and its victims are resisted, not just by the state, but by the Russian people. It isn’t a case of denial or guilt or traumatized memories. They simply do not care.

There have been brief flareups of interest in the victims during Perestroika and after the fall of the Soviet Union. After Khruschev’s famous speech denouncing Stalin, there were rehabilitations, freeing many prisoners from the Gulag. A writer, Vasily Grossman fictionalized the train ride home of such a prisoner in Forever Flowing

…the old man sat at the table, his fists tight against his temples, looking out the window…The train had already entered the green belt around Moscow. …And the man who for three decades had forgotten that clumps of lilacs still existed in the world…this man sighed deeply, seeing once again, this time under a new aspect, that life had gone on without him.

There are no national monuments or museums dedicated to that era and its victims. A volunteer group called the Memorial Society is trying to locate and catalog locales such as interrogation centers, prisons, execution sites and mass graves. They want to identify the buried bones and document each victim’s fate for posterity. They believe, rightly so, that the era and its victims must be remembered as a matter of conscience and moral justice. They find resistance from the Russian citizenry. Much of the physical legacy of that time has already been destroyed.

Satter explains:

In Russia, the idea that tragic history can be absorbed and made part of the national consciousness has not been acknowledged. In place of national memory, a new national myth has replaced the myths of Communism. It says: “We are a country with a great past. There were bad things in our history. No one justifies terror and repression. But we were great in the past and we will be great in the future”. Talk of terror interferes with the return of historical pride.

Putin will get 60% to 70% of the vote. There is an opposition and street protests against him. We shouldn’t get our hopes up. We shouldn’t look to the Russian streets for a sign that the indomitable spirit of freedom exists in Russia. We must look to the mass graves of unidentified bones to know whether that spirit is still buried somewhere in Russian hearts or if it is dead.

Satter writes about visiting a burial pit that Memorial had partially excavated.

It was the excavation we were seeking. At the bottom of the hole, which was filled with branches and leaves, I noticed bones dyed green by the moss. “Could these be the bones of the victims?…”The very ones.”…He leaned over, picked up a jaw bone, and held it in his hand. I was reminded of the skull of Yorick. “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.” But who knew the name of the person to whom this jaw belonged, and was anyone alive who still remembered him?

Until Russians are willing to look upon those bones and remember, the great terror is not over. I can imagine the souls of those millions of victims watching life go on without them. They are ghosts riding a phantom train that cannot take them home. Sadly, the West is not eager to remember them either.