Puhdistus

Sofi Oksanen

4 ideas

1. Aliide betrays her sister, shelters her granddaughter

   In Soviet-occupied Estonia, Aliide Truu, in love with her sister Ingel's husband Hans, marries a Communist Party official, hides Hans in a secret room of the farmhouse, and lets Ingel and Ingel's daughter Linda be deported to Siberia. In 1992 a young woman, Zara, fleeing the men who trafficked her into prostitution in Germany, turns up at the same farmhouse and turns out to be Linda's daughter. Aliide ends her life by killing Zara's pursuers and burning the house, so that Zara can escape.

2. Sexual shame makes victims guard their abusers' silence

   Sexual violence controls its victims beyond the act itself because the victim experiences it as her own disgrace, so she hides it instead of exposing the perpetrator. Aliide after her interrogation-rape and Zara under her pimps both keep silent for this reason, which lets the same method work in a Stalinist security apparatus and a post-Soviet criminal network. Once shame has isolated the victim, she can be threatened with exposure to her own family and community, and that threat does the work of keeping her compliant.

3. Occupation regimes harvest private grievances as collaboration

   Look at denunciations under occupation as private motives such as jealousy, desire and fear for oneself, given political cover by the regime, rather than as ideological choices. The regime needs no believers, only people with personal reasons to use its machinery against a sister, a rival or a neighbour. Seen this way, collaboration shows up as a chain of self-interested compromises, each one survivable, that add up to betrayal.

4. Purge as compulsive cleansing of the self

   The same word covers the state's political purges and an individual's attempt to scrub away what was done to her and what she did. Aliide keeps cleaning, preserving and hiding. The house stays orderly while its concealed room and buried history rot underneath, so the effort to erase guilt and humiliation ends up preserving them.

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