In her new book, Anne Applebaum tells an instructive story about Vice President Henry Wallace's first visit to the Soviet Far East in May 1944. Determined to think the best of America's wartime ally, Wallace took an instant liking to his Russian host, a senior secret policeman called Ivan Nikishov. The visitor was struck by the similarities between America and Russia as pioneering nations with vast natural resources, and he listened sympathetically as Nikishov told him how the town of Magadan, with 40,000 residents, had sprung up over the last 12 years. What Wallace hardly seems to have realized is that he was visiting a giant prison: Magadan was the "capital" of an area several times the size of France, where hundreds of thousands of people were sent to incarceration or exile. Many did not even arrive, because the ships that ferried prisoners to Magadan were notorious death traps. And work in the nearby Kolyma gold fields was so back-breaking that very few survived it for more than a couple of years. The town Wallace so admired had been built by penal labor; the singers and musicians who performed for him were captives (albeit under strict instructions not to reveal the fact); even the local embroidery which he politely praised was the work of prisoners.
Gulag by Anne Applebaum Doubleday, $35.00
What this story reminds us, of course, is that when a nation or coalition has focused all its attention on the defeat of a single enemy, it can easily become blinded to the faults, indeed the downright evil, of other forces in the world--especially if those other forces happen to be helping in the struggle against the main adversary. Winston Churchill, to his credit, was aware of this paradox: He once declared that if Hitler had invaded hell, Her Majesty's government would at least have sent a friendly diplomatic note to the Prince of Darkness. And most people would agree that when a nation is engaged in the heat of a life-and-death struggle with a clearly defined enemy, such as Nazi Germany, it is reasonable to accept help from almost any partner, however unsavory--as long as you do not deceive yourself, as Wallace appears to have done, about that partner's real nature. The wisdom of cultivating dubious allies--on the old "enemy of my enemy" principle--is much less self-evident when the war you are fighting is long, multi-fronted, and has an important moral and psychological dimension as well as a military one. That description applied to the Cold War, and it also applies to the current war against terrorism.
Since 1945, not many observers of the Soviet Union have been as naïve as Wallace; but Anne Applebaum believes that Westerners--especially on the political left--have never ceased to underestimate the radically evil nature of the Soviet system, and the degree of suffering it inflicted on its own citizens. And she is undoubtedly right to say that the dimensions of Stalin's repression, even if we do our best to assess it honestly, are hard to take in. For those of us who live in relative comfort and liberty, the story of the Soviet prison camps, through which as many as 18 million people may have passed over a period of roughly four decades, is a bone-chilling reminder of humanity's almost infinite capacity for cruelty, on a scale that defies belief. It is also a phenomenon in which many observers, including some who had little excuse, consciously chose not to believe. This was partly because the Soviet authorities, reinventing the Tsarist tradition of Potemkin villages designed to impress the foreigner, went to enormous lengths to hide the truth; and partly because some observers, knowingly or unknowingly, colluded with this cover-up because it was more comfortable to do so. And even for those who are determined to discover the facts in all their ugliness, the truth remains elusive; good people can differ about what exactly happened.
Stalin's Skeleton Closet
In a sense, as Applebaum suggests, this cover-up is still going on. For a brief period at the very end of the Soviet era, a dozen years ago, Moscow's public debates were dominated by fresh discoveries about the darkest aspects of the Soviet era and by loud cries of "never again." For an even briefer moment, it seemed as though these revelations had terminally discredited both the individuals (Stalin, Beria, and the likes of Nikishov) and the institutions (such as the Communist Party and the secret police) which had practiced repression on such a titanic scale.
But that moment has long since passed. Russia is now ruled by a former member of the secret police who enjoys huge popularity. After a decade in which the country seemed, more than once, to be teetering toward chaos, more people are willing to accept the proposition that it is worth sacrificing human rights for the sake of order and economic progress. Nor is Stalin himself seen as a purely villainous figure; having watched their country lose influence on the world stage, Russians are more inclined to voice a grudging respect for the man who, as they see it, raised that influence to unprecedented heights. While the archives that tell the story of Stalin's repression have not exactly snapped shut, there is less enthusiasm for opening them to all comers. The secret-police force--under its latest acronym, FSB--has regained enough institutional self-confidence to defend its record. The handful of Russians who campaign, in a disinterested way, for the observance of human rights and the discovery of historical facts, are once again a beleaguered minority, albeit not an actively persecuted one.
Nor is there any strong impulse in the West to prize new skeletons out of Russia's cupboard. In the current Western mood, almost any ally's blemishes can be overlooked as long as it delivers a modicum of co-operation in the war against terrorism. Encouraging Russia to look more critically at its own past is the last thing any Western government cares about; and if such pressure were applied, the reaction in Russia would be impatient, to put it mildly. While most people, both in Russia and the West, would accept that the Soviets imposed a regime of horrible repression under a thin, pseudo-judicial cover, there is little desire to know more about it.
Applebaum's purpose is to buck that trend. Taking advantage of the fact that some archives are now available, and that some former inmates remain alive and articulate, she has set out to write a comprehensive history of the Soviet penal camps for the general reader. She is not a full-time academic like Robert Conquest, who has devoted an entire career to investigating and chronicling Stalin's rule and can therefore integrate the gory details of his penal system into a broader theory about his regime. Nor, of course, does she have the literary aspirations of an Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Evgeniya Ginzburg. Her writing is often powerful and incisive, but it achieves this effect through simplicity and restraint rather than stylistic flourish.
Applebaum's voice is that of a serious author and journalist who has interviewed 30 camp survivors, read scores of camp memoirs, traveled to Russia's far north, and drawn on government archives in Moscow and half a dozen other places. She chronicles the camps' evolution from the mid-1920s, when dissident socialists, intellectuals, monarchists, priests, and common criminals were shipped to the Arctic, to the early 1930s, when a vast network of penal colonies harnessed the labor of dispossessed peasants to feed Russia's crash industrialization program. By the late '30s, as the revolution gobbled more and more of its own children, the camps were filling up with loyal communists. By this stage, the authorities had ceased to pretend that the camps were a successful experiment in rehabilitation, or a monument to the dignity of labor. The crueler the camps became, the more fervently they were covered up.
Between 1941 and 1942, Applebaum writes, a quarter of the camps' inmates died of starvation. They shared this fate, of course, with many of their "free" compatriots, such as the besieged residents of Leningrad. The camp population rose again after World War II, as the regime turned xenophobic and anti-Semitic. But the new captives included former partisan fighters whose will was not easily broken; among the book's most powerful passages are the descriptions of the rebellions which prisoners mounted, both before and after Stalin's death in 1953. From the mid-1950s, when hundreds of thousands of prisoners were released, penal labor ceased to play a significant role in the economy. But political and religious dissenters continued to be sent to camp until the last few years of the Soviet regime. In 27 chapters with 2,157 footnotes, Applebaum dissects this epic of cruelty and suffering, chronologically and thematically. She recounts the diet, kept at the bare minimum to extract useful labor out of the prisoners; the sexual abuse; the egregious horror of transport to the camps by train or ship; the shady deals between prisoner and warder; and the shifting relations between political prisoners and urkas, or common criminals.
There is much to be said for her clinical approach to a subject on which any superlative of horror sounds cheap. But in a paradoxical way, the reader of this admirable and courageous book is left wanting more. Even if we cannot know, in the final analysis, why Stalin's terror was imposed, we are curious to know (at least at a subjective, psychological level) how it was imposed. How did the individuals who masterminded and ran the camp system rationalize their own behavior? How was it that so many of their victims retained their faith in communism, insisting that their own incarceration was merely a deviation from a well-founded political project? And among those survivors who took a more realistic view of their persecutors, what feelings persist? Applebaum introduces us briefly to a hospitable Muscovite grandmother who manages a flash of humor as she describes the clothes she wore in camp as a young woman. The reader wants to hear more from this wise lady--and from other camp survivors (including those who, amazingly enough, still defend Stalin) with whom we can engage as flesh-and-blood human beings. Strikingly absent from Applebaum's bibliography are the stories, which are readily available, of prisoners (including priests, mullahs, and Buddhist monks) who were incarcerated for their religious beliefs. To what extent were prisoners sustained by these beliefs and enabled to make sense of their suffering? These are questions which other writers, building on Applebaum's foundations, will want to address.
Looking Like Your Dog
Most of the time, she allows the facts to speak for themselves; her approach is not a didactic one, and that is one of the book's merits. But where her book does become didactic, especially at the beginning and the end, she will lose the sympathy of readers who in other respects warmly admire her. Sometimes legitimately, Applebaum attacks the failure of Westerners to grasp the real nature of Soviet communism, and to understand how single-mindedly that system had to be confronted. She is shocked by the fact that tourists in ex-communist countries snap up Soviet paraphernalia as mementos, although they would never buy Nazi trinkets. She is struck by the fact that a Western intellectual can admit to a communist or even Stalinist past without embarrassment, whereas to have flirted with Nazism is considered a sin beyond forgiveness. She also denounces Cold War revisionism--the idea that the Western side might have been at fault in the Soviet-American contest--whether it comes from iconoclasts like Gore Vidal or more unlikely quarters, such as Britain's Spectator magazine.
She is right to say that some Westerners underestimate the evil perpetrated under the Soviet flag. But surely, it is going too far to regard Western tactics during the Cold War as beyond reproach. It is true, of course, that any moral assessment of that period must take full account of the horrific nature of the Soviet penal system, and of the fact that whenever it had the chance, the Soviet regime imposed similar horrors on other countries. Western leaders would stand condemned by history if they had not worked tirelessly to avoid the imposition of that system on their own countries--and in the long run, to roll back repression inside the Soviet empire.
But the fact that one party to a con-flict practiced terrible wickedness does not imply that the other behaved with disinterested perfection. With full knowledge of the Soviet Union's crimes against its own subjects, it is still possible to argue that at certain times, America and its allies stoked the fires of superpower competition and put humanity's survival at risk. The expression "military-industrial complex"--meaning an alliance of interests between the Pentagon and the arms industry which had an agenda of its own--was not coined by some soft-minded apologist for communism; it was coined by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican and supreme commander of Allied forces during World War II. As Applebaum herself notes, Stalin's jailers--especially after 1945--shored up their own authority at home by citing the imperative to achieve and maintain parity with the country that had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This does not necessarily imply that the Western side in the Cold War should have slackened its own efforts in the naïve hope that the Soviet regime would have softened as a result. But it is not being treacherous or soft-minded to study the Soviet-American contest as a self-compounding process in which one side's fearful and suspicious behavior fueled the other's.
Nor was the practice of terrible forms of repression, including the widespread use of incarceration, torture, and extrajudicial killing, any monopoly of the communist side in the Cold War. In countries like Chile, Iran, Indonesia, and Greece, precisely those crimes were perpetrated in the name of the "free world"--and they were justified, or actively abetted, by America's keenest Cold Warriors on grounds that "our sons of bitches" should be forgiven almost anything as long they fought the good fight against the Reds.
This does not mean that communism and liberal capitalism are morally equivalent routes to modernity and industrialization. At least in its purer form, the Cold War theory of convergence, which held that American and Soviet societies were becoming almost identical--was utter nonsense. But in any sustained conflict, whether personal or geopolitical, there is an ever-present possibility that the two sides will imitate certain aspects of each other's behavior. It is not only our spouses, or our pets that we grow to resemble, but also, to some extent, our enemies. To put it another way, our adversaries--ideological and geopolitical--do not merely threaten us by preparing to attack and defeat us; in a more subtle way, they also threaten us by making us more like them. It would be absurd to suggest that America itself had any equivalent of the Soviet gulag, but Cold War logic did make the United States more tolerant of its allies' repressive behavior. Analysts of the Cold War should be alive to these realities, even as they contemplate the staggering cruelty, and mendacity, of Stalin's Russia.
The force of this point goes far beyond historical analysis or philosophical speculation. It is immediately relevant for today's warriors in the battle against terrorism. If there is any part of the world where the apparatus and culture of Soviet repression--nighttime disappearances, cynical judges, isolation cells, physical and psychological torture--remains alive and well, it is on the territory of former Soviet republics, which have been closely allied with the United States in its war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. The ex-communist despots who rule these places have taken heart from the post-September 11 climate in world affairs. Their calculation is that as long as they provide the United States with military bases and air corridors, they will have a free hand to lock up their opponents and suppress freedom of speech. Should American policy vindicate this calculation? For the politicians, diplomats, and generals in the United States who are pondering this question, some sober reflection on the horrors of the Soviet gulag, skillfully and diligently documented in this book, would be time well spent. But it would be a pity if the only conclusion they draw is that America's enemies, past and present, are guilty of practicing terrible repression while simultaneously telling brazen lies. Unfortunately, America's friends commit those sins, too.
