Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review May 8, 2003 / 6 Iyar, 5763

Michael Ledeen

Ledeen
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
James Glassman
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Kathleen Parker
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Amity Shlaes
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports


Inside the Dark: Applebaum's ‘Gulag’


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | If our schools and universities cared about history, JWR columnist Anne Applebaum's magisterial work, "Gulag" (TO PURCHASE BOOK, CLICK ON LINK. SALES HELP FUND JWR) would be required reading. Not because our children need to master the enormous body of detail concerning the infamous Soviet forced-labor system - made famous by Solzhenitsyn's works some 30 years ago - but because it is only by working their way through the chilling details, year by year and camp by camp, that they can begin to understand the horrors of Communism and the magnitude of our successful war against it.

The first thing that needs to be said about this rare and wonderful work is that it defines the subject. Here, for the first time, a serious scholar has actually consulted the documentary evidence. It thus takes its place alongside Renzo De Felice's work on Italian fascism and Raoul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, as an amazing work of historical reconstruction. Anyone who wants to know about the darkest side of the Soviet Empire, and anyone who wishes to pursue other inquiries into the subject, will have to start here.

Like Hitler's slave-labor and extermination camps, the Soviet Gulag was the symbol of the regime. Like the Nazi camps, the Soviet ones started to solve a particular political problem - how to eliminate unwanted elements from the society at large - and then took on a life of their own, sometimes becoming the driving force of policy rather than a tool of it. The horrors found underneath the rocks of silence that long protected both systems from public examination are similar, and I rather think that anyone who analyzes such a phenomenon is compelled to write - as Anne Applebaum does - with an almost bloodless detachment. There are very few adjectives in Gulag, as in the great works on the other monstrous regimes of the recent past, because no adjective can do justice to the subject. The only way to get at it is by piling up the evidence. Gulag is nearly 700 pages long, and yet it is not burdensome; indeed, it could easily have been longer.

Purchasing this book
-- linked in 1st paragraph --
helps fund JWR

The result of all those pages and all that evidence is quite overwhelming, dizzying in fact. One is forced back into the dark hole of the past century, once again trying to cope with the amazing dimensions of totalitarianism. Tens of millions of people were herded animal-like away from civil society, into the Gulag archipelago, where they were brutalized by their overlords, their mates, and sometimes even by their relatives. As in Nazi Germany, entire categories were shipped off en bloc, whether members of undesirable nationalities or races (all blacks were enslaved in the thirties), political critics or mere suspects of disloyalty, or elements of the wrong "class." As in Nazi Germany, the war forced dramatic change on the system, and "for the first time, Stalin had decided to eliminate - entire nations - men, women, children, grandparents - and wipe them off the map."

Ms. Applebaum insists that this campaign was not, strictly speaking, "genocide," since the victims were not all exterminated. But she also insists that "cultural genocide" is a fair description, since all the deportees were transformed into non-persons in all the ways that Orwell described so well. All traces of their existence were eliminated. Their names were expunged from public records, their homelands were eliminated from the maps, their family cemeteries were plowed under, and the history books were rewritten. Just as photographs of the Soviet elite would be airbrushed to eliminate victims of the purges, so documentary evidence of the deportees was brushed away.

Gulag rests primarily upon the documentary evidence, but there is a lot of anecdotal material that was gathered in years of interviews, and of course from a considerable body of autobiographical literature. This enables Ms. Applebaum to provide us with some excellent discussions of "life" inside the camps, from the necessarily deranged sexual activities (rape was so common as to be considered routine), to the heart-rending attempts at resistance and escape. Once again, the effect is accomplished by simple retelling, not colorful language.

Ms. Applebaum has a fine eye for the paradoxes of the period, especially for those that carried over to the world's reaction to it. She reminds us that the Soviet people loved Stalin, and for a very long time even the victims of the Stalinist system told themselves that the whole thing was a terrible mistake, a confusion, even a betrayal of the great leader. All through the Thirties and Forties, most Soviet citizens believed that Stalin did not know about the Gulag, even though those who entered it saw all the trappings of totalitarian legalism: the trials, the official papers consigning them to hell, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the constant reminders that they had been duly and properly judged to be enemies of the state.

This sort of denial metastasized into a broader denial in the years following Stalin's death. Despite Khrushchev's revelations, nobody seriously attempted an analysis of the camp system until Solzhenitsyn, a full 20 years later, and there was an enormous effort to gainsay the accuracy of his portrait. As Ms. Applebaum reminds us, Hollywood has yet to make a defining movie about the horrors of the Gulag, and although the evils of Stalinism are surely on a par with those of the Third Reich, Hitler remains the symbol of 20th-century evil, while Stalin has largely escaped. She ponders this double standard, and provides a series of explanations, all convincing, and all important. But there is one that she has missed, I think, possibly because she is not familiar with the self-deceptions of Western policymakers.

I think it was easier for governments and scholars to look deeply into the Nazi horrors because they were looking at a system that had been destroyed. Telling the truth about Hitler did not require any government or any individual to take any dramatic action. No great risk was required, only honesty. But to tell the story of the Gulag at any moment from the rise of Stalin to the end of the Cold War was to lay down a moral and political challenge to the West, and to force men and women of good faith to fight against the Soviet Empire. Thus, for several generations, Westerners were reluctant to take a hard look at Soviet Communism, because they were unprepared to fulfill the imperatives that flowed automatically from the subject itself.

This, in turn, created a mindset and a pattern of behavior in the West that shunned the truth. We did not want to know it. And the power of that mindset was seen as the Soviet Empire collapsed, and passed into history. No Western government wished to celebrate our great victory over Soviet Communism. On the contrary; there was an active effort to downplay its significance. And when the Soviet Archives were briefly available to anyone who wished to copy them and open them to scholars and aggrieved citizens, no Western government, no Western academic institution, moved quickly enough to accomplish the task. The result: Secrecy regulations were imposed by Gorbachev's successors, and much of the material is now locked away.

So read this book, ponder its important messages, and ask yourself if we are not doing the same thing today, as Western leaders refuse to accept the horrors of regimes like those in North Korea or Iran. And be grateful that the terrible question asked by Leonid Sitko in 1949 has finally been answered:

I was a soldier, now I'm a convict
My soul is frozen, my tongue is silent.
What poet, what artist
Will depict my terrible captivity?

Anne Applebaum has done it.


Like this writer's work? Why not sign-up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.


JWR contributor Michael Ledeen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of, most recently, ""The War Against the Terror Masters," Comment by clicking here.

Up

05/06/03: Tough Guy: Powell's curious priority list
05/01/03: Desert Shame Redux: Want a free Iran and a free Syria? We have to fight for it
04/25/03: Timing Is Everything: We have a narrow window in Iraq to win Shiite support
04/15/03: Political war can remove terror masters in Syria and Iran
04/07/03: The Others: We have miles to go in eliminating the Axis
04/02/03: French Lies: Take the foreign minister at his word
03/31/03: Why muzzle Saddam's foes?
03/28/03: The post-war terror threat
03/26/03: All Fronts: Military war, political war, psychological war
03/24/03: More Bad News for Daschle: Taking out terror of all nationalities
03/21/03: The Killer Pneu: Virus terror from China
03/13/03: Iran: Nuclear suicide bombers?
03/11/03: A Theory: What if there's method to the Franco-German madness?
03/05/03: The Iranian-Election Revolt: The people speak. The West won't listen
02/19/03: The willful blindness of those who will not see
02/12/03: The Europeans Know More Than They Now Pretend? They choose to dawdle and obstruct
02/03/03: Monumental failure: Nelson Mandela had promise
01/30/03: Elevation: The president knows what it's all about
01/29/03: No Leader: France's Chirac is all about personal interest
01/28/03: The Axis of Evil Redux: Same place, a year later
01/27/03: The Return of the Ayatollah: Washington could afford a little more attention on Iran
01/13/03: How we could lose
01/09/03: Fish are Better than Women: Gauging U.S. priorities
01/07/03: The Shape of Things to Come: The terror masters are now waiting for us
12/20/02: A Prophecy for the New Year --- Faster, please!
12/16/02: Scud Surrender: The "W" factor
12/13/02: The Heart of Darkness: The mullahs make terror possible
12/12/02: The Real War
12/09/02: Tom Friedman's Reformation: His Iran
11/26/02: How Tyrannies Fall: Opportunity time in Iran
11/22/02: The Blind Leading the Blind: The New York Times and the Iranian crisis
11/13/02: The Temperature Rises: We should liberate Iran first --- now
11/05/02: End of the Road: Iran's Mohammed Khatami, on his way out
10/29/02: The Angleton Dialogues, Contnued: What George Tenet doesn’t know
10/24/02: The Iranian Comedy Hour: In the U.S., the silence continues
10/16/02: Sniper, Saboteur, or Sleeper? Channeling James Jesus Angleton
10/01/02: The real foe
09/27/02: The Iranian String Quartet: The mullahs get increasingly nervous
09/25/02: The Dubya Doctrine
09/23/02: Intelligence? What intelligence?
09/12/02: America's revenge: To turn tyrannies into democracies
09/10/02: Iran & Afghanistan & Us: We'll have to deal with the mullahcracy, sooner or later
09/04/02: Iran, according to the Times: All the nonsense that's fit to print
08/21/02: Life and death of Abu Nidal tells us a great deal about our enemies
08/08/02: Can You Keep a Secret?: The media silence on Iran
08/06/02: Fantasy Reporting: The latest disinformation from the Washington Post
08/02/02: Propping Up the Terror Masters: Europe's Solana on tour
07/16/02: Bush vs. the Mullahs: Getting on the side of the Iranian freedom fighters
07/12/02: The State Department Goes Mute: It's official: State has no message
07/09/02: History being made, but the West appears clueless
06/05/02: Is George Tenet endangering peace in Israel?
06/03/02: Ridiculous, even for a journalist
05/20/02: So how come nobody's been fired yet?
05/14/02: Open doors for thugs
04/20/02: Iran on the Brink … and the U.S. does nothing
04/16/02: It’s the war, stupid … someone remind Colin Powell
04/08/02: Gulled: In the Middle East, Arafat doesn't matter
04/02/02: Faster, Please: The war falters
03/26/02: The Revolution Continues: What's brewing in Iran
03/18/02: Iran simmers still: Where's the press?
03/05/02: We can't lose any more ground in Iran
02/14/02: The Great Iranian Hoax
02/12/02: Unnoticed Bombshell: Key information in a new book
01/31/02: The truth behind the Powell play
01/29/02: My past with "Johnny Jihad's" lawyer
01/21/02: It's Munich, all over again
01/08/02: What's the Holdup?: It's time for the next battles in the war against terrorism
12/11/01: We must be imperious, ruthless, and relentless
12/06/01: Remembering my family friend, Walt Disney
11/28/01: The Barbara Olson Bomb: Understanding the war
11/13/01: How We're Doing: The Angleton Files, IV
11/06/01: A great revolutionary war is coming
10/25/01: How to talk to a terrorist
10/23/01: Creative Reporting: Learning to appreciate press briefings
10/19/01: Not the Emmys: A Beltway award presentation
10/15/01: Rediscovering American character
10/11/01: Somehow, I've missed Arafat's praise of the first stage of our war on terrorism
10/04/01: What do we not know?
09/28/01: Machiavelli On Our War: Some advice for our leaders
09/25/01: No Room for the U.N.: Keeping Annan & co. out of the picture
09/21/01: Creative destruction
09/14/01: Who Killed Barbara Olson?
08/22/01: How Israel will win this war
08/15/01: Bracing for war
08/09/01: More Dithering Democrats
08/02/01: Delirious Dems
07/31/01: Consulting a legendary counterspy about Chandra and Condit, cont'd
07/19/01: Be careful what you wish for
07/17/01: Consulting a legendary counterspy about Chandra and Condit
07/05/01: Let Slobo Go
05/30/01: Anybody out there afraid of the Republicans?
05/09/01: The bad guys to the rescue
05/07/01: Bye-bye, Blumenthal
04/20/01: Handling China
04/11/01: EXAM TIME!
04/05/01: Chinese over-water torture
03/27/01: Fighting AIDS in Africa is a losing proposition
03/14/01: Big Bird, Oscar, and other threats
03/09/01: Time for a good, old-fashioned purge
03/06/01: Powell’s great (mis)adventure
02/26/01: The Clinton Sopranos
02/20/01: Unity Schmoonity: Sharon is defying the will of the people
01/30/01: The Rest of the Rich Story
01/22/01: Ashcroft the Jew
01/11/01: A fitting close to the Clinton years
12/26/00: Continuing Clinton's shameful legacy
12/21/00: Clinton’s gift for Bush

© 2001, Michael Ledeen