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Jewish World Review May 8, 2003 / 6 Iyar, 5763
Michael Ledeen
Inside the Dark: Applebaum's Gulag
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.
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:
Anne Applebaum has done it.
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