[spectre] Applebaum, The Gulag: Lest We Forget

[Soenke Zehle]

Like the (un)civil societies newsletter, this one too comes from an 
institute with impeccable anti-communist cold war credentials, but the 
Applebaum book is actually quite good, even though it, too, fuels the 
revival of totalitarianism theory...as do the other folks on the roster 
of this issue of the Hoover Digest [1], btw, do check out this kind of 
intellectual regrouping, the self-stylization of Bush II as the one who 
picks up where Reagan left off and all that...very interesting 
re-weaving of history going one as most folks continue to look at Iraq.

But maybe that's simply it, that died-in-the-wool cold warriors are just 
about the only folks who continue to be interested in retrieving cold 
war histories, but it's telling that the key historical events for 
_Empire_, for example, are Tian-An men (spelling?) and Gulf War I, not 
the fall of the Berlin Wall - I never figured why so many of our star 
leftists have so little interest in these kinds of histories,

sz

[1] <http://www.hooverdigest.org/051/toc051.html>

The Gulag: Lest We Forget
Anne Applebaum
<http://www.hooverdigest.org/051/applebaum.html>

The more we are able to understand how various societies have 
transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into 
objects, and the more we know of the specific circumstances that led to 
each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will 
understand the darker side of our own human nature.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the 
Washington Post.

Sidebar: How Many?
	
In the early autumn of 1998, I took a boat across the White Sea, from 
the city of Arkhangelsk to the Solovetsky Islands, the distant 
archipelago that was once home to the Soviet Union’s first political 
prisons. The ship’s dining room buzzed with good cheer. There were many 
toasts, many jokes, and hearty applause for the ship’s captain. My 
assigned dining companions, two middle-aged couples from a naval base 
down the coast, seemed determined to have a good time.

At first, my presence only added to their general merriment. It is not 
every day one meets a real American on a rickety ferry boat in the 
middle of the White Sea, and the oddity amused them. When I told them 
what I was doing in Russia, however, they grew less cheerful. An 
American on a pleasure cruise, visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see 
the scenery and the beautiful old monastery—that was one thing. An 
American visiting the Solovetsky Islands to see the remains of the 
concentration camp—that was something else.

One of the men turned hostile. “Why do you foreigners only care about 
the ugly things in our history?” he wanted to know. “Why write about the 
Gulag? Why not write about our achievements? We were the first country 
to put a man into space!” By “we” he meant “we Soviets.” The Soviet 
Union had ceased to exist seven years earlier, but he still identified 
himself as a Soviet citizen, not as a Russian.

His wife attacked me as well. “The Gulag isn’t relevant anymore,” she 
told me. “We have other troubles here. We have unemployment, we have 
crime. Why don’t you write about our real problems, instead of things 
that happened a long time ago?”

While this unpleasant conversation continued, the other couple kept 
silent, and the man never did offer his opinion on the subject of the 
Soviet past. At one point, however, his wife expressed her support. “I 
understand why you want to know about the camps,” she said softly. “It 
is interesting to know what happened. I wish I knew more.”

In my subsequent travels around Russia, I encountered these four 
attitudes about my project again and again. “It’s none of your business” 
and “it’s irrelevant” were both common reactions. Silence—or an absence 
of opinion, as evinced by a shrug of the shoulders—was probably the most 
frequent reaction. But there were also people who understood why it was 
important to know about the past and who wished it were easier to find 
out more.

Monuments and Public Awareness
In fact, with some effort, one can learn a great deal about the past in 
contemporary Russia. Not all Russian archives are closed, and not all 
Russian historians are preoccupied with other things. The story of the 
Gulag has also become part of public debate in some of the former Soviet 
republics and former Soviet satellites. In a few nations (as a rule, 
those who remember themselves as victims rather than perpetrators of 
terror), the memorials and the debates are very prominent indeed.

Dotted around Russia itself, there are also a handful of informal, 
semi-official, and private monuments and museums, erected by a wide 
variety of people and organizations. Strange, surprising, individual 
monuments can sometimes be found in out-of-the-way places. An iron cross 
has been placed on a barren hill outside the city of Ukhta commemorating 
the site of a mass murder of prisoners. To see it, I had to drive down 
an almost impassable muddy road, walk behind a building site, and 
clamber over a railway track. Even then I was too far away to read the 
actual inscription. Still, the local activists who had erected the cross 
a few years earlier beamed with pride as they pointed it out to me.

A few hours north of Petrozavodsk, another ad hoc memorial has been set 
up outside the village of Sandormokh, where prisoners from the 
Solovetsky Islands were shot in 1937. Because there are no records 
stating who is buried where, each family has chosen, at random, to 
commemorate a particular pile of bones. Relatives of victims have pasted 
photographs of their relatives, long dead, on wooden stakes, and some 
have carved epitaphs into the sides. Ribbons, plastic flowers, and other 
funerary bric-a-brac are strewn throughout the pine forest that has 
grown up over the killing field. On the sunny August day that I visited 
(it was the anniversary of the murder, and a delegation had come from 
St. Petersburg), an elderly woman stood up to speak of her parents, both 
buried there, both shot when she was seven years old. A whole lifetime 
had passed before she had been able to visit their graves.

And yet in Russia, a country accustomed to grandiose war memorials and 
vast, solemn state funerals, these local efforts and private initiatives 
seem meager, scattered, and incomplete. The majority of Russians are 
probably not even aware of them. And no wonder: Ten years after the 
collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia—the country that has inherited the 
Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its 
debts, and its seat at the United Nations—continues to act as if it has 
not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a 
national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Neither does 
Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument officially 
recognizing the suffering of victims and their families.

More notable than the missing monuments, however, is the missing public 
awareness. Sometimes it seems as if the enormous emotions and passions 
raised by the wide-ranging discussions of the Gorbachev era simply 
vanished, along with the Soviet Union itself. The bitter debate about 
justice for the victims disappeared just as abruptly. Although there was 
much talk about it at the end of the 1980s, the Russian government never 
did examine or try the perpetrators of torture or mass murder, even 
those who were identifiable.

It is true, of course, that trials may not always be the best way to 
come to terms with the past. But there are other methods, aside from 
trials, of doing public justice to the crimes of the past. There are 
truth commissions, for example, of the sort implemented in South Africa, 
which allow victims to tell their stories in an official, public place 
and make the crimes of the past a part of the public debate. There are 
official investigations, like the British Parliament’s 2002 inquiry into 
the Northern Irish “Bloody Sunday” massacre, which took place 30 years 
earlier. There are government inquiries, government commissions, and 
public apologies. Yet the Russian government has never considered any of 
these options. Other than the brief, inconclusive “trial” of the 
Communist Party, there have in fact been no public truth-telling 
sessions in Russia, no parliamentary hearings, no official 
investigations of any kind into the murders or the massacres or the 
camps of the USSR.

The result: half a century after the end of World War II, the Germans 
still conduct regular public disputes about victims’ compensation, about 
memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even about whether 
a younger generation of Germans ought to go on shouldering the burden of 
guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin’s 
death, there were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia because 
the memory of the past was not a living part of the public discourse.

The Russian rehabilitation process did continue, very quietly, 
throughout the 1990s. By the end of 2001, about 4.5 million political 
prisoners had been rehabilitated in Russia, and the national 
rehabilitation commission estimated that it had a further half million 
cases to examine. But although the commission itself is serious and well 
intentioned, and although it is composed of camp survivors as well as 
bureaucrats, no one associated with it really feels that the politicians 
who created it were motivated by a real drive for “truth and 
reconciliation,” in the words of the British historian Catherine 
Merridale. Rather, the goal has been to end discussion of the past, to 
pacify the victims by throwing them a few extra rubles and free bus 
tickets, and to avoid any deeper examination of the causes of Stalinism 
or of its legacy.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same...

There are some good, or at least forgivable, explanations for this 
public silence. Most Russians really do spend all their time coping with 
the complete transformation of their economy and society. The Stalinist 
era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. 
Post-communist Russia is not postwar Germany, where the memories of the 
worst atrocities were still fresh in people’s minds. In the early 
twenty-first century, the events of the middle of the twentieth century 
seem like ancient history to much of the population.

Perhaps more to the point, many Russians also feel that they have had 
their discussion of the past already and that it produced very little. 
When one asks older Russians, at least, why the subject of the Gulag is 
so rarely mentioned nowadays, they wave away the issue: “In the 1990s 
that was all we could talk about, now we don’t need to talk about it 
anymore.”

But there are other reasons, less forgivable, for the profound silence. 
Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound 
blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now 
feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we 
do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking 
ill of the dead.

Some still also fear what they might find out about the past if they 
were to inquire too closely. Aleksandr Yakovlev, chairman of the Russian 
rehabilitation commission, put this problem bluntly. “Society is 
indifferent to the crimes of the past,” he told me, “because so many 
people participated in them.” The Soviet system dragged millions and 
millions of its citizens into many forms of collaboration and 
compromise. Although many willingly participated, otherwise decent 
people were also forced to do terrible things. They, their children, and 
their grandchildren do not always want to remember that now.

But the most important explanation for the lack of public debate does 
not involve the fears of the younger generation or the inferiority 
complexes and leftover guilt of their parents. The most important issue 
is rather the power and prestige of those now ruling not only Russia but 
also most of the other former Soviet states and satellite states. In 
December 2001, on the 10th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet 
Union, 13 of the 15 former Soviet republics were run by former 
Communists, as were many of the former satellite states. Even in those 
countries not actually run by the direct ideological descendants of the 
Communist Party, former Communists and their children or fellow 
travelers continued to figure largely in the intellectual, media, and 
business elites. The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was a former 
KGB agent who proudly identified himself as a Chekist, a word used to 
describe Lenin’s political police at the time of the revolution. The 
dominance of former Communists and the insufficient discussion of the 
past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, 
former Communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it 
tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out 
“reforms,” even when they personally had nothing to do with past crimes. 
Many, many excuses have been given for Russia’s failure to build a 
national monument to its millions of victims, but Aleksandr Yakovlev, 
again, gave me the most succinct explanation. “The monument will be 
built,” he said, “when we—the older generation—are all dead.”

This matters because the failure to acknowledge or repent or discuss the 
history of the communist past weighs like a stone on many of the nations 
of post-communist Europe. Whispered rumors about the contents of old 
“secret files” continue to disrupt contemporary politics, destabilizing 
at least one Polish and one Hungarian prime minister. Deals done in the 
past, between fraternal communist parties, continue to have 
ramifications in the present. In many places, the secret police 
apparatus—the cadres, the equipment, the offices—remains virtually 
unchanged. The occasional discovery of fresh caches of bones can 
suddenly spark controversy and anger.

This past weighs on Russia most heavily of all. Russia inherited the 
trappings of Soviet power—and also the Soviet Union’s great power 
complex, its military establishment, and its imperial goals. As a 
result, the political consequences of absent memory in Russia have been 
much more damaging than they have in other former communist countries. 
Acting in the name of the Soviet motherland, Stalin deported the Chechen 
nation to the wastes of Kazakhstan, where half of them died and the rest 
were meant to disappear, along with their language and culture. Fifty 
years later, in a repeat performance, the Russian Federation obliterated 
the Chechen capital, Grozny, and murdered tens of thousands of Chechen 
civilians in the course of two wars. If the Russian people and the 
Russian elite remembered—viscerally, emotionally remembered—what Stalin 
did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, 
not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar 
Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way—which 
is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.

There have also been consequences for the formation of Russian civil 
society and for the development of the rule of law. To put it bluntly, 
if scoundrels of the old regime go unpunished, good will in no way have 
been seen to triumph over evil. This may sound apocalyptic, but it is 
not politically irrelevant. The police do not need to catch all the 
criminals all of the time for most people to submit to public order, but 
they need to catch a significant proportion. Nothing encourages 
lawlessness more than the sight of villains getting away with it, living 
off their spoils, and laughing in the public’s face. The secret police 
kept their apartments, their dachas, and their large pensions. Their 
victims remained poor and marginal. To most Russians, it now seems as if 
the more you collaborated in the past, the wiser you were. By analogy, 
the more you cheat and lie in the present, the wiser you are.

In a very deep sense, some of the ideology of the Gulag also survives in 
the attitudes and worldview of the new Russian elite. The old Stalinist 
division between categories of humanity, between the all-powerful elite 
and the worthless “enemies,” lives on in the new Russian elite’s 
arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens. Unless that elite soon comes 
to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia’s citizens, 
to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately 
fated to become today’s northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished 
peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank 
vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running.

Tragically, Russia’s lack of interest in its past has deprived the 
Russians of heroes, as well as villains. The names of those who secretly 
opposed Stalin, however ineffectively, ought to be as widely known in 
Russia as are, in Germany, the names of the participants in the plot to 
kill Hitler. The incredibly rich body of Russian survivors’ 
literature—tales of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying 
conditions of the Soviet concentration camps—should be better read, 
better known, more frequently quoted. If schoolchildren knew these 
heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud 
of even in Russia’s Soviet past, aside from imperial and military triumphs.

Yet the failure to remember has more mundane, practical consequences 
too. It can be argued, for example, that Russia’s failure to delve 
properly into the past also explains its insensitivity to certain kinds 
of censorship and to the continued, heavy presence of secret police, now 
renamed the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB. Most Russians are 
not especially bothered by the FSB’s ability to open mail, tap 
telephones, and enter private residences without a court order.

Insensitivity to the past also helps explain the absence of judicial and 
prison reform. In 1998, I paid a visit to the central prison in the city 
of Arkhangelsk, once one of the capital cities of the Gulag. The city 
prison, which dated back to before Stalin’s time, seemed hardly to have 
changed since then. As I walked the halls of the stone building, 
accompanied by a silent warder, it seemed as if we had stepped back into 
one of the many Gulag memoirs I had read. The cells were crowded and 
airless; the walls were damp; the hygiene was primitive. The prison boss 
shrugged. It all came down to money, he said: The hallways were dark 
because electricity was expensive, the prisoners waited weeks for their 
trials because judges were badly paid. I was not convinced. Money is a 
problem, but it is not the whole story. If Russia’s prisons still look 
as they did in Stalin’s era, if Russia’s courts and criminal 
investigations are a sham, that is partly because the Soviet legacy does 
not hang like a bad conscience on the shoulders of those who run 
Russia’s criminal justice system. The past does not haunt Russia’s 
secret police, Russia’s judges, Russia’s politicians, or Russia’s 
business elite.

But then, very few people in contemporary Russia feel the past to be a 
burden, or an obligation, at all. The past is a bad dream to be 
forgotten or a whispered rumor to be ignored. Like a great, unopened 
Pandora’s box, it lies in wait for the next generation.

Western Amnesia

Our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in 
the Soviet Union and Central Europe does not, of course, have the same 
profound implications for our way of life as it does for theirs. Our 
tolerance for the odd “Gulag denier” in our universities will not 
destroy the moral fabric of our society. The Cold War is over, after 
all, and there is no real intellectual or political force left in the 
communist parties of the West.

Nevertheless, if we do not start trying harder to remember, there will 
be consequences for us too. For one, our understanding of what is 
happening now in the former Soviet Union will go on being distorted by 
our misunderstanding of history. Again, if we really knew what Stalin 
did to the Chechens, and if we felt that it was a terrible crime against 
the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladimir Putin who would be unable to 
do the same things to them now, but also we who would be unable to sit 
back and watch with any equanimity. Neither did the Soviet Union’s 
collapse inspire the same mobilization of Western forces as did the end 
of the Second World War. When Nazi Germany finally fell, the rest of the 
West created both NATO and the European Community—in part to prevent 
Germany from ever breaking away from civilized “normality” again. By 
contrast, it was not until September 11, 2001, that the nations of the 
West seriously began rethinking their post–Cold War security policies, 
and then there were other motivations stronger than the need to bring 
Russia back into the civilization of the West.

But in the end, the foreign policy consequences are not the most 
important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it 
hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, 
after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with 
the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing 
and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along 
with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is 
already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator 
magazine opined that the Cold War was “one of the most unnecessary 
conflicts of all time.” The American writer Gore Vidal has also 
described the battles of the Cold War as “forty years of mindless wars 
which created a debt of $5 trillion.”

Thus we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, 
what held the civilization of “the West” together for so long; we are 
forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try 
harder to remember the history of the other half of the European 
continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian 
regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our 
past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is.

And not only our own particular past, for if we go on forgetting half of 
Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be 
distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was 
unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking 
massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian 
wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different 
historical, philosophical, and cultural origins; every one arose in 
particular local circumstances that will never be repeated. Only our 
ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been—and 
will be—repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors 
into “enemies,” our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or 
poisonous weeds, our reinvention of our victims as lower, lesser, or 
evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have 
transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into 
objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances that led to each 
episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand 
the darker side of our own human nature. Totalitarian philosophies have 
had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of 
people. Destruction of the “objective enemy,” as Hannah Arendt once put 
it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know 
why—and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the 
Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, 
we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

Material from pages 178–91 adapted from the book Gulag, by Anne 
Applebaum, published by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. © 
2003 by Anne Applebaum. Reprinted with permission.