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By Gerard Alexander, Claremont Institute | December 12, 2003
FrontPage magazine.com, Los Angeles, CA
A review of Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum;
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis;
and A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation, by Eric D. Weitz
Martin Amis fears that "the Russian dead sleep on"-forgotten-even after the
fall of the regime that killed them. In an effort to awaken concern for
them, Amis skillfully choreographs an enormous array of facts and voices
into a very effective and angry essay. He is most eloquent about Stalin's
personal tyranny and the scale and diversity of human suffering he ordered
and supervised. The journalist Anne Applebaum has produced for general
readers a more conventional-but no less devastating-history of one major
strand of Soviet repression, the regime's concentration camps. Both authors
regret that these events do not figure larger in the moral imagination of
Westerners, particularly intellectuals. Their books may stir consciences;
Eric Weitz's volume is itself a hopeful sign of progress.
Amis places Soviet crimes in the larger context of the Bolsheviks' battle to
seize, hold, and wield power, all ruthlessly. The main obstacles were
people, of all kinds: old regime supporters, party-political rivals,
peasants reluctant to surrender land, suspect ethnic groups, and so on. Amis
emphasizes that from the start, the Communist dictatorship monopolized power
by killing or caging these possible resisters, including through mass
executions, a budding camp system, and famine used as a political weapon.
Stalin "merely" put this machinery of repression in overdrive. Nicknamed
Koba as a child, Stalin here becomes successor to the tsar Ivan the Dread,
but far more vicious. As ruler, Stalin had the triple objectives of
destroying remaining sources of autonomy from the party-state, expanding
that state's power through industrialization, and establishing his personal
power within the state. Stalin repressed in every direction. Millions were
denied basic services, which under state socialism meant reduction to an
uncertain, hand-to-mouth existence. Millions more were "exiled" to remote
regions to what amounted to forced labor.
Millions yet again were penned in prisons and the gulag camps. Finally,
millions were killed, both outside and then within the party, through
on-the-spot executions, and in prisons, and during collectivization, and
through the terror-famine in the Ukraine, and in the camps. The toll of
political murders approaches 20 million. Some people were victimized almost
randomly, to strike fear in the rest.
The most intensive and extensive Soviet repression took place in the
"archipelago" of forced labor camps. Nazi camps existed primarily either to
cage (but generally keep alive) party-political opponents or to kill
designated categories of people. In contrast, the gulag blurred the lines
between caging, killing, and extracting labor. Applebaum's well-researched
overview is temperate, but she pulls very few descriptive punches, since
grim terms are indispensable to understanding both the camps and the regime
that built them.
The gulag was brutal by design. The violation of basic human dignities was
designed to dehumanize and demoralize. Official brutality was constant.
Basic nutrition and medical care were denied even when the Soviet economy
had more to spare. Nearly all inmates were forced to do backbreaking labor
deemed valuable to economic development and state power. Food deprivation
was an organizing principle. Always-meager rations were cut for prisoners
who did not fulfill crushing work quotas. This "sorted prisoners very
quickly into those who would survive, and those who would not."
The glide path toward starvation on which many prisoners found themselves
was only accelerated by the physical context. Many of the camps were set up
to exploit resources in barely habitable regions of Russia's far north,
where inmates labored outdoors even at 30 or more degrees below zero. Much
work was physically dangerous, and assignment to certain tasks in certain
camps was a de facto death sentence. Death rates were thus prodigious, as
weakened workers succumbed to malnutrition or epidemics. Throughout Gulag,
gaunt figures appear, chased by Death so remorselessly that they are finally
too exhausted to run any longer. Amis observes poignantly, "Your chair is
never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal
never more secure than when you read about the gulag."
Applebaum takes particular pains to highlight the gulag's role in the Soviet
economy. Stalin believed industrialization relied crucially on giant
industrial and infrastructural projects. Inmates dug canals with pathetic
tools, at huge cost in lives, and harvested gold and timber, the currency
earnings from which enabled the regime to import needed machinery. At least
in some cases, Applebaum considers it an unlikely coincidence that technical
specialists were arrested and sent to camps when and where new gulag
projects demanded their skills. In sum, the inmates were slaves in every
meaningful sense of the word. Of course, the gulag failed to add value to
the economy.
But repression was hardly a failure for the regime. It abolished any social
basis for resistance by denying citizens all material autonomy and
organizational capability. Applebaum shows that material conditions inside
the gulag and outside, in wider Soviet society, differed only in degree, not
kind. What the "punishment cells" represented to camp inmates, the camps
represented to Soviet citizens in general: a threatening motive to comply.
From this captive populace, the leadership leveraged material privilege,
national power, and international status. Their privileged lives and the
brutal nature of their rule strongly suggest that, at least by some
relatively early date, the USSR was governed either by cynical predators or
by "idealists" so able to rationalize away evil as to make the distinction
irrelevant.
The scale and nature of Soviet crimes invite these authors to risk
comparisons to the Holocaust. In numbers, Stalinism certainly killed more
people than the Shoah. Then again, Amis reminds us, Stalin had advantages
over Hitler: "the burning cold of the Arctic...darkness...space... And, most
crucially...time." In terms of the nature or character of the two episodes,
there are obvious parallels, from open-air massacres to cattle cars to camp
life. Most pointedly, those who ran camps in both systems deliberately used
food and overwork to "manage" life spans, and to schedule many to die. Thus,
in both, the "saved" had to live amidst the "drowned": healthier inmates
were in the harrowing presence of those starving to death.
Applebaum also insists on a crucial contrast with the Holocaust. The USSR
identified its enemies along class and political lines much more mutable
than the Nazi's rigid racial ones. This meant that there was no category of
people "whose death was absolutely guaranteed," which made possible outcomes
that were inconceivable for Jews under Nazism, such as release at the end of
one's sentence. It also meant the system contained no extermination
camps-although several sites came close when execution quotas were imposed
in 1937-38. Robert Conquest does not flinch from describing the
famine-terrorized Ukraine as "one vast Belsen."
Two responses are in order. First, while the gulag may not have been
designed to mass-produce corpses, nonetheless it produced them prodigiously.
Given systematic deprivation, we might even say the system was partly-just
not solely-designed to produce corpses. Second, the USSR's more mutable
categories for designating "others" had a profoundly dark side. Nazism's
rigid boundaries guaranteed death to targeted people, but virtually
guaranteed immunity from severe repression to others, most obviously tens of
millions of apolitical "Aryans." The USSR had no equivalent rubric for those
guaranteed death, but also no equivalent for those guaranteed life. For long
stretches under Stalin, as under the Khmer Rouge, virtually no one could
live without substantial fear of being declared an enemy of the people. As
Amis puts it, "Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: everyone except
Stalin," who, like Saddam, ruled even his cabinet through fear.
If it's difficult to decide which mass murder was worse, we should probably
place them in a single roomy category. Amis and Applebaum do something like
this. But both observe with a certain anger that Leninism/Stalinism does not
come close to matching the Holocaust as a conventional image of political
crime. This is partly the result of simple ignorance-Amis says that was long
the obstacle for him. But the bad news is that education is unlikely to
remedy a disparity that is only partly the result of mere ignorance. There
is, so to speak, a "sociology of knowledge" aspect to who has, and
especially who has not, integrated Stalinism into their moral imagination.
Many who downplay Stalinism do so willfully.
Consider one forum. In the past five years, the Weekly Standard, National
Review, and The Nation, have each run a similar number of book reviews
relating to the Holocaust-it is everyone's genocide. But the left-liberal
Nation reviewed noticeably more books than the other two on the crimes of,
say, Latin American militaries, while the two center-right magazines each
ran roughly three times as many reviews as The Nation of books touching on
Communist repression.
Arguably, it is worse when The Nation does review such books. When The Black
Book of Communism and Francois Furet's Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of
Communism in the Twentieth Century appeared, The Nation's review angrily
dismissed them as polemics deployed by capitalist elites to "exploit a
tragedy" and discredit reformism of any kind. You might not think it
possible to review a book about "everyday Stalinism" without once using the
words arrest, prison, shot, forced labor, gulag, or camp, and referring to
famine only in the passive construction. But somehow, The Nation in another
review found a way. Their treatment of Applebaum's book does not deny the
suffering, but criticizes her for "exploit[ing] the gulag" for political
reasons, emphasizing that it "is no easy matter...to separate the innocent
from the guilty" (not even Stalin?) and insisting that the gulag cannot be
connected to any larger political or moral narrative. Not even the fact that
all Communist regimes created gulags and killed far more people than the
regimes which came before or after them.
This isn't ignorance; it's an agenda.
Nonetheless, might it be considered as part of a legitimate ideological
division of labor, in which "progressives" focus on the crimes of
"right-wing" regimes and conservatives focus on left-wing ones? The
implication of symmetry is grotesque. The problem is not that we should take
lightly the 3,000 Chileans commonly said to have been killed by the Pinochet
regime (we shouldn't). The problem is that the Soviet regime killed that
many people, inside the camps alone, in 1942 alone, on average every three
days. Devoting equal time to Pinochet and Stalin is to take Russian lives
very lightly indeed. Even the 100,000 killed in Guatemala would be a
footnote to historians of Stalin or Mao; 3,000 is a rounding error. Simply
put, one of the two sides in this division of labor is focusing on the
greatest mass murders in history, while the other is consistently looking
away.
A less insidious version of this bias is even more widespread. Applebaum
points to the toleration-never extended in matters Nazi-of the occasional
"Gulag denier." I think a still more telling line can be drawn. Polite
society ostracizes both denial and trivialization of the Holocaust. Imagine
our response to an otherwise educated person who, without denying the
Holocaust, nonetheless failed to know basic details about it; never cited it
when referring to evil; failed to treat it as profane; agreed to discuss it
only on condition of mentioning mitigating circumstances or paying
comparable attention to far lesser crimes; or even had tenuous associations
with Holocaust deniers or apologists, so long as the connection was
qualified enough.
By these standards, we are surrounded by what we might call gulag
trivializers. As Amis notes, many people who would never deny Stalinism's
horrors nonetheless cannot name a single camp, don't know the least detail
of the terror-famine, and have no idea what the overall numbers look like.
McCarthyism and apartheid come vividly to their minds; the gulag does not.
They don't think Communism-themed cafes odd. And so long as they explain
themselves carefully, they are willing to attend demonstrations against the
Iraq war organized-as many of the main ones in the U.S. were-by A.N.S.W.E.R.
(Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a group whose guiding figures defend
North Korea's Stalinist regime.
There is some good news, though. Political science features a growing
comparative study of genocides. The sheer number of victims means that
Stalinism is difficult to omit from the short list of cases. As a result,
more and more scholars are routinely mentioning the USSR and Nazism in the
same breath, and analyzing them jointly. Eric Weitz's book is a thoughtful
example of this trend. It is an attempt to identify common elements in the
mass murders in Nazi Europe, the USSR, Cambodia, and Bosnia. Weitz, a
professor of history at the University of Minnesota, argues that
revolutionary regimes acted on nationalistic and racialist ideas by seeking
to purify entire populations through "purges," of which the ultimate version
was large-scale murder.
But these ideas are necessary but not sufficient conditions of genocide,
which appears to require in addition a gross disparity in power between
state and civil society. Even in the Nazi case: Within Germany's relatively
robust civil society the Nazis treaded carefully, e.g., regarding the murder
of the German handicapped. But in conquered territories, they slaughtered
openly. This suggests one reason Communism proved so consistently deadly.
Not only did Communist movements come to power where civil society was
weak, but they made it a primary goal to smash to pieces the existing social
structure.
Weitz does not address this or other such issues directly. In that sense,
his book, like most books, is hardly definitive. But it is a respectable,
relatively early contribution to the debate, and it is the existence of the
debate itself that is heartening for those who dread seeing "the Russian
dead sleep on" forever.
Gerard Alexander is associate professor of politics at the University of
Virginia, and author of The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Cornell
University Press).
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