THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VI, Issue # 43, March 1, 2004
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE GULAG: WHAT WE KNOW NOW & WHY IT MATTERS
By Anne Applebaum
When speaking or writing about the Soviet Union's concentration camps, I always like to begin with a disclaimer. For I do not want to
claim that, in writing a narrative history of the Gulag, I have discovered a new topic that has never been touched upon before.
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archilelago, the history of the camp system he published in the West in the 1970s, largely got it right.
Although he had no access to archives and based all of his writing on letters and memoirs of other prisoners, he did, it now appears,
understand the history of the system very well.
Nevertheless, in the years spent researching my book, Gulag: A History, I concluded that archives can make a difference to our
understanding. Documents, for example, enabled me to be far more precise than was possible in the past. Thanks to the newly opened
Soviet archives, we now know there were at least 476 camp systems, each one made up of hundreds, and some even thousands, of
individual camps, sometimes spread out over thousands of square miles of otherwise empty tundra.
We also know that the vast majority of prisoners were peasants and workers, not the intellectuals who later wrote memoirs and books.
We know that, with a few exceptions, the camps were not constructed explicitly to kill people. Stalin preferred to use firing squads to
conduct his mass executions. Nevertheless, the camps were lethal. Nearly a quarter of the Gulag's prisoners died during the war years.
The Gulag's population was also very fluid. Prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had short sentences,
because they were being released into the Red Army, or because they had been promoted -- as often happened -- from prisoner to
guard. Those releases were invariably followed by new waves of arrests.
A Nation of Slaves
As a result, between 1929, when prison camps first became a mass phenomenon, and 1953, the year of Stalin's death, some 18 million
people passed through the system. In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were deported to exile villages. The total number of
people with some experience of imprisonment and slave labor in Stalin's Soviet Union could have run as high as 25 million, or about
15 percent of the population.
We also know now where the camps were -- namely, everywhere. Although we are all familiar with the image of the prisoner in a
snowstorm, digging coal with a pickax, there were camps in central Moscow where prisoners built apartment blocks or designed
airplanes, camps in Krasnoyarsk where prisoners ran nuclear power plants, fishing camps on the Pacific coast. From Aktyubinsk to
Yakursk, there was not a single major population center that did not have its own local camp or camps, and there was not a single
industry that did not employ prisoners. Over the years, prisoners built roads, railroads, power plants, and chemical factories. They
manufactured weapons, furniture, machine tools, and even children's toys.
In the Soviet Union of the 1940s, the decade the camps reached their zenith, it would have been very difficult in many places to go
about your daily business and not run into prisoners. It is no longer possible to argue, as some Western historians have done,
that the camps were a marginal phenomenon or that they were known only to a small proportion of the population. On the contrary,
they were central to the entire Soviet system.
We also understand better the chronology of the camps. We have long known that Lenin built the first ones in 1918, at the time of
the Bolshevik Revolution, but archives have now helped explain why Stalin chose to expand them in 1929. In that year, he launched
the Five-Year Plan, an extraordinarily costly attempt, in both human lives and natural resources, to force a 20 percent annual increase
in the Soviet Union's industrial output and to collectivize agriculture. The plan led to millions of arrests as peasants were forced off
their land; they were imprisoned if theyrefused to leave. It also led to an enormous labor shortage. Suddenly, the Soviet Union
found itself in need of coal, gas and minerals, most of which were found only in the far north of the country. The decision was made:
prisoners should be used to extract the minerals.
To the secret policemen who were charged with carrying out the construction of the camps, it all made sense. Here is how Alexi
Laginov, former deputy commander of the Norilsk camps, north of the Arctic Circle, justified the use of prison labor in a 1992 interview:
If we had sent civilians, we would first have had to build houses for them to live in. And how could ordinary
people live here? With prisoners, it is easy. All you need is a barrack, a stove and a chimney, and somehow
they survive.
None of which is to say that the camps were not also intended to terrorize and subjugate the population. Certainly, prison and canp
regimes, which were dictated in minute detail by Moscow, were openly designed to humiliate prisoners. The prisoners' belts, buttons,
garters, and items of elastic were taken away from them. The guards described the prisoners as "enemies" and forbade them to use
the word "comrade," even with each other. Such measures contributed to the dehumanization of prisoners in the eyes of camp
guards and bureaucrats, who therefore found it that much easier not to treat them as fellow citizens or even as human beings. In fact,
this proved to be an extremely powerful ideological combination -- the disregard of the humanity and individuality of prisoners and
the overwhelming need to fulfill the centrally determined plan.
Stalin's "Boring" Murders
One of the reasons I wrote my book was because I started to wonder why I encountered this subject only while living in Eastern
Europe. I have a degree in Russian history from Yale University, and yet I knew very few of these details. I was also inspired, I
have to admit, by an extremely irritating New York Times review of my first book, Between East and West: Across the
Borderlands of Europe, which was about the western borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Although largely positive,
the review contained the following line: "Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukranians than
Hitler murdered Jews. Yet, how many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so boring and ostensibly undramatic."
Were Stalin's murders boring? Many people think so. The crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction in the Western
public as do the crimes of Hitler. Ken Livingstone, a former member of the British Parliament and now Mayor of London, once
spent an entire evening trying to explain the difference to me. "Yes," he said, "the Nazis were evil. But the Soviet Union was
deformed. That view echoes the feeling of many people, even people who are not old-fashioned members of the British
Labour Party. The Soviet Union went wrong somehow, but it was not fundamentally wrong in the same way as Hitler's Germany.
The Blind Eye of Ideology
Until recently, it was possible to explain this absence of popular feeling about the tragedy of European Communism as the logical
result of a particular set of circumstances. The passage of time is part of it: Communist regimes really did grow less reprehensible
as the years went by. Nobody was very frightened of General Jaruzelski, or even Brezhnev, although both were responsible for a
great deal of destruction. Besides, archives were closed. Access to the sites of the camps was forbidden. No television cameras
ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as motion picture cameras had done in Germany at the end of World War II. No
images, in turn, meant that the subject, in our image-driven culture, didn't really exist either.
Ideology, as well as the particular set of circumstances, twisted the ways in which we understood Soviet and East Eueopean
history. In the 1920s, Westerners knew a great deal about the bloodiness of Lenin's revolution and the camps that he was just
beginning to set up. Western Socialists, many of whose bretheren were among the first victims of the Bolsheviks, protested loudly,
strongly, and frequently against the crimes then being committed by the Bolshevik regime.
"It Reminds Me of Montana"
In 1944, U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace actually went to Kolyma, one of the most notorious camps, during a trip across the
Soviet Union. Imagining he was visiting some kind of industrial complex, he told his hosts that "Soviet Asia," as he called it,
reminded him of the American Wild West, and particularly of Montana, which is where he was from. He said, "The vast expanse
of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate, her inexhaustible wealth, remind me of my
homeland." He was not alone in refusing to see the truth about Stalin's system at that time; Roosevelt and Churchill had their
photographs taken with Stalin too.
Together, all of these explanations once made a kind of sense. When I first began to think seriously about this subject, as
Communism was collapsing in 1989, I even saw the logic of them myself: it seemed natural, obvious, that I should know very
little about Stalin's Soviet Union, whose secret history made it all the more intriguing. More than a decade later, I feel very
differently. World War II now belongs to a previous generation. The Cold War is over too, and the alliances and international
fault lines it produced have shifted for good. The Western political Left and the Western political Right now compete over
different issues. At the same time, the emergence of new terrorist threats to Western Civilization makes the study of the old
Communist threats to Western Civilization all the more relevant. It is time, it seems to me, to stop looking at the history of the
Soviet Union through the narrow lens of American politics and start seeing it for what it really was.
Certainly, it will help us to understand our own history. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will forget our own history
too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed Rightwing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial
complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans 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
opined that the Cold War was "one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time." An American Leftist, Gore Vidal, has described
the battles of the Cold War as "forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 triillion." Already, we are forgetting what
it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of "the West" together for so long.
Moreover, there are deeper reasons to understand this half-forgotten piece of history. For if we do not study the history of the
Gulag, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the 20th. 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. Every one of those events had different historical and philosophical origins and arose in circumstances that will
never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and demumanize our fellow men has been -- and will be -- repeated again and
again.
The more we understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens into objects, the more we
know of the specific circumstances that led to each episode of mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our
own human nature. I wrote my book about the Gulag not "so that it will not happen again," as the cliche has it, but because it
will happen again. We need to know why -- and each story, each memoir, each document is a piece of the puzzle. Without
them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Communism: Longterm Enemy
Russia & Other Former Soviet Republics
Constitutional Democracy & Other Political Regimes
Constitutional Democracy & Other Governmental Systems
Bringing Constitutional Democracy to Iraq:
Problems & Difficulties
The foregoing statement is an excerpt from remarks made by Anne Applebaum, on November 7, 2002, at a new York City Seminar. Ms.
Applebaum's articles have appeared in many periodicals, including the Spectator, the Economist, and Slate.
She is a columnist and editorial board member at the Washington Post and has written several books, most recently one
titled Gulag: A History. The original version of the excerpt of Ms. Applebaum's November 7 remarks appeared in the Winter,
2004, issue (Volume 2, Number 1) of Cato's Letter, a quarterly periodical published by the Cato Institute.
The Cato Institute's mission statement says that the Institute "seeks to broaden the parameters of public policy debate to allow
consideration of the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace." The
Institute's Internet website address is www.cato.org.
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