Hoover Digest 2005 * No. 1 HISTORY AND CULTURE:

The Gulag: Lest We Forget

Anne Applebaum

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

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.

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 equa-nimity. 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.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress