Gulag A History
"Human
knowledge," once wrote Pierre
Rigoulot, the
French historian of communism, "doesn't accumulate like the bricks of a
wall, which grows regularly, according to the work of the mason. Its
development, but also its stagnation or retreat, depends on the social,
cultural and political framework."
Tri thức nhân loại không tích tụ theo kiểu thợ nề xây tường. Sự phát triển, cũng vậy, sự trì trệ, đóng váng của nó, tùy thuộc bộ khung xã hội, văn hoá và chính trị.
Tri thức nhân loại không tích tụ theo kiểu thợ nề xây tường. Sự phát triển, cũng vậy, sự trì trệ, đóng váng của nó, tùy thuộc bộ khung xã hội, văn hoá và chính trị.
The reputation of the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger
has been deeply damaged by his brief, overt support of Nazism, an
enthusiasm
which developed before Hitler had committed his major atrocities. On
the other
hand, the reputation of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has not
suffered in the least from his aggressive support of Stalinism
throughout the
postwar years, when plentiful evidence of Stalin's atrocities was
available to
anyone interested. "As we were not members of the Party," he once
wrote, "it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were
free to remain aloof from the quarrels over the nature of the system,
provided
no events of sociological significance occurred.". On another occasion,
he
told Albert Camus - Like you, I find these camps intolerable, but I
find
equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois
press."
Danh tiếng của Heidegger bị tổn thương trầm trọng, vì phò Nazi, trong khi Sartre phò Cộng điên cuồng, lại chẳng hề hấn gì. Người phán, tớ đâu có phải là Đảng viên?
Người còn 'xạc' Camus: Thì tao cũng nghĩ như mày, trại tù VC thì đếch chịu được thật, nhưng mấy thằng mũi lõ làm quá, cứ mang ra chửi ra rả, làm sao tao chịu thấu?
Danh tiếng của Heidegger bị tổn thương trầm trọng, vì phò Nazi, trong khi Sartre phò Cộng điên cuồng, lại chẳng hề hấn gì. Người phán, tớ đâu có phải là Đảng viên?
Người còn 'xạc' Camus: Thì tao cũng nghĩ như mày, trại tù VC thì đếch chịu được thật, nhưng mấy thằng mũi lõ làm quá, cứ mang ra chửi ra rả, làm sao tao chịu thấu?
We remember D-Day, the liberation of
the Nazi concentration
camps, the children welcoming American GIs with cheers on the streets.
No one
wants to be told that there was another, darker side to Allied victory,
or that
the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler,
our enemy,
were liberated. To admit that by sending thousands of Russians to their
deaths
by forcibly repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions
of
people to Soviet rule at Yalta,
the Western Allies might have helped others commit crimes against
humanity
would undermine the moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one
wants to
think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No
one wants
to remember how well that mass murderer got on with Western statesmen.
"I
have a real liking for Stalin," the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony
Eden, told a friend, "he has never broken his word." There are
many, many photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt all
together, all
smiling.
Chẳng ai muốn biết, chúng ta chiến thắng Đệ Nhị Thế Chiến, với sự tiếp tay của Quỉ Sứ.
Chẳng ai muốn biết, chúng ta chiến thắng Đệ Nhị Thế Chiến, với sự tiếp tay của Quỉ Sứ.
At a very deep level, the two systems
are related.They are related,
first of all, because both Nazism
and Soviet communism emerged out of the barbaric experiences of the
First World
War and and the Russian civil war, which followed on its heels.
Ở dưới đáy của chúng, hai hệ thống này là bà con. Chúng đều nhờ những man rợ của Đệ Nhất Thế Chiến, và với Nga xô, của cuộc nội chiến theo liền sau đó, mà bật ra.
Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that both the Nazi and the Bolshevik regimes created "objective opponents" or "objective enemies," whose "identity changes according to the prevailing circumstances - so that, as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another." By the same token, she added, "the task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population." Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.
Cách đây nửa thế kỷ, Hannah Arendt viết, cả hai chế độ Nazi và Bolshevik tạo ra "địch thủ khách quan" và "kẻ thù khách quan", và, tùy theo hoàn cảnh, mà đội mũ nón cho chúng, sao cho thích hợp. Khi làm thịt xong địch thủ, thì tới kẻ thù, đại khái như thế. Và cũng đại khái như thế, nhiệm vụ nào cũng hoàn thành của mấy ông công an chế độ ta, không phải, khám phá tội ác, nhưng luôn trong tư thế sẵn sàng còng tay loại người nào vừa được nhà nước ban cho nón mũ mới.
Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.
Lại nữa: nhân dân bị bắt không phải vì đã làm gì, mà đã là thứ gì?
Ở dưới đáy của chúng, hai hệ thống này là bà con. Chúng đều nhờ những man rợ của Đệ Nhất Thế Chiến, và với Nga xô, của cuộc nội chiến theo liền sau đó, mà bật ra.
Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that both the Nazi and the Bolshevik regimes created "objective opponents" or "objective enemies," whose "identity changes according to the prevailing circumstances - so that, as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another." By the same token, she added, "the task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population." Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.
Cách đây nửa thế kỷ, Hannah Arendt viết, cả hai chế độ Nazi và Bolshevik tạo ra "địch thủ khách quan" và "kẻ thù khách quan", và, tùy theo hoàn cảnh, mà đội mũ nón cho chúng, sao cho thích hợp. Khi làm thịt xong địch thủ, thì tới kẻ thù, đại khái như thế. Và cũng đại khái như thế, nhiệm vụ nào cũng hoàn thành của mấy ông công an chế độ ta, không phải, khám phá tội ác, nhưng luôn trong tư thế sẵn sàng còng tay loại người nào vừa được nhà nước ban cho nón mũ mới.
Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.
Lại nữa: nhân dân bị bắt không phải vì đã làm gì, mà đã là thứ gì?
Gulag,
a history
Introduction
And
fate made everybody equal
Outside the limits of the law
Son of a kulak or Red commander
Son of a priest or commissar ...
Outside the limits of the law
Son of a kulak or Red commander
Son of a priest or commissar ...
Here
classes were all equalized,
All men were brothers, camp mates all,
Branded as traitors every one ...
All men were brothers, camp mates all,
Branded as traitors every one ...
-Alexander
Tvardovsky,
"By Right of Memory " (1)
"By Right of Memory " (1)
Và
số mệnh khiến mọi người bình đẳng
Bên ngoài giới hạn của luật pháp
Con địa chủ hay con Chỉ huy Đỏ
Con linh mục hay con Uỷ viên
Bên ngoài giới hạn của luật pháp
Con địa chủ hay con Chỉ huy Đỏ
Con linh mục hay con Uỷ viên
Ở
đây, đánh đồng giai cấp
Tất cả là anh em, tất cả, những trại viên
Và đều được dán cùng một nhãn: phản động.
Tất cả là anh em, tất cả, những trại viên
Và đều được dán cùng một nhãn: phản động.
THIS IS A HISTORY of the Gulag: a
history of the vast network
of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth
of the
Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the
Black Sea,
from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to
Vorkuta
to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs. Literally,
the
word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main
Camp
Administration. Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify
not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the
system of
Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps,
punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps,
children's
camps, transit camps. Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the
Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners
once
called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the
transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of
families,
the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.
The Gulag
had antecedents in Czarist Russia, in the
forced-labor brigades that operated in Siberia
from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. It then
took on
its modern and more familiar form almost immediately after the Russian
Revolution, becoming an integral part of the Soviet system. Mass terror
against
real and alleged opponents was a part of the Revolution from the very
beginning
- and by the summer of 1918, Lenin, the Revolution's leader, had
already
demanded that "unreliable elements" be locked up in concentration
camps outside major towns. (2) A string of aristocrats, merchants, and
other
people defined as potential "enemies" were duly imprisoned. By 1921,
there were already eighty-four camps in forty-three provinces, mostly
designed
to "rehabilitate" these first enemies of the people.
From 1929,
the camps took on a new significance. In that
year, Stalin decided to use forced labor both to speed up the Soviet
Union's
industrialization, and to excavate the natural resources in the Soviet Union's barely habitable far north. In
that year,
the Soviet secret police also began to take control of the Soviet penal
system,
slowly wresting all of the country's camps and prisons away from the
judicial
establishment. Helped along by the mass arrests of 1937 and 1938, the
camps
entered a period of rapid expansion. By the end of the 1930s, they
could be
found in every one of the Soviet Union's
twelve time zones.
Contrary
to popular assumption, the Gulag did not cease
growing in the 1930s, but rather continued to expand throughout the
Second
World War and the 1940s, reaching its apex in the early 1950s. By that
time the
camps had come to play a central role in the Soviet economy. They
produced a
third of the country's gold, much of its coal and timber, and a great
deal of
almost everything else. In the course of the Soviet
Union's
existence, at least 476 distinct camp complexes came into being,
consisting of
thousands of individual camps, each of which contained anywhere from a
few
hundred to many thousands of people. (3). The prisoners worked in
almost every
industry imaginable-logging, mining, construction, factory work,
farming, the
designing of airplanes and artillery - and lived, in effect, in a
country
within a country, almost a separate civilization. The Gulag had its own
laws,
its own customs, its own morality, even its own slang. It spawned its
own
literature, its own villains, its own heroes, and it left its mark upon
all who
passed through it, whether as prisoners or guards. Years after being
released,
the Gulag's inhabitants were often able to recognize former inmates on
the
street simply from "the look in their eyes."
Such
encounters were frequent, for the camps had a large
turnover. Although arrests were constant, so too were releases.
Prisoners were
freed because they finished their sentences, because they were let into
the Red
army, because they were invalids or women with small children, because
they had
been promoted from captive to guard. As a result, the total number of
prisoners
in the camps generally hovered around two million, but the total number
of
Soviet citizens who had some experience of the camps, as political or
criminal
prisoners, is far higher. From 1929, when the Gulag began its major
expansion,
until 1953, when Stalin died, the best estimates indicate that some
eighteen
million people passed through this massive system. About another six
million
were sent into exile, deported to the Kazakh deserts or the Siberian
forests.
Legally obliged to remain in their exile villages, they too were forced
laborers, even though they did not live behind barbed wire (4).
As a
system of mass forced labor involving millions of
people, the camps disappeared when Stalin died. Although he had
believed all of
his life that the Gulag was critical to Soviet economic growth, his
political
heirs knew well that the camps were, in fact, a source of backwardness
and
distorted investment. Within days of his death, Stalin's successors
began to
dismantle them. Three major rebellions, along with a host of smaller
but no
less dangerous incidents, helped to accelerate the process.
Nevertheless,
the camps did not disappear altogether.
Instead, they evolved. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, a few of
them were
redesigned and put to use as prisons for a new generation of democratic
activists, anti-Soviet nationalists - and criminals. Thanks to the
Soviet
dissident network and the international human rights movement, news of
these
post-Stalinist camps appeared regularly in the West. Gradually, they
came to
play a role in Cold War diplomacy. Even in the 1980s, the American
President,
Ronald Reagan, and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, still
discussing
the Soviet camps. Only in 1987 did Gorbachev – himself grandson of
Gulag
prisoners - begin to dissolve the Soviet Union's
political camps altogether.
Yet
although they lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself,
and although many millions of people passed through them, the true
history of
the Soviet Union's concentration
camps was,
until recently, not at all well known. By some measures, it is still
not known.
Even the bare facts recited above, although by now familiar to most
Western
scholars of Soviet history, have not filtered into Western popular
consciousness. "Human knowledge," once wrote Pierre Rigoulot, the
French historian of communism, "doesn't accumulate like the bricks of a
wall, which grows regularly, according to the work of the mason. Its
development, but also its stagnation or retreat, depends on the social,
cultural and political framework." (5)
One might
say that, until now, the social, cultural, and
political framework for knowledge of the Gulag has not been in place.
*
*
I first
became aware of this problem several years ago, when
walking across the Charles Bridge, a major tourist attraction in what
was then
newly democratic Prague.
There were buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and every fifteen
feet or so
someone was selling precisely what one would expect to find for sale in
such a
postcard-perfect spot. Paintings of appropriately pretty streets were
on
display, along with bargain jewelry and "Prague" key chains. Among the
bric-a-brac, one could buy Soviet military paraphernalia: caps, badges,
belt
buckles, and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet
schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms.
The sight
struck me as odd. Most of the people buying the
Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be
sickened
by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to
wearing the
hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation,
but
sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural
mood is
best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while
the
symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another
mass
murder makes us laugh.
If there
is a dearth of feeling about Stalinism among Prague tourists, it is
partly explained by the dearth of images in Western popular culture.
The Cold
War produced James Bond and thrillers, and cartoon Russians of the sort
who
appear in Rambo films, but nothing as ambitious as Schindler's List or
Sophie's
Choice. Steven Spielberg, probably Hollywood's
leading director (like it or not) has chosen to make films about
Japanese
concentration camps (Empire of the Sun) and Nazi concentration camps,
but not
about Stalinist concentration camps. The latter haven't caught Hollywood's
imagination in the same way.
Highbrow
culture hasn't been much more open to the subject.
The reputation of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been
deeply
damaged by his brief, overt support of Nazism, an enthusiasm which
developed
before Hitler had committed his major atrocities. On the other hand,
the reputation
of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has not suffered in the
least from
his aggressive support of Stalinism throughout the postwar years, when
plentiful evidence of Stalin's atrocities was available to anyone
interested.
"As we were not members of the Party," he once wrote, "it was
not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain
aloof
from the quarrels over the nature of the system, provided no events of
sociological significance occurred." (6). On another occasion, he told
Albert Camus - Like you, I find these camps intolerable, but I find
equally
intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press." (7)
Some
things have changed since the Soviet collapse. In 2002,
for example, the British novelist Martin Amis felt moved enough by the
subject
of Stalin and Stalinism to dedicate an entire book to the
subject. His
efforts prompted other writers to wonder why so few members of the
political
and literary Left had broached the subjects (8). On the other hand,
some things
have not changed. It is possible – still - for an American academic to
publish
a book suggesting that the purges of the 1930s were useful because they
promoted upward mobility and therefore laid the groundwork for
perestroika (9).
It is possible – still - for a British literary editor to reject an
article
because it is "too anti-Soviet." (10) Far more common, however, is a
reaction of boredom or indifference to Stalinist terror. An otherwise
straightforward review of a book I wrote about the western republics of
the
former Soviet in the 1990s contained the following line: "Here occurred
the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians
than
Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how many in the West remember it? After all,
the
killing was so – so boring, and ostensibly undramatic." (11)
These are
all small things: the purchase of a trinket, a
philosopher's reputation, the presence or absence of Hollywood
films. But put them all and they make a story. Intellectually,
Americans and
West Europeans know what happened in the Soviet
Union. Alexander Sozhenitsyn’s acclaimed novel about
life in
the camps, One Day in the Life of Denisovich, was published in the West
in
several languages in 1962-63. His oral history of the camps, The
Gulag
Archipelago, caused much comment when it appeared, again in several
languages,
in 1973. Indeed, The Gulag Archipelago led to a minor intellectual
revolution
in some countries, most notably France,
converting whole swathes of the French Left to an anti-Soviet position.
Many
more revelations about the Gulag were made during the 1980s, the
glasnost
years, and they too received due publicity abroad.
Nevertheless,
to many people, the crimes of Stalin do not
inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler. Ken
Livingstone,
a former British Member of Parliament, now Mayor of London, once
struggled to
explain the difference to me. Yes, the Nazis were "evil," he said.
But the Soviet Union was "deformed."
That view echoes the feeling that many people have, even those who are
not
old-fashioned left-wingers: the Soviet Union simply went wrong somehow,
but it
was not fundamentally wrong in the way that Hitler's Germany
was wrong.
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 of Brezhnev,
although
both were responsible for a great deal of destruction. The absence of
hard
information, backed up by archival research, was clearly part of it
too. The
paucity of academic work on this subject was long due to a paucity of
sources.
Archives were closed. Access to camp sites was forbidden. No television
cameras
ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they had done in Germany
at the
end of the Second World War. No images, in turn, meant less
understanding.
But
ideology twisted the ways in which we understood Soviet
and East European history as well.(12). A small part of the Western
Left
struggled to explain and sometimes to excuse the camps, and the terror
which
created them, from the 1930s on. In 1936, when millions of Soviet
peasants were
already working in camps or living in exile, the British socialists
Sidney and
Beatrice Webb published a vast survey of the Soviet Union, which
explained,
among other things, how the "downtrodden Russian peasant is gradually
acquiring a sense of political freedom." (13) At the time of the Moscow show
trials, while
Stalin arbitrarily condemned thousands of innocent Party members to
camps, the
playwright Bertolt Brecht told the philosopher Sidney Hook that "the
more
innocent they are, the more they deserve to die." (14).
But even
as late as the 1980s, there were still academics who
continued to describe the advantages of East German health care or
Polish peace
initiatives, still activists who felt embarrassed by the fuss and
bother raised
over the dissidents in Eastern Europe's prison camps. Perhaps this was
because
the founding philosophers of the Western Left - Marx and Engel - were
the same
as those of the Soviet Union. Some of
the
language was shared as well: the masses, the struggle, the proletariat,
the
exploiters and the exploited, the ownership of the means of production.
To
condemn the Soviet Union too
thoroughly would
be to condemn a part of what some of - Western Left once held dear as
well.
It is not
only the far Left, and not only Western communists,
who were tempted to make excuses for Stalin's crimes that they would
never have
made for Hitler's. Communist ideals - social justice, equality for all
- are
far more attractive to most in the West than the Nazi advocacy of
racism and
the triumph of the strong over the weak. Even if communist ideology
meant
something very different in practice, it was harder for the
intellectual
descendants of the American and French Revolutions to condemn a system
which sounded, at least, similar to their own.
Perhaps this helps explain why eyewitness reports of the Gulag were,
from the
very beginning, dismissed and belittled by the very same people who
would never
have bought to question the validity of Holocaust testimony written by
Primo
Levi or Elie Wiesel. From the Russian Revolution on, official
information about
the Soviet camps was readily available too, to anyone who wanted it:
the most
famous Soviet account of one of the early camps, the White Sea Canal,
was even published in English. Ignorance alone cannot explain why
Western
intellectuals chose to avoid the subject.
The
Western Right, on the other hand, did struggle to condemn
Soviet crimes, but sometimes using methods that harmed their own cause.
Surely
the man who did the greatest damage to the cause of anti-communism was
the
American Senator Joe McCarthy. Recent documents showing that some
accusations
were correct do not change the impact of his overzealous pursuit of
communists
in American public life: ultimately, his public "trials" of communist
sympathizers would tarnish the cause of anti-communism - the brush of
chauvinism and intolerance. (15). In the end, his actions served the
cause of
neutral historical inquiry no better than those of his opponents.
Yet not
all of our attitudes to the Soviet past are linked to
political ideology either. Many, in fact, are rather a fading
by-product of our
memories of Second World War. We have, at present, a firm conviction
that the
Second World War was a wholly just war, and few want that conviction
shaken. We
remember D-Day, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the
children
welcoming American GIs with cheers on the streets. No one wants to be
told that
there was another, darker side to Allied victory, or that the camps of
Stalin,
our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were
liberated. To
admit that by sending thousands of Russians to their deaths by forcibly
repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions of people to
Soviet
rule at Yalta,
the Western Allies might have helped others commit crimes against
humanity
would undermine the moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one
wants to
think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No
one wants
to remember how well that mass murderer got on with Western statesmen.
"I
have a real liking for Stalin," the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony
Eden, told a friend, "he has never broken his word."(16) There are
many, many photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt all
together, all
smiling.
Finally,
Soviet propaganda was not without its effect. Soviet
attempts to cast doubt upon Solzhenitsyn's writing, for example, to
paint him
as a madman or an anti-Semite or a drunk, had some impact. (17). Soviet
pressure on Western academics and journalists helped skew their work
too. When
I studied Russian history as an undergraduate in the United States in
the 1980s
acquaintances told me not to bother continuing with the subject in
graduate
school, since there were too many difficulties involved: in those days,
those
who wrote "favorably" about the Soviet Union won more access to
archives, more access to official information, longer visas in the
country.
Those who did not risked expulsion and professional difficulties as a
consequence. It goes without saying, of course, that no outsiders were
allowed
access to any material about Stalin's camps or about the post-Stalinist
prison
system. The subject simply did not exist, and those who pried too deep
lost
their right to stay in the country.
Put
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. The Second World War 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 Left and the
Western Right
now compete over different issues. At the same time, the emergence of
new
terrorist threats to Western civilization make the study of old
communist
threats to Western civilization all the more necessary.
In other
words, the "social, cultural and political
framework” has now changed - and so too has our access to information
about the
camp. At the end of the 1980s, a flood of documents about the Gulag
began to
appear in Gorbachev's Soviet Union.
Stories of
life in Soviet camps were published in newspapers for the first time.
New
revelations sold out magazines. Old arguments about numbers – how may
dead, how
may incarcerated - revived. Russian historians and historical
societies, led by
the pioneering Memorial Society in Moscow,
began publishing monographs, histories of individual camps and
people,
casualty estimates, lists of the names of the dead. Their efforts were
echoed
and amplified in the former Soviet republics and the countries Warsaw
Pact,
and, later, by Western historians too.
Despite
many setbacks, this Russian exploration of the Soviet
past continues today. True, the first decade of the twenty-first
century is
very different from the final decades of the twentieth century. History
is no
longer either a major part of Russian public discourse, nor quite so
sensational as it once seemed. Most of the work Russian and other
scholars is
real historical drudgery, involving the sifting of thousands of
individual
documents, hours spent archives, days spent looking for facts and
numbers.
But it is
beginning to bear fruit. Slowly, patiently,
Memorial has not only put together the first guide to the names and
locations
of all of the camps on record, but has also published a groundbreaking
series
of history books, and compiled an enormous archive of oral and written
survivors' tales as well. Together with others - the Sakharov Institute
and the
publishing house Vozvrashchenie (the name means "return") - they have
put some of these memoirs into general circulation. Russian academic
journals
and institutional presses have to begun to print monographs based on
new
documents, as well as collections of documents themselves. Similar work
is
being carried out elsewhere, notably by the Karta Society in Poland; and by historical museums in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
Romania,
and Hungary;
and by a handful of
American and West European scholars who have the time and energy to
work in the
Soviet archives.
While
researching this book, I had access to their work, as
well as to two other kinds of sources that would not have been
available ten
years ago. The first is the flood of new memoirs which began to be
published in
the 1980s in Russia,
America,
Israel, Eastern Europe, and
elsewhere. In writing this
book, I have made extensive use of them. In the past, some scholars of
the
Soviet Union have been reluctant to rely upon Gulag memoir material,
arguing
that Soviet memoir writers had political reasons for twisting their
stories,
that most did their writing many years after their release, and that
many
borrowed stories from one another when their own memories failed them.
Nevertheless, after reading several hundred camp memoirs, and
interviewing some
two dozen survivors, I felt that it was possible to filter out those
which seemed
implausible or plagiarized or politicized. I also felt that while
memoirs could
not be relied upon for names, dates, and numbers, they were nonetheless
an
invaluable source of other kinds of information, especially crucial
aspects of
life in the camps: prisoners' relationships with one another, conflict
between
groups, the behavior of guards and administrators, the role of
corruption, even
the existence of love and passion. I have consciously made heavy use of
only
one writer - Varlam Shalamov - who wrote fictionalized versions of his
life in
the camps, and this because his stories are based upon real events.
As far as
was possible, I have also backed up the memoirs
with an extensive use of archives - a source which, paradoxically, not
everyone
likes to use either. As will become clear in the course of this
book, the
power of propaganda in the Soviet Union
was
such that it frequently altered perceptions of reality. For that
reason,
historians in the past were right not to rely upon officially published
Soviet
documents, which were often deliberately designed to obscure the truth.
But
secret documents - the documents now preserved in archives - had a
different
function. In order to run its camps, the administration of the Gulag
needed to
keep certain kinds of records. Moscow
needed to know what was happening in the provinces, the provinces had
to
receive instructions from the central administration, statistics had to
be
kept. This does not mean that these archives are entirely reliable -
bureaucrats had their own reasons to distort even the most mundane
facts - but
if used judiciously, they can explain some things about camp life which
memoirs
cannot. Above all, they help to explain why the camps were built – or
at least
what it was that the Stalinist regime believed they were going to
achieve.
It is also
true that the archives are far more varied than
many anticipated and that they tell the story of the camps from many
different
perspectives I had access, for example, to the archive of the Gulag
administration, with inspectors' reports, financial accounts, letters
from the
camp directors to their supervisors in Moscow, accounts of escape
attempts, and
lists of musical productions put on by camp theaters, all kept at the
Russian
State Archive in Moscow. I also consulted records of Party meetings,
and
documents that were collected in a part of Stalin's osobaya papka collection,
his "special archive." With the help of other Russian historians, I
was able to use some documents from Soviet military archives, and the
archives
of the convoy guards, which contain things such as lists of what
arrested
prisoners were and were not allowed to take with them. Outside of
Moscow, I
also had access to some local archives – in Petrozavodsk, Arkhangelsk,
Syktyvkar, Vorkuta, and the Solovetsky Islands - where day-to-day
events of
camp life were recorded, as well as to the archives of Dmitlag, the
camp that
built the Moscow-Volga Canal, which are kept in Moscow. All contain
records of
daily life in the camps, order forms, prisoners' records. At one point,
I was
handed a chunk of the archive of Kedrovyi Shor, a small division of
Inta, a
mining camp north of the Arctic Circle, and politely asked if I wanted
to buy
it.
Put
together, these sources make it possible to write about
the camps in a new way. In this book, I no longer needed to
compare the
"claims" of a handful of dissidents to the "claims" of the
Soviet government. I did not have to search for a median line somewhere
in
between the accounts of Soviet refugees and the accounts of Soviet
officials.
Instead, to describe what happened, I was able to use the language of
many
different kinds of people, of guards, of policemen, of different kinds
of
prisoners serving different kinds of sentences at different times. The
emotions
and the politics which have long surrounded the historiography of the
Soviet
concentration camps do not lie at the heart of this book. That space is
reserved, instead, for the experience of the victims.
This is a
history of the Gulag. By that, I mean that this is
a history of the Soviet concentration camps: their origins in the
Bolshevik
Revolution, their development into a major part of the Soviet economy,
their
dismantling after Stalin's death. This is also a book about the
legacy of
the Gulag: without question, the regimes and rituals found in the
Soviet
political and criminal prison camps of the 1970s and 1980s evolved
directly out
of those created in an earlier era, and for that reason I felt that
they
belonged in the same volume.
At the
same time, this is a book about life in the Gulag, and
for that reason it tells the story of the camps in two ways. The first
and
third sections of this book are chronological. They describe the
evolution of
the camps and their administration in a narrative fashion. The central
section
discusses life in the camps, and it does so thematically. While most of
the
examples and citations in this central section refer to the 1940s the
decade
when the camps reached their apex, I have also referred backward and
forward – a-historically
- to other eras. Certain aspects of life in the camps evolved over
time, and I
felt it was important to explain how this happened.
Having
said what this book is, I would also like to say what
it is not: it is not a history of the USSR, a history of the purges, or
a
history of repression in general. It is not a history of Stalin's
reign, or of
his Politburo, or of his secret police, whose complex administrative
history I
have deliberately tried to simplify as much as possible. Although I do
make use
of the writings of Soviet dissidents, often produced under great stress
and
with great courage, this book does not contain a complete history of
the Soviet
human rights movement. Nor, for that matter, does it do full justice to
the
stories of particular nations and categories of prisoner-among them
Poles,
Baits, Ukrainians, Chechens, German and Japanese POWs-who suffered
under the
Soviet regime, both inside and outside the Soviet camps. It does not
explore in
full the mass murders of 1937-38, which mostly took place outside the
camps, or
the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere.
Because
this is a book intended for the general reader, and because it does not
presume
any specialized knowledge of Soviet history, all of these events and
phenomenon
will be mentioned. Nevertheless, it would have been impossible to do
all of
them justice in a single volume.
Perhaps
most important, this book does not do justice to the
story of the "special exiles," the millions of people who were often
rounded up at the same time and for the same reasons as Gulag
prisoners, but
who were then sent not to camps but to live in remote exile villages
where many
thousands died of starvation, cold, and overwork. Some were exiled for
political reasons, including the kulaks, or rich peasants, in the 1930s
- Some
were exiled for their ethnicity, including Poles, Baits, Ukrainians,
Volga
Germans, and Chechens, among others, in the 1940s.They met a variety of
fates
in Kazakhstan, central Asia, and Siberia - too wide a variety to be
encompassed
in an account of the camp system. I have chosen to mention them,
perhaps
idiosyncratically, where their experiences seemed to me especially
close or
relevant to the experiences of Gulag prisoners. But although their
story is
closely connected to the story of the Gulag, to tell it fully would
require
another book of this length. I hope someone will write soon.
Although
this is a book about the Soviet concentration camps,
it is nevertheless impossible to treat them as an isolated phenomenon.
The
Gulag grew and developed at a particular time and place in tandem with
other
events - and within three contexts in particular. Properly speaking,
the Gulag
belongs to the history of the Soviet Union as well as the Russian
history of
prisons and exile, and to the particular intellectual climate of
continental
Europe in the mid-twentieth century, which also produced the Nazi
concentration
camps in Germany.
By
"belongs to the history of the Soviet Union”, I mean
something specific: the Gulag did not emerge, fully formed, from the
sea, but
rather reflected the general standards of the society around it. If the
camps
were filthy, if the guards were brutal, if the work teams were
slovenly, that
was partly because filthiness and brutality and slovenliness were
plentiful
enough in other spheres of Soviet life. If life in the camps was
horrible,
unbearable, inhuman, if death rates were high – that too was hardly
surprising.
In certain periods, life the Soviet Union was also horrible,
unbearable, and
inhuman, and death rates were as high outside the camps as they were
within
them.
Certainly
it is no coincidence that the first Soviet camps
were set up in the immediate aftermath of the bloody, violent, and
chaotic
Russian Revolution either. During the Revolution, the terror imposed
afterward,
and the subsequent civil war, it seemed to many in Russia as if
civilization
itself had been permanently fractured. "Death sentences were meted out
arbitrarily”, the historian Richard Pipes has written, “people were
shot for no
reason, and equally capriciously released” (18). From 1917 on, a whole
society’s set of values was turned on its head: a lifetime’s
accumulated wealth
and experience was a liability, robbery was glamorized as
“nationalization”
murder became an accepted part for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In this
atmosphere, Lenin's initial imprisonment of thousands of people, simply
on the
grounds of their former wealth or their aristocratic titles, hardly
seemed
strange or out of line.
By the
same token, high mortality rates in the camps in
certain years are also, in part, a reflection of events taking place
throughout
the country. Death rates went up inside the camps in the early 1930s,
when
famine gripped the entire country. They went up again during the Second
World
War: the German invasion of the Soviet Union let not only to millions
of combat
deaths, but also to epidemics of dysentery and of typhus, as well as,
again, to
famine, which affected people outside the camps as well as within them.
In the
winter of 194-42, when a quarter of the Gulag's population died of
starvation,
as many as a million citizens of the city of Leningrad may have starved
to
death too, trapped behind a German blockade.(19). The blockade's
chronicler
Lidiya Ginzburg wrote of the hunger of the time as a "permanent state
...
it was constantly present and always made its presence felt ... the
most
desperate and tormenting thing of all during the process of eating was
when the
food drew to an end with awful rapidity without bringing satiety."(20)
Her
words are eerily reminiscent of those used by former prisoners, as the
reader
will discover.
It is
true, of course, that the Leningraders died at home,
while the Gulag ripped open lives, destroyed families, tore children
away from
their parents, and condemned millions to live in remote wastelands,
thousands
of miles from their families. Still, prisoners' horrific experiences
can be
legitimately compared to the terrible memories of "free" Soviet
citizens such as Elena Kozhina, who was evacuated from Leningrad in
February
1942. During the journey, she watched her brother, sister, and
grandmother die
of starvation. As the Germans approached, she and her mother walked
across the
steppe, encountering "scenes of unbridled rout and chaos ... The world
was
flying into thousands of pieces. Everything was permeated with smoke
and a
horrible burning smell; the steppe was tight and suffocating, as if
squeezed
inside a hot, sooty fist." Although she never experienced the camps,
Kozhina knew terrible cold, hunger, and fear before her tenth birthday,
and was
haunted by the memories for the rest of her life. Nothing, she wrote,
"could erase my memories of Vadik's body being carried out under a
blanket; of Tanya choking in her agony; of me and Mama, the last ones,
trudging
through smoke and thunder in the burning steppe.” (21)
The
population of the Gulag and the population of the rest of
the USSR shared many things besides suffering. Both in the camps and
outside
them, it was possible to find the same slovenly working practices, the
same
criminally stupid bureaucracy, the same corruption, and the same sullen
disregard for human life. While writing this book, I described to a
Polish
friend the system of tufta - cheating on required work norms -
that
Soviet prisoners had developed, described later in this book. He howled
with
laughter: "You think prisoners invented that? The whole Soviet bloc
practiced tufta." In Stalin's Soviet Union, the difference
between
life inside and life outside the barbed wire was not fundamental, but
rather a
question of degree. Perhaps for that reason, the Gulag has often been
described
as the quintessential expression of the Soviet system. Even in
prison-camp
slang, the world outside the barbed wire was not referred to as
“freedom”, but
as the bolshaya zona, the "big prison zone," larger and less
deadly than the “small zone” of the camp, but no more human-and
certainly no
more humane.
Yet if the
Gulag cannot be held totally apart in the rest of
the Soviet Union, neither can the story fully separated from the long,
multinational,
cross-cultural history of prisons, exile, incarceration, and
concentration
camps. The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can "pay
their debt to society”, make themselves useful, and not contaminate
others with
their ideas, or theirs criminal acts, is a practice as old as
civilization
itself. The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their
dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port of the Black Sea. Georgian Britain sent its pickpockets and thieves to Australia. Nineteenth-century France sent convicted criminals to Guyana, Portugal sent its undesirables to Mozambique (22).
dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port of the Black Sea. Georgian Britain sent its pickpockets and thieves to Australia. Nineteenth-century France sent convicted criminals to Guyana, Portugal sent its undesirables to Mozambique (22).
The new
leadership of the Soviet Union did not, in 1917, have
to look quite as far away as Greenland for a precedent. Since the
seventeenth
century Russia had its own exile system: the first mention of exile in
Russian
law was in 1649. At the time, exile was considered to be a new, more
human form
of criminal punishment -far preferable to the death penalty, or so
branding and
mutilation - and it was applied to a huge range of minor and major
offenses,
from snuff-taking and fortune-telling to murder. (23) A wide range of
Russian
intellectuals and writers, Pushkin among them, suffered some form of
exile,
while the very possibility of exile tormented others at the height of
his
literary fame in 1890, Anton Chekhov surprised everyone he knew and set
off to
visit and describe the penal colonies on the island of Sakhalin, off
Russia's
Pacific coast. Before he left, he wrote to his puzzled publisher,
explaining
his motives:
We have allowed millions of people to
rot in prisons, to rot
for no purpose, without any consideration, and in a barbarous manner;
we have
driven people tens of thousands of versts through the cold in shackles,
infected them with syphilis, perverted them, multiplied the number of
criminals
... but none of this has anything to do with us, it's just not
interesting ..
(24).
In
retrospect, it is easy to find,
in the history of the Czarist prison system, many echoes of practices
later
applied in the Soviet Gulag. Like the Gulag, for example, Siberian
exile was
never intended exclusively for criminals. A law of 1736 declared that
if a
village decided someone in its midst was a bad influence on others, the
village
elders could divide up the unfortunate's property and order him to move
elsewhere. If he failed to find another abode, the state could then
send him
into exile." Indeed, this law was cited by Khrushchev in 1948, as part
of
his (successful) argument for exiling collective farmers who were
deemed
insufficiently enthusiastic and hard working. (26).
The
practice of exiling people who
simply didn't fit in continued throughout the nineteenth century. In
his book,
Siberia and the Exile System, George Kennan - uncle of the American
statesman -
described the system of "administrative process" that he observed in
Russia in1891:
The
obnoxious person may not be
guilty of any crime ... but if, in the opinion of the local
authorities, his
presence in a particular place is "prejudicial to public order" or
"incompatible with public tranquility," he may be arrested without
warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may
then be
removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and
there
be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten
years.(27).
Administrative exile - which required
no trial and no
sentencing procedure - was an ideal punishment not only for
troublemakers as
such, but also for political opponents of the regime. In the early
days, many
of these were Polish noblemen who objected to the Russian occupation of
their
territory and property. Later, exiles included religious objectors, as
well as
members of "revolutionary" groups and secret societies, including the
Bolsheviks. Although they were not administrative exiles - they were
tried and
sentenced - the most notorious of Siberia's nineteenth-century "forced
settlers" were also political prisoners: these were the Decembrists, a
group of high ranking aristocrats who staged a feeble rebellion against
Czar
Nicholas I in 1825. With a vengeance that shocked all of Europe at the
time,
the Czar sentenced five of the Decembrists to death. He deprived the
others of
their rank, and sent them, in chains, to Siberia, where a few were
joined by
their exceptionally brave wives. Only a few lived long enough to be
pardoned by
Nicholas's successor, Alexander II, thirty years later, and to return
to St.
Petersburg, by then tired old men. (28). Fyodor Dostoevsky, sentenced
in 1849
to a four-year term of penal servitude, was another well-known
political
prisoner. After returning from his Siberian exile, he wrote The House
of the
Dead, still the most widely read account of life in the Czarist prison
system.
Like the
Gulag, the Czarist exile
system was not created solely as a form of punishment. Russia's rulers
also
wanted their exiles, both criminal and political, to solve an economic
problem
that had rankled for many centuries: the under population of the far
east and
the far north of the Russian land-mass and the Russian Empire's
consequent
failure to exploit Russia's natural resources. With that in mind, the
Russian
state began, as early as the eighteenth century, to sentence some of
its
prisoners to forced labor - a form of punishment which became known as katorga, from the Greek word kateirgon,
"to force." Katorga had a long Russian prehistory.
In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great had used convicts and
serfs to
build roads, fortresses, factories, ships, and the city of St.
Petersburg
itself. In 1722, he passed a more specific directive ordering
criminals,
children, into exile near the silver mines of Daurya, in eastern
Siberia (29).
In its
time, Peter's use of forced
labor was considered a great economic and political success. Indeed,
the story
of the hundreds of thousands of serfs who spent their lives building
St.
Petersburg had an enormous impact on future generations. Many had died
during
the construction – and yet the city became a symbol of progress and
Europeanization. The methods were cruel - and yet the nation had
profited.
Peter's example probably helps explain the ready adoption of katorga by his Czarist successors.
Without doubt, Stalin was a great admirer of Peter's building methods
too.
Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga remained a relatively rate form of punishment.
In 1906,
only about 6,000 katorga convicts
were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there
were only
28,600 (30). Of far greater economic importance was another category of
prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but
not in
prison, in under-populated regions of the country, chosen for their
economic
potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers
were sent
to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the
convicts
laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia's empty, mineral-rich
wasted
lands (31).
Their
sentences were not
necessarily easy ones and some of the settlers thought their fate worse
than
that of the katorga prisoners. Assigned
to remote districts, with poor land and few neighbors, many starved to
death
over the long winters, or drank themselves to death from boredom. There
were
very few women - their numbers never exceeded 15 percent - fewer books,
no
entertainment. (32).
On his
journey across Siberia to
Sakhalin, Anton Chekhov met, and described, some of these exiled
settlers:
"The majority of them are financially poor, have little strength,
little
practical training, and possess nothing except their ability to write,
which is
frequently of absolutely no use to anybody. Some of them commence by
selling,
piece by piece, their shirts of Holland linen, their sheets, their
scarves and
handkerchiefs, and finish up after two or three years dying in fearful
penury
..." (33).
But not
all of the exiles were
miserable and degenerate. Siberia was far away from European Russia,
and in the
East officialdom was more forgiving, aristocracy much thinner on the
ground.
The wealthier exiles and ex-prisoners sometimes built up large estates.
The
more educated became doctors and lawyers, or ran schools. (34).
Princess Maria
Volkonskaya, wife of the Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky, sponsored the
building of
a theater and concert hall in Irkutsk: although she had, like her
husband,
technically been deprived of her rank, invitations to her soirees and
private
dinners were eagerly sought after, and discussed as far away as Moscow
and St.
Petersburg.(35).
By the
early twentieth century, the
system had shed some of its previous harshness. The fashion for prison
reform
which spread through Europe in the nineteenth century finally caught up
with
Russia too. Regimes grew lighter, and policing grew laxer. (36).
Indeed, in
contrast to what came later, the route to Siberia now seems, if not
exactly
pleasurable, then hardly an onerous punishment for the small group of
men who
would lead the Russian Revolution. When in prison, the Bolsheviks
received a
certain amount of favorable treatment as "political" rather than
criminal prisoners, and were allowed to have books, paper, and writing
implements. Ordzhonikidze, one of the Bolshevik leaders, later recalled
reading
Adam Smith, Ricardo, Plekhanov, William James, Frederick W. Taylor,
Dostoevsky,
and Ibsen, among others, while resident in St. Petersburg's
Schlusselberg
Fortress. (37). By later standards, the Bolsheviks were also well-fed,
well-dressed, even beautifully coiffed. A photograph taken of Trotsky
imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1906 shows him wearing
spectacles,
a suit, a tie, and a shirt with an impressively white collar. The
peephole in
the door behind him offers the only clue to his whereabouts (38).
Another taken
of him in exile in eastern Siberia, in 1900, shows him in a fur hat and
heavy
coat, surrounded by other men and women, also in boots and furs. (39).
All a
rare luxuries in the Gulag, half a century later.
If life in
Czarist exile did become
intolerably unpleasant, there were always escape. Stalin himself was
arrested
and exiled four times. Three times, he escaped, once from Irkutsk
province and
twice to a region which later became pockmarked with camps. (40). As a
result,
his scorn for the Czarist regime's "toothlessness" knew no bounds.
His Russian biographer Dmitri Volkogonov characterized his opinion like
this:
“You didn't have to work, you could read to your heart’s content and
you could
even escape, which required only the will to do so.” (41).
Thus did
their Siberian experience
provide the Bolsheviks with an earlier model to build upon-and a lesson
in the
need for exceptionally strong punitive regimes.
If the Gulag is an integral part of
both Soviet and Russian
history, it is inseparable from European history too: the Soviet Union
was not
the only twentieth-century European country to develop a totalitarian
social
order, or to build a system of concentration camps. While it is not the
intention of this book to compare and contrast the Soviet and the Nazi
camps,
the subject cannot be comfortably ignored either. The two systems were
built at
roughly the same time, on the same continent. Hitler knew of the Soviet
camps
and Stalin knew of the Holocaust. There were prisoners who experienced
and
described the camps of both systems. At a very deep level, the two
systems are
related.
They are
related, first of all,
because both Nazism and Soviet communism emerged out of the barbaric
experiences of the First World War and the Russian civil war, which
followed on
its heels. The industrialized methods of warfare put into wide use
during both
of these conflicts generated an enormous intellectual and artistic
response at
the time. Less noticed – except, of course, by the millions of victims
-was the
widespread use of industrialized methods of incarceration. Both sides
constructed internment camps and prisoner-of-war camps across Europe
from 1914
on. In 1918, there were 2.2 million prisoners of war on Russian
territory. New
technology – the mass production of guns, of tanks, even of barbed
wire-made
these and later camps possible. Indeed, some of the first Soviet camps
were actually
built on top of First World War prisoner-of-war camps. (42)
The Soviet
and Nazi camps are also
related because they belong, together, to the wider history of
concentration
camps, which began at the end of the nineteenth century. By
concentration
camps, I mean camps constructed to incarcerate people not for what they
had
done, but for who then were. Unlike criminal prison camps, or
prisoner-of-war
camps, concentration camps were built for a particular type of
non-criminal
civilian prisoner, the member of an "enemy" group, or at any rate of
a category of people who - for reasons of their race or their presumed
politics, were judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society. (43).
According
to this definition, the
first modern concentration camps were set up not in Germany or Russia,
but in
colonial Cuba, in 1895. In that year, in an effort to put an end to a
series of
local insurgencies, imperial Spain began to prepare a policy of reconcentracion, intended to remove the
Cuban peasants from their land and "reconcentrate"
them in camps, thereby depriving the insurgents of food, shelter, and
support.
By 1900, the Spanish term reconcentracion
had already been translated into English, and was used to describe a
similar
British project, initiated for similar reasons, during the Boer War in
South
Africa: Boer civilians were "concentrated" into camps, in order to
deprive Boer combatants of shelter and support.
From
there, the idea spread
further. It certainly seems, for example, as if the term kontslager
first appeared in Russian as a translation from the
English "concentration camp," probably thanks to Trotsky's
familiarity with the history of the Boer War. (44). In 1904, German
colonists
in German South-West Africa also adopted the British model - with one
variation. Instead of merely locking up the region's native
inhabitants, a
tribe called the Herero, they made
them carry out forced labor on behalf of the German colony.
There are a number of strange and
eerie links between these
first German-African labor camps and those built in Nazi Germany three
decades
later. It was thanks to these southern African labor colonies, for
example,
that the word Konzentrationslager
first appeared in the German language, in 1905. The first imperial
commissioner
of Deutsche Sud-West Afrika was one Dr. Heinrich Goering, the father of
Hermann, who set up the first Nazi camps in 1933. It was also in these
African
camps that the first German medical experiments were conducted on
humans: two
of Joseph Mengele's teachers, Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer,
carried out
research on the Herero, the latter in
an attempt to prove his theories about the superiority of the white
race. But
they were not unusual in their beliefs. In 1912, a best-selling German
book,
German Thought, claimed that,
nothing
can convince reasonable
people that the preservation of a tribe of South African kaffirs is
more
important for the future of humanity than the expansion of the great
European
nations and the white race in general… it is only when the indigenous
people
have learned to produce something of value in the service of the
superior
race…that they can be said to have a moral right to exist (45).
While
this
theory was rarely put so
clearly, similar sentiments often lay just beneath the surface of
colonial
practice. Certainly some forms of colonialism both reinforced the myth
of white
racial superiority and legitimized the use of violence by one race
against
another. It can be argued, therefore, that the corrupting experiences
of some
European colonists helped pave the way for the European totalitarianism
of the
twentieth-century. (46). And not only European: Indonesia is an example
of a
post-colonial state whose rulers initially imprisoned their critics in
concentration camps, just as their colonial masters had.
The
Russian Empire, which had quite
successfully vanquished its own native peoples in its march eastward,
was no
exception. (47). During one of the dinner parties that takes place in
Leo Tolstoy's
novel Anna Karenina, Anna's husband - who has some official
responsibilities
for "Native Tribes" - holds forth on the need for superior cultures
to absorb inferior ones.(48). At some level, the Bolsheviks, like all
educated
Russians, would have been aware of the
Russian Empire's subjugation of the Kirgiz, Buryats, Tungus, Chukchi,
and
others. The fact that it didn't particularly concern them - they, who
were
otherwise so interested in the fate of the downtrodden - itself
indicated
something about their unspoken assumptions.
But then,
full consciousness of the
history of southern Africa or of eastern Siberia was hardly required
for the
development of European concentration camps: the notion that some types
of
people are superior to other types of people was common enough in
Europe at the
beginning of the twentieth century. And this, finally, is what links
the camps
of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany in the most profound
sense of
all: both regimes legitimated themselves, in part, by establishing
categories
of "enemies”, or "sub-humans" whom they persecuted and destroyed
on a mass scale.
In Nazi
Germany, the first targets
were the crippled and the retarded. Later, the Nazis concentrated on
Gypsies,
homosexuals, and, above all, on the Jews. In the USSR the victims were,
at
first, the "former people" - alleged supporters of the old regime -
and later the "enemies of the people," an ill-defined term which
would come to include not only alleged political opponents of the
regime, but
also particular national groups and ethnicities, if they seemed (for
equally
ill-defined reasons) to threaten the Soviet state or Stalin's power. At
different times Stalin conducted mass arrests of Poles, Balts,
Chechens,
Tartars, and-on the eve of his death - Jews. (49).
Although
these categories were
never entirely arbitrary, they were never entirely stable either. Half
a
century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that both the Nazi and the Bolshevik
regimes
created "objective opponents" or "objective enemies," whose
"identity changes according to the prevailing circumstances - so that,
as
soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another." By
the same token, she added, "the task of the totalitarian police is not
to
discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to
arrest a
certain category of the population." (50). Again: people were arrested
not
for what they had done, but for who they were. In both societies, the
creation of
concentration camps was
actually the final stage in a long process of dehumanization of these
objective
enemies - a process which began, at first, with rhetoric. In his
autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote of how he had
suddenly realized that the Jews were responsible for Germany's
problems, that
"any shady undertaking, any form of foulness" in public life was
connected to the Jews: "on putting the probing knife to that kind of
abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body,
a
little Jew who was often blinded by the suddenness of the light
..."(51).
Lenin and
Stalin also began by
blaming "enemies" for the Soviet Union's myriad economic failures:
they were "wreckers" and "saboteurs" and agents of foreign
powers. From the late 1930s, as the wave of arrets began to expand,
Stalin took
this rhetoric to greater extremes, denouncing the "enemies of the
people" as vermin, as pollution, as "poisonous weeds." He also
spoke of his opponents as "filth" which had to be "subjected to
ongoing purification" - just as Nazi propaganda would associate Jews
with
images of vermin, of parasites, of infectious disease . (52)
Once
demonized, the legal isolation
of the enemy began in earnest. Before the Jews were actually rounded up
and
deprived of their status as German citizens. They as civil servants, as
lawyers, as judges; forbidden den to attend Aryan schools; forbidden to
display
to wear gold stars of David; and subjected to the street. (53). Before
their actual
arrest in Stalin's were also routinely humiliated in public meetings,
fired
from their jobs, expelled from the Communist Party, divorced by their
disgusted
spouses, and denounced by their angry children.
Within the
camps, the process of
dehumanization deepened and grew more extreme, helping both to
intimidate the
victims and to reinforce the victimizers' belief in the legitimacy of
what they
were doing. In her book-length interview with Franz Stangl, the
commander of
Treblinka, the writer Gitta Sereny asked Stangl why camp inmates,
before being
killed, were also beaten, humiliated, and deprived of their clothing.
Stangl
answered, "To condition those who actually had to carry out the
policies.
To make it possible for them to do what they did." (54). In The
Order of Terror: The concentration Camp,
the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky has also shown how the
dehumanization of
prisoners in the Nazi camps was methodically built into every aspect of
camp
life, from the torn, identical clothing, to the deprivation of privacy,
to the
heavy regulation, to the constant expectation of death. In the Soviet
system,
the dehumanization process also began at the moment of arrest, as we
shall see,
when prisoners were stripped of their clothes and identity, denied
contact with
outsiders, tortured, interrogated, and put through farcical trials, if
they
were tried at all.
In a
peculiarly Soviet twist of the
process, prisoners were deliberately "excommunicated” from Soviet life,
forbidden to refer to one another as "comrade”, and, from 1937 on,
prohibited from earning the coveted title of "shock-worker” no matter
how
well they behaved or how hard they worked. Portraits of Stalin, which
hung in
homes and offices throughout the USSR, almost never appeared inside
camps and
prisons, according to many prisoner accounts.
None of
which is to say that the
Soviet and Nazi camps were identical. As any reader with any general
knowledge
of the Holocaust will discover in the course of this book, life within
the
Soviet camp differed in many ways, from life within the Nazi camp
system. There
were differences in the organization of daily life and of work,
different sorts
of guards and punishments, different kinds of propaganda. The Gulag
lasted far
longer, and went through cycles of relative cruelty and relative
humanity. The
history of the Nazi camps is shorter, and contains less variation: they
simply
became crueler and crueler, until the retreating Germans liquidated
them or the
invading Allies liberated them. The Gulag also contained a wide variety
of
camps, from the lethal gold mines of the Kolyma region to the
"luxurious" secret institutes outside Moscow, where prisoner
scientists designed weapons for the Red Army. Although there were
different
kinds of camps in the Nazi system, the range was far narrower.
Above all,
however, two differences
between the systems strike me as fundamental. First, the definition of
"enemy" in the Soviet Union was always far more slippery than the
definition of "Jew" in Nazi Germany. With an extremely small number
of unusual exceptions, no Jew in Nazi Germany could change his status,
no Jew
inside a camp could reasonably expect to escape death, and all Jews
carried
this knowledge with them at all times. While millions of Soviet
prisoners
feared they might die - and millions did - there was no single category
of
prisoner whose death was absolutely guaranteed. At times, certain
prisoners
could improve their lot by working in relatively comfortable jobs, as
engineers
or geologists. Within each camp there was a prisoner hierarchy, which
some were
able to climb at the expense of others, or with the help of others. At
other
times - when the Gulag found itself overburdened with women, children,
and old
people, or when soldiers were needed to fight at the front - prisoners
were
released in mass amnesties. It sometimes happened that whole categories
of
"enemies" suddenly benefited from a change in status. Stalin arrested
hundreds of thousands of Poles, for example, at the start of the Second
World
War in 1939 - and then abruptly released them from the Gulag in 1941
when
Poland and the USSR became temporary allies. The opposite was also
true: in the
Soviet Union, perpetrators could become victims themselves. Gulag
guards,
administrators, even senior officers of the secret police, could also
be
arrested and find themselves sentenced to camps. Not every "poisonous
weed" remained poisonous, in other words - and there was no single
group
of Soviet prisoners who lived with the constant expectation of death.
(55).
Second -
as, again, will become
evident in the course of this book - the primary purpose of the Gulag,
according to both the private language and the public propaganda of
those who
founded it, was economic. This did not mean that it was humane. Within
the
system, prisoners were treated as cattle, or rather as lumps of iron
ore.
Guards shuttled them around at will, loading and unloading them into
cattle
cars, weigh and measuring them, feeding them if it seemed they might be
useful,
starving them if they were not. They were, to use Marxist language,
exploited,
reified, and commodified. Unless they were productive, their lives were
worthless to their masters.
Nevertheless,
their experience was
quite different from that of the Jewish and other prisoners
whom the Nazis sent to a special
group of camps called not Konzentrationslager
but Vernichtungslager – camps that
were not really "labor camps"
at all, but rather death factories: Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and
Treblinka.
Majdanek and Auschwitz contained both labor camps and death camps. Upon
entering these camps, prisoners were "selected." A tiny number were
sent to do a few weeks of forced labor. The rest were sent directly
into gas
chambers where they were murdered and then immediately cremated.
As far as
I have been able to
ascertain, this particular form of murder, practiced at the height of
the
Holocaust, had no Soviet equivalent. True, the Soviet Union found other
ways to
mass-murder hundreds of thousands of its citizens. Usually, they were
driven to
a forest at night, shot in the skull, and buried in mass graves before
they
ever got near a concentration camp - a form of murder no less
"industrialized”
and anonymous than that used by the Nazis. For that matter, there are
stories
of Soviet secret police using exhaust fumes - a primitive form of gas –
to kill
prisoners, just as Nazis did in their early years. (56). Within the
Gulag,
Soviet prisoners also died, usually not thanks to the captors'
efficiency but
due to gross inefficiency and neglect. (57). In certain Soviet camps,
at
certain times, death was virtually guaranteed for those selected to cut
trees
in the winter forest or to work in the worst of the Kolyma gold mines.
Prisoners were also locked in punishment cells until they died of cold
and
starvation, left untreated in unheated hospitals, or simply shot at
will for
"attempted escape”. Nevertheless, Soviet camp system as a whole was not
deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses - even if, at times, it
did.
These are
fine distinctions, but
they matter. Although the Gulag and Auschwitz do belong to the same
intellectual and historical tradition, they are nevertheless separate
and distinct,
both from one another and from camp systems set up by other regimes.
The idea
of the concentration camp may be general
enough to be used in many different cultures and situations, but even a
superficial study of the concentration camp's cross-cultural history
reveals
that the specific details-how life in the camps was organized, how the
camps
developed over time, how rigid or disorganized they became, how cruel
or
liberal they remained-depended on the particular country, on the
culture, and
on the regime.58 To those who were trapped behind barbed wire, these
details
were critical to their life, health, and survival.
In fact,
reading the accounts of
those who survived both, one is struck more by the differences between
the
victims' experiences than by the differences between the two camp
systems. Each
tale has its own unique qualities, each camp held different sorts of
horrors
for people of different characters. In Germany
you could die of cruelty, in Russia
you could die of despair. In Auschwitz you could die in a gas chamber,
in Kolyma you could freeze to death
in the snow. You could
die in a German forest or a Siberian wasteland, you could die in a
mining
accident or you could die in a cattle train. But in the end, the story
of your
life was your own.
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