The Reticulator

Yesterday I started reading the 1990 edition of Robert Conquest’s, “The Great Terror.” I had long known about Conquest’s work, but had never read any before.

In a way I’m glad I waited until after I watched a lot of Russian movies. Not that Russian movies give an accurate portrayal of life in the Soviet Union any more than American movies give an accurate portrayal of life in our country. But they give me a picture of how the authorities wanted the Revolution to be seen, and (more importantly) of what sort of portrayal the population needed to see in order to be part of it. And now more than ever before, I see all the players as real people.

One thing that’s surprising to me is how much dissent there was in high places in the Communist Party in the late 20s and early 30s. I had known about Mensheviks, and I had known about people like Trotsky, but not about this. Chapter 1, which follows a long chapter of Introduction, tells us, referring to one of the opposition groups that were led by people who had been Stalin’s followers:

They seem to have circulated a memoir criticizing the regime for economic adventurism, stifling the initiative of the workers, and bullying treatment of the people by the Party. Lominadze had referred to the “lordly feudal attitude to the needs of the peasants.”

There is a lot more like that.

In the Introduction there is a good section summarizing the crackdown on the people. It points out that the starvation of perhaps 10 million people, mostly in the Ukraine, was not an accidental byproduct of Moscow-centered economic policies, but a deliberate attempt to show the people who was boss.

There seems little doubt that the main issue was simply crushing the peasantry, and the Ukranians, at any cost. On ehigh official told a Ukrainian who later defected that the 1933 harvest “was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We have won the war.”

It was an important learning experience not only for the peasantry, but for the police and Party officials. It prepared them for what was to follow.

I was home sick today, and in the times when I wasn’t sleeping I finished Anne Applebaum’s book, “Gulag”. Back in 1979 or 1980 I read Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” while sick in bed, so it seemed appropriate to read this one when sick, too.

It was interesting that in her final paragraph, she wrote: “This book was not written ‘so that it will not happen again,’ as the
cliche would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and
will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people.”

Leading up to this statement is her account of how this whole episode in Russian history has gone down a memory hole in present-day Russia. In her travels in Russia she encountered some people who were glad she was helping to bring these episodes to memory, but she encountered a lot more who were antogonistic or indifferent. Applebaum discusses the following categories of reasons for the silence on the topic.

• Russians are too busy dealing with the present.
• They already discussed it all in the early 1990s.
• Discussion of the gulag is associated with the democratic reforms that went bad.
• There are so many tragedies, such as the war dead and famines. Why pick on this one?
• The fall of the old system is a blow to Russians’ personal pride in their country as a world power.
• They might not like what they find — relatives and friends who were collaborators and informers.
• Many of the former leaders of the old system are still in positions of influence and power. They have an interest in concealing the past.

Applebaum then goes on to discuss some of the bad effects of this silence and concealment on Russian society:

• “…if scoundrels of the old regime go unpunished, good will in no way have been seen to triumph over evil.” The sight of villains who got away with it leads to cynicism.
• The elite have not come to value the lives and rights of all of Russia’s citizens
• It has deprived Russians of heroes (compared to Germany, where those who participated in anti-Hitler plots are now heroes)
• It has lead to an insensitivity to continued censorship and intrusions into private life by the FSB.
• There has been no judicial or prison reform

After reading the book, I found the following web site that contains a number of Applebaum’s articles and columns:

www.anneapplebaum.com

I think I’ll be reading a lot of them for more insights.

I’m still reading Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag”. One thing I like about her writing is the way she tells about marks the gulags left on the landscape. (Historical “marks on the landscape” is what a lot of my Spokesrider blog is about, too.) I don’t know if Putin would allow her to see all those things anymore, but she was able to visit a number of the sites. She tells how one can still see depressions that are left from the semi-dugout zemlyanka structures where prisoners lived in temporary camps at the building sites of roads and railways in Siberia. And she remarks on how all that’s left of a number of the camps are the “punishment isolators,” one of which was being used by an Armenian car mechanic at the time of writing.

Of course, the marks they’ve left on people are the more important thing. What is it like living with those of the older generation who once were prison guards and administrators?

And of course, what about the prisoners?

I actually met one of them, back in 1965. I looked him up just yesterday, and saw from a Wikipedia article that he died just last November. This was John Noble, who had written a couple of books about his experiences. He was born in Detroit, and was living outside Dresden when the Soviet army came. He was a prisoner until sometime after Stalin’s death. I think his books are still in our house somewhere. I saved one of them when my daughter thought she would clean out some of our stuff a few years ago. They had made quite an impression on me at the time. One of them was titled, “I was a slave in Russia.” When Anne Applebaum wrote about the establishing of the prison camps at Vorkuta, I recognized that name as one where John Noble had been. Now, thanks to the maps in her book, I have a better idea where it is.

In 1965 I was at a summer camp for highschoolers that was put on by the Minnesota Farm Bureau. Our principal said the Farm Bureau wanted to pay for two students from our school to attend, and asked if I’d like to be one of them. The Farm Bureau was a conservative, Republican type of organization, and that’s the type of program that was put on. I do remember meeting some of my first proto-campus-radicals there, who would soon be heading off to college, too, and who weren’t buying what was said. I liked it pretty well, though. I had read John Noble’s books long before that, and was glad to get a chance to meet him. I was surprised that he was such a small man. Afterwards I asked him whatever happened to the radio show that he was going to be doing, and he gave some answer that didn’t explain much. As far as I know, the radio program never came off.

But even before I ever heard of John Noble, I had heard about the midnight knock on the door. I am told kids of my generation grew up fearing the nuclear bomb. I certainly heard about atomic weapons when I was in elementary school, and about what they could do, but what I really learned to fear was the midnight knock on the door. I’ve been fascinated by the prison camp genre ever since, but I guess not fascinated enough to have read Anne Applebaum’s book before now.

Much of what she writes about life in the prison camps is familiar to me, from my reading of Noble, Solzhenitsyn, and others, but there is much new information, too, to put their accounts in perspective. More on that some other time.