A rchive Date
[ 01-06-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Russia ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/worthington.html
Inside the Soviet Gulag - the whole story
By PETER WORTHINGTON -- Toronto Sun
June 1, 2003
Ever since I was sent to Moscow in the mid-1960s to open The Toronto Telegram's bureau there, it's always puzzled me why the Nazi death and prison camp system was so much better known than the Soviet Gulag.
I wondered at the time if it was because the Nazis had been defeated and their obscenities exposed, while the Soviet Union was still riding high, with western sensibilities reluctant to delve into the cesspool of its prison system.
Even after the Soviet Union imploded, there was still a paucity of books, or documentaries about the Gulag compared to the Holocaust. Hollywood ignored the Gulag.
Apart from selective memoirs - Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and his seminal Gulag Achipelago, along with Robert Conquest's The Great Terror and Evgenia Ginsberg's Into the Whirlwind - there's not been the coverage the Gulag warrants.
Until now, that is.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist and on the editorial board of The Washington Post, and is a specialist on East Europe. Her new book, Gulag; a History is the first about the Soviet prison system based on Soviet archival material which, curiously, is as detailed as the records Germans kept about those incarcerated and exterminated.
While archival records and memoirs of survivors dovetail, a reason why Gulag accounts aren't better known in the West is because most people just aren't interested. I mentioned to Applebaum the disparity between Holocaust and Gulag books, and she noted there were thousands of personal memoirs about the Gulag, but mostly inside Russia and nowhere else.
Estimates of those killed by Sovietism from the days of Vladimir Lenin to the swan song of Mikhail Gorbachev, run to 50 million. Applebaum's research indicates that some 18.5 million went through the Gulag system, with maybe 2.5 million dying - of starvation, beatings, negligence, exposure.
I'm surprised the figure is so low. But Applebaum doesn't include Stalin's man-made famine to bring Ukraine to heel that cost some seven million lives.
Nor does she include those simply executed during interrogations, or summarily shot. Or those exiled.
The essential difference between Hitler's camps and Stalin's is that Hitler went in for death camps whose only purpose was to kill those deemed unfit to live: Jews, gypsies, Slavs and so-called Untermenschen.
The Soviets specialized in slave labour. The Gulag consisted of some 476 camp complexes - thousands of individual camps comprised of anywhere from a few hundred inmates to many thousands.
Political prisoners, criminals, so-called enemies of the state, dissenters, were expected to work until they died. It was an appalling and foolish policy, as we now know, because slave labour is an inefficient way to get the maximum out of workers.
What isn't widely realized, and which Applebaum emphasizes, is that the Gulag system of forced labour didn't begin and end with Stalin. It began when Lenin's Bolsheviks staged their coup against a democratically elected government in 1917, and continued until near the very end of Sovietism.
There were periodic amnesties, with prisoners released, and there was capricious implementation of the slave labour policy. Some camps were less brutal than others, but all were brutal - as was life in Russia.
There was also a refinement of the old czarist policy of internal exile - sending undesirables to the far east, including troublesome nationalities like the Chechen, Ingush, Kalmyks and Crimean Tartars. It should be remembered that Russia spans 12 time zones.
Another reason why stories of the Gulag aren't popular in the West may be that we don't want to be reminded that in the war against Hitler, we were helped by one mass murderer to defeat another.
The qualitative difference between Hitler and Stalin is academic - except that Stalin was more lethal against his own people than Hitler.
What Applebaum does superbly is put the Gulag into context with the rest of Soviet life. In fact, life in the Gulag was a small prison system, inside the bigger prison of the USSR that was marginally more humane.
Like Holocaust survivors, Gulag survivors often recognize one another today by the look in their eye. The experience left a lasting, indelible mark on the soul.
In her introduction - a must-read, especially for those who'll plunge no further into the book - Applebaum notes: "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." Again, the Soviets had no equivalent to the Nazi death camps - an academic distinction, because the Soviet system killed casually and indiscriminately, oblivious of law: "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."
No matter what you think you already know of the Gulag and Soviet communism, this book will tell you more. It is an important book for any who dare to know.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com Read the transcript from our recent chat with Peter Worthington
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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