One hundred years of evil

By Leona Toker
Paradoxes of public opinion: People worry about the victims of the tsunami but forget about the victims in Darfur. The O.J. Simpson trial competed for ratings with the Rwandan genocide. The Holocaust is commemorated with due solemnity (important to all sides in this period of new anti-Semitism), but talk of "those gulags" is considered boring. Indeed, in the introduction to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Gulag: A History," Anne Applebaum registers her amazement on seeing how Western tourists purchase Soviet-era souvenirs in liberated Prague. The same tourists would never dream of parading Nazi symbols as keepsakes. In his book "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million," English novelist Martin Amis attempts to reach an imaginative understanding of Stalin's era and of the accommodating attitudes of leftist intellectuals in England toward Soviet totalitarianism (the intellectual left in the United States, France and Israel has also had cause for remorse on this matter) - as well as of the reasons why the study of Soviet history often evokes a bitter laugh.
It is pointless to debate whether it was the Nazi totalitarian regime or the Soviet one that caused more human suffering; one infinity is no greater than another. The comparison, however, is legitimate when one of the two systems can shed light on the other. Amis' bitter laughter while studying Soviet history is associated with the contrast between utopian hopes and the means of achieving them; between humanistic slogans and reality; between the idealist intentions of the Russian revolutionaries and the cynicism with which they forced their social experiment on hundreds of millions of people who may have had their own recipes for happiness. These contradictions were clearly reflected in the empire of concentration/forced labor camps, which was part of the Soviet Union throughout its history and which, in the wake of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," has come to be widely known as the gulag.
Concentration camps were neither a Russian invention nor a German one. They were first established in 1896 by Spaniards in Cuba, to keep the peasants from supporting local rebels. At that time, the camps supposedly served as a "humane" substitute for massacre. The word "concentration" in the name of this institution is short for "reconcentration" - the transfer of population centers in order to separate civilians from guerrilla combatants. Nevertheless, the age-old drive for genocide found expression here too: It manifested itself in the failure to create the infrastructure necessary for the transfer, in the non-provision (whether deliberate or negligent) of food and medicine, and in the day-to-day cruelty of the perpetrators. The routines of local civilization were shattered, the needs of the community were not addressed, and thousands of women, children and elderly people were left to die of malnutrition and disease without staining the soldiers' hands with their blood.
The same method was used by the British in their war on the Boers in South Africa, with similar results. It should be noted, however, that quite a few Englishmen - and Englishwomen - struggled against this policy and went to great lengths to help the prisoners. There is no knowledge of similar activity among the German citizenry when its army hunted the Herero tribe in Africa in 1904, exterminating most of its people and incarcerating the rest in concentration camps (the first genocide of the 20th century). The German colonial powers then contributed to the history of the concentration camp by introducing the idea of forced labor; medical experiments were also conducted there by (literally) the teachers of Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz "Angel of Death" 40 years later.
A cheap alternative
The history of the concentration camps is surveyed in Joel Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot's "Le siecle des camps: Detention, concentration, extermination; Cent ans de mal radical," on which Applebaum relies. She also draws on numerous studies about the concentration camps established in Russia in 1918 at Trotsky and Lenin's initiatives. The camps were then viewed as a temporary measure. The creation of a just socialist regime was supposed to eliminate the conditions that led to crime, and with them the need for penitentiaries. This belief, another cause for bitter laughter, impeded the building of new prisons; instead, "enemies of the people" and suspects arrested in great numbers were placed in temporary facilities. This solution ("humane" in comparison to swift executions, also fashionable at the time) was relatively cheap, a fact that caused it, paradoxically, to spread and endure, continuing to exist even today in countries such as North Korea and China.
The camps served several purposes. The goal of the political police was to have suspected opponents of the regime isolated or vindictively punished, whereas the people's commissariat of justice sought to reeducate prisoners through labor. All the parties involved wanted the camps to be run as economically self-supporting enterprises, getting maximum yield at a minimal investment. During years when food was scarce throughout Russia, this minimum became a death sentence.
The number of prisoners grew steadily, reaching millions by the late 1930s. They were put to work creating infrastructure in areas where survival was difficult, building roads, factories and entire cities, cutting timber in the forests of the north, working in mines, in agriculture and in industry. Marxist political economy recognizes that slave labor is ineffective due to the lack of incentive - but Stalin's henchmen created an incentive: they tied the size of the prisoners' food rations to their labor output. Those who met the "quotas" got more to eat, those who did not, got less. The system was gradually refined, so that eventually the ration scale came to include 17 different norms of nutrition - without, of course, taking into account the systematic theft of food supplies on the way to the mess.
Thus prisoners whose bodies faltered received less food and grew even weaker. They eventually died of hunger- related illnesses, in anguish and humiliation. But even the maximal rations fell short of the calories expended in intense labor; the sturdiest of inmates, therefore, would also slip into exhaustion and occasionally lose their self-discipline and sanity. Conditions improved when increased industrial performance was needed; however, when waves of arrests caused the labor force to swell, matters tended to go in the other direction. At certain periods (especially in 1938) numerous labor camps actually became extermination camps, killing not with gas but with cold, hunger, disease, abuse by criminal inmates and even executions, carried out after a brief, pseudo-legal procedure.
But since death in the gulag was not immediate, a society with its own internal rules developed in the camps. Opportunities arose for individuals to avoid the slippery slope. Using survivor testimony, scholarly research and archival material, Applebaum constructs a comprehensive picture of life in the camps and traces the history of the gulag until its dismantling in the late 1980s. She surveys fluctuations in the social and ethnic composition of the prisoner population and shows how the fate that different groups could expect at different times was influenced by such events as the war with Germany and repeated waves of terror. She also describes the kinds of "lottery tickets" that individual men, women and children could draw at different stages in their suffering, and the dangers and moral dilemmas with which they had to grapple.
The camps' cultural legacy
No aspect of the gulag experience is left out of the book. Using documented examples, the author tells of family bonds trampled, of infants and children abandoned to a dismal fate when their mothers were arrested, of torture. She describes the deadly negligence of the authorities within the facilities and in the transports, rape and sexual exploitation, abysmal sanitary conditions, the menace posed by criminal inmates, hunger, unending workdays, the lack of warm clothing, sadistic forms of solitary confinement, disease, horrors encountered while fleeing the camps, and the different ways of dying.
Nor does the book neglect to survey the factors that aided survival: culture and education sections that operated within the camps, hospitals and their devoted (if under-equipped) staff, the rare and precious opportunities to practice one's profession, or separate cases of good fortune. Applebaum also describes the practically mandatory ways of deceiving the camp authorities but avoids noting that dishonesty in the workplace - crucial for survival in the gulag - lingers up to our own day as part of the cultural legacy of the camps.
Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982; author of "Kolyma Tales") once said that the subject of the gulag was vast enough for 10 writers like Tolstoy and 100 writers like Solzhenitsyn. It is also vast enough for thousands of historians. The uniqueness of Applebaum's book lies in its combination of a comprehensive vision, accessible prose and a sufficiently penetrating understanding of the material. Among historians there are Holocaust deniers, and there is also a school that denies the dimensions of the Stalinist terror. The main argument of the latter concerns the numbers of people incarcerated in the gulags. After perestroika, historians first gained access to the archives of the gulag administration, and efficiently discovered documents quoting smaller numbers (for example, 2.5 million prisoners in the peak years, in contrast to the estimate of 7 million made by Robert Conquest, the classical historian of Stalinist Russia. Conquest's estimate is conservative in comparison with the insistence of many of the survivors that peak years saw about 10 million prisoners in Soviet camps).
Anne Applebaum sidesteps this trap (although she cautiously leans toward the conservative statistics). Having spoken with survivors and read prisoner testimonies, she is well aware that numbers can be doctored, accounts falsified, and that statistics may fail to reflect a great many realities. She also knows how to read the reports of gulag inspectors, which strike her as surprisingly honest, about the conditions in the camps. As one survivor, author Lev Razgon, explains in his memoirs, only an initiated reader can understand the true meaning of a "shortage of drying facilities" noted in a report - i.e., that the following morning people would go to work wearing clothes that had not dried during the night and freeze to death in them.
Applebaum's contribution to the study of the history of the gulag also involves her use of new archival research (conducted by herself and others) to authenticate stories previously regarded as folklore - for example, the case of the 6,114 peasants who were brought to an uninhabited island on the Ob River and left there without food or supplies. Some 4,000 of them died within four months; the survivors were sent to prison on charges of cannibalism.
It is regrettable that after all the dedicated research that went into the project, the book was not edited with similar care. There are many small errors - misprinted words, distortions of Russian terms and names, even minor factual mistakes. The same errors were reproduced in the Hebrew translation. An editor of Russian origin would have caught most of them. Such inaccuracies are typical of the haste with which books on "ratings-worthy" subjects are published. Applebaum's book does not fall under this category, although it, too, may eventually become dated: Understanding the gulag is an ongoing process, and because some archival material has yet to become accessible, new facts and discoveries are bound to surface. Judging by the current situation, however, the need and the possibility for a next update will not arise very soon.
Why the silence?
Toward the end of the book the author proposes answers to several important questions: How is it that the gulag's end in the late 1980s - just like its emergence - attracted virtually no public attention? Why is the commemoration of the victims so subdued, why is it not massively endorsed by the state? Why are various circles in Russia reluctant to see the gulag's memory perpetuated? Who is interested in having it silenced again? And why is it of practical importance for the world's free nations to understand the gulag phenomenon down to its details? Applebaum claims she wrote the book not to help prevent the recurrence of the concentration camps, but out of a sad certainty that such camps will indeed recur in any place where those who are different are treated only as means to an end. Or, one might add, only as obstacles.
Nor should it be forgotten that forced labor camps still exist in the world's last remaining communist countries. When my nice new electric kettle, made in China, burns down unprovoked, or a button falls off a shirt that only yesterday I succumbed to the temptation of buying, I wonder whether this is not a signal from a concentration camp. Chinese camps sometimes hide behind the facades of factories. The impossibility of determining which industrial facility really is an innocent factory was explained in 1992, in the present tense, by survivor Harry Hongda Wu. Applebaum devotes only one sentence, and not an entirely accurate one, to the Chinese camps.
In 1930, gulag prisoners managed to signal to timber-processing workers in England and the U.S. that the wood imported from Russia was the product of forced labor. The attempt, however, was futile: The ban on Russian timber only caused prisoners to be reassigned; instead of felling trees, they were sent to dig the canal between the Baltic Sea and the White Sea, with death toll estimates ranging from 50,000 to 200,000. By contrast, what can improve the fates of political prisoners is, one must agree with Applebaum, international political pressure. It is to be hoped that the policy makers and public opinion might be willing to exert it.
Despite the great many striking quotations from personal stories that Applebaum enlists to demonstrate her claims, readers seeking an in-depth understanding of the gulag phenomenon will need to look beyond this historical- journalistic study. In order to come closer to life in the camps, to understand its rhythms, to conjure it up in our imagination, and to let it place ourselves and our ordinary lives into perspective, we must read at least some of the survivor stories themselves. A book by Julius Margolin, an Israeli intellectual born in Pinsk, about his years in the gulag is still awaiting a translator, as are other fascinating biographies; many are available in English but few in Hebrew. The gulag is one of the subjects that must be incorporated into the formal-education curricula of the 21st century. Applebaum's book can provide a good comprehensive background for studying and teaching the gulag, in conjunction with those survivor narratives that attempt - with some measure of success - to convey the flavor of individual camp ordeals.

Prof. Leona Toker of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the author of "Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors," published in 2000.
Haaretz