Document created: 3 September 03
Air University Review,
July-August 1975
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It is to be remembered, moreover, that almost all the present leaders held posts under Stalin.1 |
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Robert Conquest |
An overwhelmed bibliophile once lamented that the greatest bibliography in the world was that list of books he had meant to read but had never found time for. Unfortunately, many suggested lists of professional military reading fall into this category. To add another book of formidable proportions —over 600 pages of small print in the paperback edition—to the “must read” list is not the intent of this review.
But not all books need be read in their entirety for one to grasp the essential message. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago cries aloud for the world to know of the incredible consumption of human life by the Soviet regime, and he buries his readers in an avalanche of gruesome detail, as though to make effective refutation by the Soviet government impossible.*The impact of the book is implicit in the first three chapters; the remaining 500 pages comprehensively document the original themes and may be either sampled or read in entirety.
*Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Parts I and II, translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973-1974, $12.50, paperback $1.95), xii and 660 pages.
The title describes a chain of prisons, labor camps, and prison mines scattered across the breadth of the Soviet Union. The existence of that system of slave labor camps has never been a secret; the significance of Solzhenitsyn’s book lies in its revelation of the magnitude of the system and the wealth of detail supplied in documenting how these prison camps were supplied with human raw material. By a gradual distortion and perversion of Soviet law, government interrogators and magistrates arrogated whatever extrajudicial measures they needed for convictions. Accurate records were not kept, but there can be no doubt that millions of Soviet citizens were terrorized and driven into slave labor camps under living and working conditions that normally resulted in death before their sentences could be served.2 As a rabbit caught in this trap, Solzhenitsyn details every step of the process from personal experience, and he recalls the circumstances of hundreds of other zeks (prisoners) be met along the way.
Examples of injustice and atrocities can be found in the annals of most countries. But the appalling impression of The Gulag Archipelago derives from the universal nature of the regime’s inhumane treatment of its own people. Instances of terror and repression were not the isolated acts of a few misguided or sadistic minor officials. Solzhenitsyn makes it clear that the policy of terror was rooted in the deliberate policies of the founding father of the Soviet Union, Lenin, and was developed into a universal practice under Stalin. The lives snuffed out during the Stalin regime greatly exceed the combined deaths by government repression in all previous Russian history. Not since the armies of Genghis Khan built pyramids of human skulls has the world witnessed deliberate killing on such an awesome scale.
Even readers familiar with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, and other accounts of the Stalin purges may be unprepared to accept the extent of the human carnage. Certainly it is beyond the competence of Western reviewers who have sampled the literature or visited the country briefly to authenticate the terrible message of Solzhenitsyn’s book. In an effort to arrive at a judgment, I have questioned people of all ages who have lived a significant portion of their lives behind the Iron Curtain. These refugees from the system were unanimous in agreeing that this book does not distort the legal or prison system in the Soviet Union. Many of them had firsthand knowledge of incidents that would have fit nicely into the book.
In the chapter entitled “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System” Solzhenitsyn compares the apparatus of Soviet security organs to a sewage system that received waves of human waste. The categories of people considered dangerous to the state included intellectuals, workers malingering at their work, parasites, monks and nuns, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, independent peasants (Kulaks), students, capitalists, persons guilty of concealing their social origin, “wreckers” of industry, owners of gold, Esperantists, various ethnic groups, and finally anyone guilty of anti-Soviet agitation. The author recounts an incident in which a streetcar motorwoman of Krasnodar was returning on foot late at night from the car depot. On the outskirts of the city she stopped to help some people who were working to free a truck stuck in the mud. She could not avoid noticing that it was full of corpses—hands and legs protruded from beneath the canvas. The security agents in charge recorded her name, and the next day she was arrested. The interrogator asked her what she had seen, and she told him truthfully. Result: anti-Soviet agitation—ten years.
Returned war prisoners and citizens who had traveled abroad were considered especially “socially dangerous elements.” In contrast to the honor we accord our returned prisoners of war (POW’s) and their unrestrained joy in reunion with family and friends, the Soviets rewarded their returned veterans with prison sentences or executions. This policy applied not only to POW’s of the Finnish War and World War II but also to Soviet sailors who were interned in neutral countries. Solzhenitsyn reserved bitter condemnation for the British and American betrayal of 90,000 Cossacks who were tricked into surrendering to the Red Army. Although these Vlasovites had previously accepted German arms, it was becoming obvious that they constituted an independent force, and they were hopeful of winning status from the Western Allies by saving Prague from certain destruction by the Germans. (pp. 258-62) The gallant contribution of this independent group of Russians in preserving one of the great monuments of Slavic culture was rewarded by Western disavowal and certain death.
Soviet girls who went out with foreigners were sentenced under a specific article of Soviet law that designated them as “Socially Dangerous Elements.” (p. 86) In 1945 one of the leading Soviet actresses fell in love with an American Naval officer stationed in Moscow. After he was transferred, the actress gave birth to his child, who was taken from her when she was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years in a hard-labor camp in Central Asia. In a current sequel to this episode, the daughter born of this liaison became a beautiful movie star in her own right. After being reunited with her mother, she learned of her American patrimony and eventually confirmed through Western journalists that her father was still alive in Florida. Her efforts to obtain a travel visa to visit him were initially denied, and her photograph was deleted from its customary place at the official Soviet film export offices. (In similar fashion, her mother’s pictures had been removed in 1945 shortly before she was sent to prison camp.) Only the glare of international publicity ultimately forced Soviet authorities to grant a visa and perhaps prevented a modern re-enactment of her mother’s fate.3 As this is written, it is reported that father and daughter are together in Florida.
Solzhenitsyn devotes a chapter to the description of interrogation techniques that reverted to the tortures practiced in the dungeons of the Dark Ages. However, modern refinements were developed that left fewer external telltale marks. Sometimes a totally fearless man could be broken by the threat of locking his daughter in a cell with syphilitics.
While I was reading this book, the thought inevitably arose that no people, however downtrodden and terrorized, could possibly submit indefinitely to the horrors Solzhenitsyn describes. In attempting to explain this phenomenon, I consider much of the book is an apologia for the sheeplike submission of the Russian people. Most of the arrests occurred at night, when they would attract little attention. Generally the zeks were isolated in transit from the general population and dispatched to the most desolate areas of the country. But the controlling element was fear, which is underscored by the author in a grotesque incident:
A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter. . . . Then after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.
That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!” (pp. 69-70)
Although every page of this book rings with condemnation of the system, Solzhenitsyn confides how closely he came to becoming a part of it. As a member of the party youth organization, Komsomol, he was approached to join the NKVD. Only an intuitive, deep-seated dislike for all police service narrowly prevented him from joining. In retrospect, he confesses that he probably would have become a member of the state security system had the pressures on him been slightly greater.
Shortly after, Solzhenitsyn describes how he became an army officer and in the process assumed many of the same arrogant, unfeeling traits of the secret police. The training regimen of the Red Army at that time produced the classic “military mind.”
I experienced the happiness of simplification, of being a military man and not having to think things through; t& happiness of being immersed in the life everyone else lived, that was accepted in our military milieu; the happiness of forgetting some of the spiritual subtleties inculcated since childhood. (p. 162)
Solzhenitsyn confesses how easily, with his new-found authority, he was corrupted and how natural it seemed to brutalize men of inferior position. The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, and none of us is immune from crossing that line.
In later years, after both wielding power and having been victimized by it, he could philosophize that “power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal.” (p.147)
Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Soviet legal and penal system flows from his basic humanism and slavophilic longing for past values and is patently evident throughout the book. The critic who fulminated in Pravda that “the author of this work is literally choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up . . .” either had not read the book or was confident that his readers would not have access to it.4 Fortunately, we do have access to it, and judging by the torrent of abuse heaped on the book in the official press of the Soviet Union, it strikes a raw nerve there.
As pointed out by Robert Conquest, most of the present leadership of the Soviet Union survived and ultimately prospered in a system that destroyed any suspicion of domestic opposition. It would be naïve to suppose that these same people would be more benevolent to foreigners. Since the U.S. is pursuing a policy of detente, disarmament, and increased trade agreements with the Soviet Union, it would be reassuring to know that our policy-makers have some familiarity with this book.
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
Notes
1. “Evolution of an Exile,” Saturday Review/World, April 20, 1974, p. 30.
2. Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950), pp. 498-99. Churchill, among others, recounts how Stalin described the collectivization of Russian farms and the elimination of nearly ten million Kulaks. Loss of life was obviously of little concern to Stalin in his pursuit of Soviet goals.
3. For mote details of this poignant story, see Time, February 10, 1975, p. 36, or People, February 17, 1975, pp.12-13.
4. The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, vol. XXVI, no. 2, p. 2, quotes an article by I. Solovyev entitled “Path of Treason” in Pravda, January 14, 1974. Solovyev made no attempt to examine the book but used his forum to issue a lengthy and repetitious diatribe. Typical examples of his review included: “The loathsomeness and worthlessness of this figure is already quite apparent—in both amoral and political sense . . .” “The reactionary nature of Solzhenitsyn’s scribblings and his hostility toward the cause of peace, socialism, mutual understanding and friendship among peoples is arousing indignation of the public in the fraternal socialist countries, whose press is exposing the widespread speculation in the West around the name of this lampoonist.” Ad infinitum.
Colonel Glenn E. Wasson (M.A., Stanford University) is Inspector General, Air University, following a tour as Professor of Aerospace Studies, University of California at Berkeley. From 1958 to 1962 he was Course Chairman of Russian History, United States Air Force Academy. Colonel Wasson has published a number of monographs on early Russian aviation and reviews of literature concerning the Soviet period.
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