Far Outliers

Our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Soviet Union and central Europe does not, of course, have the same profound implications for our way of life as it does for theirs. Our tolerance for the odd “Gulag denier” in our universities will not destroy the moral fabric of our society. The Cold War is over, after all, and there is no real intellectual or political force left in the communist parties of the West.

Nevertheless, if we do not start trying harder to remember, there will be consequences for us too. For one, our understanding of what is happening now in the former Soviet Union will go on being distorted by our misunderstanding of history. Again, if we really knew what Stalin did to the Chechens, and if we felt that it was a terrible crime against the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladimir Putin who would be unable to do the same things to them now, but we also would be unable to sit back and watch with any equanimity. Nor did the Soviet Union’s collapse inspire the same mobilization of Western forces as the end of the Second World War. When Nazi Germany finally fell, the rest of the West created both NATO and the European Community–in part to prevent Germany from ever breaking away from civilized “normality” again. By contrast, it was not until September 11, 2001, that the nations of the West seriously began rethinking their post-Cold War security policies, and then there were other motivations stronger than the need to bring Russia back into the civilization of the West.

But in the end, the foreign-policy consequences are not the most important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time.” The American writer Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as “forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion.”

Already, we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of “the West” together for so long: we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical, and cultural origins, everyone arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been–and will be–repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into “enemies,” our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our reinvention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written “so that it will not happen again,” as the cliché 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. Destruction of the “objective enemy,” as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why–and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, apart of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 575-577

Release [from the Gulag], whether it came in 1926 or 1956, had always left prisoners with mixed feelings. Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, a prisoner released in the 1930s, was surprised by his own reaction:

I imagined that I would be dancing instead of walking, that when I finally got my freedom I’d be drunk with it. But when I was actually released, I felt none of this. I walked through the gates and past the last guard, experiencing no happiness or sense of uplift … There, along the sun-drenched platform ran two young girls in light dresses, merrily laughing about something. I looked at them in astonishment. How could they laugh? How could all these people walk around conversing and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening in the world, as if nothing nightmarish and unforgettable stood in their midst …

After Stalin’s death [in 1953] and Khrushchev’s speech [in 1956], the releases came more rapidly, and reactions became even more confused. Prisoners who had expected to spend another decade behind barbed wire were let go on a day’s notice. One group of exiles was summoned during working hours to the offices of their mine, and simply told to go home. As one remembered, Spetskomandant Lieutenant Isaev “opened a safe, pulled out our documents, and distributed them …” Prisoners who had filed petition after petition, demanding a re-examination of their cases, suddenly found that further letters were unnecessary–they could simply walk away.

Prisoners who had thought of nothing else except freedom were strangely reluctant to experience it: “Although I could hardly believe it myself, I was weeping as I walked out to freedom … I felt as though I had torn my heart away from what was dearest and most precious to it, from my comrades in misfortune. The gates closed–and it was all finished.”

Many were simply not ready. Yuri Zorin, riding a crowded prisoners’ train south from Kotlas in 1954, made it past only two stations. “Why am I going to Moscow?” he asked himself–and then turned around and headed back to his old camp, where his ex-commander helped him get a job as a free worker. There he remained, for another sixteen years. Evgeniya Ginzburg knew a woman who actually did not want to leave her barracks: “The thing is that I–I can’t face living outside. I want to stay in camp,” she told her friends. Another wrote in his diary that “I really don’t want freedom. What is drawing me to freedom? It seems to me that out there … there are lies, hypocrisy, thoughtlessness. Out there, everything is fantastically unreal, and here, everything is real.” Many did not trust Khrushchev, expected the situation to worsen again, and took jobs as free workers in Vorkuta or Norilsk. They preferred not to experience the emotions and undergo the hassle of return, if they were ultimately to be re-arrested anyway.

But even those who wanted to return home often found it nearly impossible to do so. They had no money, and very little food. Camps released prisoners with the equivalent of 500 grams of bread for every day they were expected to be on the road–a starvation ration. Even that was insufficient, since they were often on the road much longer than expected, as it proved almost impossible to obtain tickets on the few planes and trains leading south. Arriving at the station in Krasnoyarsk, Ariadna Efron found “such a crowd, that to leave was impossible, simply impossible. People from all of the camps were there, from all of Norilsk.” She was finally given a ticket out of the blue by an “angel,” a woman who by chance had two. Otherwise, she might have waited for months.

Facing a similarly crowded train, Galina Usakova, like many others, solved the problem by riding home on a baggage rack. Still others did not make it at all: it was not uncommon for prisoners to die on the difficult journey home, or within weeks or months of arrival. Weakened by their years of hard labor, tired out by exhausting journeys, the emotions surrounding their return overwhelmed them, resulting in heart attacks and strokes. “How many people died from this freedom!” one prisoner marveled.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 511-512