Humongous coffee table (the size of a small table) book I perused at one of the branches of the Jefferson Co. Public Library system. My respect for librarians suffered a jolt, Sunday, when two librarians at the Denver Public Library, who I asked to look up the shelf location since all the PC's were in use by patrons, hadn't heard of Solzhenitsyn or The Gulag Archipelago.
And JD, "Primitive socialist accumulation, " as Preobrazhensky called it. Of coarse, the Gulag internees worked. Building the pyramids was easier.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/01/21/110.html Friday, January 21, 2005. Page 104.
Prosecuting the Gulag By Peter Rollberg
Firefly Books
Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990 By Tomasz Kizny Firefly Books 496 Pages. $69.95
Yale University Press
The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror By Oleg V. Khlevniuk Yale University Press 418 Pages. $39.95
There was a time in the West when it took courage to mention the gulag in some liberal circles. Intellectuals and politicians who brought up the system of concentration camps that stretched from corner to corner of the Soviet Union could easily be labeled "anti-communists," "anti-Soviets" or simply "cold warriors." Turning a blind eye to the millions of victims of communism is among the Western left's gravest original sins, and one it still has to acknowledge in full.
Two remarkable new books on the gulag, Tomasz Kizny's "Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps 1917-1990" and Oleg V. Khlevniuk's "The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror," make some headway toward explaining how passing politics prevented the gulag from achieving the notoriety of the Nazi concentration camps or Cambodia's killing fields. Yet these days, it seems, the greatest obstacle to deeper comprehension of the gulag is not leftist dogma but trivial, common cynicism. Thanks to the sensationalist marketing of historical horrors, the transition from denial or half-denial to voyeuristic curiosity and, finally, to sarcastic tedium happened very fast in the public perception.
While their approaches are starkly different, both Khlevniuk and Kizny have made it their goal to slow down and reverse the world's growing indifference to communist violence. Khlevniuk, senior researcher at the Russian State Archive, provides a tightly knit record of confidential memos, official resolutions, individual testimonies and tabulated statistics. His is an academic narrative, while Kizny's approach is primarily artistic, defined by its hundreds of large-format, black-and-white landscapes. A Polish photographer and journalist, Kizny combines archival portraits of inmates and guards with contemporary images of the camps as they look today and accounts by survivors of their experiences.
Far from being a coffee-table book on concentration camps, Kizny's hefty volume meticulously chronicles the histories of the major gulag centers, where innocent people were forced to blast out absurd canals and sweat over railroads leading nowhere. The grainy Martian landscapes punctuated by dot-sized humans in endless ant lines are often overpowering and leave little room for hope.
But whatever faith the landscape images manage to destroy, the close-ups of survivors' faces rebuild in an instant. Purged of worldly self-importance, those portraits radiate an indestructible, quiet dignity. If Khlevniuk's main purpose is to reveal, step by step, the expansion and inner logic of the concentration camp network from inception to maximum efficiency, Kizny's book makes a somber voyage from the earliest labor camps at Solovki to northeastern Kolyma and arctic Vorkuta, ending allegorically with Stalin's last railroad project in the Western Siberian lowlands that inmates aptly dubbed the Road of Death.
While neither book addresses the question directly, both provide reliable indicators as to how so many guards, officials and intermediaries -- many well-educated, some imbued with artistic refinement -- could conscientiously serve the gulag machine. In the beginning, some administrators seem to have believed that the camps were part of a gigantic educational project designed to positively modify human nature. Khlevniuk quotes from a 1931 Pravda article in which novelist Maxim Gorky defends the penal system against Western "petty, foul slander," claiming that "the Soviet regime does not employ convict labor even in prisons, where illiterate criminals have to study and where peasants enjoy the right to leave their villages and families during the agricultural season." Kizny likewise shows celebrity writers Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy and Demian Bedny coyly smiling into the camera during visits to the camps, apparently unaware that they were legitimizing gruesome crimes against humanity that would forever taint their artistic reputations.
Another, more basic, incentive to keep the gulag's gears turning were the material rewards that top bureaucrats reaped. Gulag administrators had streets named after them, and in some cases even lived in villas on those streets. Astonishingly, Kizny reports, the Far Eastern hub of Magadan boasts a Berzin Street to this day, named for the superefficient Dalstroi taskmaster Eduard Berzin who was eventually repressed by the system he had helped create.
There is a chilling irony in how profoundly the leading camp administrators misunderstood the nature of the institution they were serving. Their grotesque blindness often led to swift poetic justice when the system turned its claws on them. (Khlevniuk's book contains dozens of perpetrators' minibiographies; hardly any of the subjects died of natural causes.) In his foreword to the Kizny volume, human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov bemoans the fact that there was no Nuremberg trial for those guilty of gulag-related crimes. But that is precisely the point: The gulag had already killed tens of thousands of its own most ardent killers. Again and again, yesterday's judges were declared today's criminals, so that Soviet society never had to own up to its millions of state-backed murders.
The question as to whether the so-called Soviet mentality was shaped by the concentration camps is briefly raised by Khlevniuk, though not explored. But Khlevniuk's documents and Kizny's photographs capture the fear that pervaded all levels of society, from peasants to nomenklatura hacks, soldiers to military commanders, miners to doctors. Everybody had cause to be afraid, and the gulag turned that fear into fuel for its prison enterprise.
Itar-Tass
The Perm-36 camp, which held political prisoners during Stalin's time, has since been turned into a Gulag museum.
Still, fear alone was not sufficient for the gulag to function. More imperative was the redefinition of normalcy that occurred. To inform on one's neighbor became normal, while refusing to do so was declared deviant; to torture a suspect was recast as normal, while the assumption of innocence was considered quaint. This reversal of behavioral norms propelled the careers of some of the meanest, most unprincipled people within the gulag and Soviet society at large. However, others may have survived precisely because they did not succumb to the new morality.
Kovalyov blames a pre-existing "slave mentality" for the gulag's emergence. Yet such a generalization leaves no room for the countless individual acts of courage and resistance that fill the pages of Khlevniuk's and Kizny's books. These accounts confirm that the decision to participate with tyranny lies with the individual alone. To blame "the Russians," "the system" or "the mentality" is not only unjust but a simplification unsupported by the facts.
Robert Conquest, one of the few Western intellectuals who withstood cynicism and political pressure to pioneer the study of the gulag, states in his introduction to Khlevniuk's book that "the Soviet regime represented a huge decline in civilization in Russia." The historical and human narratives presented by Khlevniuk and Kizny render this conclusion indisputable. It is a powerful argument against those who are again making excuses for the crimes of communism, citing Russia's need to regain the superpower status that it once achieved thanks to Stalin's efforts.
Peter Rollberg teaches Slavic and film studies at George Washington University in Washington. -- Michael Pugliese