Book: Gulag
Author: Anne Applebaum
Price: Allen Lane, ?25
Almost the first thing that Lenin did after seizing power in October 1917 was to set up the Cheka, the secret police department which under various names-the last was the KGB-was the instrument of repression, incarceration and murder of millions of Soviet citizens. The system continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. But it ceased to operate at full blast after the death of Stalin. Beria, Stalin's own chief of police, concluded that the gulag was not only unjust, but also incapable of achieving the economic objectives which, by then, were ostensibly its main justification. He dismantled its worst features straight after Stalin's death, and within a few months the first prisoners were groping their way back towards freedom.
More than 30 years later, Gorbachev allowed Soviet citizens to learn the truth. Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" was finally published in Russia. So was Vasily Grossman's epic novel "Life and Fate", which drew a direct parallel between the Soviet camps and those of the Nazis. Memoirs of former prisoners-long known in the west but suppressed inside the Soviet Union itself-began to pour off the presses in the late 1980s and 1990s. Serious historians began to work on the archives and count the dead. The Memorial Society was set up to discover and commemorate the fates of individual victims. Something like a national debate began on the history and causes of the repressions, and on what should be done to compensate the innocent and punish the guilty.
After the KGB had discredited itself during the 1991 coup, Gorbachev appointed Vadim Bakatin to turn it into a modern intelligence agency under the rule of law. Bakatin concentrated on rooting out what he called the "Chekist philosophy"-the old belief that the secret police were the ultimate protectors of the state, in whose name all actions were permissible. That belief was not confined to secret policemen. Many Russians feared that their sprawling and undisciplined country would fly apart if it were not subjected to the strictest discipline. They often accepted the myth, fed by numerous films and novels, that the Chekists were the tireless, omniscient guardians of the national destiny.
To write about the gulag in Solzhenitsyn's shadow requires courage. But Anne Applebaum has written a very good book indeed. She has drawn on the mass of eyewitness accounts, toiled in the archives, spoken to the people and travelled to see the sites of the camps. She describes the origins, workings and final demise of the camp system. She has done her best to establish the number of victims. With all possible caution, she suggests about 29m people were subjected to forced labour in the Soviet Union. Nearly 3m died in the camps and in enforced exile, which was often little better. The number of those who were executed, as opposed to dying of disease or overwork, may amount to nearly 800,000.
Applebaum judges this dreadful history with restrained indignation, but also with compassion and understanding, because she believes that any society can commit appalling crimes. The bloody record of the 20th century is reason enough to think that what has happened before could happen again. But each crime is unique, and depends on particular circumstances. The Nazi and the Soviet camps were equally evil. But there were important differences, which made it easier for generations of fellow-travellers to turn a blind eye to what the Soviets did. The Nazi camps were carefully designed for forced labour and to carry out a policy of genocide. They were managed with efficiency, and they achieved their ends. The Soviet camps were designed for a variety of often incoherent purposes: to terrify the regime's opponents, to "re-educate" them, to settle the frozen wastes of the north. They were not extermination camps, although the Cheka and its successors often carried out executions. They were managed with spectacular incompetence. The bureaucrats in Moscow fixed targets for arrests and executions. They imposed production norms which were impossible to fulfil. They provided neither enough machinery, nor food, nor medicine. Commandants and guards, often oafish and corrupt, knew that they could themselves become inmates overnight if they failed to meet the plan. They reacted with sometimes desperate brutality. In these and other ways the camps were a microcosm of the Soviet Union itself.
The last camp was closed in 1992, but the story is not over. The Memorial Society still carries out its patient research. Books on the gulag continue to be published. The victims continue to be "rehabilitated"-formally freed of any implication of wrongdoing. But the debate about justice for the victims and punishment for the guilty has died away. Applebaum appreciates the difficulties. Most ordinary Russians, almost overwhelmed by the problems of adapting to what passes for capitalism, are too busy coping with the present to worry about the past. Formal trials would have seemed biased. There were alternatives-an official enquiry or a South African-style "truth and reconciliation" commission. In 1999, the Russian government chose instead to reinforce the image of the glamorous Chekist when Vladimir Putin, himself a former senior KGB official, unveiled a commemorative plaque in the Lubyanka.
It is hard to imagine a middle-aged German politician putting up a plaque to commemorate the founding of the SS. But one should not exaggerate. The glamorisation of the secret police does not presage a return to the past: Russia has almost certainly already changed too far. But the country and its politics would be much healthier if the Russians, like the Germans, could come to terms with their past, and if their present rulers could explicitly repudiate the streak of brutality that has disfigured so much of their history.
