book report: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

In those moments of our pride when we think that we, humans, are good at our core, we are fortunate to have historians who will gladly and easily show us otherwise. If the Bible isn't enough for skeptics then histories such as this by Anne Applebaum easily suffice in the confirmation of the complete depravity of our souls. I encountered her book as I perused the library's shelves for Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. His history wasn't there but her's was and I wasn't disappointed. Gulag: A History won her the 2004 Pulitzer prize for non-fiction.

The Gulag provided the communists labor that a Communist economy can afford, slave labor. The horrific irony is that even at starvation rations and abundant exploitable resources the high cost of enforcement, guards, negated any economic contribution. Unfortunately, Stalin only knew how to throw good money after bad. The corrupted reasoning assumed more prisoner workers would eventually bring a return on the investment. This partly explained the arbitrary arrests and quickie trials which condemned so many to a grave in the tundra, the taiga or the desert steppes. The fate of those who survived might be even worse as most sold their souls as informers or prostitutes for more bread or less work or a warm bed. Those who died in the crowded cattle cars that spent days en route to the far away camps may have fared the best.

The novelist Vasily Aksyonov - Evgeniya Ginzburg's son - penned a tragic but horribly plausible scene in his trilogy, The Generations of Winter, describing what happened when a man and his wife encounter one another after both have spent years in concentration [Soviet -ju] camps. He immediately notices that she looks too healthy: "First tell me how you managed not to become ugly... you haven't lost weight!" he says, knowing to well all of the ways in which it was possible for women to survive in the Gulag. That night, they lie in bed far apart, unable to speak: "Melancholy and grief had burned them to the ground." p. 518

The Gulag also had a step-sister in punishment, exile.

In fact, Stalin's aim, at least in deporting the Caucasians and the Tartars, was probably not revenge for cllaboration. He seems, rather, to have used the war [WW2-ju] as an excuse to carry out long-planned ethnic-cleansing operations...
There were, by the war's end, 1.2 milliong deported Soiet Germans, 90,000 Kalmys, 70,000 Karachai, 390,000 Chechens, 90,000 Ingush, 40,000 Balkars, and 180,000 Crimean Tartars as well as 9,000 Finns and others...
Many have also described hos the Chechens were taken off the Studebakers, and placed into sealed trains: they were not only deprived of water, like "ordinary" prisoners, but also of food. Up to 78,000 Chechens may have died on the transport trains alone.
Upon their arrival in their designated place of exile - Kazakhstan, central Asia, northern Russia - those deportees who had not been arrested separately and sent to the Gulag were placed in special billages, just like those that the Poles and the Balts had settled, and were told that an escape attempt would bring a twenty-year camp sentence. Their experiences were similar too. Disoriented, removed from their tribal and village societies, many failed to adjust. Usually despised by the local population, frequently unemployed, they rapidly grew weak and sick. Perhaps the shock of the new climate was greater: "When we arrived in Kazakhstan," one Chechen deportee remembered, "the ground was frozen hard, and we though we would all die." By 1949, hundreds of thousands of the Caucasians, and between a third and a half of the Crimean Tartars were dead...
Perhaps "genocide" is not the proper term for these deportations, since there were no mass executions. In later years, Stalin would also seek collaborators and allies among these "enemy" gropus, so his hatred was not purely racial. "Cultural genocide," however, is not inappropriate. After they ad gone, the names of all of the deported peoples were eliminated from official documents - even from the Great Soviet Encyclopdia. The authorities wiped their homelands off the map...
In the end, these nations did "reappear" after the death of Stalin, albeit slowly. Although the Chechens were allowed to return home in 1957, the Tartars could not so so until the Gorbachex era. They received their Crimean "citizenship" - their legal right to residence - only in 1994.
The operation rid the USSR of what he thought of as "enemy" social structures: bourgeois, religious, and national institutions that might resist him; educated people who might oppose him. At the same time, it also preserved more "units of labor" for future use. (pp. 428, 429, 430)

Prisoners in the camps found solace and protection in sub-communities. There were political, criminal, ethnic, military, and religious groups. Some religious women absolutely refused to work for the "Soviet Satan." They were eventually marched to their firing squad (p. 244).

The late 1950s also saw the arrests of the first groups of Soviet Baptists, who would quickly become the largest single dissident group behind barbed wire, as well s members of other religous sects. In 1960, the dissident Avraham Shifrin even encountered a group of Old Believers, followers of the older rites of the Orthodox Church, in a punishment cell in the political cap at Potma. Their community had emigrated to the virgin foress of the northern Urals in 1919, and had lived there in complete secrecy, until a KGB helicopter discovered them fifty years later. When Shifrin met them, they had become permanent residents of the camp punishment cells, having refused categorically to work for the Soviet anti-Christ. (p.529)

As always, I look for myself in these novels. I know that our blessed freedom in this Republic will not last forever. We live in a country that now practices torture and listens in on private conversations without warrant. Little by little we become like those who hate us. Perhpas some day I will end up in a camp. Will I retain my piety? Will my faith come after my self-preservation? God help me. I want to be someone who would starve to death before compromising in a punishment cell eating punishment rations arm in arm with fellow believers. I have written book reports before on life in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novella and Herman's personal account. I come away from this book as from these others, traumatized. I think it was traumatic of Ms. Applebaum to confront the horrors over and over again as she conducted many interviews and read many secret memoirs. I agree with her that looking away only brings the next atrocity closer.

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 won human nature. This book was not written "so that it will not happen again," as the cliche 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, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

I think a Bible student would know this without histories, but books like this confirm what the Bible keeps saying, we are sinners in need of a Savior.