The first account of the concentration camps that I can remember
reading was an essay by Hannah Arendt in the July 1948 number of
Partisan Review when I was a sophomore in college. What I now
mainly recall about my first reading of this essay, “The
Concentration Camps,” is that I was greatly put off by it.
Expecting, somewhat fearfully, to be given a gruesome account of
life (and death) in the camps, what I encountered instead was a
succession of apodictic abstractions and pronouncements that
seemed, to my undergraduate mind, unduly eager to place the whole
subject beyond the reader’s ability to comprehend it. Innocent
as I then was about the details of the camps, this approach
nonetheless struck me as an odd way to deal with a human
catastrophe on an epic scale.
Rereading that essay today, more than half a century later, I can
easily see what had put me off. This is a representative
passage:
The horror of the concentration and extermination camps can never
be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it
stands outside of life and death. The inmates are more
effectively cut off from the world of the living than if they
were dead, because terror compels oblivion among those who know
or love them… . The fear of the absolute Evil which permits of
no escape knows that this is the end of dialectical evolutions
and developments. It knows that modern politics revolves around a
question which, strictly speaking, should never enter into
politics, the question of all or nothing: of all, that is, a
human society rich with infinite possibilities; or exactly
nothing, that is, the end of mankind.
Exactly what it could mean for any human experience to stand
“outside of life and death” was never explained. Nor was
Hannah
Arendt’s own response to early
accounts of the camps ever in
danger of
succumbing to “the end of dialectical
evolutions and
developments.” On the contrary, in her case it marked the
beginning of an
illustrious career as a connoisseur of
the
totalitarian “dialectical evolutions and developments” that led
to the camps.
Two other aspects of “The Concentration Camps” essay are also
worth noting. One is Arendt’s bizarre insistence on downgrading
the importance of eyewitness accounts of the camps.
If it is true
that the concentration camps
are the
most consequential institution of totalitarian rule, “dwelling on
horrors” would seem to be indispensable for the understanding of
totalitarianism. But recollection can no more do this than can
the uncommunicative eye-witness report. In both these genres
there is an inherent tendency to run away from the experience;
instinctively or rationally, both types of writer are so much
aware of the terrible abyss that separates the world of the
living from that of the living dead, that they cannot supply
anything more than a series of remembered occurrences that must
seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to their
audience.
There was ample reason to doubt that any of this was true even
before the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago
in the 1970s, but with respect to the Soviet camps, anyway, the
claim of an alleged “tendency to run away from the experience” is
scarcely credible in the light of the abundant first-hand
testimony to the contrary. The author of The Gulag Archipelago
was himself, after all, a zek, as inmates of the Soviet camps
were called, and he was also an assiduous compiler of other zeks’
personal accounts of their servitude and suffering.
What was true, however, was that the West wasn’t especially eager
to hear about the Soviet camps, and that for a long time the
Soviets were remarkably successful in preventing the circulation
of information about them. Even the word “Gulag” does not appear
to have made its entry into our English-language dictionaries
prior to the early 1970s, almost two decades after the death of
Stalin and half a century after
the creation of the Gulag itself.
It can no longer surprise us, then, to find that another curious
thing about Hannah Arendt’s 1948 “Concentration Camps” essay is
that it paid only the most cursory attention to the Soviet camps
even though they had been in existence far longer than their Nazi
counterparts—since, indeed, the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power
in 1917—and commanded vastly greater resources, populations,
and territories.
What has to be understood, of course, is that the horrors of the
Soviet system had never penetrated the public imagination in this
country on anything like the scale that made the Nazis a familiar
symbol of evil and criminality. Even as kids Americans of my
generation recognized the swastika as an emblem of the “bad
guys,” if only from the movies we saw and the comic books we
read. No Soviet symbol ever acquired a comparable status in the
public mind. Nor did Hollywood make any movies about heroic
anti-Soviet resistance movements. As Anne Applebaum writes in
the introduction to her magisterial study of the Soviet
camps—Gulag: A History,[1]
a book that is certain to remain the
definitive account of its subject for many years to come—
The Cold War produced James Bond and thrillers, and cartoon
Russians of the sort who appear in Rambo films, but nothing as
ambitious as Schindler’s List or Sophie’s Choice. Steven
Spielberg, probably Hollywood’s leading director (like it or
not) has chosen to make films about Japanese concentration camps
(Empire of the Sun) and Nazi concentration camps, but not about
Stalinist concentration camps. The latter haven’t caught
Hollywood’s imagination in the same way.
Besides, Russia (as most people still called the Soviet Union)
had been an ally in the war against Hitler, and was thus
identified in the public mind as somehow belonging to “our” side.
In the mainstream media and entertainment industries, the Soviet
Union remained exempt from critical scrutiny, and the Gulag did
not exist. Yet, as Ms. Applebaum also writes:
[N]ot all of our attitudes to the Soviet past are linked to
political ideology… . Many, in
fact, are rather a fading
by-product of our memories of the Second World War. We have, at
present, a firm conviction that the Second World War was a wholly
just war, and few want that conviction shaken. We remember
D-Day, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the
children welcoming American GIs with cheers on the streets. No
one wants to be told that there was another, darker side to the
Allied victory, or that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded
just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. To admit
that by sending thousands of Russians to their deaths by forcibly
repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions of
people to Soviet rule at Yalta, the Western Allies might have
helped others commit crimes against humanity would undermine the
moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one wants to think
that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No
one wants to remember how well that mass murderer got on with
Western statesmen. “I have a real liking for Stalin,” the British
Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told a friend, “he has never
broken his word.” There are many, many photographs of Stalin,
Churchill, and Roosevelt all together, all smiling.
This is why The Gulag Archipelago and Solzhenitsyn himself met
with such resistance and hostility in this country after his
expulsion from the Soviet Union. “Soviet propaganda was not
without its effect,” writes Ms. Applebaum. “Soviet attempts to
cast doubt upon Solzhenitsyn’s writing, for example, to paint him
as a madman or an anti-Semite or a drunk, had some impact.” Let
us never forget the infamous passage in George Steiner’s New
Yorker review of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974: “To infer that
the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal
simplification but a moral indecency.” Nor was Steiner alone in
his hostile response to Solzhenitsyn’s revelations. The late
Irving Howe, who had found so much to admire in Leon Trotsky,
took to the pages of The New Republic to offer Solzhenitsyn
moral instruction on the correct way to think about socialism.
Has anything really changed in our public comprehension—or
incomprehension—of the Gulag since the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the final dismantling of the Soviet camps? We shall all
be in a better position to answer this question when we see what
kind of critical reception is accorded to Ms. Applebaum’s
extraordinary account of the Soviet camps. Or, what is even more
important, what impact that reception may have beyond the sphere
of the book-review pages of our newspapers and magazines—in
the realm of media opinion and public awareness. For make no
mistake: Gulag: A History is a landmark achievement in the
writing of modern history. Until some work of a comparable size
is devoted to the millions who have perished under Communist rule
in China, this book will remain a model for what is, in effect, a
new historical genre: the history, that is, of what may rightly
be called an anti-civilization on a colossal scale whose sole
claim to distinction has been the degradation and destruction of
millions of innocents. In the anti-civilization of the Soviet
Gulag in the years 1929 to the death of Stalin in 1953, it
encompasses some eighteen million people, four and a half million
of whom never returned.
Gulag: A History is not, then, to be mistaken for a
comprehensive history of the Soviet Union; it is rather a history
of Soviet society’s most distinctive institution, described by
Ms. Applebaum as
the vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across
the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of
the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic
Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to
Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad
suburbs.
Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe
Uppravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time,
the word “Gulag” has also come to signify not only the
administration of the concentration camps but also the system of
Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor
camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women’s
camps, children’s camps, transit camps. Even more broadly,
“Gulag” has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself,
the set of procedures that prisoners once called the
“meat-grinder”: the arrests, the interrogations, the transport
in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of
families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary
deaths.
It is Ms. Applebaum’s distinctive accomplishment to have traced
the tortuous history of this anti-civilization in scrupulously
documented detail from its Bolshevik beginnings to the Great
Terror, the Second World War, the early years of the Cold War,
the death of Stalin, the Thaw that followed, the era of the
Soviet dissidents, and the final collapse of the Soviet regime.
And while Gulag: A History is written throughout in a prose
that is exemplary for its clarity, its gravity, and its moral
candor, it must also be acknowledged that the book is a long and
difficult read—difficult, above all, because of the feeling of
outrage and despair it induces in the reader. I could not myself
get through the chapter devoted to “Women and Children” without
pausing to wipe the tears from my eyes more than once. And that
is by no means the only section of the book to induce such a
response.
For Ms. Applebaum lavishes a great deal of attention on what may
be called the social and domestic history of the Gulag—the
food that was provided the inmates, the bedding, the hygiene (if
it could still be called by that name), the sexual customs and
even the romantic attachments that developed in the camps. Worst
of all, perhaps, are the accounts of the inhuman work schedules
demanded by what she nicely describes as the Camp-Industrial
Complex in the Soviet workers’ paradise. It is an immense
achievement to have written this book. What now remains to be
seen is whether our own society, which for so many decades has
refused to acknowledge the moral enormity of the Gulag, is even
now equal to the challenge of giving this achievement its due.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum; Doubleday, 677 pages, $35.
Go back to the text.
