With Her People

Rebecca Schull: On Naked Soil - Imagining Anna Akhmatova

National Review Online, May 23, 2008

When, in 2005, Vladimir Putin labeled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century,” he was only confirming the fact that Russia’s understanding of its Communist past is once more in flux. History is again being rewritten, distorted, and manipulated — this time in the interest of creating a national narrative in which all Russians can, supposedly, take pride. The crimes of the fallen dictatorship are being shrouded in comforting patriotic myth, or, increasingly, just denied.

In the West, by contrast, there are signs that Joseph Stalin, the most monstrous of all the Soviet despots, may finally be penetrating public consciousness as an embodiment of an evil that has rarely, if ever, been equaled. Within this context, it’s interesting to note that New Yorkers could have seen not one, but two, evocations of Stalinism on stage this April. The remarkable Rupert Goold/Patrick Stewart Macbeth-as-Stalin attracted more attention, and deservedly so. Nevertheless it would be wrong to overlook a quietly effective production at the Theater for the New City where the focus rested mainly on just one of the “wonderful Georgian’s” victims. On Naked Soil: Imagining Anna Akhmatova is a new play by Rebecca Schull (yes, Fay from Wings,but also the author of an earlier drama about the Gulag memoirist Eugenia Ginzburg) revolving around Anna Akhmatova, the poetess who was among the most eloquent of all the witnesses to the atrocities of the regime that tormented, stifled, but never quite destroyed her:

In the fearful years of the . . . terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody “identified” me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.

And describe it she did, in lines of hideous beauty and terrible sadness:

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us,

and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tires of Black Marias.

On Naked Soil shuttles back and forth between two eras, the late 1930s and the early 1960s, but it is the former, deep in those “fearful years,” that define it. The play opened with Akhmatova (Ms. Schull) alone in her room in Leningrad. The décor hinted at what had been lost: the once elegant furniture had known better days, a nude by Modigliani still teased, but behind broken glass. An ancient wind-up gramophone conjured up memories of St. Petersburg’s long-silenced bohemia. What we saw was a wreck of a room, a wreck of a life, a wreck of a nation. That Ms. Schull is some three decades older than the Akhmatova of 1938 didn’t really matter: It only emphasized the exhaustion of a woman old before her time and the immense distance between the weary, crumbling figure on stage and the siren she once was.

In 1914, Akhmatova had been a leading figure in the chaotic, fabulous, and wildly innovative avant-garde that was the perverse and paradoxical glory of late imperial Russia. Tall and striking, with a love life to match, she was a scandal, a sensation, and a star. Then war came, and revolution. Her verse darkened, and so did her life. Somehow she hung on through the early years of Soviet rule, almost, but not quite, a “former person,” reduced to near-poverty, writing, writing, writing, brilliant, unacceptable, her poems sometimes too dangerous to be committed to paper for long, dependent for their survival on the memories of a few devoted friends.

And in the room of the banished poet

Fear and the Muse take turns at watch,

And the night comes

When there will be no sunrise.

In one of the play’s most compelling scenes, the audience watched what could never be witnessed, the spectacle of Akhmatova repeating an old anecdote (for the benefit of hidden microphones) to her friend, the loyal Lydia Chukovskaya (Sue Cremin), while Chukovskaya frantically memorized lines of poetry written on a manuscript that would soon have to be burned.

For the most part, Schull’s portrayal (as playwright and actress) of Akhmatova is, understandably enough, admiring. While her Akhmatova is no saint (Schull successfully conveyed a sense of the neediness, neurosis, and self-absorption that were essential aspects of Akhmatova’s personality), it’s difficult not to suspect that she chose to smooth over some of her heroine’s rougher edges. Thus the play has relatively little space for the most enduring of Akhmatova’s affairs, the decade and a half she spent with the art critic Nikolai Punin.

That’s a mistake. A clear grasp of the trajectory of this painful, complicated, and essentially polygamous liaison is crucial to understanding how Akhmatova actually spent most of the 1920s and 1930s, but is likely to have eluded any playgoers not already familiar with the story. The pair finally split up in 1938, not long probably, before the opening scenes of On Naked Soil, although, as too often in this play, the chronology is frustratingly vague. Punin was arrested, for the third time, in 1949. He died in the camps four years later. His Gulag mugshot was just one of many images projected onto the set to flesh out the play’s dialogue, but it’s one that lingers in memory, a lined, sunken face, furious, finished.

No less discreetly, the full nature of Akhmatova’s difficult relationship with her son, Lev, is largely glossed over in favor of the more conventional saga of a determined, grieving mother doing what she could to help her imperiled offspring. In 1938, he had just been re-arrested. It was for Lev that Akhmatova had been standing in those prison queues for those 17 appalling months, desperate for a word, a glimpse, a chance to deliver a parcel of supplies, anything:

Son in irons and husband clay.

Pray. Pray.

But the horror was undoubtedly made worse for Akhmatova by guilt. She knew that Lev had neither forgiven her for sending him away to live with his grandmother for most of his boyhood, nor for what the circumstances of her private life had done to him. This element in his agony, and hers, is underplayed in On Naked Soil. As a result, Lev is reduced to little more than a proxy, an Ivan Denisovitch rather than a character in his own right, an irony that the real-life Lev would have recognized but would have been unlikely to appreciate. That said, his ordeal, even if reduced to something more generic than it deserves, is one of the worst of the nightmares that force their way so savagely into this play and its faded, solitary room. This was underpinned by the way the set design incorporated elements of a prison wall. It was there for use in just one scene but its presence onstage throughout the whole performance served as a pointed illustration of the fact that in the Soviet Union it wasn’t necessary to be in jail to be imprisoned.

After Stalin died, the jailers eased up a touch. Akhmatova was even allowed to travel abroad. Those parts of On Naked Soil set in 1965, about a year before Akhmatova’s death, show her in conversation with Nadezhda Mandelstam (Lenore Loveman), the widow of her old friend, Osip, another poet who perished at the hands of the regime. As in the sections set in 1938, Schull uses the dialogue between two women to recount Akhmatova’s story. These passages, like most of this play, come freighted with memory, and have a certain wistful resonance, but they lacked the intensity of the scenes from 1938. In those, Akhmatova’s interlocutor, Lydia Chukovskaya, a gifted writer who became the poetess’s Boswell, was nervous, tense, and visibly aware that she was herself in danger. Her own husband had been arrested earlier that year and, unknown to her, had already been shot.

Reviewing the play in theNew York Times, Caryn James worried that it became “a virtual recitation of events in [Ahkmatova’s] life, and extraordinary though those events were, simply recalling them isn’t enough to make a drama.” There’s something to that, but not much. The simple retelling of events like these ought to be enough to hold the attention of any audience. Besides, there was very little that was simple about this retelling, not least the fact that many of the words used were Akhmatova’s own, either delivered (often beautifully, if with few traces of Akhmatova’s distinctive incantatory style) as poetry, or embedded into the dialogue, jewels waiting to catch the light.

Buttressed by strong performances from its three actresses, On Naked Soil worked well enough as drama, but it has to be seen for what it is, a chamber piece, not an epic — a reflection, the tiniest piece of a hecatomb. If the play was occasionally overly didactic (with its slide projections and moments of densely packed biographical detail, it had a hint of the college lecture about it), that’s a trivial offense: this is a tale that needs to be kept alive as a memorial — and a warning. Quite what Akhmatova herself would have made of this play, however, I don’t know. One of the subtleties of Schull’s script is the way it makes clear that Akhmatova wanted to be remembered for her lines, not for a life she never truly considered to be her own:

I, like a river,

Have been turned aside by this harsh age.

I am a substitute. My life has flowed Into another channel

And I do not recognize my shores.

She began, and probably would have preferred to remain, as a poetess of the personal, if one captivated also by legend, landscape, and the past. But history had other plans. Akhmatova never fled the country that had abandoned her. Instead she took it upon herself to become a symbol, an inspiration, and a reproach, a reminder of the Russia that might have been, a chronicler of the Russia that was:

I was with my people in those hours,

There where, unhappily, my people were.

There’s a sense of nationhood in those words that Vladimir Putin could never reproduce or, for that matter, even understand.

Children of the Revolution

Catriona Kelly: Children's World

National Review, March 5, 2008

It is fair to assume that any volume with space for a discussion of the "crisis" in mid-20th-century Soviet children's theater is aimed at a specialist audience. That said, if the subject of "Children's World" (Yale University Press, 736 pages, $45), Oxford professor Catriona Kelly's immense, imaginative, and thoroughly researched new book — a history of child-rearing in Russia between the twilight of the tsars and the fall of Gorbachev — is somewhat academic, her prose style is not.

She writes clearly, keeps her use of pedagogic jargon to a minimum, and even leaves room for occasional flashes of dry, donnish humor. Describing the shabbily manufactured playthings of the inter-war years, she recounts how "smudgy and ungainly wooden figures passed for dolls, shaggy and savage-looking hairy lumps for toy animals." Meanwhile, locating a kindergarten on the top floor of an elevator-less Moscow building was evidence of the way that "the eccentricities of centralized planning made themselves felt."

High Table witticisms aside, this book's real value for the lay reader comes from the unusual perspective it offers on the wider Soviet experience, a perspective sharpened by its author's eye for the telling detail. Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, educationalist, scold, and harridan, was, Ms. Kelly records, opposed to birthday parties (they served no educational purpose and, horrors, emphasized a child's individuality). Opposed to birthday parties! That tells you almost everything you need to know about the elaborate fanaticism of the dreary Mrs. Lenin. It also says quite a bit about the cause she served: The Bolshevik revolution was designed not only to remake Russia, but to transform human nature itself.

Not all aspects of the approach taken by the fledgling Soviet bureaucracy to the treatment, education, and upbringing of children were, as Ms. Kelly shows, negative. That's not to claim (and she wouldn't) that the early period of communist rule was a time of educational liberalism — at least in any meaningful sense. Youngsters may have been given more opportunity to express themselves than in either the typical tsarist or Stalinist school, but only within strict ideological limits. What's more, many of the reforms of that era, and even some of the freedoms, must primarily be understood as devices to promote the state's assault on the family, an institution the Bolsheviks regarded with deep suspicion. Under the circumstances, it's easy to imagine that the return to social conservatism (and, with it, more regimented schools and a more conventionally organized curriculum) that accompanied Stalin's rise to supreme power in the 1930s was welcomed by many parents: One of this book's rare weaknesses is that we are never really told if that was indeed the case.

The inspiration for the change in direction under Stalin was, of course, neither philanthropic nor democratic. It merely reflected his willingness to use the appeal of both restored order and, for that matter, revived Russian nationalism (something that would have been taboo in Lenin's Kremlin) to shore up support for his dictatorship. In schools, as elsewhere, the revolution's egalitarianism — or, more accurately, collectivism — was overlaid with the cult of state and leader. The collective had been transformed into a congregation. Egalitarianism evolved into patriotic obligation as much as moral duty. The primary function of the educational system became the production of docile, loyal and subservient citizens. In some of the most interesting passages in her book, Ms. Kelly explains how this effort was orchestrated — and, often, how subtly. Its traces could be detected even in the way that children were portrayed in fiction, reportage, and textbooks. They were demoted from being the spunky, assertive heroes of revolutionary lore into altogether more passive creatures, forerunners of the dutiful and deferential Homo Sovieticus they were being molded to become.

Now, it could be argued, quite reasonably, that most schools in most countries try to churn out good citizens, however they define the term. Furthermore (as Ms. Kelly also acknowledges) what may seem like extreme regimentation to us would have appeared far less startling to the Western observer of, say, half a century ago — an epoch when schools on either side of the former Iron Curtain would have generally been much more disciplined than they are today.

Nevertheless, this book leaves no doubt that Soviet regimentation was indeed extreme. While Professor Kelly doesn't dwell on the cruelties of communist despotism, she never succumbs to the usual bien-pensant temptation of trying to find a supposed moral equivalence between East and West. This is demonstrated most strikingly, perhaps, by her decision to include (among a consistently well-chosen range of illustrations) a page of mug shots taken from the archives of a secret police home for "Family Members of Traitors to the Motherland." These particular family members cannot have been more than 9 or 10 years old. Their faces stare out, bewildered, haunted, trying to please, victims of a tyranny that could not, would not, forgive their genes.

In the end, ironically, the successes of Soviet education — standards rose, facilities were upgraded, some degree of independent thinking came to be acceptable — helped foment the widespread disillusion that contributed so much to the regime's eventual implosion. "In a pattern that comes up again and again in Soviet history," Ms. Kelly writes, "rising standards brought rising expectations." She might have noted the additional irony that those rising standards also taught the Soviet population that its expectations would never be met by the system in which they had been trained for so long, so hard, and so cynically to believe.

The rest is history.

The Lives of Others

Orlando Figes: The Whisperers

Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

It has been the worse part of a century since the bloody birth and savage adolescence of the Soviet state, but the events of those years are still obscure — lost in time, muddled by propaganda, and treated, even now, as the stuff of spin. Those terrible decades remain camouflaged, murky and mysterious, glimpsed mainly in shadow or in tantalizing, elusive outline. They have been best illuminated not in nonfiction accounts, but in novels, short stories, and verse — by Solzhenitsyn’s zek grateful for his day “without a dark cloud,” by the deadpan of Shalamov’s spare, unsparing Kolyma Tales, by Ahkmatova’s torn, desperate, eloquent laments:

This was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

And like a useless appendage,

Leningrad Swung from its prisons.

And when, senseless from torment,

Regiments of convicts marched,

And the short songs of farewell

Were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us

And innocent Russia writhed Under bloody boots

And under the tires of the Black Marias.

That’s not, of course, to deny that there have been some excellent histories of that era. One of the most notable in recent times was Orlando Figes’sPeople’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Professor Figes, a British historian, is now extending that saga deeper into the nightmare that enveloped the Soviet Union with The Whisperers, a massive, sprawling, and unsettling book billed as a description of “private life in Stalin’s Russia.” In researching it, Figes has made extensive, and extraordinary, use of freshly opened family archives and a large number of personal interviews. As well he might. To understand the founding period of the USSR is tricky enough. To uncover the private lives, and thoughts, of those who lived through it, inhabitants of a society where reticence, conformity, and role-playing could be, even at home, matters of life and death is doubly difficult. Then there is, as Figes writes, this:

People with traumatic memories tend to block out parts of their own past. Their memory becomes fragmentary, organized by a series of disjointed episodes (such as the arrest of a parent or the moment of eviction from their home) rather than by a linear chronology. When they try to reconstruct the story of their life, particularly when their powers of recall are weakened by old age, such people tend to make up for the gaps in their own memory by drawing on what they have read, or what they have heard from others with experiences similar to theirs.

To accept this logic is to accept that seminal accounts of this period, such as The Gulag Archipelago or Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, have evolved from, respectively, works of collective history and individual recollection into the imagined, or partly imagined, autobiographies of countless victims of the terror. Figes himself claims that “many Gulag survivors insist that they witnessed scenes described in . . . Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn, or Shalamov, that they recognize the guards or NKVD interrogators mentioned in these works . . . when documentation clearly shows that this could not be so.” Figes never specifies what he means by “many” (the numbers involved are probably, I suspect, less than that adjective implies), but there can be little doubt that the phenomenon is real. Complicating matters further, memories have been distorted not only by trauma and time, but also by wishful thinking:

People who returned from the labor camps . . . found consolation in the . . . idea that, as Gulag laborers, they too had made a contribution to the Soviet economy. Many of these people later looked back with enormous pride at the factories, dams, and cities they had built. This pride stemmed in part from their continued belief in the Soviet system and its ideology, despite the injustices they had been dealt, and in part, perhaps, from their need to find a larger meaning for their suffering.

Additionally, as Figes reminds us, it’s a viewpoint that finds an echo and reinforcement in the widely held opinion that victory in the “Great Patriotic War” can be seen as some sort of justification for the horrors of Stalinist rule.

These ideas are bizarre, but for large numbers of Russians they beat the alternative: facing up to just how much was lost, thrown away, or destroyed in pursuit of a delusion and in the name of a tyrant. This recourse to the comfort of denial and the ease of evasion is of more than academic interest. It helps explain the Putin government’s approach to the Communist past. A definitive reckoning with history, that long-overdue Soviet Nuremberg, is too daunting to contemplate, too potentially demoralizing for the nation as a whole, too incriminating for a still-compromised Kremlin establishment. Speaking last year in support of a new manual designed to help the teaching of Russian history in the country’s schools, Vladimir Putin conceded that aspects of the former dictatorship were “problematic.” Nevertheless, he went on to say that Russia could not allow “other states” to “impose a sense of guilt” upon it. The words he used reveal both unease about the past and, implicitly, a desire to reshape it.

If Figes’s analysis casts doubt on the reliability of some accounts of the Stalin years, those he has unearthed for the purposes of this book add fascinating detail to what we know, or think we know, of that epoch. Nevertheless, to view The Whisperers as a comprehensive survey of “private life in Stalin’s Russia” would be a mistake. For example, there is not a great deal about how it was to experience, and, where possible, endure, the camps and prisons that have come to symbolize the Stalinist order, an aspect of “private life” that Figes appears to believe lies mainly outside the scope of his chosen topic; I’m not so sure.

Meanwhile, at the other end of official approval there is, with one critical exception (the writer Konstantin Simonov, a man who was both too tough and too weak to avoid aligning himself with the system), less than might be expected about those who actively supported the regime or who, in one way or another, flourished under it. As for those “ordinary” Russians who managed, so far as they could, to keep out of the way of history, they feature relatively rarely. Readers looking for more on their lives would do better to turn to the evidence collected in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism, and Stalinism as a Way of Life, edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov.

What Figes offers is something less all-embracing. It is, primarily, a look at lives spent on the edge, neither at the heart of darkness nor untouched by it. The stories he recounts could not, by definition, fail to be interesting, but however skillfully he tries to weave them together (and Figes is a highly accomplished storyteller), the final picture is not as coherent as it might be. It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that on this occasion this talented author’s reach was greater than his grasp.

As a result, the principal value to be derived from The Whisperers is almost incidental to what is supposed to be its main theme. In particular, the book’s earlier sections are a remarkable evocation of the sheer scale of the Bolshevik project. This was, in reality, nothing less than an attempt to remake man according to the dictates of what was, for all practical purposes, a millennial cult run by a lethal combination of fanatics, sadists, and opportunists. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this task, and, with the resources of the state behind it, nothing was. In such a climate, the family, the most redoubtable bastion against totalitarianism, was bound to be a key target of the regime. And, as the narratives selected by Figes underline, that is what it became. The conflict, persecution, and occasional moments of stubborn resistance that ensued make up the grim, gripping, and horrific drama around which this book revolves.

But if the Bolsheviks proved effective at sweeping away much of what had preceded them, the ramshackle utopia with which they replaced it was a broken-backed wreck. Another striking aspect of the oral histories contained in this book is how often they share a subtext of astonishing material deprivation and hardship. If the Soviet Union was, as its supporters abroad liked to claim, a “new civilization,” it was one with large elements of the pre-modern about it.

And the physical squalor was, as Figes repeatedly demonstrates, matched by the moral; this, indeed, inspired the book’s title. The Stalin years, he writes, left the Russian language with “two words for a whisperer — one for somebody who whispers out of fear for being overheard . . . another for the person who informs or whispers behind people’s backs to the authorities.”

Mr. Putin, I think, would approve.

The Godfather, Part I: Stalin as a Boy

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Young Stalin

The New York Sun, October 24, 2007

Young Stalin

When Josef Stalin finally succumbed to the stroke he so richly deserved, a distraught Pablo Neruda mourned the death of this "giant. ... the noon, the maturity of man and the peoples." Such attitudes are, mercifully, now rare. Once known genially as "Uncle Joe," Stalin is now regularly reviled as a monster and a despot to be ranked with history's worst.

Despite this, it continues to be the case that, in the popular imagination, the name Stalin fails to deliver anything like the sense of horror conjured up by Hitler. The reasons include the persistence of leftist ideology, the fact of cultural distance, and the recollection of wartime alliance. There's something else, however, that should not be overlooked: Stalin the man is barely known, and what is thought to be known is that he was something of a plodder, a bureaucrat, the embodiment of Soviet drab: in other words, a bore. That's not a quality humanity expects from its enduring villains: Just ask Shakespeare, just ask Milton.

In our memory, Hitler is not only the incarnation of evil but also its most vivid caricature. By contrast, in public Stalin was managerial rather than charismatic, cleverly distanced from the cult of personality that enveloped him. He went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that little of substance was disclosed about his private life. His biography was transformed into pious myth, systematically drained of real interest. Those few people who knew the truth, or part of the truth, managed to survive only if they kept it to themselves.

While this culture of secrecy began to change during the Khrushchev era, the twists, turns and imperatives of Kremlin politics conspired to keep the real Stalin hidden from the historical record. After 1991 this was no longer so, but while the details of Stalin's crimes are now widely available, the individual who inspired them has remained a strangely elusive figure, still scarcely more than the "gray blur" of ancient Menshevik libel. If any historian can bring an end to this relative indifference it is Simon Sebag Montefiore. His bestselling "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" (2003) was a masterful, magnificently readable, and immaculately researched account of the Soviet leader's long rule. As a portrait of ascendant malignance, it has rarely been equaled.

Mr. Sebag Montefiore's new book adds more depth to this picture. "Young Stalin" (Knopf, 460 pages, $30) is a kind of prequel to the earlier volume. It tells the story of the dictator's earlier years, from Georgian boyhood to his (often underrated) role as one of the key organizers of the Bolsheviks' Petrograd coup. Even told badly, this would be fascinating, but the ever-fluent Mr. Sebag Montefiore recounts it with brio, insight, and quite remarkable amounts of additional, never-before published information: I read it in one sitting. In some ways "Young Stalin" comes across as a picaresque, if grim, adventure, a bawdy chronicle of seminary school rebellion, banditry, bank robbery, revolutionary intrigue, jail, piracy, extortion, love, murder, romance, exile, scandal, and, even, hunting trips with the tribesmen of the remote arctic taiga. It doesn't hurt either that Mr. Sebag Montefiore's considerable literary gifts allow him to bring life back to the lost, exotic realm within which his saga unfolds, the brutal mass of contradictions that made up the Romanovs' ramshackle, doomed empire.

The fact that, for most of his youth, Stalin was a fairly marginal figure enables Mr. Sebag Montefiore to focus even more closely on the character of his subject. Young Stalin comes across, like so many psychopaths, as charming, manipulative, and highly intelligent. Musically gifted, an accomplished poet, and a relentless autodidact, he was no less of an intellectual than the revolutionaries he so liked to disdain. But, crucially, he was also what he was proud to call a praktik, a tough guy capable of doing the "black work" of revolution. Stalin was only in his early 20s when he moved to the oil port of Batumi. 'Within three months, the Rothschilds' refinery had mysteriously caught fire ... the town was flooded with Marxist pamphlets; informers were being murdered ... factory managers shot.'

There was, of course, far, far worse to come. For reasons we can only guess at, Stalin not only excelled at black work; he relished it. Part of the blame for this must lie with a dirt-poor childhood spent in a town notorious for its hard-edged and thuggish ethos, a childhood scarred also by violence that extended into the home itself: His father was an abusive drunk. Nobody could be trusted, not even family. Throw in Stalin's psychopathy, his egomania, his seminary-sharpened ability to detect heretics, and his experience of the way the tsarist secret police managed to suborn so many supposedly loyal comrades and we can detect the outlines of the nightmare to come. Vladimir Lenin certainly could, and he was thrilled. "That chef," he commented, "will cook up some spicy dishes." So he did. And with them he poisoned a culture, a nation, and a world.

Hearts of Darkness

Robert Gellately: Lenin, Stalin and Hitler : The Age of Social Catastrophe

The New York Sun, September, 19, 2007

In the course of humanity's long, violent history, there was one brief, happy interlude, a decade or so on either side of 1900, when those fortunate enough to live in the more advanced parts of the planet were able to persuade themselves that barbarism had been banished from their culture, never to return. To those luckiest of men, the last true optimists, the barriers — psychological, political, and technological — that separated them from the savagery of the past were as reassuringly robust as the stout, solid bourgeois architecture then transforming their cities.

This self-satisfaction we now know was pure hubris, a lethal, beautiful, boastful illusion. Confronted in 1914 with the reality of industrialized warfare, that illusion died. As the war progressed, if one can use that word, the social and political restraints keeping man's atavistic ferocity at bay began to fray all across Europe, and nowhere more dangerously than in the Russian Empire. By 1917, this most backward, and therefore most fragile, of the continent's great powers was a society on the precipice. It only took the slightest of shoves, in the form of the Bolsheviks' opportunistic and initially bloodless coup, to topple it over into the abyss. The consequences were worldwide, appalling, and destructive on a scale that had never before been seen.

When in the subtitle of his new book, "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler" (Knopf, 698 pages, $35), Professor Robert Gellately refers to an age of "social catastrophe," it is no exaggeration. But his use of that phrase also makes a more subtle point. The devastation of the era he describes (roughly 1914–45) went far beyond the physical, far beyond rubble, ruin, and mass graves. The very notion of society itself was torn apart. As for man's idea of himself, it had been changed forever, and not, in any sense, for the better. Man could now be certain that the barbarian within him would always be there, however advanced the civilization — tempting, terrifying and, given an opening, unstoppable.

While Mr. Gellately explicitly narrows the focus of his book to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, its title still promises more than he manages to deliver. Rather than devoting himself to the wider implications of what he is discussing, Professor Gellately offers a conventional history within a largely conventional framework. For those in need of a serious, scholarly introduction to the subject, it's an excellent overview of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, but despite its great length — with footnotes the book runs to nearly 700 pages — an overview is all that it is. There's not a lot that's new about either the information or the arguments it contains.

Mr. Gellately worries that one aspect of his book may "disturb" some readers — the suggestion that Lenin was a monster to be ranked alongside Stalin and Hitler. As he himself might acknowledge, however, this insight is not particularly original: Historians Dmitri Volkogonov and Richard Pipes (to name but two he cites) have already covered much of this ground, and done so highly effectively. Nevertheless, despite their efforts and those of quite a few others, the real nature of Lenin's ideology remains poorly understood. In repeating the message that the story of Bolshevism is not one of good intentions gone awry, but of an evil that worked all too well, Professor Gellately is performing a very useful public service.

That the Bolsheviks were able to do what they did owed a great deal to the collapse not only of the old order, but of order itself. The rise of the Nazis was made possible by almost exactly the opposite, the desperation of a nation willing to try something, anything, to hang on to what it could of its former way of life. If that meant throwing democracy — and with it, the Jews — to the wolves, too bad.

Hitler's mandate was no blank check, however. As Professor Gellately explains in some of the most intriguing sections of his book, the prewar Third Reich was, in marked contrast with its Soviet rival, a "dictatorship by consent." Compared with what was going on in the USSR at the same time, the use of coercion was limited, largely predictable, and rarely truly murderous. The awful exception, of course, was the ever more hideous persecution of the Jews, but prior to 1939, even that was incremental, a slow-motion pogrom both camouflaged and reinforced by the language of bureaucracy and the law.

That Hitler found it necessary to proceed in this way was a paradox of his earliest years in power. The restoration of social calm was key to his popularity but difficult to reconcile with his long-term agenda of military adventure, unending conquest and relentless genocide. With the invasion of Poland, that paradox became an irrelevance, but neither the frenzy of war nor the intoxication of a victorious blitzkrieg, can fully explain the speed with which so many of the Wehrmacht's "ordinary men" either descended into barbarism or demonstrated their willingness to act as its accomplices. In some cases, it was merely a matter of days. That they did so was a sign that pointed the way to Auschwitz. It also suggested that, even before the tanks had begun to roll, the German people had already moved far, far down that most terrible of roads.

Disappointingly, Professor Gellately never fully succeeds in explaining what it took to make this possible. He takes refuge instead in the observation that, by the time World War II had concluded, it had "raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization." That is right, so far as it goes, but it's too simplistic. The more troubling questions posed by that war are not limited to any one civilization: They concern the essential nature of mankind itself. And there's no comfort to be found in the answer, none at all.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Frederick Taylor: The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Berlin, August 1978, © Andrew Stuttaford

To cross over into East Berlin in the 1970s, as I did on a couple of occasions, was to take a trip that, even then, seemed like a voyage back into a lost, almost unimaginable era. The rampaging ideologies, cruel and convinced, that had done so much to wreck Europe were in retreat across the western part of the continent, their fervor dimmed by exhaustion, bitter experience, sweet, if uneven, prosperity, and, credit where credit's due, careful American supervision. In East Berlin, by contrast, it was still 1945 or, if you prefer that date of a future that already appeared to have passed the West by, 1984.

There were occasional ruins and countless bullet holes, relics of Hitler's Götterdämmerung; there were the apartment blocks that proclaimed a utopia with no room for humanity, and then there was that sense, deadening, clammy, gray, of an oppression that Winston Smith would have understood all too well. Not just a sense, a reality: the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, was more than 100,000 strong, with at least another 200,000 informers, all for a population of just 17 million.

And then there was that wall, a symbol of horror, tyranny, and finally, deliriously, liberation. In his highly readable new book, "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89" (HarperCollins, 512 pages, $27.95), Frederick Taylor attempts to combine the tale of the Berlin Wall with a more general history of the German Democratic Republic, an approach that is understandable, yet sometimes a little frustrating: Mr. Taylor's account is very far from being a comprehensive study of what was one of the last century's most peculiar, disturbing, and interesting states.

Nevertheless, there's an undeniable logic to looking at the "other Germany" from the perspective of a wall that was both an admission of its failure and the key to its survival. While Mr. Taylor has no sympathy for the communist regime, the picture he paints is more complex than the usual Cold War cartoon. The wall was, he shows, the desperate response of the dictatorship to the prospect that its state would collapse from within, emptied out by the lure of West Germany's remarkable economic recovery. For many East Germans freedom and an increasingly higher standard of living were there for the taking. All it required was a train ticket to East Berlin, and a little luck.

For all of Berlin, East and West, was supposedly still under the shared control of World War II's "big four." As a result, the border within the city continued to be porous in ways inconceivable elsewhere on the intra-German frontier. In the first 12 years of its existence, the GDR lost around a sixth of its population to the west. As the 1950s progressed, and the barbed wire and death strips went up around the rest of East Germany, Berlin was the escape hatch, the way out. This was unsustainable. If that hatch wasn't locked tight, East Germany would collapse, and if East Germany collapsed, it would almost certainly take the fragile Cold War truce down with it.

As 1960 turned into 1961, the rush for the exit only intensified. Torschlusspanik ("panic that the door will be closed") gripped the GDR. If anything, however, the panic was underdone. The door wasn't just closed that year. It was bricked-up. In chilling, precise detail, Mr. Taylor explains how the regime made its preparations (meticulous, cynical, and, somehow, very German), kept the Soviets onside (one of the many strengths of this book is its focus on the tricky relationship between the Kremlin and East Berlin), and then succeeded in incarcerating an entire nation in the course of one August weekend.

Critical to that success was the passivity of Britain, France, and America, nominal guarantors of a nominally united city. As Mr. Taylor makes clear, they huffed, and they puffed, but they never tried to blow that wall down. To have done so would almost certainly have meant war, and who was prepared to risk Armageddon for the right of East Germans to travel? It was an exercise in Realpolitik that condemned millions to imprisonment in their miserable abomination of a republic for nearly 30 more years, but the obvious implication to be drawn from Mr. Taylor's narrative is that this was the correct thing to do. And so it was.

That is not the same as saying that this was a morally straightforward decision, yet to read this book carefully is also to see the traces of another story, that of the West German politicians (mainly on the left) who appeared to have few qualms about accepting, and perhaps even liking, the idea of that socialist sibling of theirs. When in 1987 Gerhard Schröder pronounced (with, it seems to me, unseemly relish) that reunification was a "big lie," he was not, as Mr. Taylor reminds us, alone.

Fortunately, the future chancellor got it wrong. Two years later, time caught up with East Germany. When it did so, it came rushing in at a pace that suggested it was desperate to make up for those wasted, frozen decades. Mr. Taylor describes those lovely, wild, exhilarating weeks movingly and with undisguised enthusiasm. But, while he does mention some of the difficulties and ambiguities that have followed reunification, it's difficult to avoid the feeling that his head, like his heart, remains caught up in the optimism of 1989–90. History, however, moves on, remorseless, relentless, and forgetful. As Mr. Taylor himself notes, the PDS (essentially the old East German Communist Party in unconvincing democratic drag) is now an important part of the coalition that runs Berlin.

Some people never learn, and others never give up.

Dark Comedy

National Review Online, July 31, 2006

Sometimes there can be nothing more telling than contrast. The boat sailing in the sunshine of a July 4th weekend was filled with anticipation, exhilaration, tourists, New Yorkers, the yellow t-shirts of the Jones family reunion, and the pointing and squinting of countless digital Kodak moments. Ahead lay Ellis Island, its museum of immigration, and, tucked away in a corner of that museum’s third floor, an exhibition (Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom) dedicated to a monstrosity that had its origins on some very different islands, islands scattered in the White Sea, islands that became (in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words) the “mother tumor” of a cancer that eventually metastasized into an archipelago of terror, slavery and murder all across the Soviets’ gargoyle “union.”

It stretched so far, in fact, that to reach some of its most dismal, desolate, and destructive outposts, the camps at Kolyma, took a boat trip too. There was no exhilaration on these ferries to an underworld darker than Hades, just death, hunger, squalor, rape and disease. The only anticipation was of worse to come.

Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia .

Annotated illustrations by one former prisoner, Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, displayed in this exhibition showed what awaited the guests of her particular corner of the Gulag. They were glimpses of a drained, pitiless world, populated by predators and their hopeless, helpless victims, illuminated only by the surviving shreds of Kersnovskaia’s humanity and the bleak poetry of her furious prose. Here she recalls her own arrival at a “corrective labor camp”:

“First we were made to strip naked and were shoved into some roofless enclosures made out of planks. Above our heads the stars twinkled; below our bare feet lay frozen excrement. An enclosure measured 3 square feet. Each held three to four naked, shivering, and frightened men and women. Then these ‘kennel cages’ were opened one after the other and the naked people were led across a courtyard …into a special building where our documents were ‘formulated’ and our things were ‘searched.’ The goal of the search was to leave us with rags, and to take the good things, sweaters, mittens, socks, scarves, vests, and good shoes, for themselves. Ten thieves shamelessly fleeced these destitute and barely alive people. ‘Corrective’ is something that should make you better, and ‘labor’ ennobles you. But ‘camp’? A camp wasn’t a jail. So then what on earth was going on? ”

This exhibition never quite told us. What it did do was give a sense of what life, death, and the condition somewhere in between (they even had a word for that) in the Gulag was like. Sometimes this was achieved by the display of a few simple objects, such as a crude handmade spoon; a luxury in the camps (prisoners were expected to eat with their hands). Sometimes it was just the stories of the victims themselves.

Take Maria Tchebotareva, for example. The regime did. Her photograph was on display. She was sad-eyed, broad-faced, head-scarfed, an icon of the Slavic heartlands. In happier times she might have been imagined as backdrop to some Tolstoyan pastoral idyll, but she found herself trapped instead inside a real, far darker script. Her ‘crime’ was to steal three pounds of rye from the field the state had stolen from her. She had four hungry children to feed, and in the famine years of 1932-33 (oddly no mention was made of the fact that that famine, known to Ukrainians as the holodomor, was man-made, and left millions of deaths in its wake) and nothing to feed them with. She served twelve years in the Gulag for those three pounds, followed by another eleven in Arctic exile. She never saw her children again. For the Tchebotarevs there was to be no family reunion.

In 1949 they took Ivan Burylov too, a middle-aged beekeeper stung beyond endurance by the hypocrisy of it all. His offense? To write the word “comedy” on his supposedly secret ballot paper (there was, naturally, only one candidate). They tracked him down. Of course they did. They gave him eight years. Of course they did. We’re never told whether he survived, but his ballot endured (it was included in the display), and in its acerbic, laconic way, it was as effective a monument to the USSR as any I’ve seen.

Another such monument, but this time specifically to the cruelty and futility of Soviet rule is the “Belomor” canal. Carved through the roughly 140 miles of granite that divide the White and Baltic seas, it was a typically pharaonic scheme of the early Stalin era involving well over 100,000 prisoners with primitive tools (pickaxes, shovels and makeshift wheelbarrows) and a lack of precision that would have shocked the ancient Egyptians: it proved too shallow and too narrow to ever be of much use.

As a killing machine, however, the Belomor project worked very well. In her history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum cites an estimate of 25,000 dead (there are others, far higher), but no number was given in this exhibition, just the bland adjective “many.” That was fairly typical of an exhibition that too often shied away from specifics. That was a mistake: the statistics and the details count, if only as a warning for the future, a warning that, judging by one statistic that was included, has yet to be properly heeded. Polls in Russia show that “approval” (whatever that might mean) of Stalin’s leadership has risen from 7 percent to 53 percent over the last ten years.

That’s not to say an attempt was made to minimize the horror that was the Belomor. Far from it. Most striking was a continuous loop of old propaganda newsreel purporting to show the enthusiasm of the prisoners, drones of the anthill state, as they clawed, dug, and hacked their way to reform, rehabilitation, and socialist reconstruction through the rock, swamp, and snow; and, yes, just like in Hitler’s camps, there was an orchestra.

A few feet further down the corridor (somehow the immigration museum’s still visibly institutional character added to the force of an exhibit dedicated to a state run amok) was yet more footage: those familiar parades of the weapons of Armageddon, syncopated gymnasts and marching ranks of regimented enthusiasm, but also, more revealingly, film of a young factory worker shouting her praises of great Comrade Stalin, the edge to her voice betraying the collective hysteria that always lurks somewhere within the order, discipline and control of a totalitarian system.

Much of the rest of the exhibition was dedicated to Perm 36, a logging camp set up in the wake of World War Two, that, after the end of Khrushchev’s brief “thaw,” was used to imprison, torment and sometimes kill the Kremlin’s most determined opponents, the bravest of the brave, who persisted in their political work even after serving earlier sentences, men like the Lithuanian Balis Gayauskas. Undaunted by two years in Nazi custody, 35 years in the Gulag, and a further three years in exile, this extraordinary individual had the last laugh — he was elected to the parliament of a Lithuania that had itself won back its freedom.

That happy ending is a satisfying reminder of the USSR’s ignominious collapse, but before reaching the inevitable pictures of a tumbling Berlin Wall, the exhibit took time to pay tribute to the tiny band of dissidents, who for long, lonely years did what they could to preserve the idea of freedom in lands that had known too little of liberty. Naturally, the giants were featured, Solzhenitsyn, the great chronicler, Old Testament in his wrath and grandeur, the gentle-souled, iron-willed Sakharov and, of course, Sakharov’s wife, the spiky, indomitable Bonner, but so were others too, lesser-known, but no less courageous: Sergei Kovalev, Ivan Kovalev (father and son), Tatiana Khodorovich, Tatiana Veilikanova, Grigorii Pod’iapolskii, Anatolii Krasnov-Levitin, Valerij Senderov, Tatiana Osipova (Ivan Kovalev’s wife), Levko Lukjanenko, Leonid Borodin, and Vasyl Stus. Remember their names. Remember their sacrifices.

It would have been unreasonable to think that this relatively small exhibition could ever have illustrated the full scope of decades of Soviet tyranny, but it was disappointing that it never really managed to answer Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia’s haunting question: “What on earth was going on?” It wasn’t just a question of the exhibition’s missing statistics. The bigger problem was the failure to put the Gulag into its wider context. The impression was somehow left that the camps were primarily a means (albeit brutal) of providing the manpower for “Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power,” something that sounds if not exactly benign then at least more reasonable than the description that this murderous system actually deserved. Certainly, forced industrialization was part of the story, but it’s an explanation that obscures the camps’ significance within a far more ambitious plan.

Why Soviet Communism, a poisonous blend of millennial fantasy, imperial dream, paranoia, and psychosis, to name but a few of its sources and symptoms, evolved in the way it did is the subject of potentially endless debate, but in understanding the way that the dictatorship managed to maintain its grip for so long, it’s necessary to realize that the Gulag was just one part of a network of terror, mass murder, and oppression intended, by eliminating all inconvenient traces of the past, to remake man into a cog in the new, perfect and all-encompassing Soviet machine. That is what was going on, something that this exhibition never truly managed to convey.

Despite this, its joint organizers, Perm’s Gulag Museum and the National Park Service, should be congratulated for doing something to bring the often overlooked horrors (and lessons) of the Gulag to wider attention over here (after closing at Ellis Island on July 4th, the exhibition travels to Boston, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Independence, California). The fact, controversial to some, that space was found to note that many other countries (including the United States) have, like today’s Russia, found it difficult to come to terms with brutal systems that have defaced their histories, should be seen as a statement of the obvious, not some underhand attempt to play down the extraordinary evils of the Soviet past.

But if you want to consider how much more remains to be done in this respect in Russia itself, remember the disturbing poll I mentioned earlier, and, while you are at it, reflect on the fact that according to Memorial (an organization dedicated to keeping alive the history of Soviet repression) between 2002 and 2005 30 monuments to Stalin were erected in the territories of the former USSR, There are, reportedly, plans for another 20 more.

Now ask yourself what the reaction would be if Germans began putting up new statues to Adolf Hitler.

Never Forget

The New York Sun, December 22, 2005

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

In the end, perhaps, communism will be remembered not so much for what it left behind as for what it didn't. The decades of totalitarian rule annihilated cultures, brutalized civilizations, and crushed the hopes of generations. These were the plague years, a time of slaughter on a scale never seen before: The authoritative "Black Book of Communism" (1999) puts the death toll at around 100 million, and the tally of those who passed through the Gulag, the Lao Gai, and other lesser-known hells exceeds that.

While these horrors are generally acknowledged, it is grudgingly and tacitly; there has been no Soviet Nuremberg and has never been a proper reckoning. Wander today through the cities of the old communist bloc, and there is an uneasy sense that something is not quite right. It's even there in the architecture, haunting those buildings that have managed to hang on since the time before the red flag flew. Often now beautifully restored, they stand isolated and incongruous amid the stained concrete of communism and the gimcrack glitter of the cut-and-paste capitalism that followed. Elderly, elegant mourners at a slapdash, shabby funeral, these relics are quiet, reproachful reminders of the way of life annihilated by the builders of the radiant future. They are hints of a tragedy that deserves far more explicit commemoration.

In Russia itself, now presided over by a former secret policeman, recognition of the crimes of the past is a sporadic, compromised, and listless affair. Here and there, the determined visitor can certainly find an exhibit, a statue, a tumbledown camp barracks, but these are mere scraps of mourning, an insult to the dead, apallingly compounded by the current government's nostalgia for the communist era. Earlier this fall, a bust of "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, the mass murderer who founded the Cheka - what became the KGB - was reinstalled in front of the Interior Ministry building in Moscow. He was being honored, one police spokesman said, for his work with orphans and street children. How nice.

Outside Russia, matters are often more straightforward. Communism can be portrayed, sometimes not quite accurately, as something imposed, some thing foreign. Thus newly freed Latvia was among the first to establish an occupation museum, while in Lithuania the cells of the Vilnius KGB were quickly opened up to give their dank, depressing glimpse of atrocity. In many other parts of the fallen empire, too, there are memorials, museums, archives, each designed to extract something, anything, from the wreckage of history.

It's a measure of the Kremlin's reach that one of these museums is located in an old, shabby wooden house, tucked away in a corner of Ulan Bator (Ulaanbataar), the capital of faraway Mongolia.And it's a measure of its nature that what's found inside is a record of cruelty that Genghis himself would have appreciated. The house once belonged to Peljidiin Genden, a Mongolian prime minister executed in Moscow on Stalin's orders in November 1937. (Genden's successor was to meet the same fate in the same city, just four years later.) Russia's Bolsheviks may have played a critical part in bolstering Mongolia's independence from China in the struggles of 1920-21, but within a short time, Mongolian self-determination was reduced to a lethal and contemptuously transparent sham.

In the 1920s and 1930s this nation at the ends of the earth found itself subjected to the prescriptions, psychoses, and millennial fantasies of a gang of revolutionary despots thousands of miles to the west. Class enemies had to be eliminated, the kulak threat dealt with, and agriculture collectivized. In Mongolia at that time, class enemies in the usual sense were few and far between, no capitalists were to be found, kulaks were inconveniently scarce, and collectivization would destroy a pastoral, nomadic culture that had endured for thousands of years. No matter.The plan had to be fulfilled. And it was.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

A large, angry painting on the first floor of Genden's house shows just how. It's a series of vignettes - part Bosch, part Bayeux - painted against a characteristic landscape of high plains and bright blue sky. In each, soldiers in the flat caps and jackboots of another country's revolution are shown, at times in unbearable detail, beating, shooting, interrogating, raping. A monastery is ablaze. A ger (a Mongolian yurt) is ran sacked. Death comes from hatchet, firing squad, or bullet in the back of the head. Bodies are left unburied, a feast for the vultures that wait. It is no surprise to be told that the artist's father perished during those years.The old order had little with which it could defend itself against the rage of the state. Weapons used in uprisings against the authorities are displayed in a glass case: pikes, some swords, a few old rifles and pistols; not much use,really,against machine guns, artillery, and tanks.

Elsewhere, the typical detritus of communist rule is on display: copies of long-forgotten edicts, photographs of long-forgotten trials, and, as always in such exhibits, the images of those who disappeared into the 100 million. Sometimes these are mug shots of the newly arrested - shock, terror, resignation. On other occasions the victims are recorded in earlier life, in a smart suit, at a conference, resplendent in the robes of a Buddhist priest - unaware of what fate had in store.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The centerpiece of the Genden house is a waxwork tableau of an interrogation. An officer in the security forces sits facing a prisoner. The interrogator's face is harsh and unforgiving. The prisoner is slumped in his chair, head bowed. Skulls on display upstairs demonstrate where such interrogations often led. They were uncovered during the excavation of a ravine near Ulan Bator two or three years ago. In all, the remains of around 1,000 people were found, just a small portion of the tens of thousands butchered or imprisoned at this time. Buddhist monks were a particular target. In August 1938 one Soviet "adviser" wrote happily that "the top ecclesiastics had been eliminated" and that most of the country's temples had been reduced to "ash heaps." There are good reasons why Ulan Bator is today a formulaically drab Soviet city.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The dictatorship fell in 1990, taking with it the statue of Stalin that had, incredibly, remained outside the national library until then (it later reappeared in a disco), but the murderous Georgian's local surrogate, Marshal Choibalsan, still preens on his plinth outside Ulan Bator's university, inspiring the youth of Mongolia to who knows what. Choibalsan's Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, scrubbed, buffed, and brought tactfully up to date, is prominent in the country's government.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

Still, Mongolia has made a better job of coming to terms with the realities of communism than most. Even here in the United States, the country that patiently, marvelously, and miraculously wore down the evil empire, the crimes of communism's past are regularly played down in a way that, if it were those of the Third Reich that were under discussion, would rightly be condemned.

And communism was never just a foreign scourge, irrelevant to those fortunate enough to live on this side of the Atlantic.Thousands of Americans died fighting the Cold War's hot wars in Southeast Asia, Korea, or the more shadowy conflicts elsewhere. Millions of others either fled the execution chambers and concentration camps of the Great Utopia or had family members who managed the same feat, if they were lucky, or found themselves trapped, or worse, if they were not.

Defeating this system was an American triumph. That it took so long was an American tragedy.Yet it is a part of the past that many in this country seem oddly unwilling either to acknowledge or, even, to understand. So, for example, the nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established by Congress as long ago as 1993, but it's only now that construction has started in Washington, D.C., on the memorial it has commissioned, a 10-foot bronze replica of the statue to democracy that so briefly graced Tiananmen Square. And it's a second-best solution. Plans for a $100 million museum similar to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have long since been abandoned: The necessary funds could not be raised.

A dollar for each of the dead was, it seems, too much to ask.

Easy Riders

National Review, July 18, 2005

Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

Look, I’m not Hemingway, Marco Polo, or Lewis or bloody Clark. I don’t kayak, hike, or bike, but I do know I’m not the only traveler in Mongolia to have gone through a moment of despair, regret (what was so wrong with Cancún anyway?), and panic. And why not? We were somewhere remote in the country that defines remote and our guide’s “short cut” had more than a touch of the Donner Party about it. Were those really vultures, dark, enormous, and optimistic, circling over our dusty and exhausted bus as it bounced, creaked, juddered, and shuddered along the unpaved road that wound across an empty plain that made the Mojave look like the Garden of Eden? Yes, they were vultures. Big ones. Mean ones. Hungry ones.

Hours, hours, bouncing and juddering hours later, broken only by a grim little picnic by a grim little lake previously denuded of fish by dynamite-toting Chinese, we arrived at Lun, a Mad Max scrap of a settlement that shared only a syllable with the British capital, in the hope of refueling the bus. Lun’s wreck of a gas station had gas. It had pumps. It had an attendant. What it didn’t have was electricity. No electricity. No pump. No gas. The power was out all over eastern Mongolia, but the attendant thought that a lady who lived nearby might have a stash of gas, and that stash of gas could be for sale. She did, and it was.

Lun, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

The impossible has a way of happening in the land of the Mongols. They are a people too far-flung, too poor, and too strange to survive. And yet they have. They survived the collapse of the khans’ huge empire, they survived the centuries of Chinese oppression that followed, they survived even the brief, brutal, and bizarre rule of a crazed Baltic baron, and, finally, they survived the decades of Communist dictatorship that ended only in 1990.

Now at last this nation of nomads, lamas, herdsmen, shamans, miners, bureaucrats, and trainee city slickers is back in charge of its own destiny. And as in so many other parts of the old Soviet bloc the first sign of a better future is the return of the long-suppressed past. In Mongolia that can only mean one thing: You Know Who is back. Genghis! In the Communist era, Genghis Khan (or, more accurately, Chinggis Khaan) was regarded as a distinctly disreputable figure, a man best not mentioned by the politically prudent. Not anymore.

Brushed, scrubbed, rehabilitated, and thoroughly whitewashed, the old monster has been transformed into a lawgiver, philosopher, and all-round decent guy. “Yes,” I was told, “he was a mass murderer, but that’s how war is.” Besides, he was “provoked” (it’s a long — and utterly unconvincing — story). Butcher no more, Genghis now shines as a symbol of Mongolia’s lost glory and newfound confidence. There’s even talk of moving the capital from Ulan Bator (Ulaanbaatar) to the spot that Genghis picked, Karakorum (Kharkhorin), these days a tumbledown town distinguished only by a magnificent monastery having, awkwardly, no connection to Genghis. In fact, almost nothing in Karakorum has. Well, there is a modern monument — part Trump, part Brezhnev, all disaster — dedicated to the Mongol empire, but, like Mongolian cuisine, it is best passed over in silence.

Karakorum, Mongolia, May, 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

Fortunately, there’s more in Mongolia for Genghis fans than Karakorum, including Chinggis cigarettes, Chinggis beer, and the alarming Chinggis vodka. In Ulan Bator, Chinggis has given his name to the best hotel, a wide avenue, and a good place to munch some mutton. Over in the national history museum, previously preoccupied with the exploits (stupendous) of the Mongolian Communist party, the Commies are out and Genghis is in.

Genghis Khan, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 @ Andrew Stuttaford

If the great Khan’s tale is embellished, mythologized, and sometimes just plain made up, that’s understandable in a people that still seem a little uncomfortable in the trappings of a modern nation-state. And for this, the country’s complex and often savage 20th century must bear no small share of the blame.

As even a quick glance at Ulan Bator’s glum architecture will reveal, today’s Mongolia is in many ways a creation of the Soviet Union. Russia’s Bolsheviks played an important part in establishing Mongolian independence, and their successors did their best to ensure that that independence was a sham. Ulan Bator (the name means “red hero”) resembles a rundown provincial capital anywhere in the former USSR. Like many such cities, Ulan Bator was embellished with the occasional unconvincing local flourish (its wedding palace is built in the shape of a traditional Mongolian hat), but its true spirit was crushed. Most of Ulan Bator’s monasteries were, like the monks who inhabited them, obliterated, their ornate forms replaced by the slovenly grandeur and gimcrack construction so typical of Soviet rule. Even the mausoleum of Mongolia’s other great hero, the “red hero” himself, Damdiny Sükhbaatar, bears a suspicious resemblance to Lenin’s in Moscow.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

At least the statue of Stalin that stood outside the national library was finally pulled down, if only in 1990. Other, more disturbing, traces of the murderous Georgian still remain. In 2003, construction workers uncovered a mass grave containing the remains of perhaps a thousand people. Most of the victims were Buddhist monks, shot, bludgeoned, and dumped in a ravine near Khambyn Ovoo: a small portion of the tens of thousands of victims slaughtered, exiled, or imprisoned in the 1920s and 1930s as the Mongolian party leadership, carefully choreographed by Moscow, brought the grim drama then playing in the USSR to their own country. The script is familiar, complete in every disgusting detail, even down to the rise of Horoloogiin Choibalsan, a puppet Stalin all Mongolia’s own.

Memorial Museum of the Victims of Political Persecutions, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

There’s an old wooden house in Ulan Bator that gives a flavor of those days. Once the residence of a Mongolian prime minister murdered in Moscow in 1937, it now hosts a museum dedicated to the victims, complete, as such museums usually are, with the incomplete: the names and the photographs of just a few of the dead. A wax tableau reproduces the scene in an interrogation chamber, while upstairs a small pile of skulls from the Khambyn ravine shows how such interrogations tended to conclude.

Memorial Museum of the Victims of Political Persecutions, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005, © Andrew Stuttaford

And as expected in the former Soviet empire, the accounting for the Communist years remains unfinished, ambiguous, and uncertain. A statue of Lenin presides over the prostitutes outside a downtown hotel, and Choibalsan still stands on his pedestal outside Ulan Bator’s university. Choibalsan’s party is in Mongolia’s governing coalition and its candidate recently won the country’s presidential elections. But the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary party is not what it was. It has accepted democracy, the free market (more or less), and, even, alliance with the U.S.; the Mongols are back in Baghdad, if rather less bloodily than in the time of the khans. Ulan Bator may be desperately poor, but there are many outward signs of returning enterprise — bustling shops, sidewalk kiosks, even a stock exchange.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

Outside Ulan Bator conditions are far tougher. For a couple of days our group stayed in a ger (yurt) camp in a high valley to the north. The valley was lovely, with more than a touch of Shangri-La about it, but even this idyll offered a glimpse of a very hardscrabble Arcadia, where few inhabitants had much in the way of, well, anything. Life in Mongolia is harsh: The climate is merciless, incomes are low, and with little in the way of infrastructure (there are, for example, probably fewer than 5,000 miles of paved road, a miserable figure for a country the size of Alaska) it’s difficult to see how that will change any time soon. But if anyone can make this all work, I like to believe that it will be this tough, resilient people.

Mongolia, May 2005,  ©Andrew Stuttaford

And before you say that this is a hopeless dream, go to the steppe and watch a lone horseman riding calmly through that vast impossible space, his herd in front of him, and history just behind.

It's Time

National Review Online, November 29, 2004

New York City, Saturday—In Manhattan, they say, everyone wears black, but not this Saturday, not in this plaza just across from the U.N. The demonstrators, perhaps 500, perhaps more, have turned up on this briefly glorious late autumn day in orange hats, in orange scarves, in orange coats, in orange sweaters, draped in orange blankets, wearing orange ribbons; anything, however small, will do so long as it is orange. Baseball cap advertising Land Rover? No problem. If it's orange, it's fine. Sweatshirt proclaiming the virtues of Steinway pianos? Why not? It's orange. Orange flags flutter, orange balloons bob against a clear, lovely sky that matches the blue on the other flag, pale blue and yellow, which flies this day. Blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine, and orange the color of the movement that might, maybe, finally bring the people of that country the decent government they have awaited for far too long. "Pora". "It's time." Indeed it is.

Banners, orange naturally, proclaim the loyalties of the crowd:

"Yuschenko—Yes!"

"A Criminal Should Not Be President."

"Putin, Don't Mess With Ukraine."

"Boston Ukrainians for Yuschenko."

"America and Ukraine Together."

"Kyiv, We're With You."

"Ukrainians Deserve Freedom Just Like You."

Indeed they do. In the 20th century, the people of the Ukraine, a land of two genocides, the country of Hitler's Babi Yar, and the nation of Stalin's broken, emptying starving villages, went through the worst that two totalitarian systems could do to them, the raw death toll, millions after millions after millions, supplemented by decade after decade after decade of more selective, careful purges, a cull of the best and the brightest, generation after generation after generation.

And yet, somehow, Ukraine endured.

But Putin seems to feel little or no remorse for the crimes of his Kremlin predecessors. There have been no real apologies, and no trials of those butchers who still survive. As the Russian president looks at those other far, far larger crowds in orange, the ones gathered for days in Kiev's Independence Square, he sees, doubtless, only irritants, troublemakers, hooligans, obstacles to be removed, perhaps even dupes, according to some in Moscow, of wicked Polish plotters. What he should be seeing are the countless ghosts of those that went before, victims of that Soviet past that even now he seems curiously unwilling to confront. That, however, would take a conscience.

In 1933 (wrote the writer Vasily Grossman) "horses pulled flattop carts through [Kiev], and the corpses of those who had died in the night were collected. I saw one such flattop cart with children on it. They were just as I have described them, thin, elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks...Some of them were still muttering, and their heads still turning. I asked the driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: "By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too." There was, we should remember, more food in Kiev than anywhere else in the Ukraine that year. Five, six, seven million died in that Soviet-made famine, the Holodomor, maybe an even greater number: no one knows for sure.

Standing in that New York plaza I talk to one of the demonstrators, Marko, about what's going on. We touch on the past. "My father," he says, "survived the Holodomor." I look around at some of the older faces in the crowd, and wonder what they had heard back then, what they knew, what they had lived through.

Not inappropriately, perhaps, there is behind us a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who rescued thousands of Jews from wartime Budapest only to disappear into Stalin's hands. A small plaque reads that on "January 17th, 1945 Raoul Wallenberg was detained by the Soviet government. His fate remains unknown." Fate unknown. Just another ghost. Not inappropriately, perhaps, someone in the crowd is carrying a placard showing Putin in a KGB uniform.

Someone else has a sign announcing that she is from Donetsk, the city that is the heart of the Ukraine's mainly Russian-speaking east, an area that is likely to come into sharp focus in coming weeks—exaggerated it may have been, but there is no doubt that Russia's candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, has real support in that part of the country. Taras, a friend of mine who's also at the demonstration, is more optimistic. His father, from Ternopil in western Ukraine (the city where Viktor Yuschenko had studied as a young man) had just returned from Kiev. While he was there he'd talked to a few of the miners who have been shipped in from the East to rally support for Yanukovych, the second-round "winner." They were O.K. guys, he said, enjoying an all-expenses, all-vodka trip to the big city with no plans to stick around for long. We'll see.

But Saturday is not a day for such worries. The likeable crowd, mainly twenty or thirtysomethings, a blend of recent immigrants, visitors, and the diaspora, were festive, optimistic, excited, cheering the speeches, the singers, and the sentiment, pausing only to chant the only name that counted, the name of their president:

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

He's their hero, their man, their champion, and their best hope for the true restoration of a squandered independence. In fact, like many politicians that emerged in the rougher corners of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Yuschenko is not free from awkward questions about his past, or the nature of some of his support, but this is not something that anyone wants to think about this day.

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko, Yushchenko."

An older woman points to a poster, a standard politician-and-child image, the usual fluff, and shakes her head sadly. "It's terrible what they've done to him." The man in the photograph is healthy, good-looking, fortyish. It's Yuschenko, and the picture was probably taken less than a year ago. His face looks nothing like the terrible, cratered wreck that it has become, the product, almost certainly of a poison attack, an attack that has transformed him into a martyr for the cause, the real cause, he now leads.

The crowd starts to sing a lovely, enchanting tune, verse after verse. They know the words, and they sing them smiling. "The national anthem?" I ask. "No", two women say, "It's like a pledge." "What's it called?" Thought. Pause. Embarrassed looks. "We don't know." And then they start to laugh.

It's time.