A World Behind Barbed Wire

Anne Applebaum (ed) : Gulag Voices

Tamara  Petkevich: Memoir of a  Gulag Actress

Cathy Frierson & Semyon Vilensky: Children of the Gulag

Stephen Cohen: The Victims  Return - Survivors  of the Gulag after Stalin

Fyodor Mochulsky: Gulag Boss

Alexander  Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

Kolyma Tales: Varlam Shalamov

Journey into the Whirlwind: Eugenia Ginzburg

My Testimony: Anatoly Marchenko

Faithful Ruslan: Georgi Vladimov

The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2011

Lubianka, Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

The most remarkable thing about "The Way Back," the 2010 film by Peter Weir, was neither its protagonists (escapees from the Soviet gulag system who trekked thousands of miles to their freedom) nor the curious tale of the almost certainly fictional 1956 "memoir" that inspired it (Slawomir Rawicz's "The Long Walk"). No, what distinguished "The Way Back" was its depiction of life in Stalin's camps. There have been a handful of films on this topic, but, as observed Anne Applebaum, author of a fine 2004 history of the gulag, this was the first time it had been given the full Hollywood treatment. Hitler's concentration camps are a Tinseltown staple, but Stalin's merit barely a mention.

Publishers have been more even-handed. There are many books on Soviet terror, and some have won huge readerships. Yet, as Hollywood's cynics understand, the swastika will almost always outsell the red star. That's due partly to the perverse aesthetics of the Third Reich but also to a disconcerting ambivalence—even now—about what was going on a little further to the east. The slaughter of millions by Moscow's communist regime remains shrouded in benevolent shadow. The Soviet experiment is given a benefit of a doubt that owes nothing to history and far too much to a lingering sympathy for a supposedly noble dream supposedly gone astray.

A flurry of recent books on Soviet oppression—surely encouraged by the interest generated by Ms. Applebaum's "Gulag"—is thus to be welcomed. One of the best is edited by Ms. Applebaum herself.

"Gulag Voices" (Yale, 195 pages, $25) is a deftly chosen anthology of writings by victims of Soviet rule. Some are published for the first time in English, most are by writers little known in the West and each is given a succinct, informative introduction. Above all, they help illustrate the duration, variety and range of Soviet despotism.

The Third Reich lasted for scarcely more than a decade. Most of those who died at its hands were slaughtered within the space of five years or so. The Soviet killing spree dragged on, however, from the revolutionary frenzy of 1917, through the terrible bloodbaths of the Stalin era, to the last violent spasms in 1991. The ultimate death toll may have been higher than that orchestrated by Hitler, but absolute annihilations like those envisaged by the Nazis were never on the agenda. Instead the nature of Soviet repression shifted back and forth over the years: sometimes more lethal, sometimes less, sometimes carefully targeted, sometimes arbitrary. The gulag itself was, as Ms. Applebaum notes, "an extraordinarily varied place." As the title of Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" reminds us, Stalin's hell, like Dante's, was layered. And how it endured: The most recent account in "Gulag Voices" is an excerpt from Anatoly Marchenko's "My Testimony," a memoir from 1969 that highlighted the way that Stalinist cruelty had successfully survived the dead, officially disgraced, dictator.

"Gulag Voices" begins in 1928. Dmitry Likhachev, an old-style St. Petersburg intellectual, was arrested when his literary discussion group was deemed to be a hotbed of counterrevolutionary plotting. He served four years in the Solovetsky Islands, the beautiful northern archipelago that from 1923 hosted the first organized camps, the tumor that metastasized into the hideous "archipelago" of Solzhenitsyn's great metaphor.

Mr. Likhachev's contribution is followed by a sampling of what could be found within that wider archipelago. Misery, gang rape and murder co-exist with Potemkin parodies of "normal life"—an excerpt from Gustav Herling's "A World Apart" (1951) describes the arrangements for conjugal visits. Occasionally, the prisoners might even carry on approximations of a career within the camp as an engineer, doctor or, as Tamara Petkevich recounts in "Memoir of a Gulag Actress" (Northern Illinois, 481 pages, $35), a performer for audiences of fellow convicts.

Such recollections come, as Ms. Applebaum acknowledges, with their own bias. With the exception of Mr. Marchenko, who died in the course of a later sentence, the authors all survived. Millions were not so fortunate. And some of those lives had hardly begun. In the devastating "Children of the Gulag" (Yale, 450 pages, $35), Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky chronicle the awful fate of those literally countless children whose parents had fallen foul of the rage of the Soviet state. Here, a gulag convict nurse recalls handing over a batch of prisoners' children for transfer to a "special home": "The worst happened: We'd given, according to the receipt, eleven healthy beautiful children, and not one of them was ever returned. Not a single one!" This was a story repeated again and again and again. And as for those who did survive, many were forced to accept a suspect, fragile existence in which, for decades, the knock on the door was never so far away.

That tension would have been familiar to many prisoners eventually freed from the gulag. "Gulag Voices" includes one account by the pseudonymous K. Petrus, describing his 1939 release into what Ms. Applebaum describes as "the strange ambiguity" of a life that was closer to limbo. The big cities were denied to most former inmates. Their families were broken. Many chose to remain near the camps that had once held them.

The fate of those who emerged is also a central concern of Stephen F. Cohen's "The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin" (Publishing Works, 224 pages, $22.95), a perceptive study of Khrushchev-era attempts to secure justice for Stalin's victims, the backsliding that followed and, finally, in the Glasnost years, the mass, too often posthumous "rehabilitations" of former prisoners—rehabilitations unaccompanied, however, by any realistic prospect that their tormentors would be brought to justice. Mr. Cohen was a frequent visitor to Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s and came to know some of those who had survived. His account is powerful and, often, very moving, marred only by traces of a belief in the impossible dream of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union, the will-o'-the-wisp that beguiled and destroyed Mikhail Gorbachev.

A very different (and highly unusual) perspective can be found in "Gulag Boss" (Oxford, 229 pages, $29.95) by Fyodor Mochulsky, the reminiscences of an engineer recruited by the NKVD (the Stalin-era secret police) to supervise forced labor in a Siberian camp. It was written during and after the U.S.S.R.'s implosion and ends with Mochulsky appearing to reject the methods, although not necessarily the ideology, of the system he served for so long. But he does so in the strained, awkward prose of a man unwilling to face up to what he had done. Mr. Mochulsky talks of disease, lack of food and other hardships, but the scale of the death toll that he must have witnessed is, at best, only there by implication. His overall tone is one of pained technocratic disappointment that the camp was so poorly run: He was a Speer, so to speak, not a Himmler. Yet Albert Speer served 20 years in jail. Mr. Mochulsky went on to enjoy a successful diplomatic and intelligence career and, in retirement, the luxury of modest regret.

And in those twilight years, he is unlikely to have been troubled by fears of prosecution. There has been no Bolshevik Nuremberg. Total defeat left Nazi horror open for all to see, but many Soviet archives remain closed, their tales of atrocity unpublished. The new books on the gulag cannot begin to redress the crimes they describe, but they can at least help history locate the facts with which it can pass the judgment that the victims and their jailers deserve.

Tales of the Gulag

The Gulag Archipelago By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

That "The Gulag Archipelago" had to be written says the worst about humanity. That it was written says the best. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) created an unanswerable indictment of the totalitarian regime under which he was still living and, no less critically, established that it had been poison from the start. As carefully researched as the difficult circumstances of its production would allow, "The Gulag Archipelago" is no dry roster of the dead but a work of passion and fury, underpinned by bleak humor and the hope (vain, it seems) that someday justice would be done.

Kolyma Tales By Varlam Shalamov

Far less well-known than they should be, these short stories by Varlam Shalamov (1907-82) are terse, lightly fictionalized, partly autobiographical glimpses into the gulag's abyss. "Kolyma Tales" derives its name from the region in Russia's far northeast that played host to a vast forced labor complex, in which hundreds of thousands (at least) perished. Written in a style of ironic, hard-edged detachment and so spare and so crystalline that they sometimes tip over into poetry, the tales rest at the summit of Russian literary achievement.

Journey into the Whirlwind By Eugenia Ginzburg

Rightly or wrongly, the Great Terror of 1937, an immense wave of violence that took down many who had either supported or benefited from the rise of the Soviet state, has come to be seen as the epitome of Stalinist despotism. Eugenia Ginzburg (1904-77) was among those expelled from a heaven under construction to a fully finished hell. "Journey Into the Whirlwind" remains a profoundly humane, wonderfully written first-hand account of arrest, imprisonment and exile into the gulag.

My Testimony By Anatoly Marchenko

Eugenia Ginzburg was a member of the Soviet elite; Anatoly Marchenko (1938-86) was the opposite, the son of illiterate railway workers. "My Testimony," his description of life in the 1960s gulag, is matter-of-fact, something that only makes its horrors seem worse. Marchenko's gulag experience transformed him from everyman into dissident. The last of his many re-arrests was in 1980. Still imprisoned, he died from the effects of a hunger strike in 1986. Perestroika had just begun: too late, far too late.

Faithful Ruslan By Georgi Vladimov

Moments of extraordinary beauty mark this haunting fable by Georgi Vladimov (1931-2003), told through the eyes of Ruslan, the most loyal of guard dogs. Abandoned by Master after their camp is closed down following Stalin's death, Ruslan patiently patrols the neighboring town waiting for the old order to return. It does, but only as a hallucination as Ruslan drifts into death after one final bloodletting. When Vladimov offered this novella for publication, though, it was rejected. Khrushchev had fallen and new masters were in charge. For real.

A Flock of Black Swans

adam Fergusson: When Money Dies

The Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2010

It says something about present anxieties that a 35-year-old account of Weimar hyperinflation has come into vogue. In early 2010, Adam Fergusson's long-out-of-print volume was trading online for four-figure sums. There were (false) reports of kind words about it from Warren Buffett. Now back in print, this once obscure book from 1975 has been selling briskly. Just another manifestation of the financial millenarianism now sweeping the land? Perhaps, but "When Money Dies" remains a fascinating and disturbing book.

The death of the German mark (it took 20 of them to buy a British pound in 1914 but 310 billion in late 1923) plays a key part in the dark iconography of the 20th century: Images of kindling currency and economic chaos are an essential element in our understanding of the rise of Hitler. Mr. Fergusson adds valuable nuance to a familiar story. His tale begins not, as would be popularly assumed, in the aftermath of Germany's political and military collapse in 1918 (by which point the mark had halved against the pound) but in the original decision to fund the war effort largely through debt—a decision with uncomfortable contemporary parallels (one of many in this book) tailor-made for today's end-timers.

Yet the parallels go only so far. The almost inevitably inflationary consequences of paying for a world war on credit were exacerbated by: Germany's relatively shallow capital markets, the creation of "loan banks" funded solely by a printing press that was also at the disposal of the central bank; and the muffling of warning signals in a way unimaginable in our information age. The rise in prices was obvious to all. That it was due to more than wartime shortages was not. The country's stock markets were closed for the duration of the fighting. Foreign-exchange rates were not published.

And then there were the black swans. Early 20th-century Germany was savaged by a flock, including defeat in what was then the world's most destructive war, revolution, civil unrest, territorial loss, the imposition of punitive reparations, a fresh occupation of its industrial heartland and, as if these woes were not enough, a Reichsbank presided over by Rudolf Havenstein. Even in the era of Zimbabwe's Gideon Gono, Havenstein must be considered a strong contender for the title of worst central banker of all time. There seemed to be no limit to the amount of currency he was willing to print. Yes, America has its problems today, but by comparison . . .

"When Money Dies" was written in the early 1970s for a British audience. Inflation was accelerating fast, and London's political class was at a loss about what to do. Mr. Fergusson's book (which began as a series of newspaper articles) reflected the growing national alarm over inflation and hinted that price stability would not be won back without more focus on the quantity of money in circulation. With monetarist ideas just beginning to enter mainstream British political discourse, the Havenstein of "When Money Dies"—a printing-press banker supposedly unaware of the connection between soaring inflation and roaring money supply—made a useful villain.

Yet in all probability his behavior owed as much to desperation as ignorance. Mass unemployment seemed more of a threat to Weimar's dangerously fragile social order than rising prices. Devaluation was the other side of Germany's debased coin. It kept the country's exports competitive and its factories (given an extra boost by generous subsidy regimes) humming.

But in the end the music stopped. Without a reliable pricing mechanism, much of the German economy eventually ceased to function, even at the most basic level. Rent was payable in butter, a ticket to the movies with a lump of coal. Farmers stopped sending food to the cities. Under such circumstances the harsh medicine of monetary reform (the return to a fixed parity against gold and the dollar, the imposition of strict budgetary discipline) found the political support it needed despite the pain it was bound to bring to German industry and its work force.

And so, in November 1923, a new quasi-currency, the Rentenmark, was launched. Its asset backing was little more than a conjuring trick, but with the population desperate to believe (and with the Reichsbank no longer financing the government) the magic worked. Despite the rickety nature of the recovery that eventually ensued, Germany might have arrived at a lasting turning point had not black swans—the Great Crash and a global depression—returned to bedevil its future once again.

Readers of Mr. Fergusson's melancholy chronicle can comfort themselves with the thought: That was then, and this is now. "When Money Dies" cannot be used to prove that the combination of rising deficits and the modern money manufacture euphemized as "Quantitative Easing" can only end up in near-apocalyptic disaster. (In a note to this new edition, Mr. Fergusson, who subsequently became a Conservative member of the European Parliament in the early Thatcher years, stresses that no "advanced economy is threatened with inflation approaching such severity as in post-Imperial Germany.") Nevertheless, to borrow his adjective, the book is a "sobering" warning of what could go wrong.

His examination of both the seductions of inflation and its devastatingly corrosive effect is merciless and horrifying. Most haunting are the depictions of those broken on inflation's wheel, the workers without a union to protect them, the retired trying to live on pensions that had lost all meaning, the once-proud bourgeois after the annihilation of their savings. A nation can recover from hyperinflation, but for these people time had run out. Everybody ought to read this book. But baby boomers must.

So You Want To Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star

Keith Richards: Life

The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2010

Right at the beginning of "Life," there's a hint of the glorious Spinal Tapestry that Keith Richards's autobiography might have been. Using words that are rather less decorous than a family newspaper can permit, Mr. Richards recalls how: "[1975] was the tour of the giant inflatable [phallus]. It came rising up from the stage as Mick sang 'Starf—er.' It was great was the [phallus], though we paid for it later in Mick's wanting props at every tour after that, to cover his insecurities. There was a huge business of getting elephants on stage in Memphis until they ended up crashing through ramps and [defecating] all over the stage in rehearsals and were abandoned." With such grandiloquent kitsch (and the author's implicit acceptance of its absurdity) and a cleverly freighted jeer thrown at a bandmate, we have the ingredients of a definitive rock star memoir. A child of the 1960s and 1970s, I read on expectantly.

 I should have known better. Judging by the hype and circumstance that has surrounded its release, "Life" is a tome meant to be taken very seriously: less a deliciously barbed and baroque romp than an attempt to amplify—up to 11 perhaps—the legend of the world's "most elegantly wasted man."

It will succeed. Apparently shocked, shocked by the guitarist's calm, if obsessive, depiction of his drug use (too much detail, Mr. Richards, way too much) and the suggestion that such pastimes can be managed (if not always, the author admits, by him), Walt Disney is reportedly considering writing our hero out of the next "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. By contrast, the most outrageous substance abuse described in the book—a recipe for bangers and mash involving HP sauce—has attracted none of the condemnation it deserves.

Drugs have been a big part of Mr. Richards's life, but they are part of his shtick too, and the emphasis upon them in this book will buttress the Rolling Stoner as an icon of dilapidated cool. But cool is not what it was. For all the laconic detachment of Mr. Richards's frequently amusing prose, there is something sweaty about the way this former choirboy (yes, really) is so determined to establish his machismo. It's not the girls (though there are plenty—and why not) that give the game away but the hard-man anecdotes—"so, boom, I fired a shot through the floor"—the (possibly helpful) tips on knife-fighting, the brandished Jack Daniel's, the references to himself as an alpha male, the disparagement of Mick Jagger's "todger," even a competitive approach to narcotics:

"I don't think John [Lennon] ever left my house except horizontally." Mr. Richards claims to feel imprisoned by his image ("like a ball and chain"), but, ever the professional, he's willing to play along: "Folks out there created this folk hero. Bless their hearts. And I'll do the best I can to fulfill their needs."

That's good of you, mate. But preserving the illusions that feed the Rolling Stones franchise has made "Life" so much less interesting than it could have been. That said, if you're after a first-person impression of the band, especially one in which Jagger, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman have been brutally cut down, this is the book for you. Ronnie Wood's "Ronnie" (2007) is a cheery enough collection of postcards, but he only formally joined the band in 1976. Bill Wyman's "Stone Alone" (1990) ends with the storied 1969 concert/wake for Brian Jones in Hyde Park. It's OK, and the author tries to settle a few scores ("the crucial riff for 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' was mine"), but it is ultimately dragged down by historical minutiae: "Finally we ended up in the Bali restaurant in Park Street, where we had a nice lunch of curried prawns and Cokes. It was the first real meal we'd had for twenty-four hours!"

Mr. Richards disdains (or perhaps has just forgotten) such details. "Life" is impressionistic, something reinforced by its being structured as an extended monologue—Dionysus reminiscing in the pub—a process helped along by a friendly collaborator, the accomplished journalist and writer James Fox. At least one of the two of them is capable of startlingly evocative language: Brian Jones's contributions to "Let It Bleed" were the "last flare from the shipwreck."

And "Life" covers a lot of ground. After opening his story with a smug account of a potentially disastrous arrest by Dixie's finest (it turns out more "Dukes of Hazzard" than "Cool Hand Luke"), Mr. Richards takes us back to a shockingly normal working-class childhood distinguished mainly by a musical fascination that turns into an obsession. Then comes art college saving him "from the dung heap," music, more music, Jagger, the coming together of the band, and a brief period of struggle followed, astoundingly quickly, by distaff Beatlemania. After that, we're in more familiar territory: Anita Pallenberg, Altamont, the pharmaceutical adventure tour that drags on for decades, and the usual tales of studios, tours, tax avoidance and excess. This culminates—let the moralists weep—not in a junkie's death but in a successful second marriage, creative contentment and an old man's bibliophile pleasures in a Connecticut library full of George MacDonald Fraser and Patrick O'Brian.

Naturally, there's plenty for gossips (the Mars bar was on the table), armchair psychiatrists, rock archaeologists and—to borrow one marvelous phrase—"lyric-watchers" to savor, as well as revealing glimpses of the inexhaustible self-regard of this new royalty: "A jury of my peers would be Jimmy Page, a conglomeration of musicians, guys that have been on the road and know what's what. My peers are not some lady doctor and a couple of plumbers."

For the musically inclined, there's a master class in the "simple secrets" needed to make a guitar sing the Richards way, even if the source for all those "crucial, wonderful riffs that just came" remains elusive. (Bill Wyman is probably not the explanation.)

A more reliable clue can be found in the way that Mr. Richards caresses the memory of the siren songs of his youth: Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Elvis and the others, soaring across the Atlantic to an island still not quite emerged from the drabness of a war concluded more than a decade before, and, of course, this: "The early days of the magic art of guitar weaving started then. You realize what you can do playing guitar with another guy, and what the two of you can do is to the power of ten."

And so it was. And so it still is, but, after this book, Mr. Richards may have to look for a new lead singer.

Irrepressible

Leslie Brody: Irrepressible - The life and Times of Jessica Mitford

The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2010

Toffs remain big box office in Britain as, less classily, does Adolf Hitler. Combine both in one glamorous, self-mythologizing family, and it's easy to see why the six Mitford sisters have helped feed generations of English journalists and historians. The daughters of a wildly eccentric peer, they made a splash in Britain's interwar high society. Two of them then immersed themselves in the more questionable pleasures of fascism—Unity ornamented the Führer's inner circle, and Diana married Oswald Mosley, Britain's would-be Duce.

Meanwhile, Jessica (1917-96), the fifth sister, known as Decca, took a different course, to civil-war Spain (against Franco). What followed—as Leslie Brody outlines in "Irrepressible," the first biography of this particular Mitford—was an existence filled with the clichés of an Internationale-set life. Boho revolt in London and America, marriage to a left-wing Jewish lawyer (take that, Diana!), and Communist Party membership. She stuck up for spies (the Rosenbergs, naturally); she was harassed by the U.S. government (subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, of course); and, on occasion, she did brave, marvelous things. These were usually in connection with the struggle for civil rights: 1950 found her in Jackson, Miss., campaigning to save a prisoner lost in the state's lethal legal labyrinth. A decade later Mitford was a Freedom Rider.

But some freedoms were more equal than others. Jessica quit the Communist Party, tellingly late, in 1957. That was a year after the popular uprising in Hungary, a country that she had managed to visit in 1955 without finding much amiss, an example of a blindness all too typical of her life-long attitude toward the left—unforgivable, given the clarity with which she could see when she chose.

Her "The American Way of Death" (1963) was a brutally clever examination of the scams and sharp practices of the funeral business. It established her as a muckraking journalist, and it paved the way for her role as a droll, rickety, radical grande dame—a performance that only ended in 1996 with her funeral (costing $475, Ms. Brody informs us).

"Irrepressible" is a brisk, engaging and mainly admiring work, but the author—best known for "Red Star Sister," a memoir of her own years as an activist in the 1960s counterculture—seems neither worried nor terribly interested that Jessica hung on in a largely Stalinist party long past the usual wartime excuse, something that a more critical biographer might have used to suggest that the red sheep of the Mitford family was not so different from Diana and Unity after all.

Why all three women succumbed to the totalitarian temptation is to be found in their times, in their genes and in the brilliant mess of an upbringing that muddled the aesthetics of Blandings with the ethics of Berchtesgarten. But not, alas, in Ms. Brody's book.