Red Dawn

Robert Service: Spies and Commissars - The Early Years of the Russian Revolution

The Weekly Standard, February 4, 2013

Russian Civil War Monument, Archangel, Russia, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

When everything changes, what should be done?

Over 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini lit the Islamic fire, the West is still fumbling its way to a proper response. Imagine, then, the challenge posed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. A key partner in the Allied war against Germany had just been hijacked by a fanatical cult intent on remaking the world, and the world had no clue what to do in reply.

That’s the background to this fine new work by Robert Service, a distinguished historian of Soviet communism perhaps best known for his biographies of Lenin and Trotsky, two monsters brought to unusually vivid life in these pages. Here’s Trotsky, flirting with Clare Sheridan (Winston Churchill’s embarrassing first cousin, as it happens) as she sculpts his bust in the Kremlin, and there’s Lenin, “shortish, pedantic and impatient. With his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat, he seemed at times like an angry Sunday preacher.”

This is a deftly drawn book, illuminated by the author’s eye for detail, ear for a good quote, and nose for a ripping yarn.

And what a yarn it is. The ancien régime is no more. We are given a quick look at the deposed and imprisoned Czar Nicholas, the most prominent, if far from the most important, of all the “former people” (to borrow the chilling Bolshevik phrase), reading “Turgenev .  .  . [and] anti-Semitic tracts.” Meanwhile, the armies of his kinsman, the Kaiser, are tearing chunks off what once was the Russian Empire, before dissolving into confusion after defeat on the Western Front.

All is flux. The territory controlled by the Bolsheviks shrinks and grows in a mirror image of the tides of a vast, bloody, and chaotic civil war, and the Kremlin’s efforts to export its revolution to Warsaw and beyond. National independence movements rise and fall. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania get clean away (for now), Ukraine and Georgia are not so lucky. Hovering uncertainly on the fringes are troops dispatched to Russia by its erstwhile allies in the hope that they might somehow reverse the worst of the revolution. They were never able to do so.

Service gives an excellent overview of this bewildering series of conflicts, and of the dawn of revolution as a whole, but this is just the frame for his picture of a country where nothing was as it had been and everything was up for grabs. Older, more genteel techniques of influencing events no longer worked. Traditional diplomacy was dead.

But both Russia and its revolution were too big to ignore. Although foreign governments may have dithered, some of their citizens did not. It is around their stories that Service shapes his narrative. The Bolsheviks might have thought that they were steering immense, impersonal, and unstoppable historical forces, but the new world that they created was so fluid and so fragile that the individual could, and did, make a difference.

There were the true believers—early fellow travelers not just along for the ride but eager to speed it on its way—such as the American journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant, and, more equivocally, the Briton Arthur Ransome. Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, ended up an honored corpse beneath the Kremlin walls; Bryant, his widow, was subsequently married (for a while) to the man later appointed the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Ransome became a much-loved children’s writer (Swallows and Amazons and similarly wholesome fare) and a less-loved husband of one of Trotsky’s former secretaries.

Not so idealistic, but in some ways no less credulous, were the prospectors among the rubble, the entrepreneurs and con men who saw the collapse of Russian capitalism as a business opportunity. And then there are the real heroes of this book, the remarkable band of (mainly) British or British-sponsored adventurers who did what they could to overturn Bolshevik rule.

While a small British expeditionary force gathered in the far north, His Majesty’s irregulars set to work in Moscow. At least three of them—Sidney Reilly, Paul Dukes, and George Hill—could, notes Service, “have supplied inspiration for James Bond.” No martinis, but in just one paragraph we read about Reilly’s involvement with Yelizaveta. And Dagmara. And Olga. We also read about that clever and unconventional thrill-seeker, Robert Bruce Lockhart, designated “Head of the British Mission” and the ideal agent-diplomat for a place where the rules of diplomacy had broken down. Between romances, Bruce Lockhart plotted coups. And the Britons were not alone: Uncle Sam was represented by the more staid, but not ineffective, “Information” Service, run by the marvelously named Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano, a one-man tribute both to American’s melting pot and its enterprise.

If all this sounds like the stuff of John Buchan, only more so, that’s because it is. This is a story with room for Latvian riflemen, Czech Legionnaires, and a Polish Women’s Death Battalion; for failed revolutions across Europe, for conspiracies and spies, and for the daredevil aviator Merian Cooper, one of the American volunteers in an air squadron that helped Poland beat off Bolshevik invasion. (“Coop” was shot down but escaped after 10 months of Soviet captivity. A decade-and-a-half later, he coproduced, cowrote, and codirected King Kong.)

For all the tales of derring-do, however, it’s impossible to read this book without sadness and frustration. This was a tragedy that could have been cut short. Winston Churchill, a minister in the British government during this period, argued for more to be done against the Reds. He understood what his cousin Clare Sheridan did not: that this terrible infant revolution needed to be “strangled in its cradle.” Not for the last time in his career, too few listened until it was too late.

To some Western leaders, Bolshevism was a spasm that would pass. Russia’s counterrevolutionary armies—the Whites—would prevail with just a little support from the West; or maybe Bolshevism, an onslaught on human nature itself, would simply collapse, or be overthrown in its own heartlands. Others, not unreasonably, feared that their own, already war-weary peoples would be driven to revolt by the prospect of participating in what many were bound to see as a bosses’ crusade against a bright, brave experiment. So, denied the outside assistance that might have made a difference, the Whites were overwhelmed, beaten by an enemy that, in the end, proved more cohesive and determined than they were. The undersized and ultimately irrelevant Allied detachments—primarily French, Japanese, American, and British—slunk home from their beachheads, but the Western statesmen told themselves not to worry: Trade would blunt Leninist rigor, and a cordon sanitaire of new East-Central European states would keep Bolshevism confined to its birthplace.

Less than a quarter of a century later, the Red Army was in Berlin. As for His Majesty’s irregulars, most resumed lives of quieter distinction, but the (probably) Ukrainian-born Sidney Reilly (né Rosenblum) continued to fight. Lured back to the Soviet Union in an elaborate sting operation, he fell into the hands of the secret police, and, like millions to come, was killed.

A Soviet Brigadoon

National Review Online, January 8, 2013

Sillamäe Town Hall, Estonia, August 2012 © Andrew Stuttaford

It’s not easy to surprise Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s sharp and savvy president, but I reckon I succeeded. In September, I was in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to interview him for National Review. In the small talk before we turned to the euro, economic recovery, Russia, the usual, he asked me where else I had been on this visit to his country. “Sillamäe,” I replied. The presidential eyebrows rose, just a bit. Maybe there was a word thrown in too, an “interesting,” something like that.

The author of the Lonely Planet’s 1994 guide to the Baltic States and Kaliningrad would have been blunter. After explaining that Sillamäe had been “built after WW II to support a military nuclear-chemicals plant,” an over-simplification that will do for now, he went on to tempt the tougher end of the tourist trade with this: “according to press reports, the plant’s waste dump contains several tons of radioactive and highly toxic wastes, surrounded only by an earth wall 10 meters wide and is already contaminating ground water and the Baltic Sea.”

It was worse than that. The waste dump, euphemistically a waste depository, was a large lagoon, a Leninist lake, toxic and vile, described by the man responsible for cleaning it up as a “uranium pond” hosting some twelve million tons of a sludge containing “uranium, heavy metals, acids and other chemicals.” A testament to Soviet environmental sensitivity, it was open to the air, set on far-from-ideal clay, encircled by a poorly constructed wall, and located just a few yards from the sea. It leaked, and the overspill after heavy rainfall added to the mess. In 1993 the International Atomic Energy Agency labeled the site a serious radioactive risk. Four years earlier the New Scientist had reported that many of Sillamäe’s children were losing their hair. The clean-up was finally completed in 2008. I was told that what’s left of the waste is buried (with other safeguards) under a man-made hill that juts out onto the Baltic shore.

“Will that do the trick?”

“Hope so.”

Where the waste is (somewhere), Sillamäe, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

Other traces of Sillamäe’s strange history remain well above ground.

A three-hour trip to Tallinn’s east on a bus that will end up in St. Petersburg, this sleepy, gently-shrinking, largely Russian-speaking town of some 14,000 people is located at a point just a few miles from the Russian border — and at a moment poised somewhere between Estonia’s painful history and its infinitely more promising present. Before the war, there had been just a few houses here, and a Swedish-owned shale oil processing plant. When Estonia’s Soviet “liberators” returned in 1944, the local variety of oil shale (dictyonema argillite, in case you were wondering) interested them very much indeed. Among the minerals that lurked within it was uranium, something which Stalin had — up to then — found rather hard to obtain, but wanted very badly.

The old Swedish works had been destroyed during the war, but a new production unit — Kombinat no. 7, and a new town that was intended to support it — was built, much of it by the forced labor of convicts and POWs. The latter included many Balts caught up in the conflict between their homelands’ Nazi and Soviet invaders. More than half a century later, the facility’s new Estonian owners stripped away sheetrock in its administration building to reveal well-crafted brickwork. A section has been kept exposed as a memorial of sorts to those that worked — and died — here, often in appalling conditions. Just outside is a small Soviet-era monument to the Great Patriotic War, a war that Estonia was doomed to lose regardless of which of its totalitarian occupiers might prevail. History is a via dolorosa in this part of the world.

After the prisoners came yet more wreckage of war, those still remembered in Sillamäe as “the orphans.” As the plant — the USSR’s first fully operational uranium-processing facility — was completed, teenaged survivors of the siege of Leningrad were shipped in to be trained as additions to its workforce. Production started up, beginning with local material, but then switched to higher-grade ore shipped from all over Moscow’s empire. Some 100,000 tons of uranium were produced between 1946 and 1990 for both civilian and military use, a total exceeded in only two other sites in the whole Soviet bloc.

The town grew, but behind a cordon of secrecy, denial, and security. It slipped off and on the map. Sometimes it had a name, sometimes a code. It was a closed town. Access was strictly restricted. It was years before Estonians were allowed to work there (and only a handful did thereafter). For a while, the town was administered, not as a part of Soviet Estonia, but as an exclave of Soviet Russia itself.

There was something else that set Sillamäe apart. Narva, a larger city nearby, and once a jewel of the Northern Baroque, was brutally and slovenly rebuilt after the war as a generic Soviet settlement with a population to match. To be sure, there’s some of that in Sillamäe, but this was a town with a very special purpose. Those who controlled it understood that it would work better if its inhabitants — who included some highly qualified technical staff — were treated better than the Soviet norm. Sillamäe’s center is, I’ll say it, nice, a beautifully preserved showpiece for a Stalinist architecture that is, for once, neither botched, nor slum, nor Mordor. But in feel and former function, if not in appearance, it is also faintly reminiscent of the unsettling picturesque of the Village that housed The Prisoner’s Number Six.

Sillamäe , Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

This creates a vague sense of unease only underlined by the extent to which the past still lingers on here. This must be one of the few places in Estonia where the symbols of the old regime, the hammers, the sickles, the stars, can still be seen in public, discreetly incorporated into the pale, pastel facades of the buildings of downtown. That they are still in place speaks volumes about the attitude of the locals, and, rather more reassuringly, about the self-confidence of the re-born Estonian Republic, and the relative sensitivity with which it handles the ethnic Russian minority (reduced now to perhaps 25 percent of the country’s population) that remains the most troubling relic of Moscow’s colonial rule.

2 Mere Puiestee, Sillamäe Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

 
The predominant architectural style at the town’s heart is what came to be known as “retrospectivist” (yes, really), backward-looking, fortified by the reassurance of a past that predated the storms of the 20th century. Many of the buildings play with neoclassical themes. Beyond that there are stately white staircases with a touch of old Odessa about them, a neatly laid-out park, a curious statue of a man lifting, I think, a symbolic atom, a lovely tree-lined avenue, a dignified cultural center, and a fine cinema by the name of Rodina. That’s Russian for “motherland,” but whether that referred to the shared Soviet home or Mother Russia herself was never quite clear. Neither interpretation was likely to appeal to Estonians, but Estonia is a tolerant sort of place and the cinema, along with the cultural center, has enjoyed protected status for over a decade. Across the street stands the town hall, inspired by the design of a traditional Estonian Lutheran church, something that the Soviets must have thought was innocuous enough to be the subject of pastiche. The same, presumably, could be said of the nods to traditional Estonian manor houses that can be seen elsewhere in town.

Mere Puiestee,Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

Uranium production in Sillamäe was abandoned in 1990. Soviet rule in Estonia collapsed the next year, and Sillamäe rejoined the world. The facility, renamed Silmet, was privatized, sold, resold, and sold again. Since 2011, by which time Silmet had become one of only two centers in Europe for the processing of rare earths (elements that are crucial for a wide range of electronics), it has been owned by the U.S. mining group, Molycorp.

Atom monument, Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

But Sillamäe itself, adrift from time and place, a Soviet Brigadoon but forever in full view, endures. There’s a tucked-away town museum (judging by the friendly, but astonished, welcome I received from the three or four ladies who preside there, I was the first visitor for weeks). Apart from some atrocious local art and a collection of dolls that looks as if it has been curated by a serial killer, it boasts a couple of rooms that give a bric-a-brac impression of everyday life during Sillamäe’s Soviet past.

Town Museum, Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012 © Andrew Stuttaford

Then again, wandering around town will do pretty much the same thing (if you ignore the well-stocked shops). Ethnic Russians continue to make up the overwhelming majority of the town’s population. Dreaming, perhaps, of the lost certainties of Brezhnev’s day, babushkas still wander down Mere Avenue as it sweeps grandly down to the Baltic. Lenin Avenue has gone, but there are streets named after Russian literary figures and the first cosmonaut too. Up by the bus station, there’s an imposing Soviet war memorial with flowers at its base.

Soviet war memorial, Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

But, despite pot-stirring by the Kremlin, and the occasional eruption (most notoriously over the removal to a less prominent place of another Soviet memorial — this time in Tallinn), time, the passing of the older generation, Estonia’s remarkable economic performance, and access to the rest of the EU have all brought a measure of live-and-let-live to relations between the country’s two principal ethnic groups. Unlike in Latvia, where the demographics are even more delicately balanced, there is no specifically “Russian” party represented in the Estonian Parliament, and once-noisy calls for the autonomy of the still hardscrabble Russian-speaking Northeast have died down. Both in Sillamäe and in Tallinn I was assured that younger Russians are at last learning Estonian (even if, understandably enough, their Estonian peers are reluctant to learn Russian, the language of their country’s former oppressor), something that may even give them something of an employment edge in a country that is in practice, if not in law, bilingual.

When it comes to this topic, David O’Brock, the engaging Ohio native (and long-time resident of Estonia) who runs Molycorp Silmet, is cautiously upbeat about what lies ahead. Almost all the workers at his factory are ethnic Russians and many, even the middle-aged and older, are studying Estonian, or other languages that could be of use in a world that now extends far beyond Moscow’s reach.

A once-closed town is opening up. And in more ways than one.

The Silence That Speaks Volumes

François Bizot: Facing the Torturer

The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2012

In 1971, François Bizot, a French ethnologist living in Cambodia, was seized by Khmer Rouge insurgents. Held in a prison camp for 77 days and then freed, he is the only Westerner to have survived anything but the briefest brush with Khmer Rouge captivity. His interrogation sessions evolved into a twisted facsimile of friendship with the camp’s commander, Comrade Duch. Convinced that his prisoner wasn’t after all working for the CIA, Duch persuaded the Khmer Rouge leadership to let the Frenchman go.

Phnom Penh fell to the Communists in 1975. Not so long after, Duch was appointed director of the new regime’s Tuol Seng prison. There some 17,000 people—men, women and children—would perish over the next four years, frequently after torture designed to “prove” a guilt that no longer had to be anchored in any reality. When Mr. Bizot later discovered what his tormentor-savior had become, he agonized over Duch’s “monstrous transformation.” Partly in response, in 2000, he published “The Gate,” a powerful, if lushly overwritten, memoir of his capture, release and eventual evacuation with other foreigners from Phnom Penh after that city’s surrender to the Khmer Rouge. He reached the perversely empathetic conclusion that Duch had merely managed to “tame” the terror that must have enveloped him in the nightmare world of the Khmer Rouge, just as Mr. Bizot had come to control his fear while chained up in that camp. In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Bizot described a return to Cambodia prompted by Duch’s arrest in 1999.

“Facing the Torturer” (at least notionally) picks up where “The Gate” left off and culminates in the author’s appearance as a prosecution witness at Duch’s 2009 U.N.-supervised trial. But this short book—and for a short book it can be very long-winded—is rooted in Mr. Bizot’s prolonged reinterpretations of his experiences in the Cambodia of four decades ago. It is a reappraisal colored by incidents that stretch even further back, and the book’s first chapter features a meditation on a possibly necessary evil from his youth—the killing of a beloved pet—and on an incident when, as a small boy in occupied France, he was punished by his panicked mother for sticking his tongue out at a German officer. “I understood that fear could push anyone beyond the normal limits of their behavior.” There is also a recollection of the unease he felt walking past a slaughterhouse as a child and memories of his time in the French army fighting in Algeria.

Such moments are assembled as evidence for a broader case, not so much against Duch, whose individual responsibility Mr. Bizot readily accepts, but against humanity as a whole. We are all capable of horror, he wants us to know: a discovery about as startling as the realization that, as a species, we walk on two legs. In 2010, Duch was convicted of torture, murder and “crimes against humanity” and is now serving a life sentence. Mr. Bizot sees the verdict almost as collective alibi: “We never look under the mask of the monster to make out the familiar face of a human being.” Oh, please.

Mr. Bizot corresponded with his former captor and went to see him in prison. But what lies behind that mask remains, in the end, elusive. Duch’s sparse and dutifully contrite written response to “The Gate” is included in “Facing the Torturer” but gives little away: “Life forces us to do things we do not like doing.” Given the grotesque cruelty of Tuol Seng, there must have been something more than mere opportunity, or the chaos of midcentury Indochina, that turned Kaing Guek Eav, a former math teacher, into another of the 20th century’s lethal everymen.

Duch was a merciless jailer, killer and torturer. But he is neither insane, nor, it seems, a sadist. Nor was he just obeying the orders of a leadership too dangerous to defy. The best clues in the pages of either book (and “The Gate” and “Facing the Torturer” should be read together) as to why—and how—Eav became Duch are tantalizingly incomplete. We glimpse a “demanding and moral being” (he has now, make of it what you will, converted to Christianity) who becomes “possessed” by a cult that offers him the austere pleasures of purification and an intoxicating immersion in a quest for a liberation that was anything but.

Mr. Bizot explains how torturing was for Duch “part of a whole. It was nothing more than putting the ardor of his commitment into practice, the action being in proportion to the greatness of the revolutionary ends . . . a task that he could only carry out by making himself literally ‘out of breath.’ ” Doubtless, it became easier over time.

But of the cult that consumed this “man of faith,” there isn’t much analysis in either of Mr. Bizot’s volumes—just sightings of shadows and fragments of a greater malignancy. The “dreadful smothering” of Cambodia lurks, for the most part, either offstage or in echo or reflection. But the evil comes into clear view in Mr. Bizot’s terrible, telling details. In “Facing the Torturer,” he recounts the chaos of the refugee camps set up in Thailand for Cambodians as their country collapsed into darkness. The camp that the Khmer Rouge had—astoundingly—been permitted to run on Thai territory stood out for “its cleanliness, silence, discipline.”

It was there that some of the evacuees from the French embassy—”journalists and humanitarians”—came across a “half-naked boy tied to a post: He had fainted under the scorching sun.” They complained to the authorities, only to be told that the child was a thief. He had been caught stealing from “one of the bags of rice allocated to the collective.” Well, the camp was so much more orderly than anything else the visitors had seen that they found themselves “unable to utter any protest.” They muttered a few words of lukewarm praise and left. “I was,” recalls Mr. Bizot, “familiar with this kind of silence.”

Masters of the Dark Arts

Igor Golomstock: Totalitarian Art

The Wall Street Journal, June  25, 2011

Marszalkowska 1, Warsaw, September 1988  © Andrew Stuttaford

Twentieth-century totalitarian art did not just gild the cage; it helped to build it. Paintings, movies, sculpture, architecture and festivals of choreographed joy were vital elements in the Nazi and Communist attempts to remake man. It is key to our understanding of the nightmare states that resulted, argues Igor Golomstock, and deserves to be classified as a distinctive artistic genre alongside Modernism, of which it was both byway and heir. Like Modernism, totalitarian art was intended to help sweep away what had gone before, but unlike Modernism it was prepared to steal from the past to do so. The style of the 19th-century "bourgeois" academy was thus conscripted into the service of Reich and eventually revolution, as hallmark, teacher and, to us, cliché.

In his newly updated (it was first published in 1990) "Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China," Mr. Golomstock convincingly demonstrates how the overlapping aesthetic values of these superficially disparate regimes underlined how much they had in common. This was never clearer than at the Paris exhibition of 1937.  In an unsettling preview of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Eiffel Tower found itself squeezed between massive Nazi and Soviet pavilions. Conceived as fusions of sculpture and architecture, both were expressions of brute power that played Neanderthal tribute to ancient Rome and were guarded by giant images, of the master race on the one hand, the master class on the other.

The strongest sections of the book concern the Soviet Union, as one might expect from an author whose career included membership in the Union of Soviet Artists and direct encounters with Stalinist brutality. Mr. Golomstock's father was sent to the camps in 1934, and then, some years later, his mother, taking the young Igor with her, signed up to work as a doctor at Kolyma, one of the worst of the Gulag's outposts.

Mr. Golomstock tracks the way that the smash-it-all-up trial-and-error of late imperial Russia's avant-garde (experiments that were paralleled, revealingly enough, by Italy's proto-fascist Futurists) initially meshed with the ecstatic starting-from-scratch of the Bolshevik revolutionary intelligentsia.

The extraordinary artistic innovation of the early Soviet years was rapidly replaced, however, by the stodgy conservatism of high Stalinist culture. The revolutionary past was sanitized, then mythologized. The hardscrabble present was transformed into a time of abundance by what Mr. Golomstock marvelously calls the "magic mirror" of Socialist Realism. The didactic, neo-Victorian paintings, the monumental if clumsily neoclassical architecture and, after 1941, the numerous evocations of martial valor and national pride, were all manifestations of an ersatz traditionalism that resonated with a people exhausted by decades of upheaval and were, of course, perfectly suited to the maintenance of a tightly controlled, rigidly hierarchical new order.

That said, for all Mr. Golomstock's experience and erudition, he falls some way short of conveying the ambition, allure and, well, totality of totalitarianism's cultural projects. While his examination of Nazi art takes useful detours away from the time-worn trudge through lumpen Arcadias and leaden Valhallas to include discussion of the centralized (Soviet-style) control of artistic production, he devotes relatively little space to the party's sometimes brilliant manipulation of design, its use of spectacle—Albert Speer's cathedrals of light—or, even, the films of Leni Riefenstahl. The whole picture never quite comes into view, and it was the whole picture that was the point.

It is no less frustrating that Mr. Golomstock allocates such a small portion of his book to China, the third of the 20th century's great totalitarian empires—particularly as he does find room for an addendum on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a revoltingly bloody but basically traditional despotism that left little behind it of artistic interest to anyone other than connoisseurs of peculiarly servile kitsch. By contrast, as Mao's Cultural Revolution gathered pace from 1966 on, the mounting political hysteria was reflected, channeled and amplified in and by the arts in ways still terrifying today.

There were the dazibao, the giant-lettered, largely hand-made "big character" wall posters that signaled its beginning. There was the hectoring banality of revolutionary opera. And there were the images—sometimes reproduced in their millions—that both drew upon Socialist Realism and transcended it, a process that culminated in the depiction of Mao as essentially divine. As a demonstration of the fundamentally religious nature of communism, the deification of the Great Helmsman is hard to beat, and it represents the logical conclusion of totalitarian art. Unfortunately, you won't find any direct reference to it in Mr. Golomstock's fascinating, painstaking but ultimately incomplete book.

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.

Naming the Crime

Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands - Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

National Review Online, March 18, 2011

Winter is bleak enough as it is. This year the gloom was deepened by the publication of How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, by Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain’s most feted historians, and, oh yes, a man who stuck with the Communist party until 1991 despite a global killing spree that took perhaps one hundred million lives. Naturally Hobsbawm’s new book has triggered the usual hosannas from the usual congregation for, to quote the Guardian, this “grand old man.”

There had, of course, been that minor unpleasantness back in the 1990s when Hobsbawm had appeared to imply that the deaths of 15 or 20 million people might have been justified had the Communist utopia actually been achieved. This ancient ogre (he is 93) is now more discreet. Reviewing How to Change the World in the Financial Times, Francis Wheen, no rightist and the author of an erudite and entertaining biography of Karl Marx, noted how Hobsbawm could not “bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact, referring only to ‘temporary episodes such as 1939–41.’ The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring were [also] skipped over.”

But who are we to quibble, when, as his admirers like to remind us, Hobsbawm’s life has been “shaped by the struggle against fascism,” an excuse understandable in the 1930s (Hobsbawm, who is Jewish, quit Germany as a teenager in 1933), but grotesque more than six decades after the fall of the Third Reich.

Just how grotesque was highlighted by two books that came out last year. In the first, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder describes the darkness that engulfed a stretch of Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century. He leaves only one convincing response to the question that dominates the second, Stalin’s Genocides, by Stanford’s Norman Naimark: For all the unique evils of the Holocaust, was Stalin, no less than Hitler, guilty of genocide?

The first half of Professor Snyder’s grim saga revolves around the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33, a manufactured catastrophe in which zeal, malice and indifference conspired to create a horror in which, Snyder calculates, well over three million perished (there are other, much higher, estimates). It was, Snyder writes, “not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.”

The Ukrainian countryside had already been devastated by collectivization and the killing, imprisonment, or exile of millions of its most enterprising inhabitants. Now it was to be stripped of what little it had left. The peasants were given targets for the amount of grain and other foodstuffs they were expected to hand over to the state, targets that would leave them with barely anything to live on, and often not even that. Refusal was not an option. Starvation was not an excuse. Nothing was left behind. Nobody was allowed to leave. The peasants were trapped. And they were condemned. In the spring of 1933 they died at the rate of more than ten thousand a day. “The only meat was human.”

That fall the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.

Communism has brought mass starvation in its wake on a number of occasions (2010 also saw the appearance of Mao’s Great Famine,by Frank Dikötter, a harrowing account of the death of millions during the Chairman’s Great Leap Forward), but what distinguishes the Ukrainian Holodomor (a coinage that means murder by hunger) is that, as Snyder demonstrates, this particular famine was not just incidental to the business of fashioning utopia. It was deliberate, a weapon designed to break a class enemy, Ukraine’s embattled peasantry, and the battered nation of which it was the backbone.

It is this national element that some historians would like to deny. It unsettles the conventional narrative under which the ethnically based mass murders of mid-20th-century Europe are associated almost exclusively with Nazis, and, in so doing, it raises some awkward questions about those in the democratic world who looked so longingly to Moscow in the 1930s. The details of the Holodomor might have been obscure or obscured, but there was a fairly widespread awareness in the West that something had occurred. How else to explain all that talk of omelet and eggs? Those who claimed to have turned to Communism only because of the growing Nazi threat must have believed that those millions of dead Ukrainians counted for very little.

And it wasn’t just Ukrainians. As the Thirties curdled on, the list of peoples brutalized by Stalin grew ever longer. The “national operations” that were a murderous subset of the Great Terror of 1937–38 accounted for some 250,000 deaths, including those of at least 85,000 Soviet Poles. The hideous ethnic persecution developing in the Third Reich throughout the 1930s may have been more overt than its Soviet counterpart, but it was in the USSR that the cattle trucks were already rolling. At that stage Hitler’s haul of victims lagged far behind.

That was to change. The second part of Snyder’s book details how the Nazis brought their own flavor of hell to the territories he dubs the Bloodlands. With his feel for neglected history, Snyder restores focus to the terrible fate of the Soviet POWs who had fallen into German hands: “The Germans shot, on a conservative estimate, half a million Soviet prisoners of war. By way of starvation or mistreatment during transit, they killed about 2.6 million more.”

He correctly sees this not just as a matter of callousness and cruelty but as an adjunct to Hitler’s wider plans for a region that was to be emptied of most of its original inhabitants and re-peopled by the master race.

And then, of course, there were the Jews. In page after grueling page, Snyder depicts the pogrom that erupted across the Bloodlands. After all these years, after all the histories, there are still details that appall: “By spring 1943, fires burned at Treblinka day and night. . . . Women, with more fatty tissue, burned better than men; so the laborers learned to put them on the bottom of the pile.”

In an interesting twist, Snyder reveals how the usual Western understanding of the Holocaust, centered on the almost clinical danse macabre of deportation and eventual extermination in a camp far from Paris, Amsterdam, or Rome, fails to reflect the more typical experience to the east. The frenzied killings that swept the Bloodlands in the wake of the German invasion — within six months one million Soviet Jews had been butchered — are the clearest possible evidence of a primeval savagery unleashed.

To suggest, as some have, that, by twinning his chronicle of Nazi atrocity with a history of the Soviet slaughters of the previous decade, Snyder has in some way diminished the Holocaust is absurd. The Holocaust was underpinned by a dream of annihilation that was all its own, but it was also a product of its era. Like Communism, Nazism was a creed with a strong religious resonance (it’s no coincidence that this was a time when more conventional religions were losing their traditional hold over the human imagination), yet it aimed at creating a utopia for its elect here on earth, a dangerous enough delusion under the best of circumstances, let alone those developing in the early 20th century. For these utopias were, quite explicitly, to be built by bloodshed and sustained by force, a prospect made all the more menacing by technological advance, the growth of the modern state, and, critically, the shattering of so much of European civilization by the First World War. That conflict opened the door to the Bolshevik Revolution, which in turn helped pave the way for the Third Reich, a state that was both reaction against and imitation of the Soviet Union.

The Führer who, contemplating the Holocaust, once asked “who now remembers” the Armenian genocide. would certainly have noticed how quickly the Holodomor was allowed to vanish down the memory hole.

In some ways it is still there. That the Stalinist regime was guilty of what any reasonable person would describe as genocide has been beyond dispute for decades. Yet somehow there has been a hesitation about branding the Soviet state with the worst of the marks of Cain, a hesitation that still resonates — in politics, in diplomacy, and in high culture and low. Would there have been quite such an uproar if fashion designer John Galliano had said that he “loved” Stalin rather than Hitler?

In Stalin’s Genocides, Professor Naimark recounts how the definition of genocide was diluted before being enshrined in the 1948 United Nations convention. At the insistence of the Soviets — and others — the destruction of specific social and political groups was excluded. It was a distinction rooted neither in logic nor in morality, but it worked its sinister magic. Sparing Stalin, and by extension the state that he spawned, from the taint of genocide allowed the USSR to maintain some sort of hold over the radiant future that — against all the evidence — it still claimed to be building, that radiant future that has proved such a handy alibi for all the Hobsbawms and, even, for their successors today. It helped ensure that Mao’s famine too was largely passed over in silence. It still enables Russia to avoid the hard truths of its own history, an evasion that poisons its politics both at home and abroad. Sadly, it’s no surprise that the new pro-Moscow government in Ukraine has been playing down the genocidal nature of the Holodomor.

Since the Balkan wars, the jurisprudence of genocide has, as Professor Naimark shows, evolved to the point at which there could be no serious legal doubt that the architects of Soviet mass murder would, if hauled before a court today, receive the judgment they deserve. Prosecutions for the Soviet genocides have, however, been pitifully few and confined to the liberated Baltic states. Thus, in May 2008, one Arnold Meri was tried for his role in the deportation of 251 Estonians almost sixty years before. He died before a verdict could be reached. Not long later Dmitri Medvedev awarded Meri a posthumous medal for his wartime service.

And if you want just one reason why these books by Professors Snyder and Naimark are so important, that’s not a bad place to start. Hobsbawm you can junk.

Big Bruder Watching

Gary Bruce: The Firm - The Inside  story of the Stasi

The Weekly Standard, January 24, 2011

The Wall, Berlin, August 1978 © Andrew  Stuttaford

Stalin’s observation that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic helps explain why some of the finest portraits of 20th-century totalitarianism have been miniatures. Ivan Denisovich’s “day without a dark cloud” and the hunt for the Jewish schoolboys in Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants illuminate horrors that stretch far beyond one outpost of the Gulag or a stagnant Vichy town. The decision by the Canadian historian Gary Bruce to focus his new history of the East German secret police, the Stasi (Staatssicherheit), on Perleberg and Gransee, two out-of-the-way districts in communism’s distaff Germany, might have promised something of the same. But that’s not what his book delivers.

Instead, Bruce takes advantage of the fact that an unusually high proportion of the Stasi archives were left untouched in the backwaters that are his setting to produce a meticulous, grassroots examination of (to quote Timothy Garton Ash) “the quieter corruption of [East Germany’s] mature totalitarianism.” Supplemented by a series of interviews both with former secret policemen and those they watched over, The Firm is well done, even if Bruce’s approach has meant that the grand guignol of the Stasi’s formative years is passed over too lightly for his book to be viewed as a truly comprehensive analysis of that organization’s malignant DNA. The worst aspects of the later, more discreetly brutal, decades also escape the scrutiny they deserve. There’s little on the fates of those “the firm” (the Stasi’s smug nickname for itself) considered its most serious opponents. Their cases would have been handled by (and usually in) East Berlin.

This matters. East Germany’s past remains poorly known outside its former borders and, judging by the perverse phenomenon of Ostalgie, even within them. In making Au Revoir les Enfants, Malle could rely on his audience’s familiarity with the film’s backstory of war, occupation, and Holocaust. Bruce is in no position to make similar assumptions. Nonspecialists would thus do better to turn elsewhere, perhaps to Anne McElvoy’s The Saddled Cow (1992), a perceptive overview of East German history written by a journalist who witnessed its final years, or for a somewhat later examination of still raw memories, Anna Funder’s haunting Stasiland (2003):

Frau Paul started opening doors. First a compartment so small a person could only stand. It was designed to be filled with icy water up to the neck. There were sixty-eight of these, she told me. Then there were concrete cells with nothing in them where prisoners would be kept in the dark amid their own excrement. There was a cell lined entirely with padded rubber. Frau Paul was held nearby.

You won’t find much of that in The Firm. Also missing are the Stasi’s international activities, from espionage to the support of terrorism, dirty work that took place far from the dull towns in which Bruce’s narrative unfolds. Equally, there are few traces of the dangerous dance between regime and intelligentsia that forms the subtext of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning The Lives of Others (2006). The prominent playwright who is that movie’s principal protagonist bears scant resemblance to Bruce’s bullied provincials.

Where The Firm comes into its own, however, is as a demonstration of the remarkable reach of East Germany’s surveillance state. The Stasi employed 91,000 full-time officers at the time the regime fell. In the prewar Reich, a country with a population well over three times as large, the Gestapo made do with 7,000. To be sure, the Nazis enjoyed greater popular support than their Communist successors, but statistics from other Warsaw Pact countries suggest that this cannot be the sole explanation for the difference. As Bruce notes, “The secret services of .  .  . Czechoslovakia (1:867) or Poland (1:1,574) did not even come close to the ratio in East Germany of one full-time secret police officer for every 180 East German citizens.”

We are left to guess why. Fear of the vanquished fascist enemy? Maybe. Stereotypically Teutonic thoroughness? Probably. The dangerous, reproachful proximity of the free, increasingly prosperous, Germany next door? Almost certainly.

The snooping didn’t stop with the 91,000. In 1989, the Stasi had 173,000 informants on its books. They were given the generic, now reviled, name of unofficial coworker (I—Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) but were then subclassified according to a distinctively totalitarian taxonomy. This included Secret Lead Informants (GHI), and below them, trusty Full-time Unofficial Coworkers (HIM), and below them, lowly Societal Coworkers for Security (GMS), and then, forming part of the base of this unlovely pyramid, Sporadic Contact Persons (KP) and Collaborative Operational Partners (POZW). In 1988, there was one informant for roughly every 76 preretirement adults in sleepy Perleberg District, a total that Bruce contrasts with one snitch for every 16,800 people in the Ukrainian regional hub of Kharkov at the depths of Stalinist terror.

The Gestapo, of course, benefited from the willingness (for varied reasons) of so many Germans to volunteer information on their neighbors to authorities for whom they had some sympathy. As “the sword and shield” (naturally the iconography was borrowed from the Soviet secret police) of a regime profoundly disliked for most of its existence, the Stasi had to be more proactive. Bruce shows how it recruited (predictably, a mixture of carrot and stick) and why. One Kurt Wollschläger was chosen because of the need to ferret out grumblers at the local river port. That Wollschläger was separated from his wife was, the Stasi (prudish when it came to behavior within its own ranks) reckoned, a plus: He had more time to hang around in bars. That he was a former Nazi was no problem.

Informants would report regularly to their handlers, a snippet here, an observation there, sometimes harmless, sometimes not, and sometimes, perhaps most characteristically, as a piece in a complex composite portrait being assembled of an individual that the regime was beginning to distrust. If it looked as if those suspicions might have been justifie—he bar was low: no laws needed to have been broke—he screws would tighten, relentlessly, remorselessly, but not necessarily attributably. There was not always a warning chat. A job would be suddenly lost; new employment would be hard to find. A child would not win that university place. Ugly gossip might be circulated. The phone would ring at night, with only silence at the other en— perfect expression of this shadowy, subtle, and devastating form of repression.

There was a word for this: Zersetzen (“to undermine” or “to break down”). For outright dissidents, for those “preparing to flee the Republic” or those whose mutters of discontent had tipped over into something more insistent, there was prison (and, on occasion, the bullet). The more fortunate won exile, or had exile forced upon them. For the law-abiding who never crossed such lines, there was always the reality or the risk of Zersetzen, a vital element in a system of understated control that Bruce describes as hovering “ominously in the distance, always threatening, always unsettling, a constant potential threat.” And it worked. The German Democratic Republic was, almost until the end, one of Moscow’s better-behaved satellites.

Coerced good behavior should not be confused with enthusiasm. An appropriately skeptical Bruce reports on reprehensible efforts by some historians to strip that ill-mannered adjective “totalitarian” from the regime that collapsed with the Wall: “Welfare dictatorship .  .  . post-totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship .  .  . thoroughly ruled society .  .  . forced through society” and, thanks to its colossal number of informants, “participatory dictatorship” are amongst the euphemisms that have slithered into view. We can only speculate at what motivates such nonsense: Is it the persistent academic desire to minimize the crimes of the left, or is it an unwillingness to come to terms with the full implications of past horrors?

Such poisons have a way of seeping out from university campuses, but in the case of the former East Germany, their potency is reinforced by the natural tendency of its onetime citizens to allow past moments of personal happiness to cast a favorable glow over the republic in which they once endured: “Oh, it wasn’t all bad, you know.” Bruce handles this difficult topic with considerable subtlety before concluding that one can no more put a boundary between everyday life in the fallen republic and the ever-present awareness of the Stasi’s presence than “one can encircle a scent in a room.”

The Stasi’s stink not only lingers where it once did (and sometimes very strongly) but has also been allowed to waft into the former West Germany. The Left party, a grouping formed by the merger of western leftists with the “reformed” heirs to East Germany’s old governing party, took some 12 percent of the vote in the united Germany’s 2009 elections. Reformed? Well, when Joachim Gauck, a former dissident and for 10 years the first federal commissioner for the Stasi archives, addressed the parliament in Saxony, a territory that was once part of East Germany, the event was boycotted by all Left party parliamentarians.

Tower of Power

Norbert Lynton: Tatlin's Tower - Monument to Revolution

The Weekly Standard: June 14, 2010

Imagine that a critic had written a book centered on Olympia and Triumph of the Will without emphasizing the fact, however well known, that the Nazi ideology to which the director of those movies had dedicated her talent had led to the slaughter of millions. You can’t. It would be inconceivable. Few can deny that, at their best (if that’s the adjective), Leni Riefenstahl’s films were works of genius, but their hideous context should never be ignored. And generally it isn’t.

The artists who promoted Soviet communism are given an easier ride. To take perhaps the most prominent, Sergei Eisenstein is remembered today as a stylistically revolutionary filmmaker. Fair enough. But who mentions that he, no less than Riefenstahl, was a flack for totalitarian savagery? And Eisenstein was not alone. As the Bolsheviks hacked their millennial way to a radiant future built on slaughter, medieval despotism, and the annihilation of the society that had preceded them, they were cheered on by some of the brightest creative spirits of their era, by Malevich, by Rodchenko, by Mayakovsky, by—well, take your pick.

Amongst those who cheered the loudest was Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), designer of the immense (perhaps 1,200 feet tall) unbuilt structure that became a defining emblem of revolutionary élan. He is the subject of this fascinating, if in one sense tellingly uncritical, study completed by the noted British art historian Norbert Lynton shortly before his death in 2007. Scholarly, densely argued, and rendered more opaque still by the gaps in Tatlin’s foggy biography, the book is wonderfully illustrated but not the easiest of reads. That said, persevere for long enough and you will be left mourning the brilliant culture of Russia’s imperial twilight, struck by the strangeness of what replaced it, and appalled by the moral vacuum at the heart of Lynton’s book.

Already deservedly (as Lynton demonstrates) famous as one of Russia’s leading modern artists, Tatlin began planning his building, the “tower” of Lynton’s title, in early 1919, shortly after taking a senior position in the ministry run by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin’s commissar for enlightenment. The tower was to be a monument to the Third International (the Comintern) and thus to global revolution. As such, it would have been a celebration of massacres past, present, and to come. Dreamt up as a wonder of the modern world, Tatlin’s tower was to be the lighthouse of some nightmare Pharos, a beacon illuminating only the way to destruction.

None of this seems to have bothered Lynton overmuch. He confines himself to anodyne remarks about the tower’s role as an incitement to revolution without worrying too much what that revolution might mean in practice, a peculiar omission from a man (a Jewish boy in Hitler’s Reich) who had himself been forced to flee the rage of a state.

On the other hand, one of the strengths of this book is the manner in which Lynton links Tatlin’s plans for his tower to the curious (and now largely forgotten) fusion of mysticism and futurism (Lynton’s suggestion that the tower also reflects Christian imagery is less convincing) that could be found in the thinking of some sections of the pro-Bolshevik intelligentsia: His “temple” would, Tatlin gushed, be the precursor of a future “temple of the worlds—which would .  .  . move in infinite space,” emancipating “all the world from bondage to gravity” and paving the way for the “expression .  .  . of mutual love of all the generations,” of a mankind that must become “sky-mechanics and sky-physicists.”

A marginally less overexcited Nikolai Punin, future lover, companion, and heartbreaker of the poetess Anna Akhmatova, and a man ultimately destined to perish in the Gulag, explained how the tower, home to the coming world government, would be an “organic synthesis of architecture, sculpture, and painting.” It was to encompass three large halls, one “for legislative purposes,” shaped like a cube, that rotated annually, one pyramidal (for bureaucrats) that rotated monthly, and one cylindrical, dedicated to “disseminating information to the world proletariat,” which was meant to rotate daily. These halls would be enveloped within a double helix framework that hinted at the ziggurats of antiquity and myth. Location, too, was crucial. The idea was that this vast, asymmetrical edifice of steel, iron, and glass would squat in the middle of the former St. Petersburg. Taunting and overshadowing the elegance and grandeur of the old imperial capital that had itself once represented a new direction for Russia, it would stand as a rebuke to history and homage to the future.

Spiraled, pointing, angled, closer in appearance to a giant telescope or piece of artillery than to a building, Tatlin’s work conveyed both an impression of coiled power and energy unleashed. This was an architecture parlante intended to roar, a stupendous symbol of the new age. Statues of men on horseback were, like the aristocrats—the individuals—they depicted, to be consigned to the past. Tatlin’s tower would be utilitarian, a manifestation of the collective will, a “living machine” made of industrial materials yet somehow organic, functional, more-than-modern and, like the revolution, in perpetual motion.

Of course, it was never built. The resources were not there; the political will was not there (those running the new Soviet state preferred their monuments representational, solid, and stolid); and the technology was not there. Failing to take account of the last was a rare lapse for Tatlin, the son of an engineer and a man who took pride in his technical savvy, unless the tower was (as plausibly claimed by John Milner in the fine monograph on Tatlin he wrote in the 1980s) not so much impractical as explicitly utopian from the get-go, a manifesto rather than a blueprint.

Tatlin did manage to build at least three large-scale models of his tower, photographs of which are included in Lynton’s book. The first stood around 15 feet high above a circular base (in which someone could crouch, turning the cranks that moved the tower’s halls); the second, slightly smaller and decidedly more elegant, was exhibited in 1925 in Paris, home of the Eiffel Tower that had partly inspired it; and the third, stripped down and simplified, made an appearance, like some futurist fetish, at a ceremonial parade in Leningrad the same year. All three have since vanished, long since lost like so much else in the Soviet junkyard, but Tatlin’s original vision itself endured in the leftist imagination as a statement of the what-could-be and, later, the what-could-have-been. Artistically, its status as one of the 20th century’s most influential icons of architecture unbound remains undiminished.

As for Tatlin, his career went into a decline in the culturally more conventional years of full Stalinism, neither out of favor, nor quite in. His became a life of smaller-scale projects, from furniture design, to stage sets, to art more traditional than anything he had produced for decades. What was left of his old utopian obsessions revealed itself in prolonged attempts to perfect the Letatlin, his final challenge to “the bondage of gravity.” A man-powered flying machine of remarkable beauty—oddly, no images of this craft are included in Lynton’s book—it was inspired by the work of Leonardo da Vinci, another artist uncomfortable with strict divisions between the aesthetic and the practical, in the same field. It never flew.

Towards the end, Lynton includes a picture of an older Tatlin. He looks sad, beaten, crushed, an Icarus who had fallen to earth without ever reaching the heavens.

King & the Commissars

David King: Red Star over Russia

The New Criterion, March 1, 2010

To be asked to pick the best book that you have read in the past year is usually an invitation to equivocation, but that was not the case on one evening in the late 1990s when my interrogator—and that’s the word—was the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. “Well,” I replied, “The Commissar Vanishes.”

She hadn’t heard of it. Good. Liked the book’s concept. Better. Told an aide to write down the title. Better still. Didn’t know that it was written by an unreconstructed lefty. Ah, just as well.

David King’s The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (1997) remains one of the finest and most unusual pieces of Sovietology ever produced. To start with, it is based on photographs, posters, and illustrations drawn from its author’s massive 250,000-piece collection of images relating to Russia, the former Soviet Union and “Communist movements everywhere,” a unique resource that King has been assembling for decades. This reddest of hoards is a monument to King’s political leanings—he has published more than is entirely healthy on the topic of Leon Trotsky—but, thanks to its range, it has ended up as something far grander than that. The same might be said of The Commissar Vanishes. Inspired by the way in which the Soviets wrote Trotsky out of history, King’s command of his material transforms what might have been a mildly interesting Fourth Internationalist lament into a startlingly original evisceration of the Stalinist method.

Specifically, the book revolves around the way that images and, in particular, photographs were repeatedly chopped, changed, juggled, retouched, altered, and manipulated by a regime determined to remove inconvenient traces of inconvenient people from the historical record. Execution was not enough. The lives that had gone before that concluding bullet in the skull had to be retrospectively reshaped to fit Stalin’s Procrustean view of how the Soviet story should be told.

It was a campaign that recognized no distinction between public and private, and it was a campaign that nobody could safely ignore. King highlights the precision with which the famous artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko inked out the faces of the purged from his personal copy of a book he had himself produced. Blackly blank-faced, these remnants, these apparitions, these Banquos at the apparatchiks’ dangerous feast, linger on the page alongside those still in favor, a warning, a reproach, an act of insurance. As the countless scribblings over, hacked-out heads, and other precautionary mutilations of books from this era bear witness, such ad hoc self-censorship was commonplace, if too crude and small-scale for the needs of a modern totalitarian state. To fill that gap, specialists emerged, dedicated to the wholesale reengineering of history into a malleable, constantly reedited narrative.

But it was not enough to lie about the past. Those lies had to work. They had to be buttressed and reinforced. They had to be illustrated. In one characteristic sequence, King shows how Trotsky, the commissar of King’s tellingly elegiac title, was among those subsequently “vanished” from a frequently published photograph of the second anniversary of the October revolution. With tinkering such as this, history could be continuously (the party line was always changing) reshaped, reinvented, and manufactured in a process only occasionally—and incompletely—redeemed by the archetypically Soviet slovenliness of those who sliced and diced their way through the past but sometimes allowed the faintest suggestion of the truth to slip through. In another photograph of those same celebrations republished in 1987, most of Trotsky has been edited out, but his elbow survives, unexplained, unidentified, somebody’s elbow, nobody’s elbow.

As an explanation of history through its manipulation, The Commissar Vanishes is a technical tour de force. As an examination of the wider pathologies of the Stalinist state it is a masterpiece. It was followed by Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (2003), a collection of over a hundred mugshots from the NKVD/KGB archives, glimpses of the doomed hours or days from their annihilation.

Compared with the narrower focus of those two earlier works, Red Star over Russia is an unruly sprawling epic, “a fast-forward visual history of the Soviet Union” from 1917 until just after the death of Stalin. Based again on King’s archive, this book is another extraordinary creation, but to understand it properly it helps to look at the reasons King gives for concluding his narrative when he does:

The subsequent “period of stagnation”, when Leonid Brezhnev was in charge, was generally as dull and sluggish on the visual front as it was politically, and for this reason has been left out. So too have the final years of collapse under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.”

Perhaps the perestroika era was omitted because the break in the narrative would have been too tricky to manage. Perhaps. Given his ideological orientation, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that King might have found this terminal renunciation of 1917’s once radiant future just too awful a development to contemplate. That said, his assertion that it was largely aesthetic considerations that led him to pass over the stodgy Brezhnev era rings true. As the art editor of the London Sunday Times’s magazine between 1965–75, he was at the helm during the magazine’s creative zenith, a time when its striking layout was, none too coincidentally, often highly suggestive of the early Soviet and pre-Soviet avant-garde, an approach successfully repeated in Red Star over Russia.

King has a good eye and a Fleet Street–sharpened sense of how to lure the reader in. Red Star over Russia’s cover is of a dramatically charging Red cavalryman, designed in civil war–era Kiev but anticipating Roy Lichtenstein by four decades. Meanwhile the beautiful Tamara Litsinskaya graces the cover of Ordinary Citizens. Pause for a moment to remember her: she was twenty-seven years old, “non-party,” and, on August 25, 1937, she was shot. Inevitably, there is the suspicion that King’s pursuit of the aesthetically (and commercially) effective could tempt him to ignore other, higher, considerations. A mugshot is not a pin-up. Then again, human nature is what is. To the observer—and that’s what buying Ordinary Citizens makes us—the loveliness of this young woman only adds to the poignancy to us of her terrible fate, and thus to the power of King’s message. Now we will remember Tamara Litsinskaya. And so we should.

To take another example of how the search for the right image risks clashing with the dictates of good taste, consider the inclusion in Red Star over Russia of the best-known of Dmitri Baltermans’s photographs of peasant women grieving over the victims of a Nazi massacre near Kerch. It is one of the greatest war photographs ever taken. It helped define the conflict for many Soviets. It belongs in the book. Nevertheless, thanks to the passing of time and to Red Star over Russia’s superior production values, Baltermans’s bleak, unforgivably beautiful image also becomes an objet d’art, glossily packaged for our contemplation, but increasingly disconnected from the tragedy it records. More troublingly still, the relatively poorly and rarely photographed Holodomor (1932–3), the genocidal man-made famine in which as many as seven million Ukrainians may have died, merits just one small photo, a snapshot really. Seven million dead. One photograph.

Red Star over Russia is also a volume that, however inadvertently (it was clearly not King’s intent), forces its readers to ponder their reaction to beauty deployed in the service of evil. That’s a topic that can generate a safely academic debate when it comes, say, to the artistic qualities of artifacts used by the Aztecs in their rites of human sacrifice. It becomes rather less comfortable the closer we come to our own time. Too often the response is denial or evasion. The Nazis never produced anything of aesthetic interest. The creative successes of Fascist Italy were always a despite, never a because. The artistic explosion of the early Soviet era was a gorgeous false dawn, tragic symbol of the nascent Utopia that Stalin cut down. None of these claims is true.

So far as the best of that Soviet art is concerned, the extent of its creators’ achievement should be acknowledged—many of the works reproduced by King are first rate—but so should the fact that this was art knowingly put at the disposal of a regime set on mass murder from the very beginning. That’s an ugliness King is unwilling to confront, quite possibly because this long-time admirer of Trotsky retains some allegiance to the conceit of the Revolution Betrayed, and thus to the assertion (to use a polite word) that the Bolshevik experiment was a glorious dream that went astray—an assertion that would, had it any connection with reality, do much to get many of the regime’s early cheerleaders off the moral hook.

It’s an attitude that can also be detected in King’s handling of some of the mugshots included in Red Star over Russia: those of the defendants in the first and second great Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. To be left unmoved by these portraits (and they are portraits—the NKVD used natural light, eliminating the frozen artificiality of the flashbulb photo) of these broken, terrified, furious, stunned individuals would be monstrous. At the same time, it’s impossible not to wonder over what horrors these members of the old Bolshevik elite had themselves presided. King never tells us. It’s perhaps no less significant that while King puts together a vivid indictment of the Stalin regime, most of the images he deploys to illustrate the early years of the revolution (with the exception of some harrowing photographs of the Volga famine of 1920–1) convey a sense of dynamism, of progress on the move. Where atrocity is depicted, it is only obliquely, in a few posters and in a civil war photograph of captured Red Army soldiers held, naturally, on a White “death ship.” To be sure the Whites frequently reverted to a near-primeval savagery in their fight against Bolshevism, but of the almost unimaginable, almost ecstatic cruelty unleashed on Russia by the revolutionaries we are shown nothing.

For all that, no page of Red Star over Russia is wasted: there is enough in this book to sustain more than one interpretation both of the revolution and of what it became. Many of the images, most notably the reproductions and photographs of the regime’s initially utopian, increasingly deranged, and ultimately surreal iconography, can, if read properly, be used to help pinpoint Communism for the millennial cult that it really was. At its core, there was nothing progressive about it. I doubt that King would agree with this diagnosis. He concludes Red Star over Russia with the snide observation that the fall of the Soviet Union brought “a united sigh of relief” to “the capitalists of the world.” The liberation, however imperfect, of tens of millions of ordinary citizens by that collapse doesn’t rate a mention. Some people never learn. Faith can be like that.

Imagining the Chairman

Art and China's Revolution

National Review, November 3, 2008

Park Avenue, New York City, September 2008  © Andrew Stuttaford

The sculpture (by Sui Jianguo) squats, a weird piece of a whole that was never made, on a median bisecting one of the more affluent slices of Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s of a distinctive, very distinctive, jacket, nothing more, but it’s oddly bulky, as if the colossus who once wore it were, impossibly, somewhere within. And because the shape and the cut of that jacket are so distinctive, the onlooker is encouraged to fill it with his own image of the only individual (out of hundreds of millions once clothed in such garments) it could possibly represent.

He’s a man (“monster” is too easy an alibi for you and for me) whose deeds heaped further disgrace on an already savage century, yet who now finds himself with a place in the collective imagination that is strangely, and disquietingly, ambivalent. If, on the other hand, you’re just puzzled by the sight of an oversized piece of metal tailoring in the middle of Park Avenue, glance across at the building that houses the Asia Society. A banner emblazoned with Chairman Mao — ah, that’s whose jacket it is — flutters, advertising the society’s latest exhibition. Art and China’s Revolution is a remarkable collection (it runs until January 11) of works dating mainly from the first three decades of the People’s Republic. To see it is to be left in little doubt about the nature of the man in that jacket.

And that’s probably why the Chinese government refused to lend art to this show. The party’s authority is still meant to flow, somehow, from Mao. To admit too much of the past would be awkward. “Thirty percent wrong, 70 percent right” and leave it at that. The killer’s corpse belongs in a criminal’s grave, but rests instead, honored, cherished, embalmed in chemicals and lies, housed on a Tiananmen Square defaced by his image and wrapped in his myth. The state that Mao made has mutated in ways that the People’s Liberator would have detested, but when that increasingly prosperous people buys once-undreamt-of consumer goods they do so with currency carrying the picture of the dictator who consigned 30 million, 40 million, 50 million, who knows, of their compatriots to their deaths: blood money of a sort.

With so much cruelty to choose from, it’s difficult to identify the moment when Mao’s long despotism reached its appalling nadir, but there is something about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that makes, to use the official euphemism, its “ten-year turbulence” (roughly 1966–76) a repulsively unique period in Chinese history. Far fewer perished (perhaps somewhere between 500,000 and a million; others reckon far more) than in the course of some of Communist China’s earlier horrors, but the scale of its ambitions were more total, and their implications more sinister, than anything seen before or (outside the Khmer Rouge’s copycat Kampuchea) since. Yes, it’s true that the early years of the Soviet revolution were marked by a similar belief that the very essence of man could be refashioned, but, with the exception of the onslaught against religion, the attempts of the Bolshevik intelligentsia to turn millennial delusion into quotidian reality did not survive the ascendancy of Stalin, a cynic who saw a return to cultural conservatism as a way of buttressing his power.

The no-less-cynical Mao took the opposite tack, inciting a revolution from below (“bombard the headquarters”) to eliminate any possible opposition within a leadership increasingly concerned that the Great Helmsman was steering their regime onto the rocks. To the tough Communist apparatchiks at the top of the Chinese party, a charnel-house was, within limits, perfectly acceptable; a mad house was not. Mao appealed over their heads to the educated and semi-educated young with a manipulative rhetoric that combined a dramatic rejection of the past (destroy the “four olds”: old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs) with the promise of permanent revolution (“to rebel is justified”) and ecstatic mayhem (“be violent”) in one intoxicating, exhilarating mix. The result was a hysterical spasm that devastated an already-ruined nation and, in its wildest extremes, looked to complete the transformation (zaosheng yundong) of the Chairman into the living god he was so clearly already becoming. Communism had, for all practical purposes, always been a religion, just never quite so openly.

Like all religions Maoism boasted an iconography, an iconography that is at the heart of the Asia Society show. We see traditional Chinese inkwork superseded by more “modern” painting in oil, its ancient subtleties replaced by the heavy (if occasionally wonderfully executed) didacticism of imported Soviet-style socialist realism. The arrival of the Cultural Revolution is summoned up by a series of fierce woodblock prints (often, interestingly, in the red, white, and black of Hitler’s swastika flag; those colors do the tyrant’s work so well), urgent, violent, inflammatory, deranged, the paper trail of a nation spinning, and being spun, into the abyss: Smash the Cultural Ministry! Smash the Dog Head of Soviet Revisionists! Smash. Struggle. Destroy. Obliterate. Even buildings were not spared: Seventy percent of Peking’s officially designated “places of historical and cultural interest” were destroyed in the frenzy.

Socialist realism meanwhile merged with, in Mao’s approving words, “revolutionary romanticism,” “red, bright, and shining” depictions of a dream world (sometimes almost literally so; check out Zheng Shengtian, Zhou Ruiwen, and Xu Junxuan’s Man’s Whole World is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River), that was, in truth, nightmare, lie, and something far, far stranger still. And as the Red Guards rose and darkness fell, images of that dream, and instructions on how to dream it, were repeated again and again across all media, from paintings, posters, and photography, to opera, to song, to “loyalty dance,” to film, and, most definitely, to the exclusion of everything else. Again and again and again: On some estimates 2.2 billion “official” portraits of Mao were reproduced in one format or another during these years. The print runs of the Christ-Mao of Liu Chunhua’s Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (1969) are thought to have amounted to 900 million alone. Mao, always Mao: “The world’s red sun” was the focal point of the paintings in which he appeared, glowing with an inner light, an unmistakable hint of the divine reinforced by mists, mountaintops, and suggestions of the miraculous.

And as icons tend to do, these materials offer their viewers a glimpse of an alternative, fantastic reality, in this case a heaven right here on earth. Many are undeniably, if eerily, beautiful. To their credit, the exhibition’s curators supplement them with commentary (as well as some extraordinary, and long-hidden, photography from that era by Li Zhensheng) that leaves little room for ambiguity about what these artworks both represent and disguise. Despite this, the Asia Society’s gift shop still sells bits and pieces of Maoist junk, revolutionary tote bags, enameled portraits of the great man, and a stack of Little Red Books. That’s equivalent to selling Nazi paraphernalia at a museum show dedicated to the art of the Third Reich, but, as is generally the case when it comes to insulting the memory of the victims of Communism, few seem to care: Mao killed millions and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

The realization that those uncounted tens of millions of Chinese dead do not count for very much is reinforced by the presence in the Asia Society’s foyers of a group of Qu Guangci’s identical stainless-steel statues of Mao. Simultaneously clueless, knowing, and saturated in a borrowed pop-cultural sensibility, these works wink at atrocity. And they are not alone in doing so. They are reminders of the way that China’s younger generation of artists has appropriated Maoist imagery for its own purposes, sometimes satirical, sometimes antic, and sometimes serious, but almost always with an eye on the marketplace. That they find buyers in China is evidence of a country in denial about its past. That they find buyers in London, Paris, and New York reveals something almost as bad, a West where too many are willing to use somebody else’s revolution as a means of self-expression — at a comfortable distance, of course.

To own the latest Maoist pastiche by Wang Guangyi may merely be a matter of status, a refreshingly vulgar assertion of both wealth and (less obviously) taste. Too often, however, it is accompanied by the stale stink of radical chic, a noxious whiff of ’68 that conjures up memories of Berkeley, the Sorbonne, and Western students “carrying pictures,” as the Beatles so acidly sang, “of Chairman Mao.” But to do so was, usually, no more than exhibitionism, less gesture of support for the Cultural Revolution than fashion statement, a painless public proclamation of modish rebelliousness, trendy utopianism, and the hidden self-loathing that lurked within the notion that the West had to look beyond itself for authenticity (whatever that meant). It wasn’t about Mao. It was about “me.” And all those deaths, repressions, and wrecked lives, oh, safely offstage.

They still are.