Stalin's death camps revisited

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It takes time and close attention for an outsider to learn the systems of captivity. Alexander Dolgun, an American inmate of the Soviet Gulag, listened for three months at the wall in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison as the man in the next cell tapped out the alphabet of the traditional Russian prisoners' code over and over again, until at last he was able to make out the question, "Who are you?" In his memoirs, Dolgun records his "rush of pure love" for the man who had spent so long "asking me who I am".

As Anne Applebaum reminds us at the end of her remarkable history of the Soviet concentration camps, the transformation of "people into objects", of "who" into "what", of neighbours into enemies to be debased, dehumanised and destroyed, is the common feature of all the mass atrocities of the past 100 years, from the Gulag to 11 September.

The word Gulag, familiar in the West since the publication in the early 1970s of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's heroic work of witness, The Gulag Archipelago, is a Soviet-style acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, meaning Main Camp Administration. It has come to signify, as Applebaum says, "the system of Soviet slave labour itself", which began under Lenin and finally dissolved after the fall of Communism.

Applebaum's monumental and superbly clear account of this vast, vicious system and her thoughtful interpretation of its wider meanings should help to address the plight which Martin Amis set out in Koba the Dread, his controversial recent exploration through personal memoir of the Western refusal to take in the true nature of the Soviet experiment.

"In the general consciousness," Amis wrote, "the Russian dead sleep on ... Everyone knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky." Applebaum agrees that though the "true history of the Soviet Union's concentration camps" is "by now familiar to most Western scholars of Soviet history", it has not "filtered into Western popular consciousness".

To act as a conduit between scholarshipand popular consciousness on so vast and complex a subject as the Gulag is a public service entailing a duty of care towards both Russian sources and English-speaking readers. The decorum and moral incisiveness of Applebaum's writing derives from her wise handling of sources, her circumspection in generalising about the Gulag, and her acceptance of the paradoxes in its history.

By combining facts and statistics from archives and scholarly studies with the judicious use of hundreds of memoirs and dozens of personal interviews with survivors, Applebaum tirelessly asks the inmates of the Gulag, "Who are you?", summoning them to tell their stories, shaping them into a general narrative.

Every page of her book is scattered with the names of individuals, who tell in verse, slang and rugged prose of arrests, interrogations, beatings, transports in freezing train carriages across the reaches of the Soviet empire, hard labour, disease, exhaustion, self-mutilation, the animal struggle for survival, sexual depravity, and, sometimes, of deep friendship and disinterested kindness.

Though they made up only a tiny fraction of the population of the camps, the intellectuals who wrote these memoirs give us a picture of the world of overcrowded barracks, watchtowers, lice and slops that was everyday life for the millions of " enemies of the people", mainly workers and peasants, who, for no crime, suffered for years in the Gulag or died there unrecorded from overwork, malnutrition or a bullet in the back.

Although its effect was, in the words of Jacques Rossi, author of The Gulag Handbook, to give " arbitrary sadism the status of law", the camp system was not intended by its designers to be cruel so much as useful.

It is this that makes them so emblematic of the wider Soviet system itself, which glorified productive labour in its propaganda but which, in Applebaum's words, shared "the same slovenly working practices, the same criminally stupid bureaucracy,

the same corruption, and the same sullen disregard for human life" as the Gulag.

Though their working conditions often amounted to torture and led to death, inmates of the labour camps were not meant to be mistreated so much as put to use to fulfil grandiose "work norms" decreed by the State.

Stalin saw the Gulag as a key element in Soviet economic success. Between 1929, when he consolidated his dictatorship, and 1953, when he died, some 18 million people were exploited as slaves in the thousands of camps strung across the Soviet empire from the deserts of Kazakhstan to the frozen tundra of the Siberian Arctic. The zeks felled timber, built pointless canals, hauled coal, dug for nickel and gold, designed aeroplanes and, in 1944, according to the NKVD [predecessors of the KGB], mined 100 per cent of the Soviet Union's uranium.

And all the while the Gulag's Cultural-Educational Department endeavoured to make its slaves more productive through propaganda. One ensemble of NKVD entertainers toured the camps with a stirring repertoire including The Ballad of Stalin and The Song of Beria.

"Did they believe in what they were doing?" Applebaum asks; it is a question which, as she says, goes to the heart of the Soviet system itself. As al-Sahaf 's last stand on the rooftop of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel should confirm, empirical facts and their conscientious-interpretation by free individualsare the most powerful enemiesof any totalitarian state. And yet, there are certain facts from which we prefer to avert our eyes.

In the words of Tsvetan Todorov, author of Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, truth can be "incompatible with inner comfort". We would "rather not hear the accounts of these extreme situations. They disturb us."

In the case of the Gulag, as distinct from the Nazi extermination camps, an inextinguishable ideological sympathy with the Communist dream among many Western intellectuals has led to a collective resistance to the uncomfortable truth about the massive structure of enslavement that underpinned Soviet power.

And though she surveys their nation's history with exemplary compassion, Applebaum is unequivocal in her politically acute closing reflections about how little even contemporary Russians know about their own history, and how few feel the Soviet past to be a burden.

"We didn't love freedom enough," Solzhenitsyn wrote at the beginning of The Gulag Archipelago, "we purely and simply deserved everything that came after."

Applebaum warns in tones of justified urgency that if those of us who have not lived under totalitarian regimes fail to attend closely to the reality of the Gulag, we too may "wake up one day and realise that we do not know who we are".

Gulag is published on 29 May.

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