We all know the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and Dachau. But what about Pechora, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Norilsk? Why are the camps to which Nazism’s victims were deported household words, while the Gulag archipelago – the far flung network of Soviet labour camps and penal colonies where the victims of Stalin and Communism suffered and died – remains terra incognito to most of us.
Despite the vast disparity in the death toll – (Communist regimes killed, according to the respected ‘Black Book of Communism’ an estimated 100 million in the 20th century, ranging from the major monsters Lenin, Mao and Stalin to more minor Marxist killers such as Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Fidel Castro) – it is Hitler who always takes the Gold Star when we want to award an embodiment of pure evil. For, as journalist Nick Cohen recently noted: ‘Few can bring themselves to see fascism and Communism as moral equivalents’. Far too frequently, we in the comfortable West, who have never experienced the horrors of life in a People’s Republic, make excuses for Communism, of the ‘it was an ideal that went wrong’ variety. Such feeble moral evasions cannot survive a reading of either of these books.
The victims whose stories Professor Stephen Cohen tells so movingly in The Victims’ Return were not accidental or random: they were plucked from the rotten red heart of Soviet Communism, and their fates prove, to quote the Professor’s namesake Nick again, that ‘the Bolshevik Revolution was an insane idea from its inception’. What began as an analysis of economics by a dusty old exile in the British Museum ended inexorably with a man called Blokhin in a padded cellar dressed in a leather apron putting a bullet in the back of his seven thousandth victims’ neck.
Stephen Cohen conceived his book thirty or more years ago with a PhD thesis on Nikolai Bukharin, perhaps the most brilliant mind among the Bolsheviks; Lenin’s favourite son, and at one time Stalin’s closest Comrade. Bukharin made the mistake of espousing a marginally more moderate and saner version of socialism that might have piled up a few less corpses, but even if he had not done so, I’m pretty sure that Stalin would have done for him anyway. There was no room for a talented younger rival to the paranoid Georgian at the top.
Despite abjectly begging for his life in a personal letter that was found in Stalin’s desk after the dictator died, Bukharin was shot – one of the most prominent of the estimated one million faithful Communist leaders and functionaries who fell victim to the Great Terror of the mid-1930s. The terror which consumed Communism’s own loyal lackeys followed such greater horrors as the deliberately induced Ukrainian famine in which parents were reduced to eating their own children, and the forced collectivisation of farms, which saw the extermination of the Kulak class of peasants. After these horrific hors d’oeuvres it was time for the revolution to devour its own children.
These included two of Cohen’s chief informants, Anna Larina, Bukharin’s young widow, who survived twenty years in the Gulag after her husband’s death, and Anton Antonov-Ovsenko, son of the man who led the storming of the Winter Palace during the coup d’etat that brought the Bolsheviks to power who served thirteen years in the camps, solely, it seems, for being the son of the Bolshevik hero whom Stalin had shot. Cohen’s book is not so much about the millions who Stalin killed, but the survivors – the zeks, (as Gulag veterans were called, from the Russian word for captives) – who emerged from years, sometimes decades, in the camps in the ‘thaw’ that followed the dictator’s death.
From personal interviews with these men and women, Cohen painstakingly recounts how they attempted to piece together their shattered lives, how they dealt with family, friends and even those who had betrayed them; how thy struggled to find a place in Soviet and post-Soviet society and, above all, how they dealt with the memory of what had befallen them and their nearest and dearest consumed in ‘the other Holocaust’.
If Cohen’s book deals, in the main, with prominent victims – old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Antonov-Ovseyenko – then the letters introduced and edited by Professor Orlando Figes in Just Send Me Word exchanged between just two of Stalin’s ‘ordinary’ victims, can stand as emblems of the anonymous millions who, as Stalin’s own daughter Svetlana wrote, ‘Simply vanished like shadows in the night’.
The letters were exchanged between two young Muscovites, Lev Mischenko and his girlfriend, and later wife Sveta (Svetlana) Ivanova. Lev’s were written from Pechora, the Gulag labour camp where he was detained after the Second World War. Remarkably – though this period is not covered by the letters – unlucky Lev had the unenviable experience both of a Nazi concentration camp as well as Stalin’s equally merciless detention. By a miracle, he survived.
Lev was born shortly after the Russian revolution in 1917. Soon afterwards, his parents fled from the chaos in the capital to what they hoped would be a more secure existence in Siberia. But the murderous civil war between the Reds and Whites swept up his family, and when he was four his parents were both shot by the Bolsheviks. Brought up by his grandparents, the orphan studied engineering, and had just graduated when his life was catastrophically disrupted once again – this time by Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941.
He was called up into the Red Army, but his unit was surrounded early in the war, and, along with thousands of his comrades, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. This was Lev’s first taste of hell. Russian Prisoners of War were regarded as little better than vermin by their captors, only one degree above Jews doomed to death by their race in the hierarchy of suffering that was the Nazi concentration camp system.
Given starvation rations that reduced some to cannibalism, the Russians were used as slave labour by the Germans. Only the occasional act of humanity – like a sandwich slipped him by a secretary when no-one was looking – saved Lev from total and suicidal despair. That and the memory of his fiancée Sveta, who he hoped was waiting for him back in Moscow.
Lev ended up in the notorious Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, but survived by a miracle, and was finally liberated by advancing American troops. Offered a chance to emigrate to the US, he refused, partly because he felt drawn back to his Russian motherland, partly because he hoped that Sveta was waiting for him. But he was in for a horrible shock. Russians who had surrendered to the enemy were regarded by Stalin as traitors (they included his own son) – only worthy of death. So on returning to Russia, Lev joined the unenviable group with experience of both Nazi and Soviet camps – he was sent to the Gulag on absurd charges of having aided the enemy.
The letters that form the bulk of the book (with her replies) were sent by Lev to the loyal Sveta from his labour camp at Pechora deep inside the Arctic Circle. Here Lev and his fellow inmates worked sawing wood for nine long, cold and hungry years. But he was sustained throughout his ordeal by the letters that Sveta wrote in reply to his – both the few and far between regulation letters he was allowed under prison regulations, and those he managed to smuggle out. More than a thousand survive from him to her, and 599 from her to him.
They describe a grim existence of back-breaking work, cold brutality (and occasional acts of kindness) from guards; and an honest appraisal of his fellow prisoners – not all of whom preserved a sense of solidarity against the common oppressor. For her part, the loyal Sveta, faithful throughout the long ordeal, tries to keep her distant husband up to speed with Moscow life, which at times seems hardly preferable to the Gulag, so grey and grim was post-war Stalinist Russia. We are left in no doubt that she is Lev’s lifeline and the only hope for a future. All told, as Figes writes, the archive forms the most complete correspondence to have emerged from the Gulag. The letters are certainly a moving and vivid record of the unquenchable fire of the human spirit in the grimmest circumstances imaginable.
In 1954, following Stalin’s death, thousands of Gulag inmates – Lev among them – were freed and streamed back to the cities to try and pick up the shattered fragments of their lives. Lev was able to resume work at a scientific institute in Moscow, but remained understandably bitter against Stalin (a ‘maniac’) and the Communist system which came near to destroying him. He died in 2008, Sveta followed two years later. They are buried side by side in Moscow’s Golovonskoe cemetery. They left their archive of letters to Memorial, the Russian organisation which fights to preserve and honour the victims of Stalin’s rule.
I would recommend the book especially to anyone who still labours under the delusion that Marxism and the ‘great experiment’ that began in Russia in 1917 was anything other than folly that mutated
into evil on a monstrous scale. As the careers of ‘Marxist’ luminaries such as Eric Hobsbawm and Terry Eagleton prove, there are still such people revered and honoured in the academy. Asked whether
he wanted a new title for an updated edition of his ground-breaking history of Stalinism The Great Terror
the historian Robert Conquest suggested: ‘I told you so you fucking fools’. There are still far too many of those fools around.
The Victims’ Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin by Stephen F. Cohen is published by I.B.Tauris.
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag by Orlando Figes is published by Allen Lane
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