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*****
A
Few Words from the Editor
Since
I have returned to teaching as an adjunct professor at the local branch of
The University of Texas system, I have dispoed of a little more money and
far less time. Hence the
collapse of Praesidium’s Winter and Spring issues into one: I could not
possibly have prepared separate issues of the journal over the past few
hectic months. Whether this
fusion of issues to inaugurate the new year is to become habitual, I
cannot say at the moment. It
may likely occur for at least another year.
The good news is that my modestly improved financial circumstances
may allow me to seek 501(c)3 status for The Center for Literate Values
this summer. (The application
fee is several hundred dollars, and our budget has always been meager.)
Should the day ever dawn when I may court wealthy foundations for a
few thousand dollars to expand our operation (many of you know that it is
now run exclusively out of my makeshift office at home, and that I have no
secretary or assistant or “gopher”), the journal might not fall prey
to such petty vagaries as it has this spring.
We may also be able to pay contributors a small but encouraging fee
for their work—the rarity of which, from year to year, has surely
supplied me with large-caliber ammunition for making a breach in the IRS
bunker.
There was never any intended theme for this combined issue.
I find in retrospect, however, that we have once again clustered
our thoughts and inspiration around a particular concern.
Several essays—and one short story, as well—have felicitously
converged upon politics in the broadest sense: the science, that is, of
regulating human activity in a manner both orderly and humane.
Steve Kogan’s meditation stemming from the riveting testimony of
Lev Razgon about the Soviet gulags will remind us of how disastrous was
the Stalinist experiment in making things anew.
Those who wish to create a perfect human order ex nihilo inevitably end up shooting and starving thousands or
millions of human beings. The
past’s memory is too persistent to eradicate in any other way; and if
past habits also happened to follow from common sense or common decency,
the executions must continue even after the last old history book has been
burned and the final new one rewritten.
Incredibly, the generation now coming of age seems to be far more
aware of the Jewish holocaust engineered by fascism than of the vastly
greater slaughter presided over by the twentieth century’s Marxist
utopians. No doubt, the
academy remains unmoved by the latter because its intentions were ideologically pure (as if such carnage
could be pure in any sense short of the absurd).
We therefore owe a debt of gratitude to those like Professor Kogan
who insist that the lessons of such misery be learned.
My own essay about Kant, Machiavelli, and telling lies has led me
to reflect upon what similar beasts of prey we had in Hitler and Stalin.
In their distinct ways, both incarnated Machiavelli’s Cesare
Borgia. Hitler (with
Mussolini’s help) persuaded the Catholic Church, at least early on, that
he was a bulwark against Bolshevism, thus draping his cloak à
la Machiavel; and he most certainly seasoned his mad imperial visions
with the artificial glories of a mythical past, as did Machiavelli in his
so-called Roman dream. Yet
what was Stalin’s ruthless exploitation of bourgeois convention and
gullibility if not Machiavellian to the core?
The great theorist of unprincipled political manipulation, after
all, regards no promise as binding and no outrage as impermissible.
His version of “virtue” is indeed, nothing less than the
ability to consider any criminal act as a possible option in the pursuit
of power. That
neo-conservative scholars like Leo Strauss should adopt The
Prince as their Bible ought therefore to disturb us deeply.
Precisely what is conserved in Egotism’s rapacious, ultimately
insane scramble to rule the world?
Mark Wegierski has been reviewing and discussing neo-conservative
books for me long before I had lent a critical eye to the term.
I hasten to stress (in support of our tax-exempt claim) that
neither Mark nor I nor any of the journal’s contributors approaches
these questions in the context of any party affiliation.
Our discomfort both with the New Right and the New Lefdt (for
things there are also entirely new: what would Gladstone or Wilson have
thought of campus speech codes?) roots in the equal abandonment of Western
culture by either vanguard. If
it is now “political” to befriend the mind’s endeavors and the
spirit’s creations, then we live in a desperate time, indeed.
Tom Bertonneau and Gary Inbinder remind us of just how desperate.
The former’s delightful essay on the thought-patterns of
contemporary undergraduates (complete with monstrous illustrations!)
suggests that Freshman Composition has so far descended to the level of
Middle School English as taught thirty years ago.
The latter’s dissection of a self-proclaimed “authentic” film
on King Arthur’s life and times proves that our
intellectuals are as good at rewriting history as ever Stalin’s
hack propagandists were—and also, not surprisingly, that mass ignorance
is traveling along the same vector, consenting to its own bamboozlement as
long as the folderol entertains and confirms shallow prejudices.
Mr. Mosby’s short story, as a science-fictional look into a
dystopic future, is the perfect bookend to the contents of this edition.
~J.H.
back to Contents
***********************************
True
Stories,
by Lev Razgon: Literature and the Soviet Genocide
by
Steve Kogan
It
was the end of November, and a recent snowstorm had whipped up enormous
drifts around the building. The sky was clearing, with the beginning of a
severe frost, and the stars glittered as always in winter,
with
a gloomy power and a remote indifference to all that is alive.
Lev Razgon, True Stor
After the
revelations in The Gulag Archipelago,
after the memoirs, the novels, and the unsealing of the Central Party
archives, why read another book on the Soviet labor camps? There
are even many Russians who say that they have heard it all before, and
Razgon imagines that western readers “have already read so much about
mass executions, terror, wrecked lives and decimated families that it will
probably strike them as absurd to offer yet another book on the
subject.”
I understand his hesitation,
for, even before I read his remarkable account of life and death in the
Gulag, my own small library on the camps had already said enough.
The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn't necessary
since they had to work in any weather. Besides,
longtime residents of Kolyma could determine the weather precisely even
without a thermometer: if there was frosty fog, that meant the temperature
outside was forty degrees below zero; if you exhaled easily but in a
rasping fashion, it was fifty degrees below; if there was a rasping and it
was difficult to breath, it was sixty degrees below; after sixty degrees
below zero, spit froze in midair. Spit
had been freezing in midair for two weeks.
The very sound of the word Gulag
falls like a dead weight upon the ear, the two rigid syllables forming the
Russian acronym for the dreaded “Main Administration of Corrective Labor
Camps”. Razgon reminds us in
his preface that it had “no equal in history’ and “was
distinguished, above all,” by its extent both in time and space.
In One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn follows the
unities of classical Greek tragedy and concentrates the entire horror in a
single day and place, leaving it to our imagination to fill in the
remaining years of Ivan's captivity. “There
were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like this in his
sentence, from reveille to lights out. The
three extra ones were because of the leap years....”
It is the conclusion to one of
many haunting books by former inmates of the Gulag, a prison system over
which “the stars glittered as always in winter, with a gloomy power and
a remote indifference to all that is alive.”
It takes a zek, a convict
of the Gulag, to see a reflection of Soviet rule in the icy brilliance of
the northern stars. Razgon
says that the terrors of the logging camps alone were such that “several
years after my release I still could not look without hatred at the beauty
and wonder that is a forest.
In Razgon’s traumatized imagination, even a
midnight
sky could trigger frightening associations and become a hateful sight, for
“almost like the universe, Stalin seemed to have no end and no
beginning.”
The whole oppressive weight of
Stalin’s rule is captured in this image, which does not represent his
power as a simple force of nature but as an almost infinite evil that
threatens to engulf the world.
Razgon’s association of Stalin with the skies across the Gulag is
indicative of the writing throughout the book, in which the physical
dimensions of the suffering are always expressed in terms of what it felt
like to undergo Stalin’s ruthlessness. Hence
the value of True Stories does
not lie in the documentary evidence alone, for if facts and figures were
the only measure of the camps, then Razgon would indeed have written
nothing more than just another book about ‘wrecked lives and decimated
families”, and the first two chapters would have been enough to saturate
and numb the mind. Although he
does not use the term, Razgon understands the nature of “victim
fatigue” all too well, in which a constant spectacle of horrors can
become not only unendurable but also meaningless, like the repetition of a
word until it becomes an empty sound. The
beginning of his preface is organized around this very question of
language and genocide, and he answers it by affirming his faith in the
power of literature to restore our capacity for sympathy and wonder. Like
Solzhenitsyn, who subtitles his study of the Gulag An
Experiment in Literary Investigation, Razgon has a visceral connection
to literature, and his very first sentence draws us in: “'What can my
name mean to you?' This line
from Pushkin comes to mind when I imagine my Western readers….”
Razgon cannot help but feel
separated from the west, yet in one quick stroke he creates a feeling of
intimacy through Pushkin's mournful words. His
opening is typical of Russian writers on the Gulag, whose voices seem to
emerge from the Russian classics and are capable of arousing the same
intense interest that a Dostoevsky or a Chekhov can generate. Razgon
provides the underlying reason for this effect. Citing
the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, he remarks that, just as “each unhappy family is unhappy
in its own way,” so too “the interest and value” of each story of
the Gulag depends on the particularity of the suffering.
For Razgon, therefore, no book on the Gulag is “just another
book”, since no one is “just another victim”. Arrests
are made, families are torn apart, and the corpses pile up, yet we never
lose sight of individuals, who are portrayed not simply as ends in
themselves but as a world. If
the despot who ruled the Gulag “seemed to have no end and no
beginning,” so did his victims, but in an altogether different, inward
sense. Thus, Solzhenitsyn
states on the very first page of The Gulag Archipelago that “each of us is a center of the
Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.’”
Commenting on one of his
guards, Razgon similarly observes that “all he had to do was pull the
trigger and one small universe of thoughts, emotions, friends and
acquaintances that existed quite independent of his will, would
disappear.”
Small universes had been
disappearing by the millions from the very beginning of Soviet rule, and
bullets were the least of its terrors:
The outpost Korabelnikov had been sent to organize was, I
discovered, to be used for punishing disobedient prisoners…. To
be sent to Korabelnikov’s outpost meant certain death. Each
time someone was taken there, the departure was transformed into an
incredible and barbarous spectacle. Some
of the criminals, trying in any way to delay this transfer, used to resort
to an old tactic and strip themselves naked: they would not be transported
like that in winter, they thought. This
had no effect on Korabelnikov, however. Like
the angel of death, he himself came to collect the raw material for his
punishment cell. The naked man
was bound, carried from the barrack across the entire compound, taken out
through the guard house and thrown on a sledge. Then
he was slowly driven off. The
howl of the man as he gradually froze would fade away into the distance.
Time
and again, we read of men and women who were turned into tortured animals,
a fitting image for inmates of concentration camps that were hidden in the
forests of
Siberia
. At the beginning of the
1930s, writes Solzhenitsyn, when Stalin introduced collective farming by
terrorizing the countryside, peasants
were banished not to a center of population, a place made
habitable, but to the haunt of wild beasts, into the wilderness, to
man’s primitive condition. No,
worse: even in their primeval state our forebears at least chose places
near water for their settlements. For
as long as mankind has existed no one has ever made his home elsewhere. But
for the special settlements the Cheka… chose places on stony hillsides
(100 meters up above the river Pinega, where it was impossible to dig down
to water, and nothing would grow in the soil).
Those who survived often acquired the characteristics of Arctic
animals.” In the opening paragraph of "Carpenters”, Shalamov says
that prisoners in Kolyma gradually developed an animal instinct to find
their way through freezing fog, and, in his preface to The
Gulag, Solzhenitsyn recounts a Soviet news report in which the writer
unwittingly betrayed the sheer animalism of the camps:
In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature,
a magazine of the
Academy
of
Sciences
. It reported in tiny type
that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice
lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream—and in it
were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of
years old. Whether fish or
salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific
correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice
encasing the specimens and devoured them with
relish on the spot.
The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news
of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen
state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the
genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.
As for us, however—we understood instantly. We
could picture the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how
those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher
claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off
chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to
thaw them out and bolt them down.
We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as
those present at that event. We,
too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks,
unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour
prehistoric salamander with relish.
And the
Kolyma
was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that
amazing country of Gulag, which,
though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the
psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost
imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.
Halfway through Razgon’s account, I began to wonder if I could
even understand what he was saying, for suffering on this scale is often
incomprehensible to survivors themselves. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s
novel Enemies, A Love Story, which draws on his personal contacts with victims of
the Nazi genocide, one of his characters remarks, “What happened to me
can never be fully told. The
truth is, I don’t really know myself. So
much happened that I sometimes imagine nothing happened.”
Bewildered by a past she can
barely comprehend, Tamara Broder has become a walking ghost come straight
from hell. “I’m not dead,
I’m not dead. I’m not
alive and I’m not dead.”
I do not exaggerate in my
description of her lines. They
are the same words that Dante speaks in the last canto of the Inferno
when he and Virgil come upon the figure of Satan, who is locked in ice
“at the bottom of the universe”:
How
chilled and faint I turned then, do not ask, reader, for I do not write
it, since all words would fail. I did not die and I did not remain alive;
think now for thyself, if thou hast any wit, what I became, denied both
life and death.
The parallels between the Inferno
and True Stories are equally
precise. In Canto XXXII,
Dante’s first view of the frozen lake of Cocytus takes his mind eastward
to the “frigid sky” over Russia’s “far-off Don,”
while Razgon’s image of Stalin hovering over the Gulag, like the icy
stars that “glittered… with a gloomy power,” has unmistakable
associations with Dante’s “Emperor of the woeful kingdom”. Every
literary allusion of Razgon’s is a perception of reality; hence the
precision with which he condemns Stalin’s treatment of the children of
prisoners, which he frames in view of the entire Inferno:
The tiniest infants were handed over to special nurseries where
they died almost instantly; older children were sent to special
children’s homes where they were first brutalized and then died, one
after another. Those still
older, were simply arrested and forced to pass through all the circles of
hell.
The reference works both ways, for Dante envisions the nature of evil so
precisely that he himself could almost pass for a zek. In writing of the
last circle, he speaks of men howling like animals and even suffers the
same after-effects of a traumatized memory as Razgon: “I saw a thousand
faces made dog-like with the cold, so that shuddering comes over me, and
always will, at frozen pools.”
Robert Frost once remarked that the Russians are an epic people. It
is a quality that Razgon shares with other writers of the Gulag in his
extraordinary capacity to confront psychic pain. The
identification with Dante emerges once again. In
his epilogue, Razgon writes that, fifty-two years after his arrest in
1938, when he was finally allowed to read his files, he was escorted
through the Lubyanka Prison to an empty office of the KGB, having been
guided by “my Virgil who led me through this quiet, almost uninhabited
hell.”
It is early evening by the
time he leaves the building and makes his way through a light rain to the
Solovki Stone, a “modest monument” to the victims of the Gulag, where
“I take off my fur hat, and drops of rain or tears trickle down my face.
I am eighty-two and here I
stand, living through it all over again, by the grave of those
millions.”
He has in fact been “living
through it all over again” ever since he first began to record the
destruction of his friends and family:
I knew then that no one else would summon back to life or even
remember these numerous individuals who disappeared in the Gulag. And
if I left this life without recording things which only I remember then I
would have in some sense committed a sin.
In effect, the entire
book is a spiritual journey through the camps, and the same is true of
other Russian works on the Gulag, which share Razgon’s religious view of
memory. Solzhenitsyn has often said that Russia cannot hope to save itself
from further slides into darkness unless it repents for its crimes, and,
in Hope Abandoned (1972), Nadezhda
Mandelstam similarly writes that “a sense of guilt is man’s greatest
asset. Sin is always concrete,
and repentance commands unique and powerful words, an unequivocal language
of its own. It may be the
language of a specific moment of time, but it lasts forever.”
To
understand her faith in the language of repentance, one has to appreciate
that Mandelstam is writing from a lifetime’s experience of Marxist
rhetoric, in which the concept of the individual was suppressed through
“a hodgepodge of positivist fodder” about “material” reality.
The end result was a deadening of consciousness and a “loss of
the self”, a dangerous vacuum that was replaced with party slogans,
catch-phrases, and the whole range of communist thought-control. The
first chapter of Hope Abandoned,
like Orwell’s 1984, is devoted
to a careful analysis of this process, which Mandelstam frames in
characteristically Russian terms as a spiritual exercise:
One of the most brilliant men in the history of mankind once said
that as soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words. A
word is too easily transformed from a meaningful sign into a mere signal,
and a group of words into an empty formula, bereft even of the sense such
things have in magic. We begin
to exchange set phrases, not noticing that all living meaning has gone
from them. Poor, trembling
creatures—we don’t know what meaning is; it has vanished from a world
in which there is no room any more for the Logos. It
will return only if and when people come to their senses and recall that
man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul.
For Razgon, Solzhenitsyn, and Mandelstam, the lessons of literature are
written in the language of suffering and redemption: hence the recurring
identifications with Dante and the special place of Dostoevsky in their
thoughts. As the title itself
indicates, Solzhenitsyn’s novel The
First Circle was explicitly written with Dante in mind, and it was
during Stalin’s campaign of terror in the 1930s that Nadezhda
Mandelstam’s husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, wrote his extraordinary Conversation
About Dante, not long before he himself died in the camps.
It is Dostoevsky, however, who provides a direct religious
perspective on Marxism and the Soviet genocide, for his critique of
socialism, conceived in light of the Gospels, addresses the central
doctrines of communist belief. Solzhenitsyn’s
celebrated remark that the line between good and evil does not run through
the state but through the human heart is a Dostoevskian observation
through and through, and it is interesting to note that it is prefigured
at the very birth of the Soviet state in Oswald Spengler’s analysis of
Dostoevsky’s works. Speaking
of his socialist “demons” in The
Possessed, Spengler writes in The
Decline of the West (1918-26) that they
were
denounced by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But
he himself was quite unconscious of such conflicts—“conservative”
and “revolutionary” were terms of the West that left him
indifferent…. What has the
agony of a soul to do with Communism? A
religion that has got as far as taking social problems in hand has ceased
to be a religion… and so we come back to the contrast of Tolstoi and
Dostoevski. Tolstoi, the
townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his
metaphysical impotence—like the whole civilized West, which can only
think about distributing, never renouncing—elevated
primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoevski,
who was poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about
social ameliorations—of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul
to abolish property
?
Commenting
on Dostoevsky’s prophecy that “without God, all is permitted,”
Nadezhda Mandelstam observes in Hope
Abandoned that the Gulag was the final destination of Marxist
ideology:
The
“license” explored by Dostoyevski not only destroys its adepts, but
also spreads corruption all around, scorches the very earth, and lays
everything waste. We all have
read Dostoyevski and know the anguish with which he shows up license for
what it is, trying to warn people of its consequences. We
who have lived through the great era of license are well aware that his
words fell on deaf ears. It is
a feature of those who choose the path of license that they are completely
deaf and hear nothing.
During his youth, Razgon was also deaf to the true nature of Marxism
until he too fell under the blows of “those gods whom (in full
accordance with our materialist world view) we had ourselves created.”
Petro Grigorenko similarly
writes that, even with the failures in agriculture and transportation in
1930-31, “people like me continued to be hypnotized by the old
ideals.”
As Nadezhda Mandelstam and
George Orwell have described at length, the rhetoric of Soviet ideology
was designed to deaden thought, and it is significant in this regard that
Grigorenko’s trance was shattered not only by his experiences but also
by the enlightenment that came to him through literature, having “seen
and lived in socialism as it is described in the novels of Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and George Orwell,”
whose 1984 is partly modeled on
Zamyatin’s We.
Like Grigorenko, who remained “hypnotized” even though he had
already seen “many negative things”, Razgon had once been blind to
crimes that had taken place right before his eyes, and it was not until
many years later that he began to be haunted by what he had written for
the journal of the Young Communist League:
I was seventeen, and taking my first uncertain but determined steps
as a journalist. Komsomolskaya Pravda commissioned me to write a piece about the
Moscow
children’s prison and I spent several days behind the massive brick
walls of the former Danilov monastery. Then
I wrote a sketch that borrowed the title of the prison wall-newspaper:
“A Factory for Turning Out Well-trained Citizens”. Everything
in that sketch was true and, at the same time, it was a lie from beginning
to end. The children were
certainly not cold and hungry and they did have a wall-newspaper, clubs,
film shows and almost clean sheets on their metal cots. Yet
I wrote not a word of how they shuddered when the guards shouted, how the
older children mistreated the younger, and of the prison hierarchy in
which the smaller and weaker you were, the worse it was for you… I
didn’t mention that the little children became the hostages of their
semi-criminal elders since the prison authorities could only keep control
with the help of the latter. For
the rest of my life I avoided writing about many things, but to this day I
feel a particular responsibility for this piece of dishonesty. It
is the most unforgivable of the many falsehoods I have written and
uttered.
Razgon’s act of contrition stood outside the entire framework
of Soviet doctrine, for Marxist-Leninism had proclaimed that “material
conditions govern consciousness,” when it was the ideology itself that
blinded a generation of believers. There
was nothing “historically inevitable” about Razgon’s enlightenment. He
could have remained in prison for another twenty years and never seen the
truth, for it took a special kind of person to experience the shock of
disillusionment and understand its meaning. Solzhenitsyn
records the standard denials of reality among prisoners in the camps:
“Corrupt officials put me here,” “Stalin has been misled by his
advisers,” “If only Stalin knew.” Thus,
they projected their own blindness onto Stalin, forgetting that they also
believed in his omniscience.
Soviet rule was based on contradictions of this kind, for, in the
peculiar viciousness of the system, the faithful themselves were turned
into victims, from thousands of socialists in Lenin’s time to Stalin’s
purges in the 1930s, when he exterminated the Bolshevik leaders and their
followers practically down to the last man and woman. Not
even the French Reign of Terror, which Lenin admired,
could compare in sheer thirst for blood, not only in practice but also in
a theory that proclaimed a “war to the death” against the “survivals
of accursed capitalist society, these dregs of humanity, these hopelessly
decayed and atrophied limbs, this contagion, this plague, this ulcer that
socialism has inherited from capitalism.”
Every
Russian work on the Gulag that I have read testifies to the power of
Marxist ideology to blind its believers and corrupt consciousness. Hence
the opposing belief that bearing witness to the truth has a redemptive
power through the process of confession, for repentance teaches that the
seeds of rebirth lie in the dark, in the blindness itself. It
is the theme of Dostoevsky’s epigraph to his final work, The
Brothers Karamazov: ‘Verily,
verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and
die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”
(John
12:24
). This principle of
redemption through suffering is also announced in the first pages of Hope Abandoned, in which Nadezhda Mandelstam writes that
pain acts like a leaven for both word and thought, quickening
your sense of reality and the true logic of this world. Without
pain you cannot distinguish the creative element that builds and sustains
life from its opposite—the forces of death and destruction which are
always for some reason very seductive…
It is an extraordinary observation on the death-wish in human
personality, which Mandelstam relates to the hysteria in which she herself
was caught up by the signs and slogans of the revolution:
I am not proud of my early youth. The
image that comes back to me is of a great herd of cattle stampeding over a
field of ripe corn and trampling it underfoot in vast swaths. In
those days I ran around as one of a small herd of painters. Some
of them later became well known. We
wielded rough house-painters’ brushes, dipping them in buckets of color
wash to daub crude shapes on fantastic canvases which we stretched across
the street for demonstrations to parade under.
If one listens to the words of The
Communist Manifesto with a clear and open mind, one has a glimpse into
“the forces of death and destruction” that were crying to be
unleashed: “abolition of private property”, “abolition of the
family”, “The bourgeois
claptrap about the family and education”, “the forcible overthrow of
all existing social conditions”. In
a remarkable passage in The Decline,
which parallels Dostoevsky’s portrait of Raskolnikov in Crime
and Punishment and Smerdyakov in The
Brothers Karamazov, Spengler remarks on the narcotic force of
totalitarian beliefs, whose visions of utopia are only a pretext for
unlimited destruction and surrender of the will. Both
Raskolnikov and Smerdyakov see themselves as instruments of higher powers
and, in the words of the police inspector in Crime
and Punishment, “murdered… for a theory,”
a theory whose very goal is death. As
Spengler observes, “It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the
wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction
is the true and only impulse, and Caesarism the only issue.” As
for the Caesars themselves, their one genuine ambition is to “demolish
every remnant of order” and ‘to
see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own
selves.”
Everything
about Soviet rule was senseless and unbelievable. Lenin
had promised “peace, bread, and land” and created civil war and
concentration camps, communists were branded as enemies of communism, and
Stalin’s glowing support meant almost certain death. In
Razgon’s chilling words,
If
he declared at the plenary session of the Central Committee, “We shall
not give you the blood of our beloved Bukharin, the darling of the Party
and one of its leaders,” then it was clear that Bukharin’s fate was
sealed…. Once, his voice
almost shaking with emotion, Stalin said that “children did not answer
for their fathers” and straightway issued instructions that not only the
children but all the relatives of executed Party and state officials
should be arrested without delay and dispatched to the camps or sent into
exile…
The very language of sentencing was irrational, to the point where the
word “sentence” itself, like the whole Soviet system of
“extra-judicial procedures”, became arbitrary and meaningless:
These “procedures” gave one or more individuals the right to
sentence people in their absence and without a trial to any length of
imprisonment (up to and including a 25-year term), to forced labor, exile
for life, or to be shot…. The
term “sentence” sounds barely appropriate.
It is hard for me to find a better word, yet what kind of
sentencing actually took place? Lists
were simply drawn up and people were shot. Or
people were shot, and then the lists were compiled. Or
people were shot and no record was made or kept.
And for seven decades, the entire apparatus of communist propaganda, both
east and west, glorified the
Soviet Union
as the great defender of “scientific socialism” and the model of a
“planned economy”.
In
fact, the only change that had taken place since Czarist times was the
almost complete destruction of what was best in the old order and the
intensification of what was worst. In
The Foundations of Leninism,
Stalin proclaimed that “the essence of Leninism in Party and state
work” was “revolutionary sweep” combined with “American
efficiency”,
although nothing could have been further from America’s great practical
sense than the ideology of the Soviet state, which mirrored the Czarist
monsters of its hatred and elevated the worst types of the old bureaucracy
to new heights of power. In
the second volume of The Decline,
Spengler remarks on this phenomenon and states that Bolshevism “is not
the contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism,”
the historical term for Peter the Great’s programme to westernize
Russia. Summing up its dangers
in prophetic words, Alexander Herzen described it as an act that “drove
civilisation into us with such a wedge that
Russia
could not stand it and split into two layers” that had “nothing in
common”.
His words could be applied
without change to the Soviet masters of the Gulag: “There is no instance
in history of a caste of the same race getting the upper hand so
thoroughly and becoming so completely alien as our class of upper
government servants.”
A careful reader of Russian
history and literature, Spengler observes that Bolshevism had deep roots
in “the lowest stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like
the other strata… and consequently filled with the hate of the
downtrodden.”
Nineteenth-century Russian
fiction is filled with alienated figures of this kind. It
is a type that Herzen describes in My
Past and Thoughts down to
the last detail:
Tyufyayev
[a governor of a province in
Siberia
] was a true servant of the Tsar. He
was highly thought of, but not highly enough. Byzantine
servility was exceptionally well combined in him with official discipline.
Obliteration of self,
renunciation of will and thought before authority went inseparably with
harsh oppression of subordinates…. Tyufyayev had an intense, secret
hatred for everything aristocratic; he had kept this from his bitter
experiences. The hard labour
of Arakcheyev’s secretariat had been his first refuge, his first
deliverance. Till then his
superiors had never offered him a chair, but had employed him on menial
errands. When he served in the
commissariat, the officers had persecuted him, as is the custom in the
army, and one colonel had horsewhipped him in the street at Vilna…. All
this had entered into the copying clerk’s soul and rankled there; now he
was governor and it was his turn to oppress….
If Tyufyayev was typical of the Czar’s “civilian clergy”, as Herzen
says he was, then “the hate of the downtrodden” in Petrine society
might well have found a home among the Bolsheviks. Herzen
remarks that, if Tyufyayev had lived during the Reign of Terror, he
“would have been a ferocious Commissaire
of the Convention in 1794, a Carrier,”
referring to Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who, according to the translator,
Constance Garnett, “was responsible for the noyades
and massacre of hundreds of people at Nantes, while suppressing the
counter-revolutionary rising of La Vendée.”
The spirit of Tyufyayev was
alive in Lenin just before the revolution when he wrote that “the
example of the Jacobins is instructive,” although Tyufyayev could not
have matched Lenin for sheer mendacity when the Bolshevik leader added
that “the ‘Jacobins’ of the twentieth century would not guillotine
the capitalists” but merely arrest fifty to a hundred bankers “for a
few weeks to expose their frauds”.
Several weeks before the
revolution, he proclaimed that state power would in fact be enforced
through “the grain monopoly” and “bread rationing” (starvation):
“These means of control and of compelling
people to work will be more potent than the laws of the Convention and
its guillotine. The guillotine
only terrorised, only broke active
resistance. For us, this is not enough.”
This time, he did not lie. In
March 1918, he instructed the Commissariat for Justice to be vigilant in
“setting up a really revolutionary court that is rapid and mercilessly
severe in dealing with counter-revolutionaries, hooligans,” etc.
In defining “the essence of
Leninism”, Stalin would have been closer to the truth if he had said
that the new order was the old prison system plus firing squads and
Marxist propaganda, or Tyufyayev modernized.
The
continuities are remarkable. Substitute
the word “Bolshevik” for “Petrine” in the following passage by
Herzen and you might think you were reading a page out of Solzhenitsyn or
Razgon:
One of the most melancholy results of the Petrine revolution was
the development of the official class. An
artificial, hungry, and uncultivated class, capable of doing nothing but
‘serving,’ knowing nothing but official forms, it constitutes a kind
of civilian clergy, celebrating divine service in the courts and the
police forces, and sucking the blood of the people with thousands of
greedy, unclean mouths.
So
close is the parallel between Czarism and Soviet rule that Herzen’s
words could be applied without change to the whole machinery of the Gulag,
down to the vocabulary itself of the Czarist prison system.
“How stable our prison vocabulary and terminology has
remained!” exclaims Razgon:
Exactly the same words can be found in Dostoevsky [in The
House of the Dead], Doroshevich and Solzhenitsyn. Naturally,
cells, peepholes and slop buckets continue to perform the same functions. But
even the verbs used remain distinctive: you are not “escorted” to an
interrogation or on a new transport but “taken”, not “imprisoned”
in the punishment block but “chucked” there. And
so on. Almost nothing in this
language has changed, testimony to the hellish stability of the system
that gave it birth.
What made these continuities particularly grotesque is that the old evils
not only persisted but were deliberately intensified, all in the name of
Marxist “emancipation” from the past. Had
Melville been alive to read Lenin on “the example of the Jacobins”, he
would not have been surprised by this demonic contradiction, for, as he
observed in a manuscript passage in Billy
Budd, when the French erected their guillotines, “Straightway the
Revolution itself became a wrongdoer, one more oppressive than the
kings.”
Like other features of Soviet
rule, Stalin’s campaign to collectivize farming followed this same
principle and reintroduced serfdom on a scale that the old czars could
have never conceived (it had in fact been abolished by Alexander II in
1861). This turning of the
screws also applies to the Czarist prisons that Herzen and Dostoevsky
describe, which were only a bad dream in light of what was to come. Solzhenitsyn
even provides examples of humane treatment that Czarist prisoners
received, including Bolsheviks themselves, many of whom were permitted to
have books and writing supplies, whereas he would have been shot on the
spot if his Soviet guards had found so much as a scrap of paper in his
pocket.
Armed with an ideology that destroyed all the old restraints, the
masters of the Gulag differed from Herzen’s Czarist officials chiefly in
the intensity of their ruthlessness. Compared
to Herzen’s Tuyfyayev, Razgon’s jailers seem unearthly in their
cruelty, as if they were cut off not merely from “the people”, as
Herzen says of the Petrine bureaucracy, but from the human race itself.
Yellow-eyes
came to life and the strange expression disappeared from his face. Until
now I had not understood its meaning: it came from his sense of
superiority over all those in the barge. He
wore this expression almost all the time. Only
on those rare occasions when I saw Korabelnikov (that was his name)
talking to his superiors, any superiors, did it disappear. His
yellow eyes would light up with a canine intelligence—attentive,
respectful and understanding. Then
the light faded and, once again, he gazed on the rest of us indifferently
and calmly. There was even no
malice there. And this was
surprising, because of all the many villains whom I met in that strange
world it was Korabelnikov who made the most terrifying impression on me. After
I was released from the camps the first time, and then, after a second
term in prison and in the camps, Korabelnikov would continue to haunt my
dreams, and I would groan in my sleep and wake up in a cold sweat.
This is the same Korabelnikov who sent prisoners howling naked through
the frozen wastes. At the deepest
zone of Cocytus, Virgil points toward Satan and his kingdom, and, calling
out the Latin name for the Greek god of the underworld, he exclaims to
Dante, “Lo Dis, and the place where thou must arm thee with
fortitude.”
Here, in the circle of Dis, or
Pluto, they are are now at the furthest extreme from the light of God.
Razgon’s glimpses into Stalin’s Arctic camps recall these same
associations, which place the Gulag at the furthest reaches from humanity,
even from the Nazi factories of death, which, however hideous, are not
beyond our sight. Razgon
reminds us that the Soviet camps operated across “the hills of the
Far East
, in the Siberian forests, and in the glades of the
Tambov
woods or the Meshchera nature reserve. They
existed everywhere, yet nothing remains of them now.”
Lost in space, they are lost
in time as well, for they swallowed up millions of lives and then
disappeared themselves.
There are no terrible museums as there are today at
Auschwitz
, or at Mauthausen in
Austria
. There are no solemn and
funereal memorials like those that testify to the Nazi atrocities at
Khatyn, Salaspils or
Lidice
. Thousands of unnamed graves,
in which there lie mingled the bones of hundreds of thousands of victims,
have now been overgrown by bushes, thick luxuriant grass and young new
forest.
Archeologists continue to uncover sites, and land erosions sometimes
raise the dead, but it is difficult to rebuild even a single camp as a
memorial. In an article on
Perm 36 labor camp, which “a few local academics are trying to
reconstruct,” the New York Times
notes that “there are virtually no films or photographs of the Soviet
prison system,”
and that, “unlike Germany, where the main concentration camps have been
preserved as museums, Russia has few visible traces of its recent,
harrowing past.”
The one inaccuracy in
the line is word “recent”, for people were disappearing as early as
December, 1917, when Lenin ranted against “the lackeys of the
money-bags, the lickspittles of the exploiters”
and called for a “war to the death against the rich and their
hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals”.
Lenin’s cry for blood
was truly apocalyptic, for he promised “the working people” a release
from all social injustice through the triumph of “the proletarian
state” and “the independent creation of a new life”.
Thus, Lenin the atheist
manipulated the religious sentiments of millions of Russians,
whereby the Christian concept of rebirth, as in Dante’s La Vita Nuova, was transformed into an instrument of demagoguery and
mass murder, and
Russia
itself was led “through all the circles of hell”.
Even
when he is not speaking of arrests and executions, Razgon’s demonic
pictures are exact. In one
scene of a winter roll call at
6 a.m.
, he describes prisoners standing in -30 C. weather and wearing face
masks: “Made from random scraps of cloth—bright cottons, towels or
other rags—these masks had holes cut for the eyes, nose and mouth. The
crowd of zeks then looked like some grotesque and frightening carnival
scene by Hieronymous Bosch.”
Razgon’s associations
of the Gulag with Dante and Bosch not only capture moments of horror but
also convey the demonism that he sees at the heart of Soviet rule, a
system so perverse that it could revive the most terrifying Gothic
nightmares even as it proclaimed the coming of “the new Soviet man.”
Lenin’s
assault on the past was so massive that he even tore away at his own
precedents. Not even the Reign
of Terror was allowed to serve as a model. “For us, this is not enough.” Hence
Lenin’s viciousness toward the intellectual classes, whose entire
prestige was bound up with their preservation and advancement of the human
heritage. Solzhenitsyn cites a
letter by Lenin to Maxim Gorky, in which the Bolshevik leader declares
with singular venom that, “in actual fact, they
are not [the nation’s] brains, but shit.”
So complete was the onslaught
that the very memory of the past, as in 1984,
could be punished as a “thought crime” by the state. This
was the message of power behind Stalin’s purges of the Bolshevik
leaders, that the history of the
Communist Party itself could be rewritten. If
“our beloved Bukharin, the darling of the Party”, could be consigned
to oblivion, then no one was safe. The
consequences were senseless in the extreme, for if yesterday’s
“vanguard of the working class” could be today’s “enemy of the
people”, then the division of the world into “exploiters” and
“proletarian” leaders was essentially meaningless. It
is precisely this void that Nadezhda Mandelstam has in mind when she
writes that “the ‘license’ explored by Dostoyevski not only destroys
its adepts, but also spreads corruption all around, scorches the very
earth, and lays everything waste.”
The destruction
of the past, the very labelling of the past as the great symbol of
oppression, was the key to this unrestrained ferocity. Hence
the courage of Mandelstam in committing her husband’s verse to memory,
of Solzhenitsyn in writing The Gulag
under the constant threat of arrest, and of Razgon and countless others in
keeping the intellectual heritage of Russia and western Europe alive
within themselves. When
Grigorenko remarks that he has lived under socialism as it is portrayed in
Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Orwell, he speaks for a generation of writers
for whom the classics not only helped to illuminate their own condition
but also became a guide to their writing itself. It
is as though each one had a Virgil of his own, for there is a deep
equivalence between Shalamov’s Kolyma
Tales and Chekhov’s short stories, Mandelstam’s Hope
Abandoned and the works of Dostoevsky, and Razgon’s True
Stories and the infernal scenes in Dante and Bosch. As
for Solzhenitsyn, his entire career after One
Day has something in it of
the monk Pimen in Mussorgsky’s Boris
Gudonov, the chronicler of
Russia
’s “period of troubles”. A
perfect example of these ties to the past is Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden (1988), which not only takes us on a double
journey to
Leningrad
and Dostoevsky’s gambling days in
Germany
but almost reads like a newly discovered novel by the author of The
Gambler. Tsypkin’s
immersion in Dostoevsky’s middle years is so immediate and intense that
his subject seems to have a living presence, as though Dostoevsky’s
spirit were still moving through modern-day
Russia
, in the same way that Razgon reads the Inferno
almost as though it had been written in view of the Gulag.
In
coupling the name of Orwell with Dostoevsky and Zamyatin, Grigorenko
reminds us of Orwell’s faith in literature as a vehicle of
consciousness. This is true
not only of his political and literary essays but also 1984,
in which he describes Winston Smith’s diary and his memories of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Milton as a last hold on reality in an age of Newspeak
and the daily sessions of “Two Minutes Hate”. It
is difficult to think of another major western author who shares
Orwell’s affinity with his Russian contemporaries, for whom the reading
of literature became a discipline in bearing witness to the truth. In
its analysis of the Soviet propaganda machine, its critique of the Soviet
literary world, and its remembrance of her own husband and the poet Anna
Akhmatova, Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned is the perfect embodiment of this principle. Almost
every page intertwines the lessons of literature with incisive pictures of
Soviet life, and one passage in particular sums up the perspective of the
entire book, in which Mandelstam writes that “to lose one’s
memory—provided it was an honest one—is to lose touch with reality,”
although
Not everybody has the strength to say, with Pushkin: “And
reading with abhorrence my life’s tale, / I quake and curse, /
Complaining bitterly and shedding bitter tears, / But the sad lines I’ll
not wash away.” For their
own peace of mind my contemporaries will certainly “wash away” or
embellish their “sad lines”—though they will most likely not even
realize just how sad they are.
Many western intellectuals have also been quick to “wash away” the
bitter truths about the Soviet regime and, as a result, are completely in
the dark about why their Russian counterparts have maintained their faith
in the intrinsic value of literature. During
a Soviet-American literary conference in 1988, just before the Soviet
system came crashing down, J. Hillis Miller was surprised to find Russian
academics still believing that literature has universal value and that
certain works embody spiritual absolutes “with timeless validity for all
humanity”.
It is the surprise of a
western academic who not only seems ignorant of the scope of Russian
literature but also does not appreciate the enormity of the Soviet attempt
to obliterate the past;
hence his false sense of superiority toward his Russian colleagues, who
have stubbornly held on to “a solid ground of religious and cultural
assumptions… just about as it was before the Revolution.”
On a deeper level, he has no intimate, or inner connection to
literature and therefore cannot conceive that it could live beyond its own
moment and have a present
meaning. “Each week,”
writes Razgon toward the end of his work,
the newspaper Vechernyaya
Moskva publishes rows of tiny photographs of people killed 50-60 years
ago, for no reason at all, yet I am not aware that any of the thousands
who serve in that vast building on the
Lubyanka Square
has gone insane, committed suicide, or publicly spoken out in tears of
repentance, horror and mortal anguish….
In Chekhov’s story “A Fit” a student who goes to a brothel
with his merry friends suddenly almost begins to lose his mind from the
awareness that these unfortunate women are also people. Tormented,
unfortunate people. Not one of
his educated, clever and, probably, kind fellow students can understand
what’s wrong with him.
There are no “religious and cultural assumptions” in the passage. There
is only a glimpse into the hard, cold facts of Soviet life and Razgon’s
silent identification with Chekhov’s story, for Razgon himself had once
been present at a scene of suffering in his youth and had also observed
“tormented, unfortunate people” without taking them to heart.
Contrition
is not a “religious assumption” but an experience, and those who have
lived to tell the story of the Gulag bear witness to the truth of
Mandelstam’s observation that “pain acts like a leaven for both word
and thought, quickening your sense of reality and the true logic of this
world.” This is the same
animating power that informs the entire literature of the Gulag, which
could almost take as its motto Chekhov’s single aim in writing, “just
to depict life as it is, without taking one step further.”
NOTES
Lev Razgon, “Preface”, True Stories (1989), trans. John Crowfoot (Dana Point: Ardis
Publishers, 1997), p. 7. The
story of Razgon’s arrest echoes across the decades to this day. In a
recent review of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag:
A History (The New Yorker,
April 14, 2003
), David Remnick describes an interview
he had with Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned scholar and former convict of
Solovki, an infamous island prison camp near the
Arctic Circle
. Likhachev told Remnick of the
celebrated visit in 1929 by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who
arrived on the ship Gleb Boky
and later wrote a glowing account of the camp. Remnick
refers to Gleb Boky as the camp chief, but Razgon tells us that he had
far broader powers as the former head of the Petrograd Cheka (the
first Soviet secret police), and that he later served in the OGPU and
NKVD. Boky was arrested and executed in 1937 during Stalin’s
destruction of the revolutionaries of 1917. Razgon was swept up in the
purge, having married Boky’s daughter in the early 1930s. Both were
arrested one year after Boky’s “liquidation”. Razgon’s
wife died in a transit camp. Other
family members were arrested as well. In
1990, Razgon was permitted to read his original case file and the file
of Gleb Boky’s arrest and interrogation. He
recounts this painful visit to the archives of the KGB in his
epilogue. A detailed
discussion of Solovki, with extensive photographs that include the
visit of Gorky and Boky, can be found in Tomasz Kizny, Goulag
(Balland/Acropole, 2003). Photographs
of Soviet camps are hard to come by. Kizny’s book is apparently the
first of its kind.
Varlam Shalamov, “Carpenters”,
Kolyma
Tales (1950s), trans. John
Glad (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982), p. 46.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), trans. Max Hayward and
Ronald Hingley (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 203.
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