BY PETE DU
PONT
Wednesday, June 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
PETROPAVLOVSK, Russia--The red flag of the old Soviet Union still flies
over the soccer stadium here, and statues of Lenin still dominate the
public squares of Siberian cities. Only Stalin has vanished from Russia's
past and with him any idea of reconciliation with the walking shadows of
the country's history.
Five hundred miles to the northwest lies Magadan, the administrative
center of the former Soviet Gulag. For prisoners it was the end of a long
journey from western Russia and the beginning of a descent into death.
They were forced to come here from across the Soviet Union by railroad
cattle car, without much food and minimal water (there was to be no
coddling of enemies of the state). They unloaded at the coast and were
crammed into the holds of ships and taken to Magadan to build the roads to
the Kolyma gold fields and some 90 Gulag camps.
One purpose of the Gulag was to mine gold and ore; another was to
starve and beat and freeze the prisoners until they died. Robert
Conquest's "Kolyma, the Arctic Death Camps" quotes a Soviet doctor's
statement to a prisoner: "You are not brought here to live but to suffer
and die. . . . If you live . . . it means you are
guilty of one of two things: either you worked less than was assigned you
or you ate more than was your proper due."
Between 1936 and 1946 the yearly death rate in the camps was about 20%;
all told about 15 million prisoners died in the Kolyma camps alone. Of the
10,000 to 12,000 Polish prisoners of war who were sent to Siberia in
1940-41, only 583 survived to return to fight against Germany under
Stalin's 1942 war amnesty.
So how to explain this Soviet cruelty; were Communists just madmen,
lusting to kill for whatever reason? Felix Dzerzhinsky, Nikolai Ivanovich
Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria, who successively headed the NKVD (secret
police), may have been, but it is more complex than that.
It begins with Ivan the Terrible, who replaced the hereditary
aristocracy with one owing its allegiance to the czar, and in 1565 created
Russia's first secret police--the Oprichniki. Every subsequent
czar--including Peter, Catherine and finally Nicholas II--continued the
practice. So assassination, exile and forced labor were the norm long
before Lenin's Cheka began massive execution of political opponents in
1918. Authoritarianism and brutality were an integral part of Russian
history and culture.
Second, it was an essential tenet of communism that individualism is
forbidden--be it economic individualism or political thought in opposition
to the state. The communists took power vowing to eliminate private
property, money and the market economy; all industrial and agricultural
products were to be produced and distributed by the state. By 1929 Stalin
had decided to liquidate kulaks as a class, and a kulak was defined
as any independently successful person--a farmer who had three cows
instead of two, for example--or any person who opposed collectivization or
the government.
Finally, when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 one of their first
acts was to repudiate all of Russia's foreign debt. How was a nation with
little money of its own to invest, and unable to borrow abroad, going to
build an industrialized society? Stalin's solution was to invest human
lives instead of money to modernize his nation, and thus the slave-labor
economy was born.
The first project was the Baltic-White Sea Canal, with slave labor
doing the digging and pile driving that in the rest of the world was done
by steam power; 60,000 people died building it. When huge deposits of
copper, nickel and cobalt were discovered near Norilsk in northern
Siberia, where the climate was far too severe for comfortable living, the
NKVD simply arrested the necessary engineers and technical people, charged
them with sabotage, sentenced them to 10 years and moved them to the site
along with an initial 5,000 convicts to do the heavy lifting. At the
height of Stalin's slave-labor program, 20% of the national workforce was
prisoner labor. Just up the road from Magadan one kilogram of gold mined
from the Kolyma fields cost one human life.
So in a sense the Gulag was a product of Russian tradition, the
collective philosophy of communism and financial necessity since the war.
A communism economy was an impossible concept from the start. Recognition
of the rights of the individual, or democratic values, or even a hint of
compassion, might have nullified this permanent stain on Russia's
reputation. But it was not to be, and the result was the human catastrophe
of the arctic death camps.
What did the West think about all this? Life magazine declared
Lenin "perhaps the greatest man of modern times." The New York Times'
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Walter Duranty ("I put my money on
Stalin") intentionally falsified his reporting about Soviet-induced
famines and abuses, writing in 1933 that yes, there might be a few deaths,
but "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs." In France,
philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote that "accounts of the Soviet labor
system should be suppressed even if true, since otherwise the French
working class might become anti-Soviet."
Within the Soviet Union, even long after the terror and the camps were
gone, there was a deafening silence about its appalling past. Krushchev's
famous 1956 speech to a Communist Party conference denouncing Stalin's
abuses was not published within the U.S.S.R. for more than 30 years
(perhaps because Krushchev issued exile decrees of his own).
For the older generation, guilt by association and fear of the
consequences of honesty were too overwhelming to allow any discussion of
the truth. Even today, here in the towns of the Siberian east only a few
miles from Magadan and the camps, memorials to the heroes of the
Revolution are featured in museums and the hammer and sickle are still
inlaid in the brick walls of apartment buildings.
Among younger people the uneasiness is still there, but the attitude is
one of moving on, and never mind about the past. While the walking shadows
of the Soviet Union may be out of sight, just beyond the mountains and up
what the prisoners called "the road of death," they are not gone from
Russia, and won't be for a long while.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of
the Dallas-based National Center
for Policy Analysis. His column appears Wednesdays.
