Afraid to say what we think… that’s how it starts
By Ivan Morgan
I read a lot. I’ve just finished the most brilliant, harrowing, illuminating, depressing, horrifying, intellectually rigorous book I have read in decades. Few besides me will ever read it, but I think it’s a must read for anyone who wants to understand real human politics.
It called Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. It’s a comprehensive examination of the Soviet Union’s Gulag system of prisons and forced labour camps that existed from the early Russian revolution (1917) ‘til the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Unlike previous works about the prison labour camps, Applebaum had access to many of the records kept by the Soviets when they were in power.
At 679 pages it’s a long hard slog. The subject is so depressing, so dark, that I found I could only read so many pages at one sitting. State enterprises run by slave labour. Hard stuff.
Sound appealing? Here’s a few good points. Its very well written, not just dry history. Also, it won a Pulitzer.
That’s not why I read it. My fathers’ mother – my babushka (Russian for grandmother) – was Russian. I don’t remember a lot about her other than she was an exile living in England, and she hated, HATED, communists, communism and the Soviets. She was waiting patiently for the day when they were gone, confident that day was coming. As a young person I thought that was sadly amusing. Clearly, they weren’t going anywhere. This column is in part a very public apology to a very patient old woman who died decades ago but almost lived long enough to witness her dream come true.
The Soviet dictatorship set up forced labour camps that saw over 18 million people arrested, imprisoned, enslaved and tortured in unspeakable conditions. People who didn’t agree with the Communist Party were deemed “enemies of the state” and were rounded up and deported to hellish camps in the Russian hinterlands: the high arctic, Siberia and the deserts.
Don’t try to imagine the millions of families destroyed, the millions of lives lost to hunger, disease, and cold. People died for no real reason other than they ran afoul of the folks in charge. Its unfathomable. Applebaum tries to give us a sense of the human suffering by using individual stories throughout the book to illustrate historical facts. They are heartbreaking.
It’s very important to remember that the people responsible for this knew they were doing the right thing. They knew their way of thinking was the right way, and those who disagreed with them were the enemy who needed to be “re-educated” or annihilated.
When I was a young person, my babushka wanted me to know how stuff can go bad fast. Applebaum shows us in painful detail how it happened.
It begins when a small group of people gain political power believing what political commentator and comedian Bill Maher calls the One True Opinion. They’re right and everyone else is wrong and evil. They believe their opponents are a danger to society and must be stopped at all costs. They believe they must hold on to power by force if necessary for the good of us all. They see the need for social control for the same reason.
We see attempts at social control around us every day. In politics. In the media. In our daily lives. It’s a natural aspect of politics. The trouble starts when you and I are afraid to say how we feel about something for fear we will be cancelled, shouted down, fired or otherwise punished. That’s how it starts.
On page 514 there’s a line which jumped off the page and bit me on the nose. When I read it I thought about my babushka. When I read it, I knew I had to share it. Writing about the end of the prison camps and the liberation of hundreds of thousands of Gulag victims after the death of Soviet dictator Josepf Stalin, Applebaum quotes Anastas Mikoyan, a senior Soviet official explaining why they were reluctant to admit that all the camp victims had been innocent.
I think his reasoning made political sense then and might make some sense now in our corner of the world. His reasoning can explain why our own governments are slow to take responsibility for the many problems they have created.
If they did, he wrote, “it would be clear that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters.”
It was clear to my babushka.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com