Bollettino

Let�s overturn some silver plated pieties, shall we?

David Remnick�s review of Annie Applebaum�s history of the Gulag is so riddled with disingenuous passages and distortions that it could have been written for a particularly dim Tory publication in 1930.

If there is one atrocity against the human race that we ought to know more about, it is the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn�s history weighs on that history like a nightmare �and it should. It is a great work of art. I am almost tempted to say, alas. The standard histories of the holocaust, like Raul Hilberg, are not works of art. So that any account of the Gulag, in the west, has to wrest it from Solzhenitsyn. There are, of course, histories about aspects of the Stalinist terror, from Robert Conquest to Zhores Medvedev; however, I believe Annie Applebaum has written the first popular history of it.

I�m not going to comb through this review. That seems pointless. When Remnick gets to the meat of the Gulag � the meat of the meatgrinder � you don�t have to put a bodyguard on him. It is only when he is revving up, getting into his anti-Bolshie mode, that he starts throwing spitballs.

The intro serves up a familiar Remnick motif: the anxiety to blame Lenin. Lenin, in Remnick�s view, is the father of the Gulag. To do this, however, he has to deal with the fact that, under Lenin, atrocities were mainly embedded in the Civil War. If one compares the number of prisoners in camps under Lenin to, say, the number in France�s penal colonies, there isn�t much of a difference. Lenin, of course, died in 1924. Remnick starts out with Dmitri Likhachev, a man who was imprisoned at the Solovki Islands in 1928. Here�s how Remnick puts it:

�He was living proof that the Gulag had been the invention not of Stalin but, rather, of Lenin, the Bolshevik founder, because, he said wearily, �I was a prisoner at Lenin�s first concentration camp.�

As almost always, when Remnick gets on this topic, you can bet that the omission of the fact that Lenin died four years before Likhachev was sent to Solovki is malignant. But if the confusion of dates is leading the witness, Remnick�s riff on the origin of the term concentration camp is leading the witness to drink, and heavily, and all from the waters of oblivion.

�The concentration camp, as both a term and a concept, has complicated beginnings. It was first used to refer to a form of incarceration, when the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection, Americans in the Philippines, and the British during the Boer War established what were called �concentration camps.� These camps were harsh places, where many prisoners died, but they did not begin to suggest the horror that �concentration camp� would soon convey.�

As a moral tergiversator, Remnick is operating on a grand scale. The reason that so many became communists in the 1930s was exactly this kind of distortion of the evidence made one believe that anticommunists were inherently incapable of telling the truth. Concentration camps in British and American hands, we are given to believe by the bland Remnick, were mild things. �Many prisoners died there�� Hmm. According to Niall Ferguson�s handy Empire, 27,927 Boers died in the camps, or 14 percent of the entire Boer population. Since this happened in 1900, and Lenin was alive, perhaps he was, in some mysterious way, responsible. 14,000 of the black prisoners died, too, by the way, 81 percent children. These deaths were not the fault of commisars, but of good old British upper class politicians. The imprisoned, by the way, consisted mostly of women and children. Why? Because the Boers were, by this time, fighting a guerilla war against the British army. So the British took their families prisoner in order to subdue them. Like the empire itself, the concentration camp system happened in a fit of absent mindedness � for instance, the absence of mind that would provide little provision, and no medical care, for those prisoners.

Now, let�s see how that compares to Lenin�s real concentration camp totals. Solovki was started a year before Lenin�s death. There were, according to Annie Applebaum�s introduction, eighty one camps started under Lenin, after 1921. However, even she doesn�t claim these camps were killing on the Boer camp level. They weren�t even, by her account, on the Czarist level:

�Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga [political exile] remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600. Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia's empty, mineral-rich wastelands.�

To really talk about the Gulag is to talk about Prison. Since America is the world incarceration leader, it is difficult to do in the American context. The americans contend that putting a man in prison because he is a Trotskyist is the height of unreason, while putting him in prison because he injects opiates in his veins is common sense. Americans conted that leaving a man to almost freeze to death in the snow on a work detail is torture, while immersing him in 23 hours of solitary darkness per diem, as is the fate of many of NY's worst criminals, is a refreshing response to liberal leniety. We consider that there is no topic like prison to bring out all the disgusting sophistries in a society. But certain things are clear:

- Lenin early on adapted all the techniques that were employed by the �bourgeois� powers, including executing deserters, terrorizing prisoners, and throwing into prison dissenters.
- Stalin�s name is connected by an indissoluble link to the Gulag because he took the prison camp and made it the central characteristic of his rule. That simply isn�t true of Lenin.
- The rhetoric of atrocity is diseased from the very beginning if the standards by which one condemns it are jiggered in favor of societies one favors. One of the many admirable things about Ferguson�s book is that, though he is a Conservative, he doesn�t do a lot of jiggering. One of the awful things about all of Remnick�s Russian writings is he does nothing but.