Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Preparatory

Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.

‘Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat’ (1,340 lives). ‘Oleska Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family’s… lives by consuming the meat of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other diseases’ (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman’s essayistic-documentary novel Forever Flowing: ‘And the children’s faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads – thin, wide lips – and some of them resembled fish, mouths open’ (3,880 lives). Grossman goes on:

Thus: 11,860 lives. Cannibalism was widely practised – and widely punished. Not all these pitiable anthropophagi received the supreme penalty. In the late 1930s, 325 cannibals from the Ukraine were still serving life sentences in Baltic slave camps.

The famine was an enforced famine: the peasants were stripped of their food. On 11 June 1933, the Ukrainian paper Visti praised an ‘alert’ secret policeman for unmasking and arresting a ‘fascist saboteur’ who had hidden some bread in a hole under a pile of clover. That word fascist. One hundred and forty lives.

In these pages, guileless prepositions like at and to each represent the murder of six or seven large families. There is only one major book on this subject – Conquest’s. Again: it is 411 pages long.

Credentials

I am a fifty-two-year-old novelist and critic who has recently read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment. On 31 December 1999, along with Tony Blair and the Queen, I attended the celebrations at the Millennium Dome in London. Touted as a festival of high technology in an aesthetic dreamscape, the evening resembled a five-hour stopover in a second-rate German airport. For others, the evening resembled a five-hour attempt to reach a second-rate German airport – so I won’t complain. I knew that the millennium was a non-event, reflecting little more than our interest in zeros; and I knew that 31 December 1999 wasn’t the millennium anyway.[1] But that night did seem to mark the end of the twentieth century; and the twentieth century is unanimously considered to be our worst century yet (an impression confirmed by the new book I was reading: Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest). I had hoped that at midnight I would get some sort of chiliastic frisson. And I didn’t get it at the Dome. Nonetheless, a day or two later I started to write about the twentieth century and what I took to be its chief lacuna. The piece, or the pamphlet, grew into the slim volume you hold in your hands. I have written about the Holocaust, in a novel (Time’s Arrow). Its afterword begins:

It feels necessary to record that, between Millennium Night and the true millennium a year later, my sister died at the age of forty-six.

Background

In 1968 I spent the summer helping to rewire a high-bourgeois mansion in a northern suburb of London. It was my only taste of proletarian life. The experience was additionally fleeting and qualified: when the job was done, I promptly moved into the high-bourgeois mansion with my father and stepmother (both of them novelists, though my father was also a poet and critic). My sister would soon move in too. That summer we were of course monitoring the events in Czechoslovakia. In June, Brezhnev deployed 16,000 men on the border. The military option on ‘the Czech problem’ was called Operation Tumour… My father had been to Prague in 1966 and made many contacts there. After that it became a family joke – the stream of Czechs who came to visit us in London. There were bouncing Czechs, certified Czechs, and at least one honoured Czech, the novelist Josef Skvorecky. And then on the morning of 21 August my father appeared in the doorway to the courtyard, where the rewiring detail was taking a break, and called out in a defeated and wretched voice: ‘Russian tanks in Prague.’

I turned nineteen four days later. In September I went up to Oxford.

The first two items in The Letters of Kingsley Amis form the only occasion, in a book of 1,200 pages, where I find my father impossible to recognize. Here he is humourlessly chivvying a faint-hearted comrade to rally to the cause. The tone (earnest, elderly, ‘soppy-stern’) is altogether alien: ‘Now, really, you know, this won’t do at all, leaving the Party like that. Tut, tut, John. I am seriously displeased with you.’ The second letter ends with a hand-drawn hammer and sickle. My father was a card-carrying member of the CP, taking his orders, such as they were, from Stalin’s Moscow. It was November 1941: he was nineteen, and up at Oxford.

1941. Kingsley, let us assume, was sturdily ignorant of the USSR’s domestic cataclysms. But its foreign policies hardly cried out for one’s allegiance. A summary. August 1939: the Nazi-Soviet Pact. September 1939: the Nazi-Soviet invasion-partition of Poland (and a second pact: the Soviet-German Treaty on Borders and Friendship). November 1939: the annexation of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, and the attempted invasion of Finland (causing the USSR’s expulsion, the following month, from the League of Nations). June 1940: the annexation of Moldavia and Northern Bukovina. August 1940: the annexation of Lithuania, Lativa and Estonia; and the murder of Trotsky. These acquisitions and decapitations would have seemed modest compared to Hitler’s helter-skelter successes over the same period. And then in June 1941, of course, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. My father rightly expected to participate in the war; the Russians were now his allies. It was then that he joined the Party, and he remained a believer for fifteen years.

How much did the Oxford comrades know, in 1941? There were public protests in the West about the Soviet forced-labour camps as early as 1931. There were also many solid accounts of the violent chaos of Collectivization (1929–34) and of the 1933 famine (though no suggestion, as yet, that the famine was terroristic). And there were the Moscow Show Trials of 1936–38, which were open to foreign journalists and observers, and were monitored worldwide. In these pompous and hysterical charades, renowned Old Bolsheviks ‘confessed’ to being career-long enemies of the regime (and to other self-evidently ridiculous charges). The pubescent Solzhenitsyn was ‘stunned by the fraudulence of the trials’. And yet the world, on the whole, took the other view, and further accepted indignant Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour. ‘There was no reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The excuses which can be advanced are irrational,’ writes Conquest in The Great Terror. The world was offered a choice between two realities; and the young Kingsley, in common with the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere, chose the wrong reality.

The Oxford Communists would certainly have known about the Soviet decree of 7 April 1935, which rendered children of twelve and over subject to ‘all measures of criminal punishment’, including death. This law, which was published on the front page of Pravda and caused universal consternation (reducing the French CP to the argument that children, under socialism, became grownups very quickly), was intended, it seems, to serve two main purposes. One was social: it would expedite the disposal of the multitudes of feral and homeless orphans created by the regime. The second purpose, though, was political. It applied barbaric pressure on the old oppositionists, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had children of eligible age; these men were soon to fall, and their clans with them. The law of 7 April 1935 was the crystallization of ‘mature’ Stalinism. Imagine the mass of the glove that Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.[2]

On 7 April 1935, my father was nine days away from his thirteenth birthday. Did he ever wonder, as he continued to grow up, why a state should need ‘the last line of defence’ (as a secret reinforcing instruction put it) against twelve-year-olds?

Perhaps there is a reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The real story – the truth – was entirely unbelievable.

More Background

It was in the following summer of 1969, I think, that I sat for an hour in the multi-acre garden of the fascist mansion in southern Hertfordshire with Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. A scrap of the conversation sticks in my mind, because I pulled off a mildly successful witticism at a time when I was still (rightly) anxious about my general seaworthiness in adult company. Kingsley and Bob (a.k.a. ‘Kingers’ and ‘Conquers’, just as Bob’s future translatee, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, would be referred to as ‘Solzhers’ – pronounced soldiers), were deploring a recent production of Hamlet in which the Prince was homosexual and Ophelia was played by a man. In retrospect that sounds almost staid, for 1969. Anyhow, I said, ‘Get thee to a monastery.’ No great thing; but it seemed to scan.

In 1967 Kingsley had published the article called ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’. The ex-Communist was developing into a reasonably active Labourite – before becoming (and remaining) a markedly noisy Tory. In 1968 Bob had published The Great Terror, his classic study of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, and was on the way to assembling a body of work that would earn him the title, bestowed at a plenum of the Central Committee in Moscow in 1990, of ‘anti-Sovietchik number one’. Both Kingsley and Bob, in the 1960s, were frequently referred to as ‘fascists’ in the general political debate. The accusation was only semi-serious (as indeed was the general political debate, it now seems. In my milieu, policemen and even traffic wardens were called fascists). Kingers and Conquers referred to their own weekly meetings, at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street, as ‘the fascist lunch’; here they would chat and carouse with other fascists, among them the journalist Bernard Levin, the novelists Anthony Powell and John Braine (an infrequent and much-feared participant), and the defector historian Tibor Szamuely. What united the fascist lunchers was well-informed anti-Communism. Tibor Szamuely knew what Communism was. He had known them: purge, arrest, gulag.

I didn’t read The Great Terror in 1968 (I would have been more likely, at that time, to have read Conquest’s poetry). But I spent an hour with it, and never forgot the cold elegance of the following remark about ‘sources’: ‘1. Contemporary official accounts require little comment. They are, of course, false as to essentials, but they are still most informative. (It is untrue that Mdivani was a British spy, but it is true that he was executed.)’ I have recently read the book twice, in the first edition (which I must have successfully stolen from my father), and in its revised, post-glasnost form, The Great Terror: A Reassessment. When asked to suggest a new title for the revised work, Conquest told his publisher, ‘How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?’ Because the book, itself revolutionary at the time of its appearance, has since been massively vindicated. In the mid-1960s I joined in hundreds of conversations like the following (the interlocutors here are my father and A. J. Ayer):

‘In the USSR, at least they’re trying to forge something positive.’

‘But it doesn’t matter what they’re trying to forge, because they’ve already killed five million people.’

‘You keep going back to the five million.’

‘If you’re tired of that five million, then I’m sure I can find you another five million.’

And one can, now. One can find another 5 million, and another, and another.

Alongside all this there was, in England then, a far hotter debate: the one about Vietnam. A certain urbanity was maintained in arguments about the USSR. It was in arguments about Vietnam that people yelled, wept, fought, stalked out. I watched my father forfeit two valuable friendships over Vietnam (those of A. Alvarez and Karl Miller). For he, and most but not all of the frequenters of the fascist lunch, broadly backed American policy. And this was, of course, the position of a minuscule and much-disliked minority. In my first term at Oxford (autumn, 1968) I attended a demonstration against the resuppression of Czechoslovakia. About a hundred people were there. We heard speeches. The mood was sorrowful, decent. Compare this to the wildly peergroup-competitive but definitely unfakeable emotings and self-lacerations of the crowds outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where they gathered in their tens of thousands.

In 1968 the world seemed to go further left than it had ever gone before and would ever go again. But this left was the New Left: it represented, or turned out to represent, revolution as play. The ‘redeemer’ class was no longer to be found in the mines and factories; it was to be found in the university libraries and lecture halls. There were demonstrations, riots, torchings, street battles in England, Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA. And remember the Paris of 1968: barricades, street theatre, youth-worship (‘The young make love; the old make obscene gestures’), the resurgence of Marcuse (the wintry dialectician), and Sartre standing on street corners handing out Maoist pamphlets… The death throes of the New Left took the form of vanguard terrorism (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Weathermen). And its afterlife is anarchistic, opposing itself to the latest mutation of capital: after imperialism, after fascism, it now faces globalization. We may note here that militant Islam cannot be made to fit into this ‘model’ – or into any other.

But red wasn’t dead, in 1968. During my time at Oxford they used to come to your room: the believers, the steely ones – the proselytizing Communists. One might adapt the old joke. Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer. To glance quickly at a crucial dissonance: it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany. (Hitler attracts mockery, but his actions repel it). This is not merely a question of decorum. In the German case, laughter automatically absents itself. Pace Adorno, it was not poetry that became impossible after Auschwitz. What became impossible was laughter. In the Soviet case, on the other hand, laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself. Immersion in the facts of the Bolshevik catastrophe may make this increasingly hard to accept, but such an immersion will never cleanse that catastrophe of laughter…

I have to say that for a while I rather creepily, but very loyally, toed my father’s line on Vietnam. Soon I changed my mind and we argued about it, often bitterly, for thirty years.[3] As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The prosecution of the war by America, I came to think, was clearly intolerable, impossible, not only because of what it was doing to Vietnam, but also because of what it was doing to America. There was a ghostly epiphany, a ghostly confirmation, when, in the late 1980s, the number of home casualties in the war was officially exceeded by the number of suicides among its veterans. That is strong evidence of an ideological brutalization of the motherland. The veterans returned, as we know, not to flowers and embraces, but to isolation.

The Szamuelys. All four Szamuelys – Tibor, Nina, Helen and George – were staying at the fascist mansion on the day I drove from there to Oxford, in 1972, to be orally judged for my degree. When it was over I crowed the news home by telephone, and returned to a scene of celebration. At about one o’clock that night I made a cordially unrequited pass at Helen Szamuely and then blacked out on the chaise longue in the drawing room. I awoke at about five, and stood up wonderingly, and headed for the door. When I opened it, all the fascist burglar alarms went off and I roused everyone in the house, my father, stepmother, step-uncle, and all four Szamuelys.

The Politicization of Sleep

Having analysed a particularly violent tackle by a particularly violent player, the ex-footballer Jimmy Greaves remarked: ‘Put it this way. He’s a lovely boy when he’s asleep.’ With the Bolsheviks, there was no such respite. In 1910 a political opponent said of Lenin that you couldn’t deal with a man who ‘for twenty-four hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of the revolution, and who, even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but revolution’. The actual Revolution, of course, had no effect on this habit. As the young secretary Khrushchev said to a cheering audience of Party members, ‘A Bolshevik is someone who feels himself to be a Bolshevik even when he’s sleeping!’ That’s how a Bolshevik felt about sleep,

Sleep was just another opportunity to feel like a Bolshevik.

But that is what they want, the believers, the steely ones, that is what they live for: the politicization of sleep. They want politics to be going on everywhere all the time, politics permanent and circumambient. They want the ubiquitization of politics; they want the politicization of sleep.

Soon we will look at what Stalin did to the Meyerholds: the extreme example of the politicization of sleep.

This is from a letter addressed to Maxim Gorky concerning the status of intellectuals under the new regime:

That isn’t Stalin. (That is Lenin.) Stalin hated intellectuals too, but he cared about what we call creative writing and had an uneasy feel for it. His famous and much-mocked remark, ‘writers are the engineers of human souls’, is not just a grandiose fatuity: it is a description of what he wanted writers to be under his rule. He didn’t understand that talented writers cannot go against their talent and survive, that they cannot be engineers. Talentless writers can, or they can try; it was a very good thing to be a talentless writer in the USSR, and a very bad thing to be a talented one.

Stalin personally monitored a succession of novelists, poets and dramatists. In this sphere he wavered as in no other. He gave Zamyatin his freedom: emigration. He menaced but partly tolerated Bulgakov (and went to his play Days of the Turbins fifteen times, as the theatre records show). He tortured and killed Babel. He destroyed Mandelstam. He presided over the grief and misery of Anna Akhmatova (and of Nadezhda Mandelstam). He subjected Gorky to a much stranger destiny, slowly deforming his talent and integrity; next to execution, deformity was the likeliest outcome for the post-October Russian writer, expressed most eloquently in suicide. He endured Pasternak; he silenced him, and took a lover and a child from him; still, he spared him (‘Do not touch this cloud-dweller’). But this is what he did to the Meyerholds.

The world-famous Vsevolod Meyerhold had displeased Stalin, at the height of the Great Terror, with his production of a play about the Civil War. Meyerhold was savaged by Pravda (that was a ritual, something like a promissory note of disaster) and his theatre was shut down. After a while he was given some employment and protection by Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky died in August 1938. Just under a year later Meyerhold was given an official opportunity to recant at a conference organized by the Committee on Art Affairs. He did not recant. He said, among other things:

A few days later he was arrested. The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov:

You know that your sleep has been politicized – when that is what wakes you. The interrogator, he added, urinated in his mouth. Meyerhold wrote this letter on 13 January 1940, having confessed to whatever it was they wanted him to confess to (spying for the British and the Japanese, among other charges). Stalin needed confessions; he followed the progress of certain interrogations (lasting months or even years), and couldn’t sleep until confessions were secured. So his sleep, of course, was also politicized.

A few days after Meyerhold’s arrest his young wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was found dead in their apartment. She had seventeen knife wounds. The neighbours had heard her screams; they thought she was rehearsing. It is reported that her eyes, presumably closed in sleep when the doorbell rang, had been cut out.

Meyerhold was shot on 2 February 1940.

I had just begun this book when I came across the following, in an account of the Soviet-exported Hungarian ‘revolution’ of 1919:

My first thought was to fax Bob Conquest with the question: ‘Was Tibor Szamuely related to Tibor Szamuely?’ Then I recalled the piece about Tibor, our Tibor, written by my father in his Memoirs. I settled down to it, thinking that I knew Tibor’s story pretty well, and thinking, moreover, that it was a happy story, a story of struggle, heroic cunning, luck, escape, subversive triumph. And I finished the piece with a pain in my throat. This is not a Meyerhold story; but it is another story about the politicization of sleep.

Tibor Szamuely was Tibor Szamuely’s uncle, and a famous associate of Lenin’s. Tibor, our Tibor, ‘had a framed photograph, prominently displayed, of the two monsters side by side facing a crowd from a platform’, my father writes. It was, then, as a scion of an émigré Hungarian political family that Tibor was born in Moscow in 1925. When he was eleven his father disappeared into the mouth of 1936. Tibor fought in the Red Army while still in his teens. In the early 1950s Tibor happened to say, in the hearing of somebody he thought he could trust, that he was sick of the sight of that ‘fat pig’ Georgi Malenkov (Prime Minister of the USSR, 1953–55). Representatives of ‘the Organs’ came for him in the middle of the night. He got eight years, to be served in the northern camp of Vorkuta – a name that means as much to a Russian, perhaps, as the name Dachau means to a Jew. Or means more. I choose Dachau advisedly and maybe pusillanimously. Many people died in it but Dachau did not have time to become a death camp (its gas chambers were built too late). Vorkuta was not a death camp. The gulag had no death camps of the Nazi type, no Belzec, no Sobibor (though it had execution camps). But all the camps were death camps, by the nature of things. Those not immediately killed at Auschwitz, which was a slave camp and a death camp, tended to last three months. Two years seems to have been the average for the slave camps of the gulag archipelago.

‘Write to your mother’ were Tibor’s last words to his wife as he was led away at three o’clock in the morning. It used to be his boast that he was the only prisoner ever freed by Stalin – by Stalin personally. Nina Szamuely’s mother had apparently had close relations with Hungary’s Stalinist dictator Matyas Rakosi. Stalin was duly called or cabled by the Stalinist; orders were dispatched to Vorkuta. The KGB man sent to liberate Tibor apologized to him, on the railway platform by kissing his shoes. The convicted slanderer of the state was now in favour. And Tibor, by a series of wonderful feints and flukes, escaped to the England he had visited as a boy. He escaped with his wife, his two children, and also (a great coup) his vast and irreplaceable library. So this was a happy story, I thought: a happy story.

It didn’t take Tibor long to establish himself: historian, academic, journalist, USSR-watcher. When his naturalization papers came through, the fascists held a celebratory lunch. Of his new citizenship he later said to my father, ‘You know, this means I have no more worries. Nothing matters to me now. Not even dying. I’ll be able to say to myself, well, at least it’s in England.’ And it was in England: two years later, at the age of forty-seven. And Nina died two years after that: the same day, the same cancer. I remember her with greater clarity and feeling than I remember him. I used to smile at it: her air of worry, her constant activity of worry. And I remember her funeral, too, and ‘one of the most harrowing sights imaginable,’ as my father writes, ‘that of the two young orphaned children, Helen and George, there at the top of the church steps to greet the mourners, standing completely alone…’

Tibor was an unusually late riser, and Kingsley once complained to Nina about it. She said that her husband sometimes needed to see the first signs of dawn before he could begin to contemplate sleep. Even in England. He needs, said Nina, ‘to be absolutely certain that they won’t be coming for him that night’.

We cannot understand it, and there is no reason why we should. It takes a significant effort of imagination to guess at the ‘fear that millions of people find insurmountable’, in the words of Vasily Grossman, ‘this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the state’.

More Background

‘Hugh MacDiarmid: what a bastard,’ said my father in about 1972, referring to the man widely believed to be the greatest Scottish poet of the twentieth century. ‘He became a Communist in 1956 – after Hungary.’

‘And what’s his stuff like?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you know. Nothing but Marxist clichés interspersed with archaic “Scotch” expletives.’

‘For instance?’

He thought for a moment. My memory exactly vouches for lines two and four, though it can’t do the same for lines one and three, where, for that matter, any old rubbish would have done. He said something like:

‘Enough,’ I said – though now I wish I had let him go on a bit. It was easy to joke about Communism. That was one of the things the Russians, too, had always done about Communism. On the other hand you could serve years for joking about Communism, under Communism (as Tibor knew). Joke. Q: Why are the USSR and America the same? A: Because in the USSR you can joke about America and in America you can joke about America.

During the mid-1970s I worked for the famous and historic and now perhaps obsolescent Labour weekly, the New Statesman (or the NEW STATESMAN, in its own house style).[4] My contemporaries there were Julian Barnes (novelist and critic), Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, political man of letters), and James Fenton (journalist, critic, essayist and, above all, poet). Politically we broke down as follows. Julian was broadly Labour – though Christopher Hitchens would tirelessly ridicule him for having once voted Liberal. I was quietist and unaligned. Fenton and Hitchens, on the other hand, were proselytizing Trotskyists who (for instance) spent their Saturdays selling copies of the Socialist Worker on impoverished London high streets.

‘What do I call you if I write this piece?’ I said to Christopher, on the phone to him in Washington, D.C. ‘Trotskyites or Trotskyists?’

‘Oh, Trotskyists. Only a Stalinist would have called us Trotskyites.’

I laughed. I laughed indulgently. We talked on.

At the New Statesman in the mid-1970s we used to argue about Communism. I was unaligned, but I was, in a sense, a congenital anti-Communist, inoculated not at birth but at the age of six or seven, in 1956, when the Amises settled into honest atheism with the Labour Party. And, anyway, the argument was surely all over now, with the publication, in 1973 and 1975, of the first two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. Upstairs, in the literary department, we had published a review of Volume Two, by V. S. Pritchett, beautifully and (to me) unforgettably entitled ‘When We Dead Awaken’. Pritchett’s piece ended: ‘[Solzhenitsyn] is not a political; he is without rhetoric or doublethink; he is an awakener.’ When We Dead Awaken: yes, I thought. That is the next thing now… And it hasn’t happened. In the general consciousness the Russian dead sleep on.

Hitchens and I used to argue about Communism in the corridors, sporadically, semi-seriously. The fascist novelist John Braine (proletarian, northern, monotonously drunken, and ridiculously influential, socioculturally but not politically, for at least a generation) used to say to left-wingers: ‘Why do you love despotism? Why do you yearn for tyranny?’ And this was more or less the question I put to the Hitch:

‘Rule by yobs. That’s what you want. Why?’

‘Yup. Rule by yobs. What I want is the berks in the saddle. Rule by yobs.’

These exchanges took place in a spirit of humorous appraisal, mutual appraisal. We were not quite yet the best friends we would become, and politics was part of the distance between us. Rule by yobs, incidentally, or the dictatorship of the proletariat (an outcome only academically entertained by the Bolsheviks), provided the flavour of the superficial and temporary rearrangement taking place in England then: the transfer of wealth, as the Labour Party put it, to the working classes and their families. I was partly going with the culture, perhaps, but this idea (with 99 per cent income tax in the top bracket, etc.) so little offended me that I too voted for the continuation of Labour policies. Or I tried. On General Election day in 1978 my brother and I (Labour) agreed, in the fascist mansion, to stay at home and swap votes with two in situ Conservatives. The Conservatives (we felt) pretended to misunderstand this arrangement and drove off to vote in my step-uncle’s car: a fascist Jaguar. (‘That’s four votes you cheated us out of,’ I said with some heat to my step-uncle. ‘No. Two votes,’ he corrected.) Meanwhile, the social effect of trade-union – they used to say trades-union – ascendancy was everywhere apparent. And profound and retroactive. It made me believe that the people of these islands had always hated each other. And this isn’t true. The hatred, the universal disobligingness, was a political deformation, and it didn’t last.

James Fenton said little during these semi-serious disputes, although they often took place in his office (which was always incredibly tidy, with no more than a lone paper clip on the whole sweep of the desk. Julian’s desk was incredibly tidy, also featuring the lone paper clip. My desk was a haystack. Christopher’s desk was a haystack. ‘You and Christopher ought to get married,’ said James resignedly. He was best friends with Christopher, too. And they shared the politics.) James said little during these disputes. Like Christopher, he saw no hope in the ‘actually existing’ socialism of the USSR, and actively opposed it. Very roughly, their political faith imagined a return to the well of revolutionary energy through the figure of Trotsky, that great eidolon of thwarted possibility. James had had his counter-experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia. But I wondered how he felt, qua poet, about the place of art in a socialist state; and, I thought, he must hate the language, the metallic clichés, the formulas and euphemisms, the supposedly futuristic and time-thrifty acronyms and condensations.[5] Once, when we had a solemn lunch together, James formulated his (local) position as follows: ‘I want a Labour government that is weak against the trade unions.’ And England, I unelegiacally thought, was going to get that kind of government. This was the future, and it was Left.

So on the phone, the other day, I said to Christopher, ‘We’ll have to have a long talk about this.’

‘A long talk.’

‘Because I’m wondering about the distance between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.’

‘Oh don’t fall for that, Mart. Don’t fall for moral equivalence.’

‘Why not?’

‘Lenin was… a great man.’

‘Oh no he wasn’t.’

‘This will be a long talk.’

‘A long talk.’

But progress has already been made. The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was ‘better’ than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.

Ten Theses on Ilyich

In his letter to Maxim Gorky about the fate of the country’s intellectuals (‘they’re not its brains. They’re its shit’), Lenin wrote (15 September 1922):

This is the usual figure for military losses in World War I (all belligerent nations): c. 7,800,000. This is the usual figure for military losses in the Civil War: c. 1,000,000. But then, in the Russian case, there were a further 12 million civilian losses. ‘[T]hese figures tell only half the story, since obviously, under normal conditions, the population would not have remained stationary but grown,’ writes Richard Pipes in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. By this calculation the number goes up to 23 million. And there is, I think, a good case for including the birth deficit. Because the Russian experiment wasn’t conducted for the betterment of the poor wretches who happened to be alive at the time; it was conducted in the name of their children and their children’s children… Was the, or a, Civil War inevitable? Was there so much bad blood that the census was foredoomed to its astronomical minus? Well, the Civil War became inevitable when Lenin took power. There are dozens of quotations, slogans, rallying cries attesting to his enthusiasm for civil war. The same is true of Trotsky. Civil war was a cornerstone of Bolshevik policy.

Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. In September he wrote the ferocious letter to Gorky. In the intervening July he was drawing up his many lists of intellectuals for arrest and deportation or internal exile. A month earlier Lenin’s doctors had asked him to multiply 12 by 7. Three hours later he solved the problem by addition: 12 + 12 = 24, 24 + 12 = 36… The ex-believer Dmitri Volkogonov comments in his Lenin: A New Biography:

There were further strokes. Later, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya taught him to repeat (and it only worked under direct prompting) the words ‘peasant’, ‘worker’, ‘people’ and ‘revolution’… Adam Ulam has described the nihilism of the Russian revolutionary tradition as ‘at once childish and nightmarish’. The dying Lenin – and, frequently, the living Lenin, too – was childish and nightmarish. In his last ten months he was reduced to monosyllables. But at least they were political monosyllables: vot-vot (here-here) and sezd-sezd (congress-congress).

It fills you with extraordinary torpor to learn that Lenin read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s insuperably talentless novel What Is To Be Done? (1863) five times in one summer. To read this book once in five summers would defeat most of us; but Lenin persisted. ‘It completely reshaped me,’ he said in 1904. ‘This is a book that changes one for a whole lifetime.’ Its greatest merit, he stressed, was that it showed you ‘what a revolutionary must be like’. Humiliating though it may feel, we are obliged to conclude that What Is To Be Done? is the most influential novel of all time. With its didactic portrait of the revolutionary New Man, its ‘russification’ of current radical themes, and its contempt for ordinary people, ‘Chernyshevsky’s novel, far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution’ (Joseph Frank). I am reminded of a recent aside by a Russian writer (Victor Erofeyev) who was trying to account for the cult of Rasputin. There are ‘some grounds for saying,’ he wrote, that ‘deep down, Russia has nothing in common with the West’.

In championing the ‘unprecedentedly shameful peace’ with Imperial Germany (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), Lenin temporarily lost ground within the Party. On economic policy he was now stampeded by the visionaries, notably Bukharin. This is Trotsky:

Thus the regime moved to eliminate a) law, b) foreign relations, c) private property, d) commerce, and e) money. The means chosen to eliminate money was state-driven hyperinflation. In ‘the second half of 1919, “treasury operations” – in other words, the printing of money – consumed between 45 and 60 per cent of budgetary expenditures’ (Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution). During the attempted invasion of Poland in 1920, Lenin sent the following instruction to a Red Army commissar:

By 1921, 100,000 rubles was worth two prewar kopeks.[7] At this time the set of policies retrospectively labelled War Communism was being abandoned in favour of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which, in effect, legalized the black market that was feeding the cities – with difficulty. The net result of War Communism was the obliteration of the industrial base and the worst famine in European history.

Lenin (19 March 1922):

Church records show that 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were killed that year. During an earlier Russian famine, that of 1891, in which half a million died, famine relief was a national priority. In the regional capital of Samara only one intellectual, a twenty-two-year-old lawyer, refused to participate in the effort – and, indeed, publicly denounced it. This was Lenin. He ‘had the courage’, as a friend put it,

Famine belongs to the Communist tetrarchy – the other three elements being terror, slavery and, of course, failure, monotonous and incorrigible failure.

It has often been said that the Bolsheviks ruled as if conducting a war against their own people.[8] But you could go further and say that the Bolsheviks were conducting a war against human nature. Lenin to Gorky:

Religion is reaction, certainly (and wasn’t the Tsar meant to be divine?). But religion is also human nature. One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so. The war against religion was part of the war against human nature, which was prosecuted on many other fronts.

Lenin’s famine of 1921–22 (c. 5 million dead) was not in origin terroristic. Weather played a part; but so did the Bolshevik policy of requisitioning – of taking the peasants’ grain without paying for it. Deprived of incentive, the peasants practised circumvention; and the regime, as always, responded with a crescendo of force, whose climax was the weapon of hunger. Unlike Stalin’s famine of 1933, Lenin’s famine was officially recognized as such.[9] In July 1921 Maxim Gorky was given permission to form a relief committee (consisting mostly of intellectuals) and to launch an international appeal. Socialism, far from catapulting Russia into planetary prepotence, had reduced her to beggary. Lenin felt himself heckled by a reality now known all over the world, and the humiliation expressed itself in a bitterly defensive xenophobia. He did no more than harry and obstruct the American Relief Administration. But when the crisis was over he went after Gorky’s committee. First there was a campaign of vilification in the press, claiming that the ARA was, of all things, ‘counter-revolutionary’. This is from The Harvest of Sorrow:

To be clear: Lenin bequeathed to his successors a fully functioning police state. The independence of the press was destroyed within days of the October coup d’état. The penal code was rewritten in November/December (and already we see the elastic category, ‘enemy of the people’: ‘All individuals suspected [sic] of sabotage, speculation, and opportunism are now liable to be arrested immediately’). Forced food-requisitioning began in November. The Cheka (or secret police) was in place by December. Concentration camps were established in early 1918 (and so was the use of psychiatric hospitals as places of detention). Then came fulminant terror: executions by quota; ‘collective responsibility’, whereby the families and even the neighbours of enemies of the people, or suspected enemies of the people, were taken hostage; and the extermination not only of political opponents but also of social and ethnic groups – the kulaks, or better-off peasants, for example, and the Cossacks (‘de-Cossackization’). The differences between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were quantitative, not qualitative. Stalin’s one true novelty was the discovery of another stratum of society in need of purgation: Bolsheviks.

Unlike Stalin, Lenin could plead mitigation – though, like Stalin, he would not have so pleaded.[10] In March 1887 Lenin’s older brother Alexander was arrested for conspiring to murder his namesake, Tsar Alexander III; a plea for clemency would have reduced his sentence to hard labour, but Alexander was possessed of the courage of youth and, two months later, was duly hanged. He was twenty-one. Vladimir Ilyich was seventeen. And their father had died the previous year. Clearly the consequences of these events are entitled to be boundless. My sense of it is that Lenin’s moral faculties stopped developing thereafter. Hence his foul-mouthed tantrums, his studied amorality, his flirtatious nihilism, his positively giggly response to violence: his nightmarish childishness. How terrible it is to read the verdict of the Australian historian Manning Clark, who found Lenin ‘Christ-like, at least in his compassion’ and ‘as excited and lovable as a little child’.

The trouble with Lenin was that he thought you could achieve things by coercion and terror and murder. ‘The dictatorship – and take this into account once and for all – means unrestricted power based on force, not on law’ (January 1918). ‘It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror. We shall return to terror and to economic terror’ (March 1922). And so on – again, there are dozens of such statements. On his first day in office Lenin was looking the other way when the Second Congress of Soviets abolished the death penalty.[11] ‘Nonsense,’ said Lenin: ‘how can you make a revolution without executions?’ To think otherwise was ‘impermissible weakness’, ‘pacifist illusion’, and so on. You needed capital punishment, or it wouldn’t be a ‘real’ revolution – like the French Revolution (and unlike the English Revolution or the American Revolution or, indeed, the Russian Revolution of February 1917). Lenin wanted executions; he had his heart set on executions. And he got them. The possibility has been suggested that in the period 1917–24 more people were murdered by the secret police than were killed in all the battles of the Civil War.[12]

It can be tersely stated: under Lenin, the ‘value of human life collapsed’, as Alain Brossat put it. And that was the end of the matter, for the next thirty-five years.

Vasily Grossman:

Who-Whom?

Who, here, is describing whom?

The whom is Vladimir Nabokov (the father) and the who is Leon Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution (1932, and written in exile). How translucently bloodthirsty is the phrase ‘he was finally killed…’ Because Trotsky counted Nabokov among those he wanted killed, and someone ‘finally’ killed him. Trotsky was not accustomed to waiting so long. He joins Lenin as guilty of the basic charge, although he typically stated the case with more revolutionary ‘elan’: ‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ A considerable severance. Trotsky was not without literary talent, literary expressiveness. But Edmund Wilson, in To the Finland Station (1940), is ridiculous when he talks about Trotsky’s stuff as being ‘part of our permanent literature’. Trotsky’s History is a valuable historical document, but it is worthless as history, as historiography, as writing; truth, like all other human values, is indefinitely postponable. After a while the reader is physically oppressed by the dishonesty of his prose. In any case, Trotsky’s final pages, for all their massive, inordinate – indeed, world-historical – complacency, are also quietly ironic when you consider the fate of their author. The History runs to three volumes, so these quotes are effectively from pages 1,258–59:

Which leaves you wondering if piatiletka is Russian for ‘summary execution’, perhaps, or ‘slave camp’.[13] ‘Fifteen years after the revolution’: 1932. Stalin, Trotsky’s enemy and eventual murderer, was immovably emplaced, and 6 million people were being systematically starved to death. The Ukraine, in Conquest’s phrase, was becoming ‘one vast Belsen’…

Vladimir Nabokov (the son) met Edmund Wilson in 1940, just after the appearance of To the Finland Station; and they became good enough friends to produce an inspiring correspondence: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940–1971. As the editor, Simon Karlinsky, says in his introduction, Wilson acted, to begin with, as Nabokov’s ‘unpaid literary agent’. This spontaneous donation of energy was received with desperate gratitude by Nabokov, who would remain grossly overworked and more or less ‘penniless’ until Lolita (1955). He had just fled with his Jewish wife, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, from France, which was then collapsing to the Germans. Next, going backwards in time, Hitlerian and Weimar Berlin, where Nabokov incorporated into a novel (The Gift, 1937–38) an erudite but also brilliantly impressionistic biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky – whose revolutionary primer (Nabokov translates it as What to Do?) was Lenin’s looking-glass.[14] Then, going further back in time, the flight from revolutionary Russia. Cowed, perhaps, by Nabokov’s strictures on art and ‘ideas’, we neglect the political pulse in him and in his fiction. He wrote two novels about totalitarian states (Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading); these were imaginary, but the totalitarian states Nabokov had experienced were real: Lenin’s and Hitler’s. And, as Trotsky contentedly noted, Vladimir Nabokov (the father) was assassinated in Berlin in 1922, when Vladimir Nabokov (the son: in Speak, Memory he refers to the assailants as ‘two Russian Fascists’) was turning twenty-three; that night – ‘Father is no more’ – was the crux of his life. So, yes, there would be a political pulse. And this is partly why Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies. Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny.

Wilson and Nabokov fell out. Their first enduring disagreement had to do with the Russian Revolution. Their second had to do with Russian prosody, and it was this, quaintly but intelligibly, that foreclosed their friendship, together with Wilson’s cold words about Lolita. As I regretfully see it, Bunny (Bunny was the nickname Volodya was soon using) began to pick fights with his friend at just about the point where Nabokov’s reputation was eclipsing his own. The friendship plummeted in 1966, when Wilson went into print with a hostile (and ignorant) review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin – and gave its last flicker, palely and politely, five years later.

In To the Finland Station Wilson had written about Lenin romantically: Lenin the warrior-poet, the quiet man of destiny, with something of the instinctive grace of the noble savage – Lenin, the savage savant. When the book was reissued in 1971 Wilson added a new introduction:

Lenin, we note, is still being assessed merely as a social or collegiate being. As for Trotsky, ‘I have not found anything which obliges me to make any rectifications,’ writes Wilson, having read Isaac Deutscher’s (notoriously mythopoeic) biography. So this stands, among much else: ‘[I]t is as a hero of the faith in Reason that Trotsky must figure for us.’

Wilson was not lastingly gulled by Stalin, but he could never give up on the essential purity of October. So he played his part in the great intellectual abasement. To explain this abasement certain historical conditions are often adduced. They are: the generational wound of World War I (a war successfully branded as ‘imperialist’ and therefore capitalist), the Great Depression of 1929–34, the rise of fascism and then Nazism (and their combined involvement in the Spanish Civil War), and, later, the moral force of the Russian losses in World War II. But the fact remains that despite ‘more and more voluminous and unignorable evidence’ to the contrary (as my father put it, writing of the mid-1950s), the USSR continued to be regarded as fundamentally progressive and benign; and the misconception endured until the mid-1970s. What was it? From our vantage it looks like a contagion of selective incuriosity, a mindgame begun in self-hypnosis and maintained by mass hysteria. And although the aberration was of serious political utility to Moscow, we still tend to regard it as a bizarre and embarrassing sideshow to the main events. We must hope to find a more structural connection.

In 1935 Wilson journeyed to the USSR and wrote about it in Travels in Two Democracies (1956), which, as Professor Karlinsky puts it,

Now: let us consider this utopia, the fully achieved utopia that Wilson hoped to find. Ten seconds of sober thought will decisively inform you that such a place is not heaven but a species of hell; that such a place is alien to us; that such a place is non-human. The ‘Potemkin villages’ occasionally rigged up to deceive foreign VIPs, with the appearances of plenitude trucked in from the cities, and labourers and cowgirls impersonated by the secret police, and imported trees wedged into slots on the road-side: such a setting is an appropriate figure for utopia, any utopia, because it is farce, because it is travesty.

Wilson shepherded his illusions into his grave (1972). I want to quote some extracts from Nabokov’s great letter of 23 February 1948: 1948. In its opening sentences you can hear Nabokov rolling his sleeves up, and you can feel the prose moving a notch towards his high style:

Despite his palpable warmth of feeling, Nabokov is here showing restraint. For Wilson has clearly delivered a gross injury to his friend and to their friendship. Nabokov is bearing in mind that Wilson, not understanding the Bolshevik reality, does not understand the insult, either.

Ominously gathering force, the letter continues. Nabokov reminds, or informs, Wilson that the opposition to Bolshevism was and is pluralistic. There follows a comparatively playful elucidation (‘[i]ncidental but very important’) on the exact constituency of the Russian ‘intelligentsia’ (they were, definingly, professionals: ‘In fact a typical Russian intelligent would look askance at an avant-garde poet’); Nabokov lists their strengths and virtues (we feel VN Senior as a powerful exemplum here), and firmly proceeds:

Nabokov starts a new paragraph. This letter impresses me further every time I read it. I like the even cadences, now, as the writer reasserts the decorum of friendship: ‘I do not want to be personal, but here is how I explain your attitude…’ There follows a perceptive and generous and near-universal analysis (one I will hope to add something to) of the kind of conditions that would facilitate such a severe cognitive dissonance. In 1917 Wilson was twenty-two; the Russian ‘experiment’ – remote and largely obscure – spoke to his natural ardour.

Solovki: cradle of the gulag (and established under Lenin). The Lubyanka was the Cheka’s headquarters in Moscow; its dates are 1918–91.

‘I am now going to state a few things,’ writes Nabokov, winding up, ‘which I think are true and I don’t think you can refute.’ The letter ends with two encapsulations. Pre-1917:

Post-1917:

‘Intellectual’ is a word commonly applied to the Bolshevik leaders (and it is often said that Stalin was ‘the only non-intellectual’ among them). They qualified, one supposes, as intellectuals of the radical fringe, in that they were half-educated in history and political economy, and in nothing else. As Nabokov has just explained, however, a Russian intellectual is a professional; and it was a rare Old Bolshevik who ever presented himself for gainful employment (though Lenin, earlier, lost a couple of cases as a lawyer). We have seen, too, that the revolutionary vanguard developed an abnormal aversion to the intellectuals, who were, as Lenin said, ‘shit’. And in 1922 Lenin threw himself into the business of what Solzhenitsyn, establishing a metaphor for the gulag, calls ‘sewage disposal’. Some were executed or internally exiled, and scores of thousands were deported. American commentators ‘saw us’, writes Nabokov, ‘merely as villainous generals, oil magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes’, but the émigrés were very broadly the intelligentsia. They were the civil society.

In another sense, of course, the revolutionaries were professionals: avowedly and disastrously, they were ‘professional revolutionaries’, just as Chernyshevsky had enjoined them to be, ‘fulltime revolutionaries’, with their leather jackets, revolvers, hideouts, trysts, schisms, conspiracies, passwords, false beards, false names.[15] Watched, trailed, shadowed, menaced, detained, searched, infiltrated, provoked, arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, tried, sentenced: when, in the course of a single evening, these undergrounders found themselves at the commanding heights, how could it be otherwise than who-whom? (in Lenin’s famous question)? Who will vanquish whom? Who will destroy whom?

Nabokov’s ‘Life of Chernyshevsky’, which comprises about a hundred pages of The Gift, is serious (and comic) and scholarly, and based on deep reading. And poor Nikolai Gavrilovich, of course, emerges as a Gogolian grotesque (obsessed by perpetual-motion machines and encyclopedias), a shambling cuckold, and a literary anti-talent (who, with his ‘agonisingly circumstantial’ style, was ‘a person ridiculously alien to artistic creation’). The following lines take on wide application, if we regard Chernyshevsky as the tutelary spirit, the jinx or genius of Bolshevism and its transformative dream:

But now we feel a freedom, do we not – a freedom from who-whom? Edmund Wilson, in his trundling way, might have expected Nabokov to harbour some distaste for his dispossessor and deracinator. And it isn’t so. Nabokov writes about Chernyshevsky with pity, with reverence, with artistic love. And I’m afraid that this is as far as we are ever going to get with the utopia and the earthly paradise. Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Insecure: More Background

You could always joke about it. This was a contribution by Robin Ravensbourne to a clerihew competition in the New Statesman (another notable winner was Basil Ransome’s ‘Karl Marx / Provided the clerks / With a dialectical reason / For their treason’). A month later there was a Weekend Comp. where you had to think up the names of organizations whose acronyms mocked and betrayed them: Barnaby Rudge and Oliver Twist Hostel for Elderly Ladies, for example. Robert Conquest won first prize with, among others, Teachers’ Organization for Aiding Disoriented Youth, and Sailors’, Yachtsmen’s and Pilots’ Health Institute for Long Island Sound. (And I also admired Mr Ransome’s post-modernist Professional Institute of Registered Newspaper Typesetters.) But my father took the bays with the following: Institute of New Statesman Editors and Contributors for Underwriting the Russian Experiment. And once a month or so, upstairs, there was another Russian connection: our ballet critic, Oleg Kerensky, was the nephew of Alexander Kerensky, that ‘buffoon, charlatan and nincompoop’, as a contemporary relevantly described him, who headed the Provisional Government of 1917. An additional ten IQ points in Kerensky might have saved Russia from Lenin; and a similar elevation in Tsar Nicholas II might have saved Russia from Kerensky. It is now 1975, and Kerensky is not long dead, over in New York. And his nephew, Oleg (a homosexual of a familiar type: warm, courteous, and passionate about the arts), looks in once a month with his ballet column.

Insecure. When you can joke about something, you’re meant to feel secure about it. And you could always joke about the USSR. Christopher Hitchens joked about the USSR. For instance… Two comrades are discussing the inexplicable failure of a luxurious, state-run, Western-style cocktail lounge, recently opened in Moscow. The place is going under, despite all the gimmicks: rock music, light shows, skimpily clad waitresses. Why? Is it the furnishings? No, it can’t be the furnishings: they were all imported from Milan, at startling cost. Is it the cocktails? No, it can’t be the cocktails: the booze is of the finest, and the bartenders are all from the London Savoy. Is it the waitresses, in their bustiers and cupless brassieres, their thongs, their G-strings? No, it can’t be the waitresses (‘The chicks it’s not,’ I remember Christopher saying). It can’t be the waitresses: they’ve all been loyal party members for at least forty-five years.

This is a joke with a limited constituency (women are seldom amused by it), but it does point to one of the Bolsheviks’ most promethean projects. They intended to break the peasantry; they intended to break the church; they intended to break all opposition and dissent. And they also intended (as Conquest, writing of Stalin, put it) ‘to break the truth’.

Sometimes, in our casual office arguments, I saw an acknowledgment of this in Christopher’s eyes. He could joke about it. But he wasn’t secure. How could he have been? Still, the truth, like much else, was postponable; there were things that, for now, were more important.[16] Although I always liked Christopher’s journalism, there seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-limiting: the sense that the truth could be postponed. This flaw disappeared in 1989, and his prose made immense gains in burnish and authority. I used to attribute the change to the death of Christopher’s father, in late 1988, and to subsequent convulsions in his life. It had little or nothing to do with that, I now see. It had to do with the demise of the socialist possibility. The residue of a tiring aspiration had evaporated.

We will all go on joking about it because there’s something in Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic. This became palpable when the Russian experiment entered its decadent phase: the vanity and high-bourgeois kleptomania of Brezhnev, the truly pitiful figure of Chernenko (an old janitor with barely enough strength to honour himself as a Hero of Socialist Labour). Both these men, and Andropov (the KGB highbrow), whom they flanked, presided over a great landmass of suffering. The country was living at African levels of poverty, malnutrition, disease and child mortality. (And Afghanistan, meanwhile, was having its next census slashed – indeed, almost halved.)[17]

Throughout this period the Russian people heard nothing from their leaders but a drone of self-congratulation. And the truth, no longer postponable by the standard Bolshevik means (violence), screamed with laughter at what it saw. Napoleon said that power is never ridiculous (and despotic power is presumably doubly unsmiling); but Bolshevism, by this stage, was ridiculous. Glasnost, which was a euphemism for not lying, laughed the Bolsheviks off the stage. The poets had talked about the inhuman power of the lie – but there is an antithesis to that: the human power of the truth. Lying could no longer be enforced, and the regime fell. And the leaders had become too evolved, and were incapable of the necessary cruelty – the cruelty of Lenin and Stalin, which was not medieval so much as ancient in its severity.

In Lenin’s Tomb David Remnick addresses himself to the squalid comedy of the Bolshevik disintegration:

There is also something horribly comic in Remnick’s remark that the ‘leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously’. But the facts are of course intense. As the economist Anatoly Deryabin wrote in the official journal Molodoi Kommunist: ‘Only 2.3 per cent of all Soviet families can be called wealthy, and about 0.7 of these have earned that income lawfully… About 11.2 per cent can be called middle-class or well-to-do. The rest, 86.5 per cent, are simply poor.’ Towards the end of this chapter (‘Poor Folk’) Remnick visits a ghost village of the Collectivization in the Volgoda region, once a prosperous community, and now ‘little more than a few collapsed cabins, a graveyard, and wheel ruts in the mud’. An old woman told him: ‘The collective farms are a disaster. There’s nothing left. It’s all lost.’ And a neighbour adds:

Back at the New Statesman, towards the end of 1975, V. S. Pritchett might have passed Oleg Kerensky on the stairs when he delivered his review of the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago. The laughter should have stopped around then. Why didn’t it?

The Collapse of the Value of Human Life in Practice – 1[18]

(Telegraphic.)

Vladivostok, 22 February 1919.

‘Following report of 71 Bolshevik victims [that is, victims of Bolsheviks] received from consular office at Ekaterinburg, dated 19th February:—

‘“Nos. 1 to 18 Ekaterinburg citizens (first three personally known to me) were imprisoned without any accusation being made against them, and at four in the morning of 29th June were taken (with another, making 19 altogether) to Ekaterinburg sewage dump, half mile from Ekaterinburg, and ordered to stand in line alongside of newly-dug ditch. Forty armed men in civil clothes, believed to be Communist militia, and giving impression of semi-intelligent people, opened fire, killing 18. The 19th, Mr Chistorserdow, miraculously escaped in general confusion. I, together with other consuls at Ekaterinburg, protested to Bolsheviks against brutality, to which Bolsheviks replied, advising us to mind our own business, stating that they had shot these people to avenge death

of their comrade, Malishev, killed at front, against Czechs.

‘“Nos. 19 and 20 are 2 of twelve labourers arrested for refusing to support Bolshevik Government, and on 12th July thrown alive into hole into which hot slag deposits from works at Verhisetski near Ekaterinburg. Bodies were identified by fellow labourers.

‘“Nos. 21 to 26 were taken as hostages and shot at Kamishlof on 20th July.

‘“Nos. 27 to 33, accused of plotting against Bolshevik Government, arrested 16th December at village of Troitsk, Perm Government. Taken 17th December to station Silva, Perm railway, and all decapitated by sword. Evidence shows that victims had their necks half cut through from behind, head of No. 29 only hanging on small piece of skin.

‘“Nos. 34 to 36, taken with 8 others beginning of July from camp, where they were undergoing trench-digging service for Bolsheviks to spot near Oufalay, about 80 versts from Ekaterinburg, and murdered by Red Guards with guns and bayonets.

‘“Nos. 37 to 58, held in prison in Irbit as hostages, and 26th July murdered by gunshot, those not killed outright being finished off by bayonet. These people were shot in small groups, and murder was conducted by sailors and carried out by Letts, all of whom were drunk. After murder, Bolsheviks continued to take ransom money from relatives of victims, from whom they concealed crime.

‘“No. 59 was shot at village Klevenkinski, Verhotury district, 6th August, being accused of agitation against Bolsheviks.

‘“No. 60, after being forced to dig his own grave, was shot by Bolsheviks at village Mercoushinski, Verhotury district, 13th July.

‘“No. 61 murdered middle of July at Kamenski works for allowing church bells to be sounded contrary to Bolshevik orders, body afterwards found with others in hole with half head cut off.

‘“No. 62 arrested without accusation, 8th July, at village Ooetski, Kamishlov district. Body afterwards found covered with straw and dung, beard torn from face with flesh, palms of hands cut out, and skin incised on forehead.

‘“No. 63 was killed after much torture (details not given), 27th July, at station Anthracite.

‘“No. 67 murdered, 13th August, near village of Mironoffski.

‘“No. 68 shot by Bolsheviks before his church at village of Korouffski, Kamishlov district, before eyes of villagers, his daughters and son, date not stated.

‘“Nos. 69 to 71, killed at Kaslingski works near Kishtin, 4th June, together with 27 other civilians. No. 70 had head smashed in, exposing brains. No. 71 had head smashed in, arms and legs broken, and two bayonet wounds.

‘“Dates in this telegram are 1918.’”

(Telegraphic.)

Vladivostok, 24 February 1919.

‘My telegram of 22nd February.

‘Following from consul at Ekaterinburg:

‘“Nos. 72 to 103 examined, 32 civilians incarcerated and taken away by Bolsheviks with 19 others at various dates between 9th July, 7th August, 27th July, all 51 having been declared outlaws. Official medical examination of 52 bodies (of which 32 examined, Nos. 72 to 103 not identified), found in several holes; 3 from Kamishlof revealed that all had been killed by bayonet, sword, and bullet wounds. Following cases being typical: No. 76 had 20 light bayonet wounds in back; No. 78 had 15 bayonet wounds in back, 3 in chest; No. 80, bayonet wounds in back, broken jaw and skull; No. 84, face smashed and wrist hacked; No. 89 had 2 fingers cut off and bayonet wounds; No. 90, both hands cut off at wrist, upper jaw hacked, mouth slit both sides, bayonet wound shoulder;

No. 98, little finger off left hand and 4 fingers off right hand, head smashed; No. 99 had 12 bayonet wounds; No. 101 had 4 sword and 6 bayonet wounds.

‘“These victims are distinct from 66 Kamishlof hostage children shot by machine guns near Ekaterinburg beginning of July, names not obtainable.’”

Nicholas the Last

Charles I and Louis XVI were publicly executed after open trials. Nicholas II was secretly shot in a provincial basement along with his immediate family (and four members of his staff). It was a small room and it contained eleven victims and eleven killers. They were supposed to concentrate on one victim each, but the killers were soon firing at random. Those still alive when the gunsmoke cleared were disposed of by bayonet or further shots to the head. The bodies were transported by truck to a disused goldmine; sulphuric acid was poured on their faces before burial elsewhere – to make the Romanovs harder to identify.

In his ‘Introduction, 1971’, as we have seen, Edmund Wilson was forced to give ground on the question of Lenin’s amiability and benevolence (his words). It may seem sadistic to go on quoting him, but Wilson was distinguished and representative and by no means the worst offender (he is by now allowing that he ‘had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars’). Towards the end of the piece, however, Wilson is still trying to account for Lenin’s bad manners. Were they attributable, perhaps, to the poor breeding of Lenin’s father? ‘Lenin himself, although his mother came from a somewhat superior stratum, and though Lenin distinguished himself as a scholar, had always rude and rather vulgar traits.’ Wilson regretfully adds:

He then quotes, without comment, Trotsky’s page-long rationalization of the murders. Indeed, Wilson writes as if regicide – and bad manners – were Lenin’s only blemishes; and maybe he was ‘led to believe’ that there were no others. It is a bizarre emphasis. The clouds of ignorance part, revealing the solar fire of archaic snobbery.

Trotsky had half a point when he said (elsewhere) that the Romanov children paid the price for the monarchical principle of succession. This would certainly apply to the Tsarevich, Alexis; but the four girls could expect no such inheritance – and neither could the doctor, the valet, the maid, the cook, or the dog.[19] Wilson quotes Trotsky’s Diary in Exile (1935):

But Trotsky is lying. The masses of workers and soldiers were not told of the ‘decision’ to execute the entire family; for almost a decade they were told, instead, that the Tsarina and her children were in ‘a place of security’.[20] Nor was it proclaimed, as an additional morale-stiffener, that the Cheka had simultaneously murdered Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Feodorovna, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Prince Ivan Konstantinovich, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, Prince Igor Konstantinovich and Count Vladimir Paley. This group was recreationally tortured, ante mortem. Grand Duke Sergei was dead on arrival, but the rest were thrown alive into the mine shaft where their bodies were eventually found.

The murder of the Romanovs seems to me fractionally less odious than, say, the murder of a Cossack family of equivalent size. The Tsar, at least, was guilty of real crimes (the encouragement of pogroms, for example). His end provoked, among the masses, little comment and no protest. The murder of the Tsarina and the five children was clearly seen by the Bolsheviks as a political deficit. It was therefore an irrational act, an expression of anger and hatred, though you can imagine how it was parlayed into an assertion of Bolshevik mercilessness, of ‘stopping at nothing’. The ancillary killings sent no message to the Red Army or to the Party rump (except as a rumour). It sent a message to the Politburo, and the message said: we will have to win now, because we at last deserve anything they care to do to us if we fail. The Romanovs were murdered in mid-July 1918. By this time the regime had lost much of its pre-October support, and was responding with hysterical insecurity – that is, with violence. On 3 and 5 September came the decrees legitimizing the Red Terror.

There are several accounts, written or deposed, by the guards, executioners and inhumers of the Romanovs. One of the inhumers said that he could ‘die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress’s—’.[21] Imagining this, we arrive at a representative image of the gnarled hand of October. One executioner wrote (and he is quoted here for the dullness of his moral tone):

Yes, an imposing enemy: a thirteen-year-old haemophiliac. The Tsarevich outlived Nicholas II (deservedly renamed Nicholas the Last by Orlando Figes). In those final seconds, then, the child was Alexis II. Or Alexis the Last – but undeservedly.

The Collapse of the Value of Human Life in Practice – 2

Stalin famously said: ‘Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.’ After the death there would be no man and no problem; but there would indisputably be a corpse.

Corpse-disposal was a national tribulation throughout the period of hard Bolshevism, which ended in 1953. By December 1918, when the regime, responding to the crisis, announced its monopoly of the funeral industry, there were stacks of corpses (and packs of sated dogs) outside the cemeteries of every major city, and you could smell a hospital from a distance of several streets; annual epidemics came with the spring thaw. ‘To die in Russia in these times is easy,’ writes a diarist, ‘but to be buried is very difficult.’ After the nationalization of the graveyards, burial depended on bribery, a process surrealized by hyperinflation:

Cremation was attractive to the regime. For one thing it undermined the Orthodox Church, which expressly prescribed interment. Cremation was also modern, ‘a new, industrialised and scientific world of flame and ash’.[23] After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire. Another solution, of course, was the mass grave. The pits at Butovo, near Moscow, are thought to hold 100,000 bodies; another Stalin-era necropolis, at Bykovna in the Ukraine, is thought to hold 200,000.

In 1919, as part of a further move against religion, the coffins of medieval ‘saints’ were opened up and exposed to scientific scrutiny. The sweet-smelling, tear-shedding, eternally fresh dead bodies of church doctrine were revealed as little bundles of bone and dust. ‘The cult of dead bodies and of these dolls must end,’ read the Justice Department’s instruction. The policy ceased to apply when, in January 1924, Lenin had his last stroke. A powerful refrigerator was imported from Germany, and the Immortalization Commission worked flat out for six months, anxiously monitoring the mould on Lenin’s nose and fingers. The corpse was rendered incorruptible, by science, and enshrined as an icon.

After the war, in Kolyma, Stalin’s Arctic Auschwitz, natural erosion brought about a strange discovery: ‘A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses from 1938 was sliding down the side of the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma.’ The bodies were transferred to a new mass grave by bulldozer. Varlam Shalamov[24] was there:

Getting to the Other Planet

Your chair is never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal never more secure than when you read about the gulag: the epic agony of the gulag. And your lecteurial love for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (at such moments you are tempted to reach for Aleksandr Isayevich) never more intense. ‘How much does the Soviet Union weigh?’ Stalin once rhetorically asked a team of interrogators who were having difficulty in breaking a suspect (Kamenev). He meant that no individual could withstand the concerted mass of the state. In February 1974 the Moscow Cheka served Solzhenitsyn with a summons. Instead of signing the receipt, he returned the envelope with a statement that began:

And, for that moment, the Soviet Union and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn weighed about the same.

Exertions of the imagination are now called for. The Christmas before last, when she came to stay, my mother revealed an interest in Russian ‘witness’ literature. I slipped her a paperback called Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. She accepted it gratefully but responsibly. ‘Didn’t they have terrible times,’ she asked me (and there was no question mark). ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they.’ ‘Terrible times,’ she said. The experience of the gulag was like a nightmare that ever worsened. It was a torment as lavish as any divinity could devise; and we are only on page 94 of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind when we hear the words of Job (these words are repeatedly whispered in her ear): ‘For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me’…

They had terrible times: unbelievably terrible times. And the camps of the gulag were just the last and longest stop on an unbelievably terrible road. First, arrest (almost always at night).[25] Solzhenitsyn describes the body chemistry of the arrested in terms of sudden heat – you are burning, boiling. ‘Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another… That’s what arrest is: it’s… a blow which shifts the present into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.’ In this instant, a poet wrote, ‘you tire as in a lifetime’. Thus you were taken from your world and you entered… You entered what? One must bear in mind Martin Malia’s more general warning: it is not the work of a moment to ‘[grasp] the extraordinary combination of dynamism and horror that characterized the Soviet experiment’.

Next, imprisonment and interrogation: this period normally lasted for about three months. In the chapter called ‘The Interrogation’ Solzhenitsyn tabulates thirty-one forms of psychological and physical torture (the use of the latter became official policy in 1937). Red Terror torture was competitive and hysterical and baroque. Stalin-era torture could be all that too, but here, in the prisons of the cities, its setting was bureaucratic and cost-efficient. The interrogators needed confessions. It is important to understand that those accused of political crimes were almost invariably innocent. The interrogators needed confessions because these had been demanded from above by quota – that cornerstone of Bolshevik methodology. The apparatus was now immovably plugged into the Stalin psychodrama, and responded accordingly to his spasms of fear and rage, and his simpler need to exert power by mere intensification.

The tortures described by Solzhenitsyn are unendurable. This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction. This is Solzhenitsyn’s description of ‘the swan-dive’:

Another method was to confine the prisoner in a dark wooden closet where

Yet even here, in his representations of obliterating defeat, Solzhenitsyn is quietly adding to our knowledge of what it is to be human. He does this again and again:

And all this was superimposed on a regimen of unimaginable overcrowding (‘crammed into GPU cells in numbers no one had considered possible up to then’)[26] and chronic, depersonalizing sleeplessness: ‘In all the interrogation prisons the prisoners were forbidden to sleep even one minute from reveille to taps.’ Taps means the bugle call for lights-out; but here the lights burned all night, both in the heaving cells and in the interrogation rooms. The overall process was known as ‘the Conveyor’, because the enemy, who never slept either, came at you in relays for as long as it took. Once in a blue moon we read about people (were they human?) who withstood the attrition and refused to confess, which was nearly always fatal. The confession was in any case merely part of a more or less inevitable process. When it was their turn to be purged, former interrogators (and all other Chekists) immediately called with a flourish for the pen and the dotted line.

Three months of that and then the prisoners faced the journey to their islands in the archipelago. The descriptions of these train rides match anything in the literature of the Shoah. I thought for a moment that there might be a qualitative difference: the absence of children, or at least the absence of their ubiquity. But the entire families of the ‘kulaks’, the targeted peasants, were deported and encamped in their millions during the early 1930s alone; and entire nations were deported and encamped during and after the war.[27] No, the children were there, as victims, and not just on the transports. About 1 million children died in the Holocaust. About 3 million children died in the Terror-Famine of 1933.

It is the journey we have all read about in Primo Levi and elsewhere, but there were also some Russian refinements. The journey would tend to be much longer (and much colder: Stalin, as we shall see, had things that Hitler didn’t have) – a month, six weeks. The prisoners’ diet – sometimes a combination of heavily salted Sea of Azov anchovies plus no water-ration – has a Russian feel to it. And there is the unshirkable question of Russian stoicism and humour, and of Russian obedience to the herd.

Eugenia Ginzburg had already been in prison for two years when she was transported to Vladivostok, sharing ‘van 7’ with seventy-six others. At a stop in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk a further consignment of prisoners was wedged on board. All the women in van 7 were half dead with starvation and disease, but there was something about the physical appearance of the newcomers that caused universal dismay: their heads had been shaved. It is difficult, at first, for the male reader to grasp this ‘supreme insult to womanhood’ (Solzhenitsyn notes that among the men head-shaving bothered nobody): ‘[The newcomers] viewed our dusty, greying, dishevelled plaits and curls with envious admiration… “They might do the same to us tomorrow.” I ran my fingers through my hair. No, that is something I thought I would hardly survive.’ There follows a scene of passionate commiseration. Then:

And Ginzburg herself, in the epilogue of her stoical and humorous – and, in every sense, devastating – book, after eighteen years of graphic torment, astonishingly concludes: ‘How good that… the great Leninist truth has prevailed in our country and party… Here they are, then – the memories of a rank-and-file communist, a chronicle of the times of the cult of personality.’[28] Reading this, Solzhenitsyn, with his national-historical grasp, must have given a long low whistle.

There was another Soviet innovation: slave ships. But first, at the Vladivostok terminus, the transit camps – and the Tolstoyan scale of the operation, with vast landscapes traversed, it seemed, by entire populations. ‘As far as the eye could see there were columns of prisoners marching in one direction or another like armies on a battlefield,’ writes the Romanian witness Michael Solomon. ‘One could see endless columns of women, of cripples, of old men and even teenagers… directed by whistles and flags.’ At Vanino, en route to Kolyma, the prisoners entered what was in effect a slave market, where they were prodded and graded and assigned. Political prisoners, unlike the honest embezzlers and speculators, were detailed for the hardest labour, and for this they needed a first-class health clearance. Blind and skeletal from scurvy, Tanya Stankovskaya (‘That’s the spirit, girls!’) was given a first-class health clearance. She died four hours later. On the planet Earth, we are told, for every human being there are a million insects. The transit prisoners at Vanino seemed to have experienced this as an immediate truth. ‘The bugs were so legendary, even by camp standards, that they are reported in almost all the prisoners’ accounts as provoking every night a struggle which would last till dawn’ (Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps). But not even the insects would approach Tanya Stankovskaya.

For the fantastic sordor of the slave ships we again rely on Michael Solomon:

The biggest ship in the fleet (grossing 9,180 tons) was called the Nikolai Yezhov, after the Cheka chief who presided over the Great Terror; when Yezhov was himself purged, in 1939, the Nikolai Yezhov became the Feliks Dzerzhinsky, honouring the Cheka’s ferocious founder. Eugenia Ginzburg’s ship, the Dzhurma, ‘stank intolerably’ from a fire in which many prisoners, hosed down with freezing bilge during a riot, were boiled alive. In 1933 the Dzhurma sailed too late in the year and was trapped in the ice near Wrangel Island: all winter. She was carrying 12,000 prisoners. Everyone died.

It was on board the ships that the ‘politicals’ – a.k.a. ‘the 58s’ (after Article 58 of the Criminal Codex), ‘the counters’ (counterrevolutionaries), and ‘the fascists’ – would usually receive their introduction to another integral feature of the archipelago: the urkas. Like so many elements in the story of the gulag, the urkas constituted a torment within a torment. Mrs Ginzburg sits in the floating dungeon of the Dzhurma: ‘When it seemed as though there was no room left for even a kitten, down through the hatchway poured another few hundred human beings… [a] half-naked, tattooed, apelike horde…’ And they were only the women. The urkas: this class, or caste, a highly developed underground culture, ‘had survived,’ writes Conquest, ‘with its own traditions and laws, since the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and had greatly increased in numbers by recruiting orphans and broken men of the revolutionary and collectivization periods.’ Individually grotesque, and, en masse, an utterly lethal force, the urkas were circus cut-throats devoted to gambling, plunder, mutilation and rape.

In the gulag, as a matter of policy, the urkas were accorded the status of trusties, and they had complete power over the politicals, the fascists – always the most scorned and defenceless population in the camp system. The 58s were permanently exposed to the urkas on principle, to increase their pain. And one can see, also, that the policy looked good ideologically. It would be very Leninist to have one class exterminating another, higher class. How Lenin had longed for the poorer peasants to start lynching all the kulaks… Imprisoned thieves were amnestied under Lenin, as part of his ‘loot the looters’ campaign in the period of War Communism. As Solzhenitsyn says, the theft of state property became and remained a capital crime, while urka-bourgeois theft became and remained little more than a misdemeanour. Apart from the new privilegentsia and a few ‘hereditary proletarians’, the urkas were the only class to benefit from Bolshevik policies. The urkas, who played cards for each other’s eyes, who tattooed themselves with images of masturbating monkeys, who had their women assist them in their rapes of nuns and politicals. In Life and Fate Vasily Grossman writes almost casually of an urka ‘who had once knifed a family of six’. The gulag officially designated the urkas as Socially Friendly Elements.

In the case of Kolyma another strange cruelty was provided by topography. It is not clear to me how they built up their sense of it (the guards seemed to disappear and prisoners were seldom taken from the squirming hold), but there was a near-universal feeling that the ship was disappearing over the shoulder of the world. ‘And so, finally,’ writes Conquest,

The Epic Agony of the Gulag

The shoes: sections of old car tyre, secured with a wire or an electrical cord.

Made from buckwheat, the thin porridge is found by one inmate (P. Yakubovich) to be ‘inexpressibly repulsive to the taste’.

In the Arctic camps the prisoners were not supposed to work outside when the temperature fell below minus fifty – or at any rate sixty – degrees Fahrenheit. At fifty below it starts to be difficult to breathe. It was forbidden to build fires.

A group of prisoners at Kolyma were hungry enough to eat a horse that had been dead for more than a week (despite the stench and the infestation of flies and maggots).

Scurvy makes the bones brittle; but then, ‘Every prisoner welcomes a broken arm or leg.’ Extra-large scurvy boils were ‘particularly envied’. Admission to hospital was managed by quota. To get in with diarrhoea, you had to be evacuating (bloodily) every half an hour. The hospitals were themselves deathtraps, but inert deathtraps. A man chopped off half his foot to get in there. And prisoners cultivated infections, feeding saliva, pus or kerosene to their wounds.

Goldmining could break a strong man’s health forever in three weeks. A three-week logging term was likewise known as a ‘dry execution’. Solzhenitsyn: ‘[Varlam] Shalamov cites examples in which the whole membership of the brigade died several times over in the course of one gold-washing season on the Kolyma but the brigadier remained the same.’ And the brigadier, typically, was an urka.

At Serpantinka, the anus mundi of the gulag, prisoners were crammed upright into a shed so tightly that they were denied the use of their arms. They had to catch the pieces of ice thrown in to them with their mouths, like penguins. The men were in there for ‘several days’; and they were waiting to be shot.

According to Solzhenitsyn, almost all women prisoners – many of them wives and mothers – would sooner or later find themselves walking up and down the corridors between the men’s bunks saying, ‘Half a kilo. Half a kilo’: ‘A multiple bunk curtained off with rags from the neighbouring women,’ he writes, ‘was a classic camp scene.’

During the early 1930s every non-apparatchik in the USSR was hungry, and the peasants were starving in their millions. The zeks of the gulag, from 1918 to 1956, were always somewhere in between.

The mature gulag ran on food and the deprivation of food. Illuminatingly, the history of Communism keeps bringing us back to this: the scarcity or absence of food.

In 1929 Stalin made the acquaintance of a talented maniac called Naftaly Frenkel. Notice Solzhenitsyn’s tone:

The style is mock-epic, and it is appropriate, because Frenkel is a figure so freakish in his severity. It seems he had no ideology (he wanted only money and power), but in his literalism, his scientism, and his natural indifference to all human suffering Frenkel was an excellent Bolshevik. It was he who advised Stalin to run the gulag on the steady deprivation of food.

Again they used norms and quotas:

The ‘full norm’ was near-unachievable (sometimes more than 200 times higher than the Tsarist equivalent). A socialist-realist superman might manage it, for a time. But you were not meant to manage it. As the zek increasingly fell further behind the norm, he weakened further too, and his ration would soon be demoted to ‘punitive’ (300 grams). As for the rations, Conquest cites those of the Japanese POW camps on the River Kwai (Tha Makham): ‘There, prisoners got a daily ration norm of 700 grams of rice, 600 of vegetables, 100 of meat, 20 of sugar, 20 of salt, and 5 of oil…’; all these items were, of course, great rarities and delicacies in the archipelago. Solzhenitsyn describes a seven-ounce loaf (218 grams): ‘sticky as clay, a piece little bigger than a matchbox…’

Marx dismissed slavery as unproductive by definition. But Frenkel argued that it could work economically – so long as the slaves died very quickly. Solzhenitsyn seems to be quoting Frenkel here: ‘“We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months – after that we don’t need him any more.’” Three months: you can read a whole scholarly monograph on world slavery without once seeing an expectancy as low as three months. Three months. The photographs on the walls of the Auschwitz Museum commemorating a few score victims who were not killed immediately give the date of arrival and the date of death. The median period is three months. That is evidently how long the worked human body lasts without solace or sustenance or, finally, hope.

What made the difference between succumbing and surviving? Easily the most powerful force in the cosmos of the gulag was chance, was luck; but you had to make yourself a candidate for luck. One reads of two Bulgarians, two brothers, who hanged themselves with their scarves on the first day; and part of you concedes that this was an entirely reasonable act. Others were able to absorb something of the gulag into themselves, and take inner strength from it. In a place dedicated to death, what you needed in your self was force of life: force of life. Our witnesses are unrepresentative – they are professionals, intellectuals. The others’ tales, the peasants’ tales, for example, remain largely untold, or unwritten. But I am repeatedly struck by the quality of these testimonials, not just in their breadth of soul but in their talent: the expressiveness, the level of perception. And these, too, are subsidiary manifestations of force of life.

‘The worst prison is better than the best camp,’ formulated Tibor Szamuely (the nephew). ‘Prison, and more particularly solitary confinement,’ writes Eugenia Ginzburg, ‘ennobled and purified human beings and brought to light their most genuine resources.’ In one of his more extraordinary strophes Solzhenitsyn insists: ‘Prison has wings!’ What lies before you is a great project of self-communion and, to begin with at least, a great argument with fear and with despair; then, perhaps, comes the moment when (as Solzhenitsyn puts it), ‘… I had the consciousness that prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life.’ Not the conviction but the ‘consciousness’, the discovery of something in yourself that was already there. After that, a different spiritual state, a different degree of humanity seemed to be achievable. Here are two glimpses of it. First, Solzhenitsyn’s (this comes at the end of seven days and nights of solitary and interrogation):

And here, again, is Eugenia Ginzburg:

So human, so dear.[30]

But the worst prison is better than the best camp. In the camps, such words (dear, human) are used facetiously or contemptuously or not at all; the future tense is never heard; and for the zek, more generally, the ‘natural desire to share what he has experienced dies in him’ (Solzhenitsyn); ‘He has forgotten empathy for another’s sorrow; he simply does not understand it and does not desire to understand it’ (Varlam Shalamov). Thus there was nowhere to turn but inwards. Speculating on the ‘astounding rarity’ of camp suicides, Solzhenitsyn writes:

Because they were all innocent, the politicals. None of them had done anything. On arrest, the invariable response was Zachto? Why? What for? When she heard that a friend had been picked up (this was in the early 1930s), Nadezhda Mandelstam said: Zachto? Anna Akhmatova lost patience. Don’t you understand, she said, that they are now arresting people for nothing. Why, what for? That was the question you asked yourself each day in the gulag archipelago. And we must imagine this word carved on the trunk of every tree in the taiga: Zachto?

There are several names for what happened in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s. The Holocaust, the Shoah, the Wind of Death. In Romani it is called the Porreimos – the Devouring. There are no names for what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 (although Russians refer, totemically, to ‘the twenty million’, and to the Stalinshchina – the time of Stalin’s rule). What should we call it? The Decimation, the Fratricide, the Mindslaughter? No. Call it the Zachto? Call it the What For?

The Isolator

‘By pressing men against each other, totalitarian terror destroys the space between them,’ writes Hannah Arendt. This feels profoundly true of life as it was lived under Bolshevism. Does the size of Russia (easily the largest country on Earth: a sixth of its land surface) – does the very size of Russia perversely account for its prodigies of overcrowding, of claustrophobic densities, of cramming, of stacking people up against one another? In the countryside there were the huddled huts, and, in the cities, there was a family behind every window. The trams (and the trains) were always dangerously full; riding them was a physically bruising experience, and one long-pondered by anyone over fifty. Then, too, we think of punitive proximities: the men at Stapianka, awaiting death, wedged together, upright, with their arms stuck to their sides; the men at Kolyma, trussed and stacked like logs in vans and then driven off for execution; the men in Zhitomir prison, 160 in a cell for eight, with no room for the dead to fall or, it seems, even slump. And this form of torture was no secret for ordinary Russians. It was part of the atmosphere, the rumour, the terror. The old British FO hand, Reader Bullard, records in his diary entry for 2 April 1934 (in the calm before the Purge):

In the camps you could feel moments of thrilling solitude – in the taiga, the steppe, the desert. But solitude, too, has its penal applications.

Janusz Bardach is not a literary personage, and his book of 1998, Man Is Wolf to Man, was co-written.[32] But he has what all the articulate survivors seem to have: force of life, amplitude of soul. His five days and nights in the Isolator are very far from being one of the most painful episodes in gulag literature: Bardach himself had worse times. But in its janitorial gloom, its grasp of a settled, a second-generation thickening of cruelly…

This is Kolyma. Note the chilled solidity of the cadences (and the integrity of the memory):

After a fistfight with a violently anti-Semitic work foreman (an urka turned trusty, and so technically a ‘bitch’), Bardach gets five days.

Some isolators consisted of split logs thrown together; some had no roofs, exposing the prisoner to the elements – and the insects; some were designed to force the prisoner to stand upright (seventy-two hours of this could be enough to cause permanent damage to the knees). Bardach’s isolator was windowless, grey, concrete. The prisoner is led into an antechamber; and then Man Is Wolf to Man gives us the following: ‘A single encaged lightbulb burned through a film of dust, cobwebs, and dead insects.’ The lightbulb is ‘single’ (of course); it is also ‘encaged’. Bardach is ordered to strip to his underwear and is steered down a hallway, where another encaged lightbulb illuminates water on the floor of his cell. The water, ice-cold, was ‘a permanent feature of the isolator; I could tell by the thickness of the slime on the walls…’[33] The ceiling drips. The furnishings comprise a bucket and a bench of ‘soggy raw wood’ (with ‘soft but pointed splinters’) to which the prisoner is permanently confined. A lot of thought has gone into the bench – it is a piece of work. Wedged up against the wall, with its supports sunk into the cement floor (lest the prisoner think of improving its position), the bench was so narrow that ‘I could not lie on my back, and when I lay on my side, my legs hung over the edge; I had to keep them bent all the time. It was difficult to decide which way to lie… I lay with my back to the wall, preferring a cold, wet back to a face full of mould and mildew.’ The silence climbs. Soon Bardach starts chanting, then swearing, then screaming.

During the second day a rhythm established itself – a strange pas de deux of physical and mental distress. There was water in the cell (the bilgey sewage on the floor), but no drinking water. Bardach’s thirst was so intense that he considered licking the bacterial slime off the walls: ‘My lips became chapped, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, my throat became sticky. I could hardly swallow.’ He lay ‘as though on a slow-moving river’, with his thoughts ‘climbing on top of each other’. Sleep, always unutterably precious to the zek (at reveille, writes Solzhenitsyn, you yearned with every atom for another half-second of rest), now became ‘a desperately needed harbour’. He was exhausted – exhausted by continual shivering; but sleep would not come. To thirst, hunger, cold, pain, lice and bedbugs (they dropped on him from the ceiling), the isolator now added dysentery. And confinement added fear, too, ‘manageable at first but more difficult to conquer as time passed’. His muscles quivered, his teeth chattered, his parched tongue filled his mouth.

Bardach was now obliged to go on a journey within himself and examine the boundaries of his spirit: ‘Is this unbearable, or is it something I can survive? I wondered. What is unbearable? How am I to decide what my limit is?… What is it like to break down?’ He thought of the self-mutilators; he thought of the man ‘dragging a partially severed foot as he walked to the guards’. He thought of the dokhodyagas, the ‘goners’, the garbage-eaters: ‘Why some and not others? Why some and not all?’ And the answer came, inarticulately, from his soul. Somehow, ‘hope circled back, though I didn’t know how or why.’

Late in the evening of the fifth day the guard released him, and he was reunited with the slave camp and the Kolyma winter.

The New Men

So where, in this landscape, do we find them, the New Men? Where is homo Sovieticus, that new breed of ‘fully human’ human beings?

Among the professors and ballet dancers hacking with spoons at the permafrost? Among the bitches and urkas, among the waddling janitoriat?

Perhaps we shall find them in Elgen (‘Elgen is the Yakut word for “dead”’), among the returning workers glimpsed by Eugenia Ginzburg:

These could, in theory, be the New Men. Because they’re women. ‘[T]hat’s where we had got to,’ writes Ginzburg. Nobody could tell the difference.

But the best candidates are to be found among the dokhodyaga: the goners. It is easy to miss the goners because (as Bardach says), ‘[r]ummaging through the garbage, eating rancid scraps of meat, chewing on fish skeletons – such behaviour was so common that no one noticed’. The goners became ‘semi-idiots,’ writes Vladimir Petrov,[34] ‘whom no amount of beating could drive from the refuse heaps’. Consider that: no amount of beating. If the scraps were thrown into the latrine, then the goners went in after them.

‘The name dokhodyaga is derived from the verb dokhodit which means to arrive or to reach,’ writes Petrov:

I knew that we would find them, the New Men. There they are, beaten, beaten, and, once again, beaten, down on all fours and growling like dogs, kicking and biting one another for a gout of rotten trash.

There they are.

The Little Moustache and the Big Moustache

In the early pages of Gulag 3 Solzhenitsyn writes about the punishments meted out to Soviet citizens who went on functioning under German occupation. These included schoolteachers. What were the differences in the classroom under the two regimes? Under Hitler, Solzhenitsyn decides, teachers would spend much less time lying to their students (under Stalin, ‘whether you were reading Turgenev to the class or tracing the course of the Dnieper with your ruler, you had to anathematize the poverty-stricken past and hymn our present plenty’). Otherwise the differences were largely symbolic. There would be celebrations at Christmas rather than at New Year; an imperial anniversary would replace that of the October Revolution; and ‘[p]ictures of the big moustache would have to be taken out of school, and pictures of the little moustache brought in’.

Solzhenitsyn picks up the theme 400 pages later. It is now 1952; he has been released from camp and sentenced to internal exile (a most precarious existence, usually indistinguishable from beggary, and terrorized beggary at that). Solzhenitsyn considered himself improbably blessed: he became a schoolteacher in Kazakhstan. (And his pupils, one feels sure, were also improbably blessed.) Not until years later would he discover

Another casualty: dead schools.

What is the difference between the little moustache and the big moustache (and under the big moustache we ought to subsume the middling moustache of Vladimir Ilyich)?

In 1997, during an interview with Le Monde, Robert Conquest was asked whether he found the Holocaust ‘worse’ than the Stalinist crimes: ‘I answered yes, I did, but when the interviewer asked why, I could only answer honestly with “I feel so.”’ Conquest, anti-Sovietchik number one, feels so. Nabokov, the dispossessed noble, felt so. We feel so. When you read about the war, about the siege of Leningrad – when you read about Stalingrad, about Kursk – your body tells you whose side you are on. You feel so. In attempting to answer the question why, one enters an area saturated with qualms.

Figures. Even if we add the total losses of the Second World War (40–50 million) to the losses of the Holocaust (c. 6 million), we arrive at a figure which, apparently, Bolshevism can seriously rival. Civil War, Red Terror, famine; Collectivization accounted for perhaps 11 million, Conquest suggests; Solzhenitsyn gives a figure (‘a modest estimate’) of 40–50 million who were given long sentences in the gulag from 1917 to 1953 (and many followed after the brief Khrushchev thaw); and then there is the Great Terror, the deportations of peoples in the 1940s and 1950s (‘the specially displaced’), Afghanistan… The ‘twenty million’ begins to look more like the forty million. Of course, the figures are still not secure, and they vary dismayingly. But these are not the ‘imaginary’ zeros of the millennium, and we will certainly need seven of them in our inventory of the Soviet experiment.[35] We badly need to know the numbers of the dead. More than this, we need to know their names.[36] And the dead, too, need us to know their names.

The exceptional nature of the Nazi genocide has much to do with its ‘modernity’, its industrial scale and pace. This piercingly offends us, but the disgust, perhaps, is not rigorously moral; it is partly aesthetic. (At Hiroshima approximately 50,000 people died in 120 seconds, most of them instantly. Again, as well as a moral disgust, we feel an aesthetic disgust, a supererogatory affront. But what would you prefer? Of the deaths on such prodigal display, I would choose August 1945; I would become a wall-shadow at the speed of light.) In Nazi circles during the early 1940s there was much frowning talk of the need to streamline the killings, to make them more ‘elegant’; the supposed concern was for the mental health of the executioners. ‘Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando,’ General Erich von Bach-Zelewski told Himmler at the conclusion of a massacre in 1941. ‘These men are finished [fertig] for the rest of their lives.’ The basic concern was not for the men’s sanity so much as for their effectiveness; and the subsequent quest for more ‘humane methods’ (i.e., gas) was fundamentally a quest for the necessary tempo. But the regime went through the motions – it provided the executioners with ‘counselling’, and so on. In the USSR there seems to have been little anxiety about the moral and psychological wounds sustained by the Chekists.[37] ‘Find tougher people’ was all that Lenin had to say on the question. And Stalin, selecting downwards, as always, evidently wanted his men to be finished, morally finished; it bound them to him, and, more than that, it confirmed his unspoken assessment of human nature. He knew that human beings, given certain conditions, can in fact kill all day, and all year. Is there a clear moral difference between the railtracks and smokestacks of Poland, on the one hand, and, on the other, the huge and unnatural silence that slowly settled on the villages of the Ukraine in 1933? The Holocaust is ‘the only example which history offers to date of a deliberate policy aimed at the total physical destruction of every member of an ethnic group,’ write Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison – whereas, under Stalin, ‘no ethnic group was singled out for total annihilation’. The distinction thus resides in the word ‘total’, because Lenin pursued genocidal policies (de-Cossackization) and so of course did Stalin (see below). Indeed, most historians agree that if Stalin had lived a year longer his anti-Semitic pogrom would have led to a second catastrophe for Jewry in the mid-1950s. The distinction may be that Nazi terror strove for precision, while Stalinist terror was deliberately random. Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: everyone except Stalin.

Ideology. Orlando Figes summarizes the representative view:

Marxism was the product of the intellectual middle classes; Nazism was yellow, tabloidal, of the gutter. Marxism made wholly unrealistic demands on human nature; Nazism constituted a direct appeal to the reptile brain. And yet both ideologies worked identically on the moral sense. ‘The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses,’ writes Solzhenitsyn.[38] ‘Because they had no ideology’. He goes on:

Ideology brings about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and righteousness – a savagery without stain. Hitler’s ideology was foul, Lenin’s fair-seeming. And we remember Figes’s simple point: the Russian Revolution launched ‘an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity’s historic striving for social justice and comradeship’. Whereas Hitler’s programme stood a fair chance of staying where it belonged – in the dreams of the young artist on his bunk in the Asyl für Obdachlose, a shelter for the destitute in Vienna.

Is there a moral difference between the Nazi doctor (the white coat, the black boots, the pellets of Zyklon B) and the blood-bespattered interrogator in the penalty camp of Orotukan? The Nazi doctors participated not only in experiments and ‘selections’. They supervised all stages of the killing process. Indeed, the Nazi vision was in essence a biomedical vision. This is from Robert Jay Lifton’s classic study, The Nazi Doctors:

This was a capsizal that Bolshevism did not attempt: the concerted use of healers as killers. Lifton writes:

Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the ‘miracle’ of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure. Stalin did not destroy civil society. Lenin destroyed civil society.

The refusal of laughter to absent itself, in the Soviet case, has already been noted (and will be returned to). It seems that the Twenty Million will never command the sepulchral decorum of the Holocaust. This is not, or not only, a symptom of the general ‘asymmetry of indulgence’ (the phrase is Ferdinand Mount’s). It would not be so unless something in the nature of Bolshevism permitted it to be so.

Hitler and Stalin, or their ghosts, might at this point choose to enter a plea of diminished responsibility. Who has the weaker claim? In his essay ‘“Working Towards the Führer”’ Ian Kershaw has to do much shrugging and writhing and coughing behind his hand, but he gets it said in the end:

Well, the case is just about capable of being made; and no one would attempt anything of the kind on behalf of Hitler. When you read Alan Bullock’s thousand-page Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, in which the protagonists are considered in roughly alternating chapters, you feel like a psychiatric-ward inspector unerringly confronted by the same two patients. The German patient exhibits a florid megalomania of the manic variety. Hitler, indeed, created a whole new style of insanity – in which the simulacrum of preternatural self-assurance is repeatedly dispersed in a squall of saliva. Giving his arguments for an immediate attack on Poland (22 August 1939), Hitler addressed his top brass at the Berghof:

Three days later (this is the account of a German diplomat):

Because Göring was used to it. This was the mad energy Hitler sometimes harnessed in his demagoguery. After Stalingrad he suffered an inflammation of the brain. His general symptoms, now, included spectacular headaches, one trembling arm, one dragging leg, untreatable insomnia, and acute and chronic depression (though he still managed frequent tantrums). His medication bespeaks him: the Hitlerian urine sample would duly reveal that he was on hormone injections plus eight to sixteen doses, daily, of a patented medicine called ‘Dr Koester’s Antigas Tablets’ (oh for an l), which turned out to consist largely of two poisons, strychnine and atropine, thus greatly stoking the internal furnace. In mid-April 1945 Goebbels sent for the horoscope of the Führer, which prophesied victory. Hitler married for the first time on the last full day of his life: 30 April… The other case, the Soviet patient, as we shall go on to see, is much harder to read. This is a case of inscrutable introversion, and of violent episodes. Here, though, is a madman of much greater self-control – indeed, here is a madman with patience.[39]

Stalin, unlike Hitler, did his worst. He did his worst, applying himself over a mortal span. In the year of his death he was developing what had every appearance of being another major terror, succumbing, at the age of seventy-three, to a recrudescent and semi-senile anti-Semitism. Hitler, by contrast, did not do his worst. Hitler’s worst stands like a great thrown shadow, and implicitly affects our sense of his crimes. Had it come about, ‘mature’ Nazism would have meant, among other things, a riot of eugenics on a hemispherical scale (there were already plans, in the early 1940s, for further refinement of the Aryan stock). Josef Mengele’s laboratory at Auschwitz would have grown to fill a continent. The Hitlerian psychosis was ‘non-reactive’, responding not to events but to its own rhythms. It was also fundamentally suicidal in tendency. Nazism was incapable of maturation. Twelve years was perhaps the natural lifespan for such preternatural virulence.

Bolshevism was exportable, and produced near-identical results elsewhere. Nazism could not be duplicated. Compared to it, the other fascist states were simply amateurish.

At the end of his career Hitler faced defeat and suicide. ‘When Stalin celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1949,’ writes Martin Malia, staggeringly, ‘… he indeed appeared as the “father of the peoples” to about a third of humanity; and it seemed as if the worldwide triumph of Communism was possible, perhaps even imminent.’

Historians refer to it as the Sonderweg thesis: Germany’s ‘special path’ to modernity – or, rather, Germany’s special path to Hitler. But Russia has a special path too, and so does every other country, including the imaginary ‘model’ state from whose evolution Germany is thought to have diverged. The German combination of advanced development, high culture and bottomless barbarity is of course very striking. And yet we cannot wall off Nazism as inimitably German; and Bolshevism, clearly, cannot be quarantined as inimitably Russian. The truth is that both these stories are full of terrible news about what it is to be human. They arouse shame as well as outrage. And the shame is deeper in the case of Germany. Or so I feel. Listen to the body. When I read about the Holocaust I experience something that I do not experience when I read about the Twenty Million: a sense of physical infestation. This is species shame. And this is what the Holocaust asks of you.

But Stalin, in the execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate, had weapons that Hitler did not have.

He had cold: the burning cold of the Arctic. ‘At Oimyakon [in the Kolyma] a temperature has been recorded of – 97.8 F. In far lesser cold, steel splits, tyres explode and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As the thermometer drops, your breath freezes into crystals, and tinkles to the ground with a noise they call “the whispering of the stars”’.[40]

He had darkness: the Bolshevik sequestration, the shockingly bitter and unappeasable self-exclusion from the planet, with its fear of comparison, its fear of ridicule, its fear of truth.[41]

He had space: the great imperium with its eleven time zones, the distances that gave their blessing to exile and isolation, steppe, desert, taiga, tundra.

And, most crucially, Stalin had time.