No More Learning

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The system itself rewarded evasion and noncompliance. Thus, the poorer the performance of the collective farm, the more substantial the subsidy and the less demanded in the way of work quotas. The poorer the performance of plumbers and mechanics, the less bur- dened they were with calls and quotas. The poorer the restaurant ser- vice, the fewer the number of clients and the more food left over to take home for oneself or sell on the black market. The last thing restaurant personnel wanted was satisfied customers who would return to dine at the officially fixed low prices.
Not surprisingly, work discipline left much to be desired. There was the clerk who chatted endlessly with a friend on the telephone while a long line of people waited resentfully for service, the two workers who took three days to paint a hotel wall that should have taken a few hours, the many who would walk off their jobs to go shopping. Such poor performance itself contributed to low produc- tivity and the cycle of scarcity. In 1979, Cuban leader Raul Castro offered this list of abuses:
[The] lack of work discipline, unjustified absences from work, deliberate go-slows so as not to surpass the norms--which are already low and poorly applied in practice--so that they won t be changed. . . . In contrast to capitalism, when people in the country- side worked an exhausting 12-hour workday and more, there are a good many instances today especially in agriculture, of people . . . working no more than four or six hours, with the exception of cane- cutters and possibly a few other kinds of work. We know that in many cases heads of brigades and foremen make a deal with workers to meet the norm in half a day and then go off and work for the other half for some nearby small [private] farmer [for extra income]; or to go slow and meet the norm in seven or eight hours; or do two or three norms in a day and report them over other days on which they don't go to work
All these "tricks of the trade" in agriculture are also to be found in industry, transportation services, repair shops and many other places where theres rampant buddyism, cases of "you do me a favor and I'll do you one" and pilfering on the side. (Cuba Update, 3/80)
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If fired, an individual had a constitutional guarantee to another job and seldom had any difficulty finding one. The labor market was a seller's market. Workers did not fear losing their jobs but managers feared losing their best workers and sometimes overpaid them to prevent them from leaving. Too often, however, neither monetary rewards nor employment itself were linked to performance. The ded- icated employee usually earned no more than the irresponsible one. The slackers and pilferers had a demoralizing effect on those who wanted to work in earnest.
Full employment was achieved by padding the workforce with people who had relatively little to do. This added to labor scarcity, low productivity, lack of work discipline, and the failure to imple- ment labor-saving technologies that could maximize production.
The communists operated on the assumption that once capital- ism and its attendant economic abuses were eliminated, and once social production was communalized and people were afforded some decent measure of security and prosperity, they would con- tentedly do their fair share of work. That often proved not so.
Communist economies had a kind of Wonderland quality in that prices seldom bore any relation to actual cost or value. Many expen- sive services were provided almost entirely free, such as education, medical care, and most recreational, sporting, and cultural events. Housing, transportation, utilities, and basic foods were heavily sub- sidized. Many people had money but not much to buy with it. High- priced quality goods and luxury items were hard to come by. All this in turn affected work performance. Why work hard to earn more when there was not that much to buy?
Wage increases, designed to attract workers to disagreeable or low-prestige jobs or as incentives to production, only added to the disparity between purchasing power and the supply of goods. Prices were held artificially low, first out of dedication to egalitarian princi- ples but also because attempts to readjust them provoked worker protests in Poland, East Germany, and the USSR. Thus in the Soviet
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Union and Poland, the state refused to raise the price of bread, which was priced at only a few pennies per loaf, though it cost less than ani- mal feed. One result: Farmers in both countries bought the bread to feed their pigs. With rigorous price controls, there was hidden infla- tion, a large black market, and long shopping lines.
Citizens were expected to play by the rules and not take advantage of the system, even when the system inadvertently invited transgres- sions. They were expected to discard a self-interested mode of behav- ior when in fact there was no reward and some disadvantage in doing so. The "brutal totalitarian regime" was actually a giant trough from which many took whatever they could.
There was strong resentment concerning consumer scarcities: the endless shopping lines, the ten-year wait for a new automobile, the housing shortage that compelled single people to live at home or get married in order to qualify for an apartment of their own, and the five-year wait for that apartment. The crowding and financial depen- dency on parents often led to early divorce. These and other such problems took their toll on people s commitment to socialism.
Wanting It All
I listened to an East German friend complain of poor services and inferior products; the system did not work, he concluded. But what of the numerous social benefits so lacking in much of the world, I asked, aren't these to be valued? His response was revealing: "Oh, nobody ever talks about that. " People took for granted what they had in the way of human services and entitlements while hungering for the consumer goods dangling in their imaginations.
The human capacity for discontent should not be underesti- mated. People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the
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good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have. Leading professionals who had attained relatively good living standards wanted to dress better, travel abroad, and enjoy the more abundant life styles available to people of means in the capitalist world.
It was this desire for greater affluence rather than the quest for political freedom that motivated most of those who emigrated to the West. Material wants were mentioned far more often than the lack of democracy. The e? migre? s who fled Vietnam in 1989 were not perse- cuted political dissidents. Usually they were relatively prosperous craftsmen, small entrepreneurs, well-educated engineers, architects, and intellectuals seeking greater opportunities. To quote one: "I don't think my life here in Vietnam is very bad. In fact, I'm very well off. But that's human nature to always want something better. " Another testified: "We had two shops and our income was decent but we wanted a better life. " And another: "They left for the same reasons we did. They wanted to be richer, just like us. "2 Today a "get rich" mania is spreading throughout much of Vietnam, as that nation lurches toward a market economy (New York Times, 4/5/96).
Likewise, the big demand in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was for travel, new appliances, and bigger apartments (Washington Post, 8/28/89). The New York Times (3/13/90) described East Germany as a "country of 16 million [who] seem transfixed by one issue: How soon can they become as prosperous as West Germany? " A national poll taken in China reported that 68 percent chose as their goal "to live well and get rich" (PBS-TV report, 6/96).
In 1989, I asked the GDR ambassador in Washington, D. C. why his country made such junky two-cylinder cars. He said the goal was to develop good public transportation and discourage the use of costly private vehicles. But when asked to choose between a rational, efficient, economically sound and ecologically sane mass transporta-
2 All quotations from the Washington Post, 4/12/89.
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tion system or an automobile with its instant mobility, special status, privacy, and personal empowerment, the East Germans went for the latter, as do most people in the world. The ambassador added rue- fully: "We thought building a good society would make good people. That's not always true. " Whether or not it was a good society, at least he was belatedly recognizing the discrepancy between public ideol- ogy and private desire.
In Cuba today many youth see no value in joining the Communist party and think Fidel Castro has had his day and should step aside. The revolutionary accomplishments in education and medical care are something they take for granted and cannot get excited about. Generally they are more concerned about their own personal future than about socialism. University courses on Marxism and courses on the Cuban Revolution, once overenrolled, now go sparsely attended, while students crowd into classes on global markets and property law (Newsday, 4/12/96).
With the U. S. blockade and the loss of Soviet aid, the promise of abundance receded beyond sight in Cuba and the cornucopia of the North appeared ever more alluring. Many Cuban youth idealize life in the United States and long for its latest styles and music. Like the Eastern Europeans, they think capitalism will deliver the goodies at no special cost. When told that young people in the United States face serious hurdles, they respond with all the certainty of inexperi- ence: "We know that many people in the States are poor and that many are rich. If you work hard, however, you can do well. It is the land of opportunity" (Monthly Review, 4/96).
By the second or third generation, relatively few are still alive who can favorably contrast their lives under socialism with the great hardships and injustices of prerevolutionary days. As stated by one Cuban youth who has no memory of life before the revolution: "We're tired of the slogans. That was all right for our parents but the revolution is history" (San Francisco Chronicle, 8/25/95).
In a society of rapidly rising--and sometimes unrealistic--expec-
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tarions, those who did not do well, who could not find employment commensurate with their training, or who were stuck with drudge work, were especially inclined to want a change. Even in the best of societies, much labor has an instrumental value but no inherent gratification. The sooner a tedious task is completed, the sooner there is another to be done, so why knock yourself out? If "building the revolution" and "winning the battle of production" mean per- forming essential but routine tasks for the rest of one's foreseeable future, the revolution understandably loses its luster. There is often not enough interesting and creative work to go around for all who consider themselves interesting and creative people.
In time, the revolution suffers from the routinization of charisma. Ordinary people cannot sustain in everyday life a level of intense dedication for abstract albeit beautiful ideals. Why struggle for a bet- ter life if it cannot now be attained? And if it can be enjoyed now, then forget about revolutionary sacrifice.
Reactionism to the Surface
For years I heard about the devilishly clever manipulations of communist propaganda. Later on, I was surprised to discover that news media in communist countries were usually lackluster and plodding. Western capitalist nations are immersed in an advertising culture, with billions spent on marketing and manipulating images. The communist countries had nothing comparable. Their media coverage generally consisted of dull protocol visits and official pro- nouncements, along with glowing reports about the economy and society--so glowing that people complained about not knowing
what was going on in their own country. They could read about abuses of power, industrial accidents, worker protests, and earth- quakes occurring in every country but their own. And even when the press exposed domestic abuses, they usually went uncorrected.
Media reports sometimes so conflicted with daily experience that
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the official press was not believed even when it did tell the truth, as when it reported on poverty and repression in the capitalist world. If anything, many intellectuals in communist nations were utterly starry-eyed about the capitalist world and unwilling to look at its seamier side. Ferociously opposed to the socialist system, they were anticommunist to the point of being full-fledged adulators of Western reactionism. The more rabidly "reactionary chic" a position was, the more appeal it had for the intelligentsia.
With almost religious fervor, intellectuals maintained that the capitalist West, especially the United States, was a free-market par- adise of superabundance and almost limitless opportunity. Nor would they believe anything to the contrary. With complete certi- tude, well-fed, university-educated, Moscow intellectuals sitting in their modest but comfortable apartments would tell U. S. visitors, "The poorest among you live better than we. "
A conservative deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal David Brooks, offers this profile of the Moscow intellectual:
He is the master of contempt, and feels he is living in a world run by imbeciles. He is not unsure, casting about for the correct answers. The immediate answers are obvious--democracy and capitalism. His self-imposed task is to smash the idiots who stand in the way. . . . He has none of the rococco mannerisms of our intellectuals, but values bluntness, rudeness, and arrogance. . . . [These] democratic intellec- tuals [love) Ronald Reagan, Marlboros, and the South in the American Civil War. (National Review> 3/2/92)
Consider Andrei Sakharov, a darling of the U. S. press, who regu- larly praised corporate capitalism while belittling the advances achieved by the Soviet people. He lambasted the U. S. peace move- ment for its opposition to the Vietnam War and accused the Soviets of being military expansionists and the sole culprits behind the arms race. Sakharov supported every U. S. armed intervention abroad as a defense of democracy and characterized new U. S. weapons systems like the neutron bomb as "primarily defensive. " Anointed by U. S.
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leaders and media as a "human rights advocate," he never had an unkind word for the human rights violations perpetrated by the fas- cist regimes of faithful U. S. client states, including Pinochet's Chile and Suharto's Indonesia, and he directed snide remarks toward those who did. He regularly attacked those in the West who dissented from anticommunist orthodoxy and who opposed U. S. interventionism abroad. As with many other Eastern European intellectuals, Sakharov's advocacy of dissent did not extend to opinions that devi- ated to the left of his own. 3
The tolerance for Western imperialism extended into the upper reaches of the Soviet government itself, as reflected in a remark made in 1989 by a high-ranking official in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Andrey Kozyrev, who stated that Third World countries "suffer not so much from capitalism as from a lack of it. " Either by design or stu- pidity he confused capital (which those nations lack) with capitalism (of which they have more than enough to victimize them). He also claimed that "none of the main [bourgeois groups] in America are connected with militarism. " To think of them as imperialists who plunder Third World countries is a "stereotyped idea" that should be discarded (New York Times, 1/7/89).
As a system of analysis mainly concerned with existing capitalism, Marxism has relatively little to say about the development of social- ist societies. In the communist countries, Marxism was doled out
3 See Andrei Sakharov, My Country and the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), especially chapters 3, 4, and 5. A memorable moment was provided me by the noted journalist I. F. Stone, in Washington, D. C. in 1987. Izzy (as he was
called) had just given a talk at the Institute for Policy Studies praising Sakharov as a courageous champion of democracy, a portrayal that seemed heavily indebted to the U. S. media image of Sakharov. Encountering Stone in the street after the event, I said to him that we should distinguish between Sakharov s right to speak, which I supported, and the reactionary, CIA-ridden content of his speech, which we were under no obligation to admire. He stopped me in mid-sentence and screamed: "I'm sick and tired of people who wipe the ass of the Soviet Union! " He then stomped away. Izzy Stone was normally a polite man, but as with many on the U. S. Left, his anti-Sovietism could cause him to discard both rational discourse and common courtesy. On subsequent occasions he talked to me in
a most friendly manner but never once thought to apologize for that outburst.
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like a catechism. Its critique of capitalism had no vibrancy or mean- ing for those who lived in a noncapitalist society. Instead, most intel- lectuals found excitement in the forbidden fruit of Western bourgeois ideology. In looking to the West, they were not interested in broadening the ideological spectrum, a desirable goal, but in replacing the dominant view with a rightist anticommunist ortho- doxy. They were not for an end to ideology but for replacing one ideology with another. Without hesitation, they added their voices to the chorus singing the glories of the free-market paradise.
Heavily subsidized by Western sources, the right-wing intelli- gentsia produced publications like Moscow News and Argumentyi Fakti which put out a virulently pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist mes- sage. One such publication, Literaturnaya Gazeta (March 1990), hailed Reagan and Bush as "statesmen" and "the architects of peace. " It questioned the need for a Ministry of Culture in the USSR, even one that was now headed by an anticommunist: "There is no such ministry in the United States and yet it seems that there is nothing wrong with American culture. " Who said Russians don't have a sense of humor?
With the decline of communist power in Eastern Europe, the worst political scum began to float to the surface, Nazi sympathizers and hate groups of all sorts, though they were not the only purvey- ors of bigotry. In 1990, none other than Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa declared that "a gang of Jews had gotten hold of the trough and is bent on destroying us. " Later on he maintained that the com- ment did not apply to all Jews but only those "who are looking out for themselves while giving not a damn about anyone else" (Nation, 9/10/90). The following year, in Poland's post-communist presiden- tial election, various candidates (including Walesa) outdid each other in their anti-Semitic allusions. In 1996, at a national ceremony, Solidarity chief Zygmunt Wrzodak resorted to anti-Semitic vituper- ation while railing against the previous communist regime (New
YorkTimes, 7/9/96).
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Romanticizing Capitalism
In 1990, in Washington, D. C. , the Hungarian ambassador held a press conference to announce that his country was discarding its socialist system because it did not work When I asked why it did not work, he said, "I dont know. " Here was someone who confessed that he had no understanding of the deficiencies of his country's socio- economic process, even though he was one of those in charge of that process. Leaders who talk only to each other are soon out of touch with reality.
The policymakers of these communist states showed a surpris- ingly un-Marxist understanding of the problems they faced. There were denunciations and admonitions aplenty, but little systemic analysis of why and how things had come to such an impasse. Instead, there was much admiration for what was taken to be Western capitalist know-how and remarkably little understanding of the uglier side of capitalism and how it impacted upon the world.
In the USSR, glasnost (the use of critical debate to invite innova- tion and reform) opened Soviet media to Western penetration, and accelerated the very disaffection it was intended to rectify. Leaders in Poland and Hungary, and eventually the Soviet Union and the other European communist nations, decided to open their economies to Western investment during the late 1980s. It was anticipated that state ownership would exist on equal terms with cooperatives, for- eign investors, and domestic private entrepreneurs ( Washington Post, 4/17/89). In fact, the whole state economy was put at risk and even- tually undermined. Communist leaders had even less understanding of the capitalist system than of their own.
Most people living under socialism had little understanding of cap- italism in practice. Workers interviewed in Poland believed that if their factory were to be closed down in the transition to the free market, "the state will find us some other work" {New Yorker, 11/13/89). They thought they would have it both ways. In the Soviet Union, many who
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argued for privatization also expected the government to continue providing them with collective benefits and subsidies. One skeptical farmer got it right: "Some people want to be capitalists for themselves, but expect socialism to keep serving them" ( Guardian, 10/23/91).
Reality sometimes hit home. In 1990, during the glasnost period, when the Soviet government announced that the price of newsprint would be raised 300 percent to make it commensurate with its actual cost, the new procapitalist publications complained bitterly. They were angry that state socialism would no longer subsidize their denunciations of state socialism. They were being subjected to the same free-market realities they so enthusiastically advocated for everyone else, and they did not like it.
Not everyone romanticized capitalism. Many of the Soviet and Eastern European e? migre? s who had migrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s complained about this country's poor social services, crime, harsh work conditions, lack of communitarian spirit, vulgar electoral campaigns, inferior educational standards, and the astonishing ignorance that Americans had about history.
They discovered they could no longer leave their jobs during the day to go shopping, that their employers provided no company doc- tor when they fell ill on the job, that they were subject to severe rep- rimands when tardy, that they could not walk the streets and parks late at night without fear, that they might not be able to afford med- ical services for their family or college tuition for their children, and that they had no guarantee of a job and might experience unem- ployment at any time.
Among those who never emigrated were some who did not har- bor illusions about capitalism. In fact, numerous workers, peasants, and elderly were fearful of the changes ahead and not entirely sold on the free-market mythology. A 1989 survey in Czechoslovakia found that 47 percent wanted their economy to remain state controlled, while 43 percent wanted a mixed economy, and only 3 percent said they favored capitalism (New York Times, 12/1/89). In May 1991, a
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survey of Russians by a U. S. polling organization found that 54 per- cent chose some form of socialism and only 20 percent wanted a free-market economy such as in the United States or Germany. Another 27 percent elected for "a modified form of capitalism as found in Sweden" (Monthly Review, 12/94).
Still, substantial numbers, especially among intellectuals and youths--the two groups who know everything--opted for the free- market paradise, without the faintest notion of its social costs. Against the inflated imagination, reality is a poor thing. Against the glittering image of the West s cornucopia, the routinized, scarcity- ridden, and often exasperating experiences of communist society did not have a chance.
It seems communism created a dialectical dynamic that under- mined itself. It took semi-feudal, devastated, underdeveloped coun- tries and successfully industrialized them, bringing a better life for most. But this very process of modernization and uplift also created expectations that could not be fulfilled. Many expected to keep all the securities of socialism, overlaid with capitalist consumerism. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, they were in for some painful surprises.
One reason siege socialism could not make the transition to con- sumer socialism is that the state of siege was never lifted. As noted in the previous chapter, the very real internal deficiencies within com- munist systems were exacerbated by unrelenting external attacks and threats from the Western powers. Born into a powerfully hostile cap- italist world, communist nations suffered through wars, invasions, and an arms race that exhausted their productive capacities and retarded their development. The decision by Soviet leaders to achieve military parity with the United States--while working from a much smaller industrial base--placed a serious strain on the entire Soviet economy.
The very siege socialism that allowed the USSR to survive made it difficult for it to thrive. Perestroika (the restructuring of socio-
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economic practices in order to improve performance) was intended to open and revitalize production. Instead it led to the unraveling of the entire state socialist fabric. Thus the pluralistic media that were to replace the communist monopoly media eventually devolved into a procapitalist ideological monopoly. The same thing happened to other socialist institutions. The intent was to use a shot of capitalism to bolster socialism; the reality was that socialism was used to subsi- dize and build an unforgiving capitalism.
Pressed hard throughout its history by global capitalism s power- ful financial, economic, and military forces, state socialism endured a perpetually tenuous existence, only to be swept away when the floodgates were opened to the West.
? CHAPTER 5
STALIN'S FINGERS
In 1989-1991, remarkable transformations swept across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Communist governments were over- thrown, large portions of their publicly owned economies were dis- mantled and handed over to private owners at garage sale prices. And one-party rule was replaced with multi-party parliamentary systems. For Western leaders, who had tirelessly pursued the rollback of communism, it was a dream come true.
If the overthrow of communism was a victory for democracy, as some claimed, it was even more a victory for free-market capitalism and conservative anticommunism. Some of the credit should go to the CIA and other cold war agencies, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and various right-wing groups, all of whom funded free-market, anticommunist political organizations and publications throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in what swiftly became the best financed chain of "revolutions" in history.
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The upheavals occurred with remarkably little violence. As Lech Walesa boasted in November 1989, Polish Solidarity overthrew the communist government without breaking a single window. This says at least as much about the government that was overthrown as about the rebels. Rather than acting as might U. S. -supported rulers in El Salvador, Colombia, Zaire, or Indonesia--with death-squad terror- ism and mass repression--the communists relinquished power almost without firing a shot. The relatively peaceful transition does not fit our image of unscrupulous totalitarians who stop at nothing to maintain power over captive populations. Why didn't the ruthless Reds act more ruthlessly? 1
How Many Victims?
We have heard much about the ruthless Reds, beginning with the reign of terror and repression perpetrated during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin (1929-1953). Estimates of those who perished under Stalins rule--based principally on speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures--vary wildly. Thus, Roy Medvedev puts Stalin's victims at 5 to 7 million; Robert Conquest decided on 7 to 8 million; Olga Shatunovskaia claims 19. 8 million just for the 1935-40 period; Stephen Cohen says 9 million by 1939, with 3 million executed or dying from mistreatment during the 1936-39 period; and Arthur Koestler tells us it was 20 to 25 million. More recently, William Rusher, of the Claremont Institute, refers to the " 100 million people wantonly murdered by Communist dictators since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917" (Oakland Tribune, 1/22/96) and Richard Lourie blames the Stalin era for "the slaughter of mil- lions" (New York Times, 8/4/96).
1 During the mid-1980s, the police in communist Poland shot forty-four demon- strators in Gdansk and other cities. Ten former police and army officers were put on trial in 1996 for these killings. In Rumania, there reportedly were scores of fatalities in the disturbances immediately preceeding the overthrow of Ceaucescu, after which Ceaucescu and his wife were summarily executed without trial. The killings in Poland and Rumania are the sum total of fatalities, as far as I know.
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Unburdened by any documentation, these "estimates" invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR's single largest enterprise.
In the absence of reliable evidence, we are fed anecdotes, such as the story Winston Churchill tells of the time he asked Stalin how many people died in the famine. According to Churchill, the Soviet leader responded by raising both his hands, a gesture that may have signified an unwillingness to broach the subject. But since Stalin happened to have five fingers on each hand, Churchill concluded-- without benefit of a clarifying follow-up question--that Stalin was confessing to ten million victims. Would the head of one state (espe- cially the secretive Stalin) casually proffer such an admission to the head of another? To this day, Western writers treat this woolly tale as an ironclad confession of mass atrocities. 2
What we do know of Stalin's purges is that many victims were Communist party officials, managers, military officers, and other strategically situated individuals whom the dictator saw fit to incar- cerate or liquidate. In addition, whole catagories of people whom Stalin considered of unreliable loyalty--Cossacks, Crimean Tarters, and ethnic Germans--were selected for internal deportation. Though they never saw the inside of a prison or labor camp, they were sub- jected to noncustodial resettlement in Central Asia and Siberia.
To be sure, crimes of state were committed in communist coun- tries and many political prisoners were unjustly interned and even murdered. But the inflated numbers offered by cold-war scholars
2 Stalin "confided the figure of 10 million to Winston Churchill": Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1973), 463n. No doubt, the famines that occurred during the years of Western invasion, counterrevolutionary intervention, White Guard civil war, and landowner resistance to collectivization took many victims.
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serve neither historical truth nor the cause of justice but merely help to reinforce a knee-jerk fear and loathing of those terrible Reds.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to pre- viously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well- documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. 3 At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime. 4
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. 5 Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York
Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as "the largest system of death camps in modern history. "
Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the
3 By way of comparison, in 1995, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the United States there were 1. 6 million in prison, three million on probation, and 700,000 on parole, for a total of 5. 3 million under correctional supervision (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/1/96), Some millions of others have served time but are no longer connected to the custodial system in any way.
4 J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn, and Victor Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence," American Historical Review, 98 (October 1993) 1017-1049.
5 Getty, et al. , "Victims of the Soviet Penal System . . "
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common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war. ) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000. 6
Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes ("counterrevolutionary offenses") num- bered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpo- litical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swin- dling, and other violations punishable in any society. 7
Total executions from 1921 to 1953, a thirty-three year span inclu- sive, were 799,455. No breakdown of this figure was provided by the researchers. It includes those who were guilty of nonpolitical capital crimes, as well as those who collaborated in the Western capitalist invasion and subsequent White Guard Army atrocities. It also includes some of the considerable numbers who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and probably German SS prisoners. In any case, the killings of political opponents were not in the mil- lions or tens of millions--which is not to say that the actual number was either inconsequential or justifiable.
The three historians who studied the heretofore secret gulag records concluded that the number of victims were far less than usu- ally claimed in the West. This finding is ridiculed by anticommunist liberal Adam Hochschild, who prefers to repeat Churchills story about Stalin's fingers (New York Times, 5/8/96). Like many others, Hochschild has no trouble accepting undocumented speculations about the gulag but much difficulty accepting the documented fig- ures drawn from NKVD archives.
6 Ibid. 7 ibid.
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Where Did the Gulag Go?
Some Russian anticommunist writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and many U. S. anticommunist liberals, maintain that the gulag existed right down to the last days of communism. 8 If so, where did it disappear to? After Stalins death in 1953, more than half of the gulag inmates were freed, according to the study of the NKVD files previously cited. But if so many others remained incarcerated, why have they not materialized? When the communist states were over- thrown, where were the half-starved hordes pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of travail?
One of the last remaining Soviet labor camps, Perm 35, was vis- ited in 1989 by Republican congressmen and again in 1990 by French journalists (see Washington Post, 11/28/89 and National Geographic, 3/90, respectively). Both parties found only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were identified as outright spies. Others were "refuseniks" who had been denied the right to emigrate. Prisoners worked eight hours a day, six days a week, for 250 rubles ($40) a month.
What of the supposedly vast numbers of political prisoners said to exist in the other "communist totalitarian police states" of Eastern Europe? Why no evidence of their mass release in the postcommu- nist era? And where are the mass of political prisoners in Cuba? Asked about this, Professor Alberto Prieto of the University of Havana pointed out that even a recent State Department report on human rights showed hundreds of people being tortured, killed, or
8 The term "gulag" was incorporated into the English language in part because constant references were made to its presumed continued existence. A senior fellow at the liberal-oriented Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Borsage, sent me a note in December 1982, emphatically stating in part that "the gulag exists" When I gave talks at college campuses during the 1980s about President Reagan's domestic spending policies, I repeatedly encountered faculty members who regardless of the topic under discussion insisted that I also talk about the gulag which, they said, still contained many millions of victims. My refusal to genuflect to that orthodoxy upset a number of them.
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"disappeared" in almost all the Latin American countries, but men- tions only six alleged political prisoners in reference to Cuba (People's
Weekly World, 2/26/94).
If there were mass atrocities right down to the last days of com-
munism, why did not the newly installed anticommunist regimes seize the opportunity to bring erstwhile communist rulers to justice? Why no Nuremberg-style public trials documenting widespread atrocities? Why were not hundreds of party leaders and security offi- cials and thousands of camp guards rounded up and tried for the millions they supposedly exterminated? The best the West Germans could do was charge East German leader Erich Honecker, several other officials, and seven border guards with shooting people who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall, a serious charge but hardly indicative of a gulag.
Authorities in the Western capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did contrive a charge of "treason" against persons who served as officials, military officers, soldiers, judges, attorneys, and others of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), a sovereign nation that once had full standing in the United Nations, and most of whose citizens had never been subjects of the FRG. As of 1996, more than three hundred "treason" cases had been brought to trial, including a former GDR intelligence chief, a defense minister, and six generals, all indicted for carrying out what were their legal duties under the constitution and laws of the GDR, in some instances fight- ing fascism and CIA sabotage. Many of the defendants were eventu- ally acquitted but a number were sentenced to prison. What we witness here is the Nuremberg trials in reverse: Reds put on trial for their anti-fascist efforts by West German friendly-to-fascism prose- cutors, using a retroactive application of FRG penal law for GDR cit- izens. As of the beginning of 1997, several thousand more trials were expected. 9
9 The vice-president of the highest court in the GDR, was a man named Reinwarth, who had been put in a concentration camp by the Nazis during the war and who
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In 1995, Miroslav Stephan, the former secretary of the Prague Communist party, was sentenced to two and a half years for order- ing Czech police to use tear gas and water cannons against demon- strators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty Red oppression that the capitalist restorationists in Czechoslovakia could find? An action that does not even qualify as a crime in most Western nations?
In 1996 in Poland, twelve elderly Stalin-era political policemen were sentenced to prison for having beaten and mistreated prison- ers--over fiftyyears earlier--during the communist takeover after World War II (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/9/96). Again one might wonder why post-communist leaders seeking to bring the commu- nist tyrants to justice could find nothing more serious to prosecute than a police assault case from a half-century before.
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prison- ers, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other commu- nist states. In 1989, when the millionaire playwright Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, he granted amnesty to about two-thirds of the country's prison population, which numbered not in the millions but in the thousands. Havel assumed that most of those incarcerated under communism were victims of political repression and therefore deserved release. He and his associates were dismayed to discover that a good number were experienced crimi-
was the presiding judge in trials that convicted several CIA agents for sabotage. He was sentenced in 1996 to three-and-a-half years. Helene Heymann, who had been imprisoned during the Hitler regime for her anti-Nazi activities, later was a judge in the GDR, where she presided over anti-sabotage trials. She was put on trial in
1996. When her conviction was read out, it was pointed out by the judge that an additional factor against her was that she was trained by a Jewish lawyer who had been a defense attorney for the Communists and Social Democrats. Also put on trial were GDR soldiers who served as border guards. More than twenty GDR soldiers were shot to death from the Western side in various incidents that went unreported in the Western press: Klaus Fiske, "Witchhunt Trials of East German Leaders Continue," Peoples Weekly World, 10/19/96. These trials are in direct violation of the FRG/GDR Unification Treaty, which states that any criminal prosecution of acts undertaken in the GDR is to be done in accordance with GDR laws operative at the time.
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