Gulag and Ajter SOVIET TERROR, AMERICAN AMNESIA There has been a striking asymmetry between the American responses to the two great mass murders of our century, the Nazi and the Soviet. Why? PAUL HOLLANDER T HAS been customary in our times to make refer- regarding the significance of these findings for a reas- ence to the Holocaust whenever we wish to allude sessment of the Soviet mass murders. I to some unrivaled evil. The Holocaust became the It is not my purpose to dispute the uniqueness of the undisputed reference point for self-evident evil, and for Holocaust. The question here raised is why, in compar- good reason. By the same token, words like "Nazi," ison to the intensity of the moral outrage evoked by the "Auschwitz," "Storm Troopers," and "Gestapo" are re- Holocaust, the Soviet mass murders have stimulated so flexively appended to political or social phenomena we little moral energy. wish to discredit conclusively. It rarely happens that self-evident evil is denoted by Genocide or Mass Murder? reference to the mass murders committed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Words hke "Soviet," "Soviet Com- T IS tempting to suggest that the differences be- munist," "Koljina," or "KGB" are rarely used to dis- tween the character and procedures of the Nazi and credit political movements and practices. It is doubtful I Soviet mass murders account for the difTerent that one in a thousand Americans knows what Kolyma moral responses to these slaughters. was, or would recognize the name of a single Soviet con- In Nazi Germany the state set up highly efficient ex- centration camp. It is just as unlikely that one in a termination plants (gas chambers, crematoria) with no thousand Americans has heard the names of Beria, less a goal than the total elimination of the Jewish pop- Serov, Yagoda, or Yezhov, who used to be in charge of ulation of Europe, perhaps some day of the whole world. the Soviet mass murders. It was a carefully planned, highly organized operation Indeed, as Soviet mass graves have been discovered, that had spectacular results: the killing of six million one after another, in the last few years, the American Jews and smaller numbers of other "undesirables." media have greeted the discoveries with remarkable These mass murders gave rise to the term "Holo- equanimity. One alone, in Kuropati, near Minsk, was caust" and popularized the concept of "genocide"—so estimated by Soviet sources to contain over a quarter- much so that since the 1960s it has been applied with milhon remains; Bykovnia, near Kiev, a similar num- diminishing discrimination to far lesser outrages, such ber, killed during the 1930s. No Russian reporters or of- as the "cultural genocide" of some minority underrepre- ficials appeared on our television screens to comment sented in institutions of higher education, or policies of on these discoveries, and no American television corre- proposing birth control to unwed mothers. Radical fem- spondents reported breathlessly from the scene. We inists called pornography "genocide"; for some "experts" were also spared the reflections of academic specialists of the "recovery movement," childhood is a "holocaust"; the homosexual organization Act-Up asserted that Mr. Hollander teaches sociology at the University of Massachu- "Dinkins's policy is genocidal." setts at Amherst. His books include Political Pilgrims, Anti- The Soviet mass murders were in significant ways Americanism, and Decline and Discontent. He is currently different from the Nazi ones. There was no plan corre- working on a book on the loss of ideological conviction among sponding to the "final solution" (the killing of a group Communist elites and the fall of Communist systems. of people in order to purify the world of evil); no partic- 28 NATIONAL REVIEW/MAY 2, 1994 ular ethnic group was singled out for total elimination; ually the details were furnished by the survivors' ac- indeed, the victims came from every social stratum and counts, they were often denigrated (especially by the re- ethnic group of Soviet society. There were no extermi- visionist historians) for being too personal and emo- nation camps using modern technology and machinery. tional to be treated as reliable. The victims were killed in relatively old-fashioned and At the end of World War II the Nazi system was de- inefficient ways: either shot or allowed to die of starva- stroyed; cameramen freely entered the former camps; tion, cold, and disease in what the Soviet authorities archives were opened; many perpetrators of these called "corrective labor camps." (According to Mikhail crimes were interrogated, studied, and brought to jus- Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, two Russian emigre his- tice. A substantial portion of American and European torians, "it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the first populations were exposed to pictures of gas chambers, Europeans to use the term 'concentration camp'" as crematoria, heaps of corpses, emaciated survivors. early as 1918.) So long as the Soviet system was a going concern, lit- On tbe other hand the total number of the Soviets' tle corresponding information about tbe Soviet camps victims was far greater than the Nazis', if we add in was available. Western reporters and social scientists those who were victims of pohtically induced famine could not explore former or existing camps to recon- and deportations. According to General Volkogonov, struct the past. Until Gorbachev came into power the head of the parliamentary commission on rehabilita- Soviet system was highly secretive. tion, "from 1929 to 1953 . 21.5 million people were Still, lack of information as such was not decisive. repressed. Of these a third were shot, the rest sen- There was some information already in the 1930s, more tenced to imprisonment where many also died." These after World War II (including the work of Dallin and figures did not include famine victims and deported Nicolaevsky published in 1948), and much more follow- ethnic groups. ing Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign starting in A large portion of the Soviet victims, some might 1956. Robert Conquest's massive pioneering work. The argue, were not actually killed, they just could not sur- Great Terror, has been available since 1968. In 1978 he vive the harsh living conditions in the camps, including published Kolyma: Arctic Death Camps, a stunning the bad weather, not subject to human control. These study of the most murderous Soviet camps. There were living conditions, some might further contend, resulted even some comparative accounts (based on personal ex- less from ill will or deliberate policy than from overall perience) of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, such backwardness, sloppiness, and even the needs of the as Under Two Dictators by Margarete Buber and Gus- economy. After all, slave labor was badly needed to tav Herling's World Apart. carry out the great projects of the early five-year plans, and if mortal- ity rates were high, these regretta- Accused of Being to the Right ble sacrifices were exacted to accom- plish worthy objectives. There was one striking expression of a match- ATTILATHE HUN? less cynicism the two camp systems Leave No Poubt. had in common. At the entrance to the Nazi camps were signs reading Oo you lean to the right of "Arbeit macht frei" (Labor liber- the current TAX & &FENP administration? ates), while over the gates of Kolyma there was the inscription "Labor is RUSH eKe In his a matter of honor, courage, and Attila the Hun chair. heroism." Now YOU can iwaryour Attlla the Hun™ tie! Doubting the Soviet Record Attractive navy-burgundy NOTHER possibility is that stripes with qoid silk it was the relative paucity of Attila the Hun profiles. A information about the Soviet mass murders that explains the dif- Makes a bold, yet conservative statement. ferent moral reactions. While in the Makes a great birthday, Father's Pay, and post-Stalin era the quantitative di- Anniversary gift, tool -ONLY $24.90- mensions of Soviet mass murders (including postage & handling!) began to emerge, they remained an abstraction for the public at large, 1-8OO-687-2559 even for the well educated. As MCA'ISA Accepted Arthur Koestler noted half a century Kingdom Productions, Inc. ago: "Statistics don't bleed; it is the P.O. Box 35296-NR detail that counts." And when grad- NM 87176-529e MAY 2, 1994 / NATIONAL REVIEW 29 But these works attracted little public attention and mass murders (devised by Stanley Milgram to explain sparked little moral outrage; it is this tepid reaction Nazi murderousness). that invites further inquiry. It is not unreasonable to believe that the same politi- The controversy that surrounded Viktor Kravchenko cal predispositions which in recent times expressed is a case in point. The flower of the French intelligent- themselves in ridiculing the idea that the Soviet Union sia vilified Kravchenko (a Soviet defector and author of was an evil empire played a part in the neglect of the two important books) in the late 1940s and ridiculed his topic of the Soviet mass murders. allegations about Soviet camps. The attitude of the Left in the United States was no more charitable. A reporter No Moral Equivalence for The Nation sneered in 1949: "The man [Kravchenko] is very cheap . Wbat he lacks is distinction and cul- HOSE left-of-center on the political spectrum ture ... he is also a very poor propaganda agent. He and most deeply estranged from American soci- commits mistakes by exposing his hand at points where T ety seemed to have had the greatest difficulty tbe game demands that be hide it." expressing moral indignation about the Soviet atroci- At the time of his defection (in 1944) Time magazine ties—even when their existence was no longer in bad written: "Editorial comment [on him] was mini- doubt.