by Martin Amis
[She] isn’t a bad little creature. She had nine months in an OGPU31 prison without allowing it to break her spirit. She told me that it sometimes happens in those crowded prisons that one of the prisoners will have a fit of hysteria and begin to scream, which spreads to others until perhaps hundreds are screaming uncontrollably. [She] says people who live near the OGPU place in Moscow have heard the screaming more than once, and describe it as terrifying.
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):
The isolator was a windowless, grey concrete building with a flat tar roof. I passed twice every day … The solitary building was outside the zone and encircled by a double row of barbed wire.
Every time I passed the building I felt disturbed and slightly frightened. I always feared that one day I, too, would be locked inside. The feeling was like a premonition; that in some unknowable way, my fate was connected to the isolator …
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.
* * *
31 The secret police renamed itself seven times: Cheka (1917–22), GPU (1922–23), OGPU (1923–34), NKVD (1934–43), NKGB (1943–46), MGB (1946–53), MVD (1953–54), and KGB thereafter.
32 With Kathleen Gleeson (and their names are the same size on the cover of the paperback and hardcover). Bardach worked on his memoir while in his seventies (he is now a resident of Iowa City, and a world-renowned reconstructive surgeon), in itself sufficiently remarkable when you consider that the gulag experience almost always destroyed the faculty of memory. Nadezhda Mandelstam cohabited for three months with the amnestied journalist Kozarnovski (she was hiding him from the Cheka). For three months she systematically questioned him about the fate of her husband. She was not surprised (though she was doubly grieved) when she established that Kozarnovski’s ‘memory was like a huge, rancid pancake in which fact and fancy from his prison days had been mixed up together and baked into one inseparable mass’.
33 In Bardach’s cell the water was ankle-deep. Cf. Gulag 2 (p. 420). Solzhenitsyn tells of a whole penalty block where the water reached the prisoners’ knees: ‘In the autumn of 1941 they gave them all 58–14 – economic counterrevolution – and shot them.’ Torture preludial to death: this is a persistent theme. Sometimes the torture was, so to speak, situational; sometimes it was vigorous and concerted.
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:
It was the hour of the mid-day break and long lines of workers, surrounded by guards, filed past us on their way to camp … All the workers, as though by order, turned their heads to look at us. We, too, shaking off the fatigue and stupor of the journey, gazed intently at the faces of our future companions … these creatures in patched breeches, their feet wrapped in torn puttees, their caps pulled low over their eyes, rags covering the lower part of their brick-red frost-bitten faces.
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:
At first I could not understand the connection, but it was explained to me: the dokhodyagas were ‘arrivistes’, those who had arrived at socialism, were the finished type of citizen in the sociali
st society.
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.
34 It Happens in Russia, published in England in 1951.
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
that sometime during or since the war the Soviet school had died: it no longer existed; there remained only a bloated corpse. In the capital and in the hamlet the schools were dead.
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.
(i.)
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.
(ii.)
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.
(iii.)
Ideology. Orlando Figes summarizes the representative view:
The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment – it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx – which makes Western liberals, even in this age of postmodernism, sympathise with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to ‘improve mankind’, whether through eugenics or genocide, spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion.
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:
Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed … Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life … But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.
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.
(iv.)
Is there a moral diffe
rence 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:
Pointing to the chimneys in the distance, [Dr Ella Lingens-Reiner] asked a Nazi doctor, Fritz Klein, ‘How can you reconcile that with your oath as a doctor?’ His answer was, ‘Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.’
This was a capsizal that Bolshevism did not attempt: the concerted use of healers as killers. Lifton writes:
We may say that the doctor standing at the ramp represented a kind of omega point, a mythical gatekeeper between the worlds of the dead and the living, a final common pathway of the Nazi vision of therapy via mass murder.
* * *
(V.)
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.
(vi.)
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.
(vii.)
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: