Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  At the start of perestroika the generation in power had grown up in Stalin’s lifetime and admired him. Most successful persons lived according to his “precepts,” fostering evil. Everyone knew that under Stalin the “organs of state security,” which had swelled like cancerous tumors with their innumerable agents, were omniscient. Writers, poets, journalists, scholars, and YCL and Communist Party activists, as well as what some called “simple people,” pursued their callings in this environment. From time to time they all received tangible benefits from their baseness: Some achieved advancement in their careers, others boasted of publications and undeserved fame, still others gained improvements in their living conditions, and their children received a suitable education. The swarm of informants, the legions of handlers from the “organs,” and the local executioners were not conscious of their own crimes, let alone willing to acknowledge them. These people were the ones who, during the Gorbachev reforms era, were from thirty to forty years old, forming the generation upon which great hopes were placed.

  The process of creating “a Soviet person” comprised several stages. It began with kindergarten and school, then the Junior YCL and YCL organizations, followed by the GULAG and everything that belonged to it, including the “law enforcement organs,” the courts, and, in the times of Lenin and Stalin, the extrajudicial organs. Just what did the valiant secret police teach those who had the misfortune to make their acquaintance on political and other grounds? The first lesson was that force decides everything. The second lesson was the impunity they possessed and the utility of lying. The investigators lied, often inventing accusations and “extending” sentences and not just for “politicals” but for ordinary criminals as well. Those under investigation also lied, slandering both themselves and totally innocent people in the hope of easing their own lot. The third lesson was the absence of justice. Judges handed out sentences to please the investigators or other authorities; the extrajudicial organs did not even bother with formalities.

  The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was entirely correct in comparing the GULAG to a metastasizing cancerous tumor. The incremental growth of the system of concentration camps and a concomitant increase in the number of victims led to far-reaching consequences. Among the most serious was the wide dissemination of camp “culture” throughout all strata of the Soviet and, later, the Russian population. The “organs of law and order” used torture, fear, and humiliation to “educate” the prisoners. Common criminals who were “socially close” to the authorities were also sent into the camps, and they inflicted their ways upon others, primarily the “enemies of the people”—that is, the political prisoners. This practice also became state policy.

  Inhuman living conditions and excessive work norms that, if unfulfilled, led to a reduction in the already scanty prisoners’ rations, which were insufficient to maintain their strength, made elementary physical survival the chief goal of the prisoners. Many of the morally steadfast perished. Other prisoners survived by jettisoning anything that smacked of humanity, including decency, conscience, and morality. It was they who disseminated camp culture among the rest of the population. Millions passed through the GULAG and raised children and grandchildren. Their influence spread into morals, habits, and language.

  Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading Soviet dissident who exposed the abuses of punitive psychiatry, wrote that according to the most conservative calculations, the number of prisoners in the GULAG at any one time was not less than 2.5 million persons, constituting 1 percent of the population, and they served an average term of approximately five years. The rate of recidivism was no more than 20–25 percent. Thus, according to Bukovsky, almost a third of the country passed through the camps.2

  It is revealing that the romanticism of criminality occupies an important place in contemporary Russian culture. At the core of this “romanticism” is a senseless cruelty, a complete disrespect for human life, and a rejection of everything humane, leading to absolute legal nihilism. In turn, these victims of the regime, partly through their descendants, constructed the guillotine for democracy in contemporary Russia. But there existed another very large stratum of the population that comprised torturers, executioners, guards, judges, and prosecutors. None of them received any punishment whatsoever for their terrible crimes, which were not subject to any statutes of limitation. No one was even condemned from a moral point of view. These butchers and sadists, just like their henchmen, walked away with heads held high and likewise raised their children and grandchildren.

  There was yet another category of people who poisoned democracy and Russia’s normal development—namely, the legions of informers who condemned their victims to inhuman tortures or death. Informers were motivated by numerous reasons: many from “ideological considerations”; others for the sake of their careers, for the receipt of some sort of benefits, for the elimination of a more successful rival in love—there are too many to list—but mostly from selfish motives.

  Here let us recall the prophetic words from The GULAG Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “The young learn that baseness is never punished on this earth, but always brings rewards. How bleak and terrible it is to live in such a country!” This applied to all of the unpunished butchers of the Stalinist regime.

  Moreover, in accordance with a secret OGPU circular from February 1923, the following were condemned to physical extermination:

  Political parties and organizations:

  1) All former members of pre-revolutionary political parties; 2) All former members of monarchist associations and organizations; 3) All former members of the Union of Independent Landholders, as well as the Union of Independent Farmers during the period of the independent Central Parliament (Rada) in Ukraine; 4) All former members of the old aristocracy and nobility; 5) All former members of youth organizations (Boy Scouts and others); 6) All nationalists of whatever stripe.

  Officials of tsarist institutions:

  1) All officials of the former Ministry of Internal Affairs; all officials of the guards, the police, and the gendarmes, all secret agents of the guards and the police, all ranks of the border guards, and so forth; 2) All officials of the former Ministry of Justice: all members of the circuit courts, judges, prosecutors of all ranks, Justices of the Peace, judicial investigators, officers of the court, heads of rural courts, and so forth; 3) All officers and junior officers of the tsarist army and navy without exception.

  Covert enemies of the Soviet regime:

  1) All officers, junior officers, and rank-and-file soldiers of the White army [anticommunist forces], irregular White Guard detachments, Petlyura units, various rebellious subunits and bands that are actively fighting against Soviet power. Persons who have been amnestied by Soviet authorities are not exempted. 2) All civil officials of the central and local organs and departments of the White Guard government, of the army of the Central Rada, the Hetman administration, and so forth; 3) All religious figures, bishops, Orthodox and Catholic priests, rabbis, deacons, monks, choirmasters, church elders and so forth; 4) All former merchants, owners of shops and stalls as well as “NEP men”; 5) All former landowners, large-scale tenants, and rich peasants who in the past utilized hired labor. All former owners of industrial enterprises and workshops; 6) All persons whose close relatives occupy an illegal position or are continuing armed resistance to the Soviet regime in the ranks of anti-Soviet bands; 7) All foreigners regardless of nationality; 8) All persons having relatives or acquaintances abroad; 9) All members of religious sects and communities (especially Baptists); 10) All scholars and specialists of the old school, especially those whose political orientation is not known to this day; 11) All persons who were earlier suspected or convicted of contraband, espionage, etc.3

  Any commentary on this comprehensive list would be superfluous.

  The foundation of Soviet and Russian totalitarianism is slavery, with deep historical, psychological, and philosophical roots. Pyotr Chaadaev, the nineteenth-century philosopher-critic of Russian so
ciety and culture who urged that Russia should orient itself toward Western European civilization, noted the “inverse action of religion” in Russia. The Roman clergy, he noted, provided an example by freeing their own slaves, but the Russian people descended into slavery only after becoming Christian.4 After seizing power, the Bolsheviks palmed off a new form of the worst kind of slavery under the guise of freedom. It enabled them not only to restore serfdom, which had been abolished by the tsar in 1861, but also to extend it to the entire population.

  As a weapon to achieve this qualitatively new level of enslavement, the Soviet government made use of the innate reflex toward freedom discovered by the Nobel laureate Academician Ivan Pavlov, a reflex that was suppressed by hunger and other means of deprivation. Pavlov believed that the combined effects of terror and hunger would transform the freedom reflex into a reflex toward slavish submissiveness. In Soviet Russia words substituted for reality and elicited reflexive obedience. Soviet power, according to Pavlov, created animal-like relations among people such as what exists in the jungle among beasts.5

  This discovery by a leading physiologist came at an opportune moment for Soviet power and, much later, for the Putin regime. “Utilizing such ancient and dependable mechanisms as semi-starvation and inescapable poverty, permanent terror and forced, stupefying labor, the [Communist] party tirelessly hammered down simple Soviet people in the country it had conquered,” writes V. D. Topolyanskii. “Millions of prisoners in the socialist zone were required to jettison their innate tendency toward independent thinking, renounce the outmoded habits of personal responsibility toward succeeding generations that the Bolsheviks perceived as harmful, forget feelings of personal dignity, and be imbued with sensations of permanent happiness in life-long slavery.”6

  There is something “magical” about slavery—not just for the slaveholders but for the slaves as well. It is simpler for the slaveholders. They find it convenient not to have to deal with real persons but with a species of obedient bio-mechanisms. With regard to the slaves, if slavery implies certain conditions—for example, a comprehensible goal that is within reach, the absence of responsibility, or even a degree of comfort—then the slaves may be content. (Even the Stalinist underlings were slaves, although they lived not badly by the standards of that time and place.) Many of them simply don’t notice the circumstances in which they live; they misperceive their normal condition as freedom. This is the sort of slavery that Russians chose for themselves. Perhaps it is why in reality they have known nothing else for practically their entire history.

  Another dimension of Russia’s de facto thralldom is feigned piety. A striving to appear “better” in the eyes of public opinion—in other words, a sanctimoniousness—long ago became a way of life for the conformist majority. The Bolsheviks found the prevailing spiritual and intellectual slavery very much to their liking as they built on the Russian people’s habituation to what, in comparison to that of the Bolsheviks, was the moderate savagery and petty tyranny of tsarist power. Stalin and his ilk proclaimed a new state religion and established a historically unprecedented slave-owning theocratic state.

  The doctrine of the Bolshevik religion combined traditional elements of Russian Orthodoxy and paganism. Elements borrowed from these antecedents included, among others, idolatry—flagrant examples of which were the public exhibition of Lenin’s mummy and the countless portraits and statues of the “Founding Fathers”—and the practice of sacrifices. The latter involved both human sacrifices—for example, in the show trials and in the GULAG—and financial sacrifices in the form of party and trade union dues and of the obligatory purchase under Stalin of state bonds and, later, of lottery tickets.

  These new dogmas, which were universally disseminated throughout the USSR, required that complete control be established over the physical and spiritual lives of its citizens, who were forced to follow these dogmas. Soviet authorities effectively used varied means to achieve this goal.

  The Soviet slaveholding system mandated that everything without exception belonged to the state, including intellect, qualifications, and knowledge. It was the basis for the suppression of individual sovereignty and the elimination of even its outward appearance. For example, unless applicants possessed a workbook and references, no personnel department had the right to hire them. References had to be signed by the so-called triangle: the enterprise or institutional leader (the shop, department, etc.), the party organizer, and the trade union organizer. Even brilliant specialists were unable to secure a good job if they had bad references or, even worse, no references at all. There was no alternative for procuring employment. This requisite was the first element of the system in which Soviet citizens, like serfs, were dependent upon the state.

  A second element was the state monopoly on housing. Along with the system of internal passports, it enabled the state to dictate to its citizens where to live and work. In essence, Stalin’s introduction of internal passports, and a system of passes for controlling people’s travel and changes in their place of residence, strengthened serfdom via legislation. It would be difficult to conceive of a more effective policy for controlling the people.

  The Soviet slaveholding system paid special attention to educating the “new person.” The measures employed included massive hypnosis of the subjects of the communist empire and liquidation of “vestiges of the past,” including the maniacal destruction of Russian science, medicine, and culture, as well as quotidian culture, or the “old way of life.” Those who embodied this culture were isolated from society in concentration camps; the luckier ones were expelled abroad.

  The Iron Curtain was an effective barrier against the emergence of any kind of heresy. Soviet citizens were prohibited from going abroad, the circulation of foreign newspapers and magazines was banned, and Western radio stations broadcasting in Russian were jammed. Censorship and secrecy were the most effective prophylactics. Soviet people could know very little about the world around them—only that which the state permitted and only according to the interpretation that the state deemed necessary.

  The coercive measures employed differed greatly depending on the specific goal. For example, those persons wishing to secure what, from the time of the Bolshevik coup, were the minimum benefits that constituted “well-being” had to cozy up to the authorities or, even better, join the nomenklatura, the privileged elite of Soviet society. The state’s establishment early in the Soviet era of special retail stores where one could purchase foodstuffs unavailable elsewhere at subsidized prices, and the retention of these special stores until the end of the communist regime, clearly demonstrated the unbreakable connection in Soviet thinking between one’s social position and the opportunity to obtain quality foodstuffs and other “benefits and privileges.” To obtain the level of supply ordained from “above,” those who enjoyed access had to play by the “rules of the game,” and they included membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  Those who ignored the rules of the game were severely punished. The most egregious example of this was the persecution of Boris Pasternak after publication abroad of his book Doctor Zhivago in 1957 and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. The Stalinist tradition of public reprisals against dissenters long survived the dictator’s death in 1953. Another level of “coercive means” was the elaborately devised, differentiated, and diverse mechanisms of punishment and reeducation for various kinds of “heretics” to teach them and others a lesson.

  The system of punishment, including the notorious GULAG, was the most effective means of all. Punishing criminals and struggling against “heretics” were far from the only, or even the primary, goals of this monstrosity. According to the great criminals who came to power for the long term in November 1917, the concentration camps, as they were openly called at the time, were meant to achieve very concrete economic tasks. Soviet-style state capitalism, or the planned economy, required universal compulsion to labor. The scheme was grounded in the colonization of unassimilated
territories using prisoners’ labor. What a truly revolutionary approach! That is why the GULAG was supplied with an inexhaustible influx of prisoners, who were viewed as a slave labor force. Economic considerations were obviously among the reasons for the abnormally long prison sentences in the USSR.

  Another extremely effective mechanism of punishment was punitive psychiatry, which I have already discussed at length.

  The army was in an especially difficult position in Soviet slaveholding society. Military personnel were excluded from the purview even of the existing legislation. Battalions’ constructing generals’ dachas or “objects of the national economy” and soldiers’ harvesting crops—all amounted to slavery under the name of “honorary rights and duties.” The officers were also slaves. While the soldiers could again become relatively free after serving their compulsory two years, the officers could not escape military slavery until they retired after completing their term of service.