by Rand Paul
Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent member of Bolshevik leadership from the beginning, did, however, intercede on behalf of Mandelstam.4
When Bukharin visited the spy chief Genrikh Yagoda to try to help Mandelstam, Yagoda thought the poem so entertaining he committed it to heart and recited it to Bukharin. Mandelstam’s widow recorded that while Yagoda may have found humor in the poem, he would “not have hesitated to destroy the whole of literature, past, present and future, if he had thought it to his advantage. For people of this extraordinary type, human blood is like water.”5 Bukharin’s visit did, however, help to shorten Mandelstam’s sentence.
Yagoda himself would ultimately suffer the same fate he had meted out to thousands when he was arrested and executed in 1938. I wonder if Yagoda remembered Mandelstam’s lampoon of Stalin as he awaited his executioners. Similar to the guillotine of the French Revolution, Stalin’s party purges eventually got around to killing the killers.6
It’s easy from the comfort of America, decades later and an ocean away, to question why Pasternak wasn’t more courageous. But before judging him too harshly, realize that millions of people died at Stalin’s whim. Not only was every individual at risk but often families were sent to camps for “crimes” of a single family member.
Indeed, even Mandelstam himself, from his camp, tried to ingratiate himself with Stalin by writing odes to glorify his rule. For that matter, so did Pasternak and Akhmatova.
Akhmatova in the 1950s penned a poem “In Praise of Peace” (and Stalin), including the line: “Legend speaks of a wise man who saved each of us from a terrible death.” After Mandelstam’s return from exile in 1937, he also published an “Ode” to Stalin that he vainly would read in public in an attempt to win back the favor of the dictator. While it is tempting to ridicule these poets today, one should imagine life in a country where everything from the economy to the arts to even sports was controlled by one man, Stalin.7
Soviet purges often meant not only killing the person, but erasing them completely from the collective memory. It wasn’t as neat and clean as Orwell devised it with unauthorized histories, photographs, books flushed down the memory hole. It was messier and bloodier.
Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, captures just such a moment in the communist occupation of Czechoslovakia:
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was the great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment.
Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Vladimír Clementis standing close by him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.
The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.8
Barely a year later Orwell would depict just such an authoritarian cleansing of history in 1984, where “the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”9
One result of Gorbachev’s glasnost was that the Russian people were allowed to begin to remember the victims. In 2018, a memorial to some of Stalin’s victims was dedicated at Kommunarka. The memorial wall lists 6,609 victims of Stalin’s Great Terror. According to Carl Schreck and Nikita Tatarsky, “Kommunarka was one of three areas in Moscow used by the NKVD for mass executions and burials during the Great Terror, in which some 700,000 people perished.”10
The memorial, though, is not without controversy. Almost all of the names listed were true victims of Stalin. However, at least eighty-eight were killers from the ranks of Stalin’s secret police who ultimately were, in turn, also purged and executed.
Activist Andrei Shalayev objected that Stalin’s killers were honored alongside the “true” martyrs of Stalin. Carl Schreck and Nikita Tatarsky reported that Shalayev, in his own small protest, affixed a sign to two nearby trees that “in fine print, [lists] the names of what he calls 88 of the most ‘odious’ perpetrators of Stalin’s death machine who are also listed on the memorial.”
Shalayev has a point. It’s hard to imagine a list of Holocaust victims that also included Nazis that Hitler later had killed.
At Kommunarka memorial, a sad irony is that an accomplished linguist named Yevgeny Polivanov, who fell victim to one of Stalin’s purges, is listed just yards away from his notorious interrogator, Valentin Filatovich Grigoryev, who, in turn, was executed three years later.
As Schreck and Tatarsky tell us, “On October 1, 1937, as Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s brutal purge raged, a brilliant, one-handed Russian linguist [named Polivanov] penned a complaint from Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison about his treatment by the NKVD secret police.”11
Yevgeny Polivanov, who was said to know eighteen languages, picked his words carefully as he pleaded with the court: “I request a halt to the severe interrogation methods (physical violence), as these methods compel me to lie and only serve to confuse the investigation. Furthermore, I am close to losing my mind.” His signature on each page of his forced confession shows his deterioration as the weeks of interrogation wore on. Finally, after four months he was executed.
One can imagine Polivanov’s family’s anger upon seeing his killer’s name at the memorial at Kommunarka.
When Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet government “rehabilitated” his victims or their surviving relatives. “Rehabilitate” seems a bit of a sterile and impractical way to sort through the victims. It is hard to imagine how “rehabilitating” someone killed by Stalin means anything. But in the legalistic world of Soviet socialism, it meant granting access to schools, position, travel, even food for the victim’s descendants as a form of reparation. According to Schreck and Tatarsky, “the Soviet government [ultimately] rehabilitated . . . nearly 270,000 people who perished in his purges or faced other forms of repression.”12
Altogether Stalin is estimated to have imprisoned 25 million people. From poets to scientists to peasants, more than 10 percent of Russians encountered the gulag in one form or another.
Orlando Figes, in The Whisperers, explores the complex psychological reactions of victims and their families to the Stalin purges. Figes concludes that “one lasting consequence of Stalin’s reign” was “a silent and conformist population.”
Americans, myself included, have always wanted populations to rise up and resist dictatorship. As a kid, I could never get my mind around the idea that one dictator could control millions of people.
Part of the answer is omnipresent police and terror. According to NPR, Figes brings that terror to life:
When Nina Kaminska was a teenager in Stalin’s Moscow, she came home late after a party and discovered that she had forgotten her key. She rang her family’s apartment doorbell and waited . . . and waited.
Her father finally answered the door in a full suit and tie. He had always expected his doorbell to ring in the middle of the night, and he had dressed to be taken away by the secret police. When he saw that it was only his daughter, he slapped her face.13
The constant fear led to whispers. There were two kinds of whisperers. One whisperer informed on their neighbor. Like the Vichy French or Herod’s Sanhedrin, these whisperers turned in their neighbors and friends. The other whisperer spoke quietly so as not to be heard or turned in to the secret police. The Russians developed two distinct words to describe each kind of whisperer.
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nbsp; One man controlled millions by, as NPR describes it, “relying on ‘mutual surveillance,’ urging families to report on each other in communal living spaces and report ‘disloyalty.’ Many people did what they could to survive, but they dealt with shame and guilt long after Stalin’s reign.”14
To get an idea of the fear that drove people to inform upon their neighbors, Figes tells the stories of landed peasants, or kulaks, that were rounded up by Stalin, nearly two million by some estimates. The kulaks were peasants but considered “rich.” They were often landowners and resisted the confiscation of their land.
The story of Antonina Golovina, who was exiled when she was eight, captures the lifelong stigma of being the daughter of a kulak. When the secret police came to their home, Antonina and her brothers and her mother were “given just an hour to pack a few clothes.” Their destination? A remote region of Siberia. Her father was a kulak, and he was sentenced to three years in a Gulag labor camp. Their multigenerational house was destroyed.
Antonina and her family somehow survived the frozen tundra of Siberia. But many of their camp inmates did not. The ground was too frozen to bury the dead, so they were piled up until spring, when they were disposed of in the river. Antonina tells of how winter snow destroyed a couple of the barracks, and the prisoners were forced “to live in holes dug in the frozen ground.”
Ultimately Antonina’s family and their father were released and reunited. But, under the Stalinist regime, they were still seen as suspect. Instead of growing up to become Ayn Rand’s heroine Kira, who refuses to join the Communist Party and dies trying to escape Russia, Antonina, like thousands of others, saw no way out. She joined the Communist Youth League. She hid her “kulak” roots. As Figes describes it: she “even forged her papers so that she could go to medical school. She never spoke about her family to any of her friends or colleagues at the Institute of Physiology in Leningrad, where she worked for forty years.” Antonina joined the Communist Party and blended in.
Antonina only became brave enough to talk of her past when Gorbachev allowed the thawing of glasnost. Glasnost’s opening allowed thousands of still-living victims and their families to speak out without fear of repercussions.15
Some victims rebelled more than others. Yevgenia Ginzburg was a Communist Party member who in 1937 got caught up in one of the insane purges that saw enemies within the party. Ginzburg was a professor who taught the history of the Communist Party. When a prominent Bolshevik leader and personal friend of Stalin’s was assassinated, Ginzburg was arrested. Unlike many others arrested in the Great Purge, she fought back but was ultimately convicted. Her husband was given fifteen years and their personal property was confiscated. Despite her protests, her trial was said to have taken seven minutes.
She feared her verdict would include a death sentence, but the court sentenced her to a prison camp. Her autobiographical response to the court is both triumphant and unapologetic:
To live! Without property, but what was that to me? Let them confiscate it—they were brigands anyway, confiscating was their business. They wouldn’t get much good out of mine, a few books and clothes—why, we didn’t even have a radio.
My husband was a loyal Communist of the old stamp, not the kind who had to have a Buick or a Mercedes . . . Ten years! . . . Do you [the judges], with your codfish faces, really think you can go on robbing and murdering for another ten years, that there aren’t people in the Party who will stop you sooner or later? I knew there were—and in order to see that day, I must live. In prison, if needs be, but I must at all costs live! . . . I looked at the guards, whose hands were still clasped behind my back.
Every nerve in my body was quivering with the joy of being alive. What nice faces the guards had! Peasant boys from Ryazan or Kursk, most likely. They couldn’t help being warders—no doubt they were conscripts. And they had joined hands to save me from falling. But they needn’t have—I wasn’t going to fall. I shook back the hair curled so carefully before facing the court, so as not to disgrace the memory of Charlotte Corday. Then I gave the guards a friendly smile. They looked at me in astonishment.16
The reference to Corday is to the woman seen by many as a heroine for assassinating Jean-Paul Marat during the French Revolution.
Chapter 30
It’s Not Socialism Without Purges
Socialists love to talk about being inclusive, and about bringing everyone into the process. They say they value the free and fair exchange of ideas. However, they also acknowledge that socialism requires a supermajority to function. How do you get everyone to agree on a path forward? The easiest way is to deplatform those who don’t agree.
I met Jon Utley when I was elected to the U.S. Senate. In a city where the conservative intellectual movement often seems to be on the wane, Jon remains a strong proponent for free markets, a less interventionist foreign policy, and limited government. In other words, he is an old-school constitutional conservative.
As publisher of The American Conservative, Jon’s voice is an important one as populism and nationalism attempt to supplant conservatism. Jon came to conservatism, like many other intellectuals of the twentieth century, after his family first flirted with communism.
Jon’s mother, Freda Utley, was born in England. As England languished in the 1920s, she embraced the new communism of Russia. She married a Russian Jewish economist, Arcadi Berdichevsky, and moved to Russia, where Jon was born.1
But all did not go as planned and even government officials were not immune from Stalin’s wrath.
At 2 a.m. on April 14, 1936, the KGB came calling. As Jon describes it, “In those days, they would arrest someone and then look for something they’d done.” Jon’s father was arrested in one of Stalin’s purges of his own communist ranks.
Georgie Anne Geyer describes Jon’s mother’s turmoil: “Freda, unable to help him, soon used her and Jon’s British passports to return to England, where she mobilized important leftist friends, people like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Lasky, to try to find out where Arcadi was and even sent a letter directly to Stalin. What camp in the Gulag, that web of labor camps that eventually killed untold millions? What part of that white barrenness of the Arctic? Even the knowledge that he had died—and how and where and when—would be some sort of solace! But the Soviets were never into solace.”2
Jon’s father was presumed dead, but the details were not revealed until Jon traveled back to Russia in 2004 to see for himself. His father had died in Vorkuta, a Soviet concentration camp in the far north of Russia. Camp records revealed that he had been executed in 1938 for being a leader in a hunger strike and “provoking massive discontent among the prisoners.”
When Jon visited the camp where his father was killed he was struck by the fact that “twenty million people are estimated to have died in these camps, but they are almost forgotten. There are hardly any museums or exhibits of communist camps. Many emptied ones were burned down at the time of Nikita Khrushchev, but mostly they were scavenged by poor peasants for anything usable, and then the remains, built of wood and cheap brick, just rotted into the forest or tundra. They were poorly built by unskilled prison labor, and many were temporary and moved when timber or easily mined minerals were depleted from nearby.”
Vorkuta was so far to the north that prisoners often arrived via the Arctic Sea. How cold was it? Utley explains that “during the winter, daylight is less than three hours long and temperatures go to 40 degrees below zero.” One can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to endure such circumstances.
Solzhenitsyn describes the deadly winters from the point of view of the prisoner: “When you’re cold, don’t expect sympathy from someone who’s warm.”3
Jon and his mother were able to flee to England and ultimately to the United States because she still held an English passport. Fortunately, according to Jon, “Knowing the prohibition against taking Russian-born children out of the country, they had put only my mother’s name on my birth certificate.”
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With her husband’s presumed death and her immersion into American culture, Freda Utley wrote The Dream We Lost in 1940, one of the first accounts of the terror and misery of communism.
Jon asks the same question so many ask: “why didn’t they resist more?” The answer, according to Jon, is that millions were condemned and executed for resistance, but the movement lacked momentum because the prison camps were very isolated and their horrific conditions kept secret.4
Jon describes how he felt as he stood in the brick quarry where his father was executed: “I guess I felt a certain peace as to where he was; it ended a question. Actually, it’s a sort of peaceful thing to know what happened because my mother never knew what happened to him. I always wondered what he would have been thinking of, of what was in his mind when he was killed, or whether he would ever have dreamed that his son would find the place where he died.”5
How massive were the Soviet pogroms? In 1932 and 1933, an estimated 7 to 11 million people were killed by Stalin. Most of these were kulaks like Antonina Golovina’s family who resisted the Soviet land grab. Collectivization of the farms caused food production to plummet, and the ensuing famine saw millions more die.
The combined number for those killed under Lenin and Stalin likely exceeds sixty million, a mind-boggling number.6
Part V
Where Are These Angels? The Philosophy of Socialism
“I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?”
—Milton Friedman
Chapter 31
Socialism Expects Selfless Rulers and Citizens
From the very beginning, one criticism of socialism has been its utopian nature. Even Marx criticized the voluntary socialist communes in America as utopian.