Dry rations
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Gideon Haigh
Download the complete article PDF
Gideon Haigh's biography and other articles by this writer
A human being survives by his ability to forget.
– Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales
In the past decade or so, no country has learned so much about its past as Russia, and no country has been so little moved. From its declassified archives have flooded tales of repression and horror in minutest detail; its people, meanwhile, have continued their somnolent reverse march towards tyranny, led by a former secret policeman who a generation or two earlier would in all likelihood have been orchestrating firing squads and torturing the innocent into fantastical confessions. In the Western intelligentsia, of course, there remains an ugly ease with the legacy of Soviet tyranny; announce yourself a communist and people will still slap you on the back and call you "comrade". Yet it is stupefying to learn, as a recent poll suggested, that seven in 10 Russians hanker nostalgically for the certainties of their grim criminal empire and three-quarters favour censorship in their press. For most of the 20th century, Russians were mute; now, it seems, they are deaf.
Are these two facts related? Russians, as Stalin himself boasted in a famous interview with Emil Ludwig in 1932, were never simply captives of communism: "Do you really believe that we could have retained power and have had the backing of the vast masses for 14 years by methods of intimidation and terrorisation?" Even Stalin's most significant Russian biographer Dmitri Volgonokov has to admit in Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (Prima, 1996): "No other man in the world has ever accomplished so fantastic a success as he: to exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country's blind adulation."
Stalinism's eerie afterglow might even be detected in Iraq, wrecked well before its invasion by the misrule of Saddam Hussein – inter alia, a devoted pupil of Stalin, who kept volumes of his collected works at each imperial palace. American neo-conservatives saw a society under totalitarian control as akin to hostages held at gunpoint; hence their blithe expectations of dancing in Baghdad streets as Ba'athists were run out of town. Stalinism shows us otherwise – how a regime and its people can so interpenetrate and mutually accommodate that even when the regime perishes, its hair and nails, as it were, can continue growing.
Some have seen Russia as habitat suited to despots, perceiving the antecedents of Bolshevism in the country's immemorially violent history – a history, moreover, of inflicting violence on itself. "What a people!" exclaimed Napoleon as Muscovites burned their city rather than capitulate to him. "They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians!" In Stalin in Power (Norton and Company, 1990), Robert Tucker places Stalin firmly in the tradition of Peter the Great, emulating Peter's use of serf and prison labour to construct St Petersburg and in such exercises of homicidal futility as the Baltic-White Sea Canal and Igarka railway. That alone, however, is not a wholly satisfactory explanation. It might be truer to say that the Bolsheviks' path to power was smoothed by Russia's equally strong history of quiescence. Russian theatre's most famous stage direction is the last line of Pushkin's Boris Gudonov: "Narod bezmolvstvuet" (The people remain silent). The silence in Tsarist times was partly an outcome of their dispersal within a vast land where four in five Russians were peasants, and partly an artefact of the brutal brevity of lives; at the turn of the century, Russian life expectancy was 32 years (against, for instance, 47 in France). "What an astonishing thing is the death of a Russian peasant!" writes Ivan Turgenev in Sketches from a Hunter's Album (1852). "He dies as if performing a ritual act, coldly and simply." It was Lenin's genius to recognise this, distinguishing the Bolsheviks from earlier demotic movements in Russia, like the Decembrists and the Narodniki, by dealing death an honoured place in his politics; as his biographer Robert Service observes, he regarded "the death of innocent individuals as part of the unavoidable messiness of historical progress". The 30 million deaths caused by famine of 1891, for instance, Lenin viewed not merely with equanimity but with exultation: "Famine, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, will ... usher in socialism ... Famine will destroy faith not only in the Tsar, but in God, too." Lenin's retinue competed to emulate his Bolshevik tverdost (hardness); thus formulations like Trotsky's: "We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life." This comfort with cruelty also made up for the Bolsheviks', at least at first, relatively paltry numbers.
When Lenin swept to power in October 1917, he proclaimed Russia "the freest country in the world". What he did not reveal was how intent he was on changing this. The apparatus of state control sprang up almost overnight. The Bolsheviks were rewriting the penal code to mandate arbitrary arrest and violence within a month of taking power, rejecting the idea of an independent judiciary as "one of the most widespread sophistries of bourgeois science". Their secret police, the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission), forerunner to the NKVD and KGB, purported to be an interim measure, but rapidly became permanent. The Bolsheviks found concentration camps ready-made, confining their enemies in prisoner-of-war compounds emptied by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, but they soon surpassed themselves: by 1921 there were 84 camps in 43 provinces.
"The dictatorship – and take this into account once and for all – means unrestricted power based on force, not law," Lenin announced in January 1918. A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks closed their first newspaper, Russkiye Vedomosti, because of the publication of an article critical of Lenin, on a charge of "attempting to influence people's minds"; on that, it was clear, the Bolsheviks intended establishing a monopoly. By the time their incomparably vicious revolution had taken 14 million lives, writes Donald Rayfield in Stalin and His Hangmen (Penguin, 2004), "nobody dreamed of influencing the government; people were reduced to fear, their best hope that they would be left alone".
RUSSIANS HAD THE WORLD'S FIRST MARXIST GOVERNMENT; they could also be thought of as fundamentalism's first victims. While the public writings of the early Bolsheviks are usually austere and technocratic, their private musings are often wracked by an eerie religiosity. "What was the October Revolution, what indeed is the Communist Party, but a miracle?" asked Lenin's colleague Georgy Pyatakov. "A real Communist ... that is, a man who was raised in the party and has absorbed its spirit deeply enough becomes himself in a way a miracle man." The Bolsheviks anticipate Hitler's verity that "any violence which does not spring from a firm spiritual base will be wavering and uncertain"; for them, as Orlando Figes observes in his cultural history of Russia Natasha's Dance (Penguin, 2001), revolution "was a bloody purgatory on the way to heaven on earth".
This was not, of course, a faith based on Christian charity. Human feelings – sensations like love, pity and beauty – were to be resisted. "Life is such that it rules out sentiment and woe to the man who lacks the strength to overcome his feelings," diarised the Cheka chief Feliks Dzerzhinsky. "My thought orders me to be terrible and I have the will to follow my thought to the end." Even aesthetic experiences could become a torment, Lenin once complaining to Maxim Gorky how music disturbed him:
It acts on my nerves. It makes one want to say a lot of sweet nonsense and stroke the heads of people who live in a filthy hellhole and yet can create such beauty. But you can't stroke anyone's head today – you'll get your hands cut off. The need is to beat them over the head, beat them mercilessly even though we, as an ideal, are against any coercion of people.
Communism offered an alternative theology. Where Christianity saw man in God's image, communism regarded him as a product of historical development; changing historical development, consequently, would beget a new man. "To produce a new ‘improved version' of man," said Trotsky, "that is the future task of communism." And while man was inherently imperfect and incomplete, of course, he could be liquidated in vast numbers without compunction.
In the wake of revolution, the Communist Party built its mandate not on popular support but on the people's trauma, deprivation and inanition. In 1922, Petr Gannushkin, Russia's leading psychiatrist, confided to Lenin his conviction that half the country's population was suffering from mental illness: "It is not normal for sons to kill their fathers and fathers their sons." Stalin, however, thrived amid such abnormality; under him, the wide popular consensus for a politics without conflict and division would be transformed into a system in which opposition was identified as a challenge to social consent and political harmony, and such "equality" as existed was based on absence of rights rather than presence.