Dry rations - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Gideon Haigh
LIFE IN RUSSIA WAS NEVER AGAIN QUITE SO HELPLESS AND HOPELESS AS IN THE GREAT TERROR, but, thanks to its foundations, was irreducibly fake. Even the solitary notch on Stalin's gunbelt, the defeat of Nazism, simply demonstrated the capabilities his regime otherwise ground beneath its heel. Stalin's exhortatory methods were unchanged: in 1941 and 1942, almost a million servicemen were tried and 157,000 shot as enemies of the people for crimes like rolling a cigarette with a German propaganda leaflet or admiring the quality of German aircraft design. The state's crimes continued: the gulag's 1.7 million labourers were used so unsparingly that 930,000 died during the war; about 1.5 million Tatars, Chechens, Inguish, Kalmyks and other subject peoples were deported at the cost of 530,000 lives. Standing taller, thanks to the bigger pile of bodies beneath him, Stalin won the elections of December 1947 with a memorable 131 per cent of the vote. Paranoid and punitive to the last, not to mention increasingly anti-Semitic, he ruled until perhaps the most undeserved natural death in history in March 1953.
In some ways, however, Stalinism's ghastliest feature was its posthumous consequences – that there weren't any. In December 1955, Khrushchev, having eclipsed and executed his great rival, Beria, two years earlier, proposed an inquiry into Stalin's crimes. Resistance, led by Stalin's chief henchmen Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, was vocal. "Examining possible mistakes by Lenin's successor will raise doubts about the correctness of our whole course," exclaimed Kaganovich. "People will even say to us: ‘Where were you?' " A compromise was struck: Khrushchev's commission, headed by former Pravda editor Pyotr Pospelov, would meet for only a month in secret session; its 70-page report nonetheless revealed 2 million arrests and almost 700,000 executions between 1935 and 1940. "The facts were so horrifying that in certain very difficult passages Pospelov's voice shook," recalled one politburo member, "and once he broke down and sobbed."
Yet while Khrushchev's famous repudiation of Stalin at the XXth Party Congress may have been an epochal moment for fellow travellers in the West, its reception in the Soviet Union was mixed. At the Central Committee Plenum in June 1957, again in camera, Molotov was asked to account for days like one 20 years earlier when he and Stalin had personally approved 3147 death sentences – and then gone to the cinema. "I accept that responsibility," answered Molotov, "as do other members of the Politburo." The transcript, not made public for another 40 years, is a tissue of disgusting evasions.
Khrushchev: "Who authorised torture to produce false confessions?"
Molotov: "All politburo members."
Khrushchev: "But you were the second-in-command after Stalin, so you bear the main responsibility, and right after you, Kaganovich."
Molotov: "But I raised more objections to Stalin than any of you did; more than you did, comrade Khrushchev."
The nearest Soviet history came to a reckoning, Taubman notes, was a squib: "The prosecutors themselves were guilty." No wonder Khrushchev railed: "All of us together aren't worth Stalin's shit." But, fearful that the party would unravel if Stalin were totally discredited, he did nothing more. He may even have read the runes correctly, at least at the time. A young Komsomol official near Stavropol found that many "refused to believe" Khrushchev's congress speech, scorned "washing one's dirty linen in public", and cleaved to the belief that the Great Terror had been worth it: after all, the party officials it eliminated had been their oppressors, hadn't they? And by the time that Mikhail Gorbachev was himself positioned to challenge this attitude – for it was he – the passage of three decades had further entrenched it.
OBEDIENT MARCHERS WERE MARKING MAY DAY IN 1986 WHEN KIEV WAS SATURATED with radioactive caesium and strontium from their government's disintegrating nuclear power station at Chernobyl, at the eventual cost of at least 2500 lives. It was Soviet Russia's climactic metaphor: the people going through the motions of celebrating a state that set their lives at nought. Academics and journalists are inclined to speak of communism as naturalists of an extinct species. But its poison lingers in the Russian body politic like the radiation in Kiev – in the strain of lives mingling public guilt and private innocence, the atomisation of society, the decrepitude of institutions and the recrudescence of authoritarianism – and one wouldn't want to bet against a comparable Ba'athist legacy in Iraq. Geared solely to its own perpetuation, neither regime left its people anything to build on; the old habits of getting by and making do have instilled an abiding susceptibility to violence.
Who knows how long it takes to break the mind-forged manacles of totalitarianism? God allotted the Israelites forty years of desert wandering to unlearn the habits of mental slavery to the Egyptians before admitting them to the promised land – but that option, of course, isn't open. No wonder the past can seem so beguiling. "A nation trampled by despotism, degraded, forced into the role of an object, seeks shelter," wrote the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski of the Iranian revolution. "But a whole nation cannot emigrate, so it undertakes a migration in time rather than space. In the face of circling afflictions and of reality, it goes back to a past that seems a lost paradise. The old acquires a new sense, a new and provocative meaning."
During the patient, painstaking and humane interviews that undergird her history of death and mourning in Russia, Night of Stone (Viking, 2001), Catherine Merridale found respondents cynical about their history but fearful of rejecting it too wholeheartedly: it was, after all, all they had. "Russia's is a culture in which the idea of individual responsibility remains too vague," she concluded. "It is a society in which the law is a cipher, where people do not believe fundamentally that legal or democratic processes can help them." What puzzled and moved her most of all was the desperately circular nature of the remonstrations they allowed themselves; in order to assert facts about themselves, they had to continue colluding in mass fiction.
It seems absurd, but some of Stalinism's survivors still work hard to demonstrate their innocence, and what they need is proof, not of the madness of the system as a whole, but of the error that was made in their one individual case. They prepare their files of documents before we meet, they point to articles of the law, they tap the pages with their fingers, check that they are understood.
They were victims then and victims now – but today of the very accommodations, compromises, deceptions, hypocrisies and, of course, forgettings that made totalitarianism survivable. ♦