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Eventually showing up twenty minutes late to work was not just grounds for mandatory dismissal but a felony. “Losing your job was interpreted as a soft sort of treason against society,” explained historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, “since everyone was supposed to be working as hard as they could on behalf of everyone
As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The search for truth, the urge to understand the meaning of life, is wholly alien to the younger generation which has passed through the school of the Communist Youth Organization. For them, all problems have been solved; there is a standard answer to every question.
If anyone puts forth a thought which does not fit into the pattern laid down by Stalin, they do not argue against it, but they react with such suspicion of the other’s true intentions and hidden thoughts that he quickly learns to keep his ideas to himself.
Losing some of the USSR’s greatest elite military minds would cost many lives down the road during World War II, both in the Soviet Union itself and in Europe as a whole.
Yet for Stalin, any connection that was private was a threat to the common good that was the basis of socialism. The private interconnections that make up civil society were transformed from being the basis of a nation’s flourishing and stability into something to fear.
Entire ethnicities within the USSR were rounded up and deported, in an effort to sever the relations between the peoples and their ancestral lands to better remake the men and women in line with communist principles.
Jewish socialists who escaped Hitler to the Soviet Union were accused of being not just “filthy refugees” but also “Nazi spies.”[cxciii] Over half a million Jews were executed, while many others sent to prison camps. “At last the dreams of our beloved Czar Nicholas, which he was too soft to carry out, are being fulfilled,” quipped one captive. “The prisons are full of Jews and Bolsheviks.”
Collecting stamps, speaking the internationalist language of Esperanto or simply having a pen pal were grounds for arrest.
Not content with turning colleagues against one another in their given fields, Stalin’s campaign took on a systemic attempt to create a society where no one could trust anyone else, including husbands and wives, and parents and children—to say nothing of neighbors or coworkers or the like.
Being friends with an enemy of the state was a crime for not turning them in—but being ignorant that they were an enemy of the state was a crime for not being cautious enough.
A search of the location, some evidence seized, and the suspect would be taken away. Russians joked about the relief they felt when someone knocked on their door in the middle of the night to tell them that the house was on fire.
Getting confessions out of the accused thereby became a matter of life and death for the captors themselves. Evolutionary pressures encouraged the most evil and ruthless to succeed, since what was rewarded was not serving justice but rather getting the prisoners to confess.
In 1935, the Soviet government had lowered the age of criminal responsibility to just twelve—partly with the aim of threatening those in prison with the arrest of their children if they refused to confess to their crimes (a second decree that year allowed the arrest and imprisonment of relatives of anyone who was in prison for crimes against the state).
As George Orwell put it, “What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.”
There were no intellectual acrobatics which the fellow-travelers would not undertake to save their lovely faith in Russia. Year after year they had accepted and explained away horror and super-horror: falsifications of history, corruption, terror, man-made famine, the death penalty for minor thefts, the punishment of relatives for alleged crimes committed by members of their family thousands of miles away, capital punishment for young children, concentration camps with a population running into millions.”
The message was so unambiguous that even a child could understand it (because, of course, the story was targeted precisely toward children): if your parents break the law, there is no higher moral response than to turn them in—even it cost you your own life.
There was a brief moment where children in several large cities organized in an attempt to fight back. Calling themselves Revenge for Our Parents, the students knew perfectly well that their families were innocent. Their youthful naivete is understandable but no less tragic. They issued a leaflet arguing against the mass arrest of so many loyal citizens—and then they were, of course, virtually all arrested themselves. Naturally so were their siblings and any remaining parents, in this case for having failed to denounce the pamphleteers for their counter-revolutionary activities.
One day there would be a family, and the next the child was not only alone but completely socially isolated and shunned by everyone around them. The epidemic of hopeless children who understandably started taking their own lives caused handwringing at the Kremlin.
FDR’s first hundred days in the White House were a massive leftward tilt in American governance, with the machinery of government moving at an unprecedented pace. Everything seemed to be on the table in terms of policy. It was very clear that this was a historic opportunity to remake the relationship between the private sphere and the public one.
Sinclair’s stated purpose in writing The Jungle had been to spread the message of socialism to the American people. Instead, the Federal Government became a guarantor of the quality of products of private industry at public cost.
This increased access also meant increased information, and—just as with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman— Lyons became a harsh critic of the USSR after seeing with his own eyes what the Bolshevik experiment meant in practice.
The comparison between lives lost in warfare and lives lost due to oppression by the government seemed to be lost on Sinclair—as is the fact that the Civil War led to freeing the enslaved, while Stalin had done everything in his power to crush the Ukrainian population.
It doesn’t take much to make the argument that an alliance with Stalin was the right move for the United States to make after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attacks: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Yet two years before the Japanese assault on Hawaii, there was already a great amount of agitation for the United States to work closely with Stalin.
The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.
Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President Thomas Marshall was known for his wisecracks, and had quipped in 1912 that “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President, and nothing was ever heard of either of them again.”[ccxcvii] There is something to be said for the fact that Marshall’s joke is far better known today than he himself is.
To a good many onlookers the Russian revolution is a great experiment, in which sociological results to be attained justify a colossal human investment. The one hundred and sixty million inhabitants are the raw material of the experiment, and a formula for economic perfection is its objective.
Huge numbers of deportees were not even accused of any crimes, but were sent there simply due to their ethnicity—a constant issue in the heavily multiethnic Soviet Union.
Technically speaking, its roots lay in the czar’s katorga series of prisons which held so many of the Old Bolsheviks before the Revolution. That said, in 1916 there were fewer than 30,000 total prisoners, while the USSR’s Gulag routinely held two million at a time.
Though the term Gulag came about under Stalin, by 1921 Lenin was already running eighty-four various camps for potential enemies and those deemed to be unreliable elements. That number became an archipelago of over 30,000 camps under Stalin, and it was under his reign that the camps began to be used for slave labor—especially in areas universally understood to be inhospitable to human life.
Political prisoners under the czar—including Bolsheviks—had enjoyed certain a surprisingly high standard of living, with access to books, writing instruments, a fair amount of food and even decent clothing. At the early stage of what would become the Gulag system the prisoners still had the idea that they had rights. Their misconception was swiftly corrected.
Attempts were made to keep the nature and extent of the growing Gulag system secret from the population at large and from foreign countries.
Much of the skepticism about conditions in the Soviet Union was based on the very rational premise that this sort of mistreatment made no sense, for a large number of the captives who finally reached the camps were useless in terms of labor due to the horrors they had suffered en route, horrors that in some cases could have been prevented by simply allowing them to have water.
Arriving at the camps the captives were greeted by various signs, with one example being the claim that “With Just Work I Will Pay My Debt to the Fatherland,” reminiscent of Auschwitz’s notorious Arbeit Macht Frei sign.
It was by 1937, during the Great Terror, where the nature of the camps took a turn. Stalin now sent regional quotas to the NKVD, telling them how many people he expected to be arrested, with the numbers broken down by each given region. It then became their role to find that amount of men and women to arrest and send away.
Instead of merely being exploitative, with poor living conditions causing many to perish, the Gulag now became a place where the deaths of prisoners was regarded not as an accident or a cost or an afterthought but as an outright goal.
All of this contributed to a near-total extermination rate in some locations, with Soviet sources themselves reporting a death rate of 97-98% of the inmates.
“In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer, but to sing and smile while you worked as well,” another former prisoner told Applebaum. “They didn’t just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that the economy of the Soviet Union was heavily predicated on—if not based entirely on—the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of innocent people being kept imprisoned in the camps of the Gulag.
Whereas the United States had lost a bit over 400,000 men in World War II, the USSR lost somewhere between eight and twelve million, in addition to a similar number of civilians.
Further, Stalin sent many Russian ex-POWs to the Gulag upon their return to the USSR, both as punishment for having been captured and to isolate their knowledge about the outside world from the rest of the population.
Stalin’s anti-Semitism was heavily informed by a couple of things. To begin with, Russia had historically been one of the most anti-Semitic countries on earth, both de facto and de jure. The promise of not only equality but mere safety in one’s home drew a large percentage of Jews toward socialism both in Russia and abroad.
In 1948 the Soviet Union became the first country to recognize the newly-declared state of Israel, expecting Israel to be a bulwark against the West due to violent conflict between the Israelis and the British rulers. Months later Stalin saw this would not be the case, and refused to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.
During World War II a Soviet organization called the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was created to mobilize world opinion to help the USSR fight against Hitler. After the war, any Soviet Jew who wrote to them inquiring about Israel—a land where Jews would be safe from persecution—was arrested.
Terror is proved by historical experience to be integral to communism, to be, in fact, the main instrument by which its power is increased and sustained. From the beginning of the communist regime in Russia, every major political and economic turn has been carried through by terror.
It was because Stalin, despite evident facts, thought that the war had not yet started, that this was only a provocative action on the part of several undisciplined sections of the German Army, and that our reaction might serve as a reason for the Germans to begin the war. […] And what was the result of this? The worst that we had expected. The Germans surrounded our Army concentrations and consequently we lost hundreds of thousands of our soldiers.
In America and other liberal democracies, Party members handed in their cards and quit. It turned out that the criticism had been true, all of it. The Soviet Union was no workers’ paradise at all but a workers’ slaughterhouse. The words of Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s foremost rival, came to mind: “When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s Stick.”
Finally, the Soviets reopened the camps. Buchenwald—rechristened NKVD special camp Nr. 2—was near the city of Weimar, and Saschsenhausen—Nr. 7—a mere thirty-five kilometers from Berlin. Close to two hundred thousand people were rounded up and carted away when the world was still reeling from seeing the images of the Holocaust. Years later over ten thousand bodies would be uncovered at Saschsenhausen alone, the majority of whom were minors and the elderly.
By 1949 West Germany (officially the Federal Republic of Germany) and East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) became their own countries. The French, American and British occupation zones made up the former and would be a part of NATO, a multinational alliance dedicated to mutual defense. The Russian zone became the latter and in 1955 would cofound the Warsaw Pact, a counterweight to NATO that consisted of several communist nations dedicated to mutual military support and political ties.
No amount of communist handwaving to the contrary could explain why, given the choice, citizens were choosing West Germany over East. Claims that the thousands of immigrants were somehow fascists or spies or provocateurs persuaded no one.
