Gulag Quotes

“The dominance of former communists and the insufficient discussion of the past in the post-communist world is not coincidental. To put it bluntly, former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past: it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their claims to be carrying out 'reforms,' even when they personally had nothing to do with the past crimes.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical, and cultural origins, every one arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been—and will be—repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into “enemies,” our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our re-invention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or explusion or death. The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written “so that it will not happen again,” as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the “objective enemy,” as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why—and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered - viscerally, emotionally remembered - what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way - which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“This book was not written ‘so that it will not happen again’, as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“No one wants to be told that there was another, darker side to Allied victory, or that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. To admit that by sending thousands of Russians to their deaths by forcibly repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions of people to Soviet rule at Yalta, the Western Allies might have helped others commit crimes against humanity would undermine the moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No one wants to remember how well that mass murderer got on with Western statesmen. “I have a real liking for Stalin,” the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told a friend, “he has never broken his word.”16 There are many, many photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt all together, all smiling.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“it is true that both the Red Army and the secret police traditionally gave vodka to soldiers who were being asked to do dirty work: empty bottles are almost always found inside mass graves.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not—all will walk. Those who can’t walk—we will shoot.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Soviet joke about the terrible anxiety Ivan and his wife Masha experienced when the knock on the door came—and their relief when they learned it was only the neighbor come to tell them that the building was on fire.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Allegiance to a belief system can have deep, non-rational roots,”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Moscow. In the early 1930s, however, such glasnost”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Most of the time, however, the cruelty of Soviet camp guards was unthinking, stupid, lazy cruelty, of the sort that might be shown to cattle or sheep.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“the plan was not being fulfilled, it was not poor organization or malnutrition that were to blame, not stupidly cruel work policies or the lack of felt boots—but insufficient propaganda.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months
waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the
crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue
from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before.
Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a
whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been
her face . . .
—Anna Akhmatova, “Instead of a Preface: Requiem 1935–1940”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“In general, women who were able to sew or to quilt were able to earn extra bread rations, so coveted were even the slightest improvements to the standard uniform: the ability to distinguish oneself, to look slightly better than others, would become, as we shall see, associated with higher rank, better health, greater privilege.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“The reasoning, as far as I could see, being that the young would recover and have work left in them, while the old were not worth saving.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“One might say that, until now, the social, cultural, and political framework for knowledge of the Gulag has not been in place. I first became aware of this problem several years ago, when walking across the Charles Bridge, a major tourist attraction in what was then newly democratic Prague. There were buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and, every fifteen feet or so someone was selling precisely what one would expect to find for sale in such a postcard-perfect spot. Paintings of appropriately pretty streets were on display, along with bargain jewelry and 'Prague' key chains. Among the bric-a-brac, one could buy Soviet military paraphernalia: caps, badges, belt buckles, and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms. The sight struck me as odd. Most of the people buying the Soviet paraphernalia were Americans and West Europeans. All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat. It was a minor observation, but sometimes, it is through just such minor observations that a cultural mood is best observed. For here, the lesson could not have been clearer: while the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Lenin’s vision of labor camps as a special form of punishment for a particular sort of bourgeois “enemy” sat well with his other beliefs about crime and criminals. On the one hand, the first Soviet leader felt ambivalent about the jailing and punishment of traditional criminals—thieves, pickpockets, murderers—whom he perceived as potential allies.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Lageris buvo sunkiausias mūsų moralinės stiprybės,mūsų kasdienės moralės egzaminas ir 99 proc. jo neišlaikė,-rašė Šalamovas.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“War, compared the selection process he went through in 1946 to a slave market: Everyone was ordered to the courtyard and told to strip. When your name was called you appeared before a medical team for a health inspection. The exam consisted of”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka—Lenin’s secret police, the forerunner of the KGB— personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random “enemies” he came across while doing his job.12”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia’s citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today’s northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running. Tragically,”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Do not rejoice too early And let some oracle proclaim That wounds do not reopen That evil crowds don’t rise again. And that I risk seeming retarded; Let him orate. I firmly know that Stalin is not dead. As if the dead alone had mattered And those who vanished nameless in the North. The evil he implanted in our hearts, Had it not truly done the damage? As long as poverty divides from wealth As long as we don’t stop the lies And don’t unlearn to fear Stalin is not dead. —Boris Chichibabin, “Stalin Is Not Dead,” 1967”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky wrote that “absolute power is a structure, not a possession.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“They didn’t just want to oppress us: they wanted us to thank them for it.”81”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia’s citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today’s northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running.”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History