B (4:05)

Thank you very much again, Arnie. I won't belabor my thanks for the second time. It really is a pleasure being here. Having been a not entirely successful student here 30 years ago, I did do a master's degree and I did get the degree. But it's very nice to be here and to set the historical context. I'd like to begin by pointing out that not only are we approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solzhenitsyn's first books, but I am also standing to you tonight, just four months shy of the 60th anniversary of Stalin's death. In commemoration of that event, I'd like to read a very short excerpt from the memoirs of his daughter Svetlana, who sat by his deathbed until the very end. For the last 12 hours, she wrote, the lack of oxygen became acute. The death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed to be the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death. Within days of Stalin's demise, his henchmen Beria. And then Khrushchev began dismantling one of the Soviet leaders signature achievements, namely his concentration camps. They did so for many reasons. Some had wives and relatives in the camps. Some feared retribution from others. Who did. Most of all, though they did so because the camps were an economic disaster which they knew and about which more in a moment, and some feared they were a political disaster waiting to happen as well. No one, of course, knew better than Stalin's Politburo just how many people imprisoned within them were innocent. Yet although they knew this. None of Stalin's Soviet successors, not Nikita Khrushchev, not Leonid Brezhnev, and not, in the end, even Mikhail Gorbachev was far seeing or politically powerful enough to finish the job of dismantling the system and the memory of the system. And as a result, both the economic and the moral legacy of the camps continue to distort Russian society today. So one might say that Stalin is dead, but his last terrible gaze still casts its shadow. But although the legacy of the Gulag is the ultimate subject of my talk tonight, I want to begin with a brief account of what we have learned about the camps, not really since the time of Stalin's death, but in particular what we know now that we did not know 10 or 15 years ago. I've never claimed that in writing my narrative history of the Gulag that I discovered a new topic that had never been touched on before. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. The history of the camp system that he wrote and published in the west in the 1970s largely got the outline right. Although he had no access to archives, and Aldi based all of his writing on letters and the memoirs of other prisoners, he did, it now appears, understand the basic outline of the Gulag's history from its earliest incarnation on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, through its spread across the far north and then around the country, proving in fact that prisoner's gossip, as it was sometimes dismissed, was not as inaccurate as many people thought. In the years though, that I spent researching my book, I concluded that archives can make a difference to how we understand Soviet history. There are a lot of stories now about archives closing, but just to be clear, I was able in the 90s to work in archives in Moscow and Karelia. And I. I had access to documents from archives in St. Petersburg, Perm, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Novosibirsk. At one point I was handed a part of the archive of a small camp, kind of Lagpunkt called the Kadrovye Shore, in the far north. And I was politely asked if I wanted to buy it, which I did, of course. It's now at the Hoover Institute. What was available to me was very often quite ordinary. The day to day archive of the Gulag administration, for example, with inspectors reports and financial accounts, letters from camp directors to their supervisors in Moscow. But when reading these documents, the full extent of the system and its importance to the Soviet economy comes sharply into focus. Certainly these documents enabled me to be far more precise than was ever possible in the Past. Thanks to archives, we now know, for example, that there were at least 476 camp systems, each one made up of hundreds or even thousands of individual camps or lagpunks, sometimes spread out over thousands of square miles of otherwise empty tundra. We know that the vast majority of prisoners in them were peasants and workers. And not the intellectuals who later wrote memoirs and books. We know that with a few exceptions, Stalin's camps were not designed in order to kill people. They were not constructed that way because Stalin preferred to use firing squads to conduct his mass execution. Nevertheless, they were at times very lethal. Nearly a quarter of the gulags prisoners died during the war years. They were also very fluid. Prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had short sentences, because they were being released into the Red army, or because they had been promoted from prisoner to guard. As sometimes happen, there are also frequent amnesties for the old, the ill, for pregnant women, and for anyone else no longer useful to the forced labor system. And these reliefs were inevitably followed by new waves of arrests. As a result. We now also know that between 1929, when they first became a mass phenomenon, in 1953, the year of Stalin's death, some 18 million people passed through the Soviet gulag. In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were deported not to camps but to exile villages. In total, that means that the number of people with some experience of imprisonment and the penal system is in Stalin's Soviet Union could have run as high as 25 million, or about 15% of the population. We also now know where the camps were, namely, everywhere. Although probably all of us are familiar with the image of the prisoner in the snowstorm digging coal with a pickaxe. There were also camps in central Moscow. Where prisoners built apartment blocks or designed airplanes. There were camps in Krasnoyarsk, where prisoners ran nuclear power plants. And there were fishing camps on the Pacific coast. The gulag photo albums in the Russian State Archive, which I've seen, are chock full of pictures of prisoners with their camels. From Akhtubinsk to Yakutsk, there was in the end, not a single major population center that did not have its own local camp or camps, and not a single industry that did not employ prisoners. Over the years, prisoners built roads, railroads, power plants, chemical factories. They manufactured weapons, they made furniture, even children's toys. So in the Soviet union of the 1940s, the decade the camps reached their zenith. It would have been difficult in many places to go about your daily business and not run into prisoners. So it's no longer possible to argue, as some Western historians once did, that the camps were known to only a small proportion of the population. Of course, we also now understand better the chronology of the camps. We've long known that Lenin built the first ones in 1918, at the time of the revolution, as a kind of ad hoc emergency measure to contain the enemies of the people and prevent counter revolution. We also have known that he and his successors expanded them to the Solovetski Islands in the early 1920s. But the archives shed a good deal of light on why Stalin and chose to expand them further in 1929. In that year, Stalin launched the Five Year Plan, an extraordinarily costly attempt in human lives and natural resources to force a 20% annual increase in the Soviet Union's industrial output and to collectivize agriculture. This plan, as most of you in this room will know, led to millions of arrests as peasants were forced off their land and they were imprisoned if they refused. But it also led to an enormous labor shortage. Suddenly, the Soviet Union found itself in need of coal, gas and minerals, which could only be found in the far north of the country. Following a series of discussions which used almost exclusively economic language to justify the expansion of the camps, the decision was taken at the very highest levels of the Soviet government of the Party that prisoners should be used to extract these needed minerals. And to the secret policemen who were then charged with carrying out the construction of the camps, this solution made a lot of sense. And so here is how Alexei Loginov, who's the former deputy commander of the Norilsk camps north of the Arctic Circle, justified the use of prisoner Labor. In a 1992 interview, he said, if we had sent civilians, we would first have had to build houses for them to live in. And how could civilians live there? With prisoners, it's easy. All you need is a barrack, a stove with a chimney, and they survive. Prisoners in gulag documents are very often referred to as contingenti contingents. From the point of view of the Soviet leadership and of the camp commanders, they were an ingredient in production. They were like lumps of coal or bars of steel. You know, enemies of the people didn't need to live like civilians in normal houses at all, which made them both cheaper and more expendable. None of this is to say that the camps, in addition to their economic function, were not also intended to terrorize and subjugate the population. Certainly it's true that prison and camp regimes, which were dictated in very minute detail by Moscow, were openly designed to humiliate prisoners, famously prisoners, belts, buttons, garters, and items made of elastic were taken away from them. They were described as enemies. They were forbidden to use the word comrade even with one another. Such measures contributed to the dehumanization of prisoners in the eyes of camp guards and bureaucrats, who therefore found it that much easier not to treat them as fellow citizens and maybe not even as fellow human beings. In fact, this turned out to be an incredibly powerful ideological combination, the disregarding of the humanity of prisoners combined with the overwhelming need to fulfill the plan. And nowhere is this clearer, I found, than in the camp inspection reports, which were submitted periodically by local prosecutors and are now kept neatly on file in the Moscow archives. When I first began to read them, I was quite shocked both by their frankness and by the peculiar kind of outrage they express. You know? So, describing conditions in Volgolag, a railroad construction camp In Tartarstan in July 1942, one inspector complained, for example, that, quote, the whole population of the camp, including free workers, lives off flour. The only meal for prisoners is so called bread, made from flour and water without meats or fats. As a result, the inspector went on indignantly, there are high rates of illness, particularly scurvy. And, not surprisingly, the camp was failing to meet its production norms. Well, this outrage ceased to seem surprising after I had read several dozen similar reports, each of which used more or less the same sort of language, and each of which ended with more or less the same ritual. Conclusion. Conditions must be improved so that the prisoners will work harder and so that production norms will be met, very little was actually done. While it might have been expected that living conditions in the Gulag would be poor during the war, as they were all over the Soviet Union, a nationwide inspection of 23 large camps in 1948 still concluded, among other things, that 75% of the prisoners in Noril Lag, in northern Siberia, Norilsk, had no warm boots. That the number of prisoners unfit for hard labor in Karelia had recently tripled. The death rates were still, quote, unquote, too high in half a dozen camps, that is too high to allow for efficient production. These reports reminded me very much of the inspectors of Gogol's era. The forms were observed, the reports were filed. The effects on actual human beings were ignored. There would be a result. Camp commanders were routinely reprimanded for failing to improve living conditions. Living conditions continued to fail to improve, and there the discussion ended. Of course, the level of specificity in these reports also clears up any remaining doubt about who was in control of the camps and the central government or the regional bosses back in Moscow, they knew exactly what camps were like, and they knew really in very great detail now, without question, the expansion of the camps in this period and later distorted the Soviet economy. With so much cheap labor available, the Soviet economy took far longer than it should have done to become mechanized. All kinds of problems were solved just by calling for more workers, with so many, famously, of course, the White Sea canal was built with pickaxes. With so many poorly trained people working under coercion, construction was not of the highest quality either. By one account, labor productivity among free workers in the forestry industry was three times higher than among workers in the camps. Nevertheless, the camps also distorted the way that people in the lands of the former Soviet Union thought about economics, which is a point I'd like to illustrate by describing a trip I took to Vorkuta a few years ago on the arctic circle. Vorkuta's history begins in 1931, when a group of colonists first arrived in the region by boat up the northern waterways. Although even the czars had known about the region's enormous coal reserves, no one had ever managed to work out precisely how to get the coal out of the ground, Given the sheer horror of life in a place where temperatures regularly drop to minus 30 or minus 40 in the winter, and where the sun does not shine for six months of the year, and where, in the summertime, the flies and the mosquitoes, as I can testify, they travel in these big, dark clouds. Nevertheless, Stalin found a way by making use of another sort of vast reserve. Vorkuta's 23 original settlers were, of course, prisoners, and the leaders of that founding expedition were, of course, secret policemen. So over the subsequent two and a half decades, a million more prisoners would eventually pass through Vorkuta, which is one of the two or three most notorious hubs of the gulag. With the help of prisoners, the Soviet authorities in Vorkuta built shops and swimming pools and schools. The cost of heating shoddy Soviet apartment blocks for 11 months of the year was astronomical, far more, as it turned out, than the value of the coal itself. The city's infrastructure, built on constantly shifting permafrost, Required huge efforts to maintain. You know, miners could instead have been flown in and out on two week or four week shifts, as they are in Canada or Alaska. Nevertheless, Vorkuta, the city kept going throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and some 70,000 people still live there today. The truth, of course, is that Vorkuta was, and still is, completely unnecessary. Why build Kindergartens and university lecture halls in the tundra. Why build a puppet theater? Vorkuta has three, or did when I was there. Maybe they've closed down, but in Vorkuta it's surprisingly difficult to make that argument or ask such questions even now. I asked them, for example, of Zhenya was a retired geologist with whom I spent the better part of a day. Together, she and I walked around the city. We went to see the prisoner cemeteries, which have been memorialized in recent years. We walked around the ruin Geological Institute, which was a once solid structure complete with a columned Stalinist portico and a red star on the pediment. And although Zhenya's Polish parents had been deported to vorkut in the 1940s, although she knows and willingly recounts the city's history, Zhenya nevertheless spent a good part of the day railing against the thief democrats and the greedy bureaucrats who had probably sensibly decided to shut the institute down. So if your whole life has been associated with the place, it is hard to admit that that place should never have existed. And even if that place is widely famed for atrocity and for stupidity, and even if it is notoriously unpleasant, it's even harder to admit that it should never have been built at all. But if Zhenya, who was herself the daughter of victims, was unable to understand why her city is now being dismantled, then who can understand it? And that question brings me to the next part of my talk tonight, in which I would like to ask why the Gulag, about which historians, Soviet historians, and Russian historians now know so much, and whose economic impact we understand so much better? Why is it so seldom debated and discussed by Russians? One of the things which always strikes contemporary visitors to Russia is the lack of monuments to Stalin's victims. Arne mentioned it a minute ago. Yes, there are a few scattered memorials. There are places, as in Vorkuta, there is a prisoner's cemetery in Kolyma, there's a small. Not even that small, there's a statue. But there is no national monument or place of mourning. And in fact, the absence of monuments is a good measure because it accurately indicates a lack of. An absence of public awareness. Of course, those of you who know recent history know that there were wide ranging discussions of Soviet repression in the late 1980s, during the. During Gorbachev's reign, during Glasnost. And it's equally true that these discussions were extremely important, and they played a very big role in delegitimizing the Soviet regime. Nevertheless, that bitter debate about justice for Victims and about history is now really quite completely over. And more importantly, it had left no political institutions in its wake. Although there was much talk about it at the end of the 1980s, the Russian government never did examine or try their perpetrators of torture or mass murder in even those who were identifiable at the time. There were no truth commissions, either of the sort implemented in South Africa, which might have allowed victims to tell their stories in public, in an official public place, and to make the crimes of the past a part of contemporary debate. And the result, predictably, is that half a century after the end of World War II, the Germans still conduct regular public debates about victims compensation, about memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even about whether a younger generation of Germans should go on shouldering the burden of guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin's death, 60 years after Stalin's death, there are no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia, because the memory of the past is not a living part of public discourse. I should say, and those of you who know Russia will know this, that at some level, the reasons for this are not hard to fathom. The Stalinist era was really a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. Post Soviet Russia is not the same as post Soviet Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities are still fresh in people's minds. The memory of the camps, I should say post Communist Russia, the memory of the camps is also confused in Russia by the presence of so many other atrocities. War, famine, collectivization. You know, why should camp survivors get special treatment? People have said that to me. Further confused by the link made in some people's minds between the discussion of the past that took place in the 1980s and the economic collapse which followed in the 1990s. What was the point of talking about all that? People said to me, it got us nowhere. There's also a question of pride. Like Zhenya, many experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a personal blow. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel, but at least we were powerful. And now that we aren't powerful, we don't want to hear that it's bad. It was bad. Nevertheless, the most important explanation for the lack of debate is not the fears and anxieties of ordinary Russians, but the nature of the country's new ruling class. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, is a former KGB officer who has described himself as a Chekist, deliberately using the word for Lenin's hated political police. Famously, the Russian president has also described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, presumably meaning greater than World Wars I or 2. Under his watch, Soviet flags have returned to anniversary parades, and the Soviet national anthem has been revived, albeit with new words, and nobody knows them. His intentions are clear enough to me and to those around him, as I'll explain in greater depth in a later lecture in February. Putin is and was trying to create an alternate version of post Soviet history, one which supports his ideology. Thus, 1989 was not a moment of liberation, but the beginning of economic collapse. The hardships and the deprivations of the 1990s were not the result of decades of communist neglect or widespread thievery, but of Western style capitalism and democracy. Communism was at least stable and safe. Post Communism has been a disaster. The Soviet Union was powerful. Russia, at least until recently, was a failure. The more people believe all of this, the less likely they are to want a system which is more genuinely democratic and genuinely capitalist. You know, the more nostalgia for Soviet era symbols, the more he seems to believe, more secure his KGB clique is going to be. This failure to repent or to discuss or even to dwell on the past is a part of this explanation for this redirecting of history towards the political needs of the present rulers. It has also had consequences for the formation of Russian civil society and for the development of the rule of law. It helps to explain, for example, why so many Russians are not bothered by certain kinds of censorship or by the FSB, the new incarnation of KGB's ability to open mail, tap telephones, or enter private residences without a court order. I think there's a deeper significance, too. To put it very bluntly, if the scoundrels of the old regime go unpunished, good will in no sense be seen to have triumphed over evil. This may sound, I don't know, apocalyptic or American, but it's not politically irrelevant. After 1991, the secret police kept their apartments, their dachas, and their large pensions. Their victims remained poor and marginal, and still are. To most Russians, it now seems as if the more you collaborated in the past, the wiser you were. By analogy, the more you cheat and lie in the present, the wiser you are now. Personally, what bothers me the most about Russia's lack of interest in his past is the way it has deprived young people of a whole category of heroes. The names of those who secretly oppose Stalin ought to be as widely known in Russia as they are as are in Germany, for example, the names of people who took part in the plot to kill Hitler the incredibly rich body of Russian survivors literature, really extraordinary stories of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying conditions of Soviet labor camps, should be better read and better known and more frequently quoted. If school children knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something else to be proud of in Russia's past. Soviet past. Aside from imperial military triumphs, this, after all, is the country that invented the modern human rights movement. But in today's Russia, those early human rights activists have left a very thin legacy. On the contrary, Russian indifference to the past may also have helped create a widespread indifference to judicial and police reform. Political trials and harsh sentences are now returning. A few weeks ago, two women, two young women were sentenced to a Siberian labor camp as punishment for a political protest. Well, many such places have changed surprisingly little. Some years ago, I visited a criminal prison in Arkhangelsk and I emerged really genuinely reeling from what I'd seen. These women's cells with their hot, heavy air and sort of overwhelming stench, really made me feel as if I was walking into the past, into one of Yevgenia Ginsburg's descriptions of her Stalinist era prisons. In one cell I met a sobbing 15 year old girl who'd been accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of $10. She'd been in jail without a hearing for a week. Afterwards, I spoke to the prison boss. It all was about money, he said. He said the prison warders are rude because they're badly paid. The ventilation is bad because the building is old and needs repairs. Electricity is expensive, so we have to keep the corridors dark. Trials are delayed because there aren't enough judges. I wasn't convinced. Money is a problem, but it's not the whole explanation. If Russia's prisons still look like a scene from a Gulag memoir, and if Russia's courts and criminal investigations are still heavily politicized, that's partly because the Soviet legacy does not haunt Russia's criminal police, secret police chief judges, jailers or businessmen. But then, very few people in contemporary Russia feel the past to be a burden or an obligation at all. Like a great, unopened Pandora's box, the past lies in wait for another generation. Yet do we in the west remember the Soviet past any better? One of the reasons I wrote my Gulag book really horribly 15 years ago now, it's hard to believe. When I started it was because I really encountered this subject only while living in Eastern Europe. And I started to wonder why. Since there are presumably some other book writers in the room tonight, I can also confess that I was inspired by an extremely irritating New York Times review of my first book in 1994, which was about the western borderlands of the Soviet Union. And although of course largely positive, it it contained the following line quote here meaning, here meaning Ukraine and Belarusia. Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how many in the west remember it? After all, the killing was so boring and ostensibly undramatic. Were Stalin's murders boring? Many people think so, indeed. And I've just added this sentence an hour ago. Perhaps not coincidentally, a brand new New York Times review of my brand new book, Iron Curtain, also asks why anyone should care nowadays about Soviet atrocities in Eastern Europe. Haven't we all heard this before? Is what more or less the conclusion? Until recently, it was of course possible to explain this absence of popular feeling in our part of the world about the tragedy of European Communism as the logical result of a particular set of circumstances. You know, the passage of time is part of it. Again, you know, Communist regimes really did grow less reprehensible as the years went by. Nobody was very frightened of General Yarozalsky or even of Brezhnev, although of course, both were responsible for a great deal of destruction. Besides, archives were closed. Access to campsites was forbidden. No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they did in Germany at the end of World War II. No images, in turn meant that the subject in our image driven culture didn't really exist either. Of course, to some extent, ideology twisted the ways in which we understood Soviet and East European history as well. In fact, in the 1920s, a great deal was known in the west about the bloodiness of Lenin's revolution. Western socialists, many of whose brethren had been jailed by the Bolsheviks right after the revolution, protested loudly and strongly against those arrests. Nevertheless, in the 1930s, however, as Americans and West Europeans became more interested in learning how socialism, or elements of socialism could be applied here, the tone changed. Writers and journalists went off to the USSR trying to learn lessons they could use at home. The New York Times employed a correspondent, famously Walter Durante, who lauded the Five Year Plan and argued that it was a massive success and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a part, not all, but a part, of the Western left struggled to explain and sometimes excused the camps and the terror which created them to precisely because they wanted to make use of some aspect, even distantly, of the Soviet experiment at home. But it's not only the Left. In Fact, our determination to ignore Soviet terror solidified even further during the Second World War, when Stalin was our ally. In 1944, the then American Vice President, Henry Wallace, who was fortunately next replaced by by Truman, actually went to Kolyma, which was one of the most notorious camps. During a trip across the USSR and imagining he was visiting some kind of industrial complex, he told his host that, quote, soviet Asia reminded him of the Wild West. The vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate from tropical to polar, her inexhaustible wealth, remind me of my homeland. It's an American. Yeah. According to a report the boss of Colima later wrote for Beria, the head of the security services, Wallace did ask to see prisoners, but he was kept away. He was not alone, of course, in refusing to see the truth, and you can hardly blame him. Roosevelt and Churchill had their photographs taken with Stalin too. All of that contributed to our firm conviction that the Second World War was a wholly just war. And very few people today want that conviction shaken. You know, we remember D Day liberation of the Nazi camps, the children welcoming American GIs, you know, with cheers on the streets. And we don't want to remember, we try not to remember that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. Nobody wants to think that we defeated one mass murder with the help of another during the Cold War. It's true. Our awareness of Soviet atrocities went up in the 1960s. They receded again even in the 1980s. I remember it well. There were still American academics who went on describing the advantages of East German health care or Polish peace initiatives in the academic world. When I went to university, Soviet historians who wrote about the camps generally divided up into two groups. Those who wrote about them as criminal and those who downplayed them, if not because they were actually pro Soviet, than because they didn't like Ronald Reagan. So right up into the end, our views of the Soviet Union and its repressive system always had more to do with American politics and American ideological struggles and political arguments than they ever had to do with the Soviet Union itself. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, much has really changed. World War II now belongs to a previous generation. The Cold War is over too, and the alliances and the international fault lines at pre produced have shifted for good. The Western left and the Western right now compete over completely different issues. It's become finally possible for us to stop looking at the history of the Soviet Union through the narrow lens of Western politics. It's possible, and I'll conclude by saying it's also necessary. It's true that our tolerance for the occasional Gulag denier in our universities will not destroy the moral fear fabric of our society. And even I don't think that the fashion for hammer and sickle T shirts will corrupt our youth forever. Nevertheless, it's true that if we fail to incorporate what we do know now about the Gulag into our own memory of Europe and our own memory of European history, there will be consequences. You know, after all, it is our history. You know, why did we fight the Cold War after all? You know, was it because crazed right wing politicians, you know, in cahoots with the military industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and they forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? I'm not sure. We still remember what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, and what held the civilization of the west together for so long. At the same time, if we don't study the history of the Gulag, then some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the 20th 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. I could go on. Every single one of these events had different historical and philosophical origins, and they arose in circumstances that will never be repeated. But our ability to debase and and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been and will be repeated again and again. Our transformation of our neighbors into enemies, our reinvention of our victims as lower, lesser evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death. The more we understand about how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens into objects, the more we know of the species circumstances which led to each episode of mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. I wrote my book about the Gulag not so that it will never happen again, as the cliche has it, but because it will happen again. We need to know why. Each story, each memoir and each document is a piece of the puzzle. Without them, we'll wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are. Thank you very much.

A (39:40)

Thank you very much, Anne. That was excellent. Your underlining of the Historian's creed at the end was very moving. I wanted to start by asking you a question, maybe somewhat more precise character, but it goes to the heart of one of your arguments and that has to do with the economic effects of the Gulag system in the Soviet Union, where you said that one way of looking at it, I mean, you indicated there were several ways this could be approached. One way of looking at it was that you actually held Soviet economic development back to a certain extent in terms of the development, presumably then of other sectors of the economy. But is it quite possible to think about it in those terms? I mean, wasn't the Gulag system, in a way, in a fearful kind of way, an integral part of the Soviet system? I mean, where it was very difficult to imagine that the Soviet economy, at least the way it developed during the Stalinist era, could have existed at all without a system of penal colonies that delivered inexpensive, non expensive labor?

B (40:47)

I mean, there are two answers to that question. I've been asked a version of this before, which is, can you imagine the Soviet Union without the Gulag and how can you separate it out? And I think to that part of your question, yes, you're right, it's hard to imagine it. And maybe the better expression to use is not that it held the same Soviet system back, that it held Russia back and it held Ukraine back, and that the, you know, the development of this part of the world was not so much, not so much underdeveloped as misdeveloped. You know, that, you know, when you looked at the Soviet economy in 1990, 91, things were simply in the wrong place. You know, factories weren't near the source of iron or coal, and there was far too much development in the very expensive far north, where it costs far more to build cities. This is part of, of course, of a bigger mentality, which is so the, you know, bizarrely, given how obsessed they were with economics, Soviet planners were not very good economists. You know, they didn't count how much it's going to cost to heat the buildings in Vorkuta. You know, they would say, all right, we need this coal. Let's have lots of miners living up there. Let's build a lot of buildings for them. But there was never any, never any way of estimating what costs what and what's the real expense involved in building a city. And so there was a kind of distorting of the whole system that, I mean, it's not only to do with the Gulag, but the Gulag was a piece of it because the Gulag provided cheap labor. I mean, of course, the interesting thing is that the Politburo, the Soviet leadership itself, understood this at the end. I mean, you know, not Stalin, but, you know, Beria and people around him were very clear that the Gulag was an economic problem. Ironically, of course, it had started as a. You know, the point of it. Stalin's use of it was for economic reasons. You know, he wanted. He believed that spreading the gulag. He'd read a lot of Peter the Great, and he thought, well, if you can. If we could just, you know, create slave labor all over the place like he did, then would. Then we'll. Or misread Peter the Great. Maybe I should say then, you know, then that will.

A (42:56)

Imperial historians.

B (42:57)

I was going to say there are about seven historians of Imperial Russia in the room. I don't want to offend them, but, you know. But he thought, well, yes, that this will increase our economic. Actually, by the end of the 30s, it was clear that this was a problem. And by the early 50s, Beria certainly knew that it was economically disastrous. The camps were very expensive. They were expensive to maintain. It's not an intelligent way to use your labor force. It's not very smart to send your nuclear physicist to dig coal. It was an immense waste of human resources, and even they knew it. That was part of the original decision to begin dismantling it in 53 and 54.

A (43:37)

So it was the inefficiency of the whole system that was built into it.

B (43:42)

The whole system was inefficient. And the Gulag was kind of the most inefficient part of the inefficient system. I mean, you know, of course, it appealed to Stalin not only for economic reasons, but of course it had other. Another purpose, too, which is probably the real reason why it wasn't dismantled, because it served another function, which was it was a part of the system of terror.

A (44:02)

So, other questions. I would start down here. Yes. At the end over there.

C (44:13)

Hi. Thanks a lot for that. I found out to Dan. I found this quite remarkable that.

D (44:20)

The.

C (44:20)

Day in the Life of Ivan Deznowicz, I think, was published in what, 50 years ago? 62. And I haven't read it, but I have read Vasily Grossman's Wonderful Life and Fate. And GROSSMAN Died in 64. And I think he. And if I'm not incorrect, he and Slozhenitsyn were writing their two sort of masterpieces at the same time. And it's sort of about Soviet totalitarianism. Now, how is it that. Why do you think it is that Grossman's whole manuscript was taken away by the KGB and he was told that it wouldn't be published in 200 years? I think it was literally 1962, but then Slozhenitsyn's book is published. Why is. I mean, how does that work? Why did the Soviet system allow Solzhenitsyn stuff to be published? And that's very specific.

B (45:06)

I might answer right away. There's a very clear reason for it. Solzhenitsyn's book was published as part. Because of. It was part of a political conflict then taking place at the highest levels between Khrushchev and others in the Politburo. It was part of a sort of. It was published because Khrushchev was fighting against a group of people who roughly one would call Stalinists, who later became the Brezhnevites. I mean, I don't want to go into boring detail, but it was a political gesture. And actually, although it was published and then it was unbelievably popular and read everywhere and caused immense comment and debate, it was actually bad reviews of it began to appear soon after, and by 63 or 64, you couldn't find it anymore, and it was effectively rebanned within a year or two after Khrushchev fell from power. So it was a kind of piece of. There was a conflict going on inside the Politburo over who would take power after Stalin's death, and Ivan Denisovich was a kind of tool in that conflict. The sort of. The modernizers were using it against the Stalinists, and they pushed through the publication of it. So it wasn't that anybody felt deeply moved by it, or maybe some people felt deeply moved by it, but it's not clear whether Khrushchev did or that he even really understood it before it was published.

A (46:26)

The Soviets, in that sense, were the last ones to take literature seriously.

B (46:30)

Yes, yes. I mean, imagine a book being published as part of the war between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It's impossible to see it. Cameron forces the publication of a novel that somehow embarrasses.

A (46:44)

You're absolutely right, yes. Another question over there. I'll move around the room.

B (46:51)

Hi. Coincidentally, there's an article on the BBC website today by Steve Rosenberg on exactly this topic, and he quotes a recent survey in which 48% of Russians viewed Stalin as having a positive influence on.

D (47:08)

The Soviet Union Union. Your view?

B (47:13)

I can take that one. I mean, funny, literally yesterday I was reading there's a new book by somebody called Leon Aaron, who's an American academic who has written a book about glasnost, and he's gone back through polling done in the late 80s and through reread all those endless essays people were writing in public publishing in the Russian press when it first became possible in the late 80s and early 90s. And the polling then is really extraordinary. I mean, it surprised even me. I didn't bring it with me, and I don't have it off the top of my head. But the condemnation of Stalin, people asking questions such as, what do you feel about communism? The numbers are 99% negative. What kind of a country do you want to live in? 99%. We want to live in a liberal democracy. I mean, there was a mood in Russia in the late 80s and early 90s that was deeply and profoundly anti Stalinist, and that was clearly created by the discussion and debate of the issue. Since then, you've had. I mean, I don't want to say there's been no conversation. And I've simplified this a little bit because it goes more like this rather than like that. There are moments of when issues come up and then they die, and then they come up again and they die. But generally speaking, public debate about that period is very weak and poor. And while there are some people still talking about it, it's not illegal to talk about it. It's really gone. So you now have a younger generation of people who didn't know much about it. You know, Stalin was good. Yeah. He won the war. We haven't learned anything different from that, or not much more. So, yes, you have had a. There's been a real sea change in the last 20 years. And you have to ask why, you know, is it. It's to do with the politics, it's to do with the educational system, it's to do with the discussion of this issue. It's very, very dramatic.

A (49:12)

Other question at.

E (49:23)

I was particularly moved when you mentioned the hammer and sickle T shirts. When I was a young man, I was a member of the Communist Party for a number of years. I'm ashamed of that fact now. But I was duped and I went along with it. It was at the time of the Vietnam War, and I've got all the excuses, but with hindsight, looking back on it, I just look at myself and say what a bloody fool I was. But I meet lots of. Well, not lots. I meet a few ex comrades from that era, and they are steadfastly refusing to accept the evidence you mentioned about the young people in the Soviet Union or the ex Soviet Union, Russia as it is today, who don't know, who haven't had access to the information. Information. But people in the west have no such Excuse. And what shocks me is to see young people walking around with their little hammer and sickle badges and their little hammer and sickle and their Che Guevara T shirts. When you tackle them, they say, oh, if only Lenin had lived and old Trotsky was really a nice man. They don't even know, you know, about Tronstadt or any of that stuff. And I just think, you know, what's going on, you know, what is it with people in the West? They didn't damn well experience it and they just refuse. And as you said, you know, what is the death toll of communism in the 20th century? I mean, you know, the Gulag and then all the others, the Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the. I mean, it must be, I don't know, 50 million. Mao Tse Tung, how many did he kill?

B (51:03)

The answer to that one is it depends how you count exactly.

E (51:06)

I mean, the FSB admit to 19 million, isn't it? I'm not sure they admit to that.

A (51:16)

But do you have a specific question?

E (51:17)

Well, my specific question is. I'm sorry, the specific question is, what do we have to do to get young people in the west to realize the enormity of the disaster that communism was in the 20th century?

A (51:32)

Thank you. Thank you very much. That certainly came from the heart. I'll take another one at the back over there at the end. Yes, please.

D (51:44)

Yes. Thank you. My question really follows on from the previous gentleman's comments. I've worked in several ex Soviet states for several years and professor, it's based on your comment about your experiences in the USA when you said in the 1980s, the response or the position of various academics and doubtless others on the issue of the Gulag was really determined by their attitude to domestic politics, American politics. What has your impression been? This is where it comes in with the previous gentleman's point. What's your impression in the UK about that? Do you still. Did you come across people in academia who protested against your view or protested by silence against it? Thank you.

B (52:48)

Of course, nobody at the LSE is bad at all, so stipulate they're all fine. To the question about young people, I mean, to be fair, you could say, and why don't young people know any British history? And why don't they remember anything about why don't they know any American history? I mean, these young people today, they don't know enough history. It's a general rule. I actually think, you know, the problem I described has changed and this is partly an answer to your question too. There has been One big change, actually, even since I wrote my book and since I started doing research for this book in the 90s, and that is that the availability of Soviet archives really has changed the way that academics write about Soviet history and people talk about Soviet history now. There was a kind of sea change. You know, it used to be that the two groups, right, either you wrote about the Gulag using prisoner's memoirs, because that's what there is, or you wrote using officially available information, which meant Soviet newspapers and a few little documents they published, and there wasn't anything else. And so you could choose this point of view or that point of view, and they didn't mesh at all. I mean, you would remember this era, the archives have made a really enormous difference because now a lot of things that we used to argue about have just kind of disappeared. I mean, was there a Gulag and how many people died? Well, yes, there was. And we can count them or we can start to count them. It's not so easy to count them. But the archives have made it a much more realistic conversation in academic publishing and in, in the world of professional historians. I don't really meet people who say Stalin was good or the Soviet Union should be excused. I mean, they may be out there, but even the ones who used to say that don't do it anymore. There's been a really major change because of archives, and I think that's trickled down a little bit into, even into the way Soviet history is taught to undergraduates and the way it's taught at school. It's clearly taught differently now than when I was taught it. When I was taught this very cliched again, it was either a right wing cliche or a left wing cliche, but they weren't very deep. And we now have a much deeper sense of what happened. And I think that's an important change. We just got to get, I mean, effectively the solution to the problem you present is get lots of young people to buy my book and it will all be fair.

D (55:22)

Uk.

B (55:23)

And just to finish about the uk, academics are not, I don't think, very different from their American. I mean, there's a. There are sort of. I mean, all you had to do was read the obituaries of Eric Hobsbawm a couple of months ago. I mean, the Guardian, there was a loving obituary about him and what a great man he was. And then there were a couple real denunciations in the Telegraph at the time. I mean, there's still a division vision in academia about people with views like his. But again, I think it's in the field of Soviet studies. It's much smaller and less than it used to be here as well, because people simply have the real archives and arguments are now have kind of moved on.

A (56:03)

Let me underline that point about archives in Russia, because quite a number of our students, certainly those at the postgraduate level who have an interest in these kinds of affairs now actually do their research in Russia.

B (56:15)

Well, you have to.

A (56:16)

And it is becoming. I mean, there's a general sense that there's very little that can be done in Russian archives, particularly during the Putin era, which is my. In my view, generally is not true. I mean, there are limitations that were not there in the 1990s, but there is still an immense amount of archival material that can be used on these kinds of issues or Soviet international history.

B (56:37)

One of the effects of opening the archives is a lot of things sort of got out one way or the other. I mean, the Polish Defense ministry in about 1991, quietly took a few Xerox machines to Moscow to the military archives, and Xeroxed something like a million documents of, you know, these are documents to do with the Soviet, you know, the fronts that came through Poland at the end of the war, the occupation of. And military documents about how the Polish Home army, how the resistance were treated by the Red army, as I said. And it's now kind of now it's all sitting in Warsaw where you can happily read it and they can close the archives all they want and it's still open. That's true about the Gulag Archive. There's a thing called the Gulag Archive, which is the institution's own archive of the system and that has been microfilmed. And you can read it in the extreme comfort of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. So a lot of it's out. And so, yes, they can close off certain things or make it harder to get things, but I don't think we're never going to go back to the stage where it's all banned and we can't read anything.

A (57:45)

It's very difficult in terms of the policies that go into it. I did a lot of work in Russian archives in the 1990s, and you know, exactly the kind of behavior that you describe, which on the Polish side, what was I used to object to very strenuously because of the effects that it had on the Russian side. Now, of course, with lots of this being closed, I'm very happy that I'm able to read it in Warsaw or at the Hoover Institution or In Jerusalem or elsewhere, in terms of areas where it was possible to pick up materials from back then. So you live and learn. Professor Oskin. Microphones.

B (58:24)

There's one phenomenon about Bruna which is rather puzzling, and that is there were.

A (58:28)

Of course a lot of colonists there.

B (58:30)

And some of them went through the whole experience, dreadful experience, and continued to maintain their faith in Stalin and in the Communist. And tried to join the party when they got home. Yes, rejoined. I used to know one of them.

E (58:43)

A man called Lyatt Kopyliev.

B (58:45)

He actually didn't become disillusioned with the Communist Party until the for short theory. And things were much easier. Now. How do you explain. Okay, yeah, I mean, that's really a deeper question. You know, that's a question about the nature of ideology and why people believe things and don't believe them and what it would take to make them disbelieve them. I mean, remember that many of the. Of course, there were many communists who were arrested. There were many communists arrested in the, particularly in the late 30s. And there were whole. Some people have described groups of communists who stuck together in the camps and sort of reinforced one another's views. And they would keep telling each other, you know, all these people are criminals, but our arrests were a mistake. And people, you know, people found ways of explaining it, of justifying it and legitimating it. And remember that, you know, it was a, you know, the appeal of communism and the appeal even of Stalinist communism. It gets harder and harder for us to understand it now from our perspective. But it was, you know, it was a complete theory of history. It was a scientific theory of history. It explained why things were the way they were and how things were going to be. And it continued to appeal to people even when it was displayed, proved in many ways from the beginning to the end. And so your question is really a deeper question about the nature of belief. Even when confronted with reality, it isn't happening the way Marx said it was going to happen. People still went on doing things. And you get this. Actually, in my book about the post war Eastern Europe, this comes up as an issue all the time. We're supposed to be carrying out this reform and the workers are supposed to be coming to class consciousness and they're supposed to be supporting us, but they don't why, you know, what's wrong? How do we adjust things so that reality fits the theory? It's one of the deepest and most interesting problems about the Soviet Union. And it's one of the things I think hardest for us to understand.

A (60:51)

Take a couple of questions upstairs. Yes, please. The gentleman in the blue shirt over there. Do we have another question? We can. Yep, over there at the foreign.

F (61:03)

Okay.

A (61:04)

Okay, please.

F (61:05)

Thank you. I understand your point about the very thin legacy of Russian human Act human rights activists in the sort of 70s and so on and sort of. And what's going on under the Putin regime at the moment, but I wonder if you're being overly pessimistic about the current political implications of this. If one looks, and I'm just looking at the sort of most recent Edelman survey of trust of governments, it looked at about 25 countries, and the one which, where the people trusted its government least was actually Russia, and the one in fact, where people trusted their government most was actually China. And UK and US were actually nearer to Russia than to China.

A (61:52)

But.

F (61:53)

So my question then is really is, are you not underestimating the understanding within the Soviet people or the Russian people of what went on and the nature of their present government?

A (62:13)

Yeah, please.

F (62:16)

And I'm afraid to say that you do a lot of cherry picking to.

B (62:21)

Fit your Gulag thesis.

F (62:23)

You practically forgot about the American native Indians who were forced to live in reservations no different from those in Kolyma, but.

A (62:35)

So that was not what the lecture was on, I think.

B (62:37)

No, no, no.

A (62:40)

Could we place an Uber on to the other speaker that's sitting, please?

B (62:46)

Just a question on whether you have a sense of how Russian history gets taught to Russian school children and whether that's school children and at undergraduate level, and whether that's changing over time from sort of Soviet area to the 90s, the Yeltsin era, and now, and how important you think, yeah, am I underestimating the Russians? Maybe. It's always hard to know what to make of those polls. If you do polls and you ask people about Putin, he still gets a very favorable rating. If you then ask them, how do you feel about the person who runs your city or your town, then it's often very negative. So clearly, clearly the Russians are not happy with the way they're immediately governed, which must mean something. Nevertheless, I'm waiting for the evidence of mass discontent that will be strong enough to unseat Putin. There was a moment earlier, late last year, when I thought maybe we would see something like that, but I don't see it yet. And actually, what worries me more is not that people are, you know, I'm not surprised that people are discontented and that, you know, in particular, corruption is an issue that bothers people now more than almost Anything else but this, you know, these deeper respect for the rule of law, the court system, the penal system. These are not and haven't been strong issues, even in the public protests. I mean, we've seen protests about falsified elections and we see complaints about corruption. But you don't hear a lot of conversation about the deeper issues. I mean, I don't. And then maybe somebody here is going to disagree with me. I will say a word about the American Native Indians. Actually, one of the things I've learned while talking about this subject in different parts of the world is that although yes, I'm speaking about Russia and I'm, you know, I. This is the research I did, I do think it's true that the phenomenon of there being a piece of history that people find difficult and they need to talk about it is actually very widespread, if you. Almost any country you can think of. In its way, the American civil rights movement was a kind of coming to terms with the past. We hadn't ever really dealt with what slavery had done to us and what it had done to the political system and how much unfairness was still left in the country. And it was a sort of going through that was a way of dealing with that piece of history. You know, you would find it. I mean, you know, I don't have any country in the world. Once you begin to think about it, whether it's the Australians and the Aborigines or the French and Vichy or Argentina and the Colonel's regime, you begin to get this phenomenon of people needing to find a way to talk about a period of time like that. So although it's true, I wasn't talking about the American Indians. It's a piece of American history that could be better understood and better discussed. How Russian history is taught to Russian school children, from what I know, and I did look at this once, but not recently, but from what I know, it's. It basically varies according to who the teacher is. I mean, there's enormous variability. I mean, I hear about Memorial, which is a Russian organization that is both a human rights organization and an organization that teaches and studies history, has all kinds of wonderful programs in Russian schools, inspiring children to go and ask their parents what happened to them during the war, and grandparents and so on. And there are programs like that. I've met rather amazing Russian school teachers. There are also a lot of bad textbooks around that either underplay or distort the role of Stalin in Soviet history. And I think it's really luck of the draw. I mean, who gets There aren't a lot of. It's a little bit like that with archives in Russia. Yes, the archives are all closed except the ones that are open and why this one is open and that one isn't. And it's kind of hard to say. It really depends on who the director is and what kind of mood he is when you get there and how he interprets his instructions from Moscow. And as I understand it, it's hard to generalize about the school system too, because you get some teachers who teach. And then. Although, as I said, there was a major textbook reform a few years back, which was very disturbing, including a kind of whitewashing of Stalin. So it. I don't want to generalize about it. There are others who may know more here anyway. I suspect some of you might even have gone to Russian schools. So sorry, you're in charge, please.

F (67:40)

Thank you very much for his talk. You made a very interesting point that Solzhenitsyn makes as well, and that's that the Gulag started under Lenin. And that's really what I wanted to. Wanted to ask, or you can elaborate on, is to what extent it was Stalinism or to what extent it really was Leninism. And if there was some kind of counterfactual and Trotsky had taken over rather than Stalin, would the Gulag have still been in place?

B (68:06)

That's very funny. That was the essay question I had on my. When I took a course in Soviet history as an undergraduate. The essay question.

A (68:14)

Not at lse.

B (68:16)

Not at lse. No. The final question was a perfectly reasonable question. Was Stalinism a development of Leninism or was it a distortion of Leninism? You have one hour to answer this question. That was so I. So in 30 seconds, you know, yes, Stalin was different from Lenin. Yes, many of the elements. But at the same time, most of the elements of what we would consider Stalinism, many of them were put in place immediately after the revolution. The camps were created right at the beginning. Red terror was part of the system from the beginning. The secret police were created from the beginning. A system of centralized mass propaganda was there at the beginning. The other thing that is clear in the very Beginning, from early 20s onward, is the very peculiar Russian obsession with what we now call civil society. So independent associations and groups and clubs and youth organizations and private institutions, not just economic institutions, but schools were attacked and dismantled under Lenin. And from the beginning, and this becomes a kind of keystone. It's a piece of Sovietization that we tended to ignore, forget about later on, because it wasn't a spectacular as nationalizing industry. But it's something that Lenin does right away and it's also something that the Red army and the NKVD do when they get to eastern Europe in 1945. It's one of the first things that they do. So they must have considered it very important. All these kind of basic building blocks are there from the beginning, although Stalin added his own elements and certainly the mass system of camps that the idea that the camps were for millions of people and not just for tens of thousands of people, that's Stalinist rather than Leninist.

A (70:08)

Now this lecture series is going to continue in the Lent term. We will then move closer to issues that deal with contemporary Russia and contemporary Eastern Europe. We also have a number of other lectures on LSE and in LSE ideas that deal with topics connected up to Russia. For instance, on Tuesday 5th February, over in the Hong Kong Theater, we have I still call him, our very own Professor Dominic Levin, though he's now moved on to Cambridge for a little while. Still very much our very own talking about Russia and the First World War. Time to think again, question mark. Chaired by Professor Jenna Tatlip. So I would strongly recommend that one and it was a great pleasure to listen to you tonight. Thank you very much for your lecture. We are going to continue. This is just a temporary break before we move on to other matters in lento. Thank you very much.

B (71:03)

Thank you very much.