The Gulag: what we know now and why it matters

good evening my name is on Wes table from LLC ideas I'm going to be chairing the lecture by Anne Applebaum the LSE ideas a former professor of history and international affairs tonight and welcome to to all of you and opposed now after I introduced her a few weeks ago need no further introduction but it is important I think to mention that the topic that and will be dealing with for her presentation today if you love what we know now and why it matters when it comes out of one of her several successful books a book on the gulag from the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 it's probably become the most read book of all times with regard to notice the soviet penal system and detector there are also people who try to think about memorization about how to deal or in terms of history and what we know today with these terrible tragedies that peoples of the Soviet Union went through during the Soviet era it's particularly pertinent that this lecture is taking place now because some of you know it's exactly 50 years since the publication in in the Soviet Union for such an instance one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and that is probably the starting point at least for many writes in the terms of their understanding tends to deal with the tragedies of the gulag and for the installing this area in general I'm just back from the linen I came back this morning and I'm not say that it has struck me when you compare the mineralization of the victims for motive in in Germany with the complete lack of mineralization of any significant amount in the corner Soviet Union to the victims of the gulag and the victims of the Soviet system in general it's something that always possibly run on in Russia and elsewhere that there are absolutely no memorials that people can seek out and is no official memorial certificate leader in terms of this immense tragedy that everyone who live in the Soviet Union was searched for during that period and therefore it is particularly important that people who take an interest in Russian and in Soviet history forcing on this particular subject and try to deal with it in text so we are very grateful to have an affable India as the little more professor in analogy ideas and to hear her presentation I could also mention the existence within Elysee ideas for for Russia program that we're trying to extract a number of people who are here tonight have a link to that program and one of the things that we are trying to do is to invite younger Russian solos particularly those dealing with ratnam or early Russian history here to Elysee ideas to spend some time here we've had I think about 12 young Russian scholars who have been here so far and this is Tim a tremendous success something that we have loved writing programmatically benefiting from this work and perhaps it was one thing that should come out of historical investigations both Russian and Soviet history it is the need to cooperate between people who work on from Soviet history outside of Russia and those who now are starting to work on it particularly younger people resulting if you work on it inside Russia and it's a great title to have you here it's wonderful to have you on board as the diploma would have certainly very much looking forward to lecture on the gulag what we know now and why Anna 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 non entirely successful student here thirty years ago I did do a master's degree and I did get the degree but it's it's very nice to be here and to set the historical context and 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 you tonight on 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's fat lana 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 Baria 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 fear 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 and the and memory of the system and as there is but the economic and the moral legacy of the camp's continued to distort Russian society today and 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 camp's not really since the time the 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 all be based all of his writing on letters and the memoirs of other prisoners he did it now appears understand the basic outline of the gulags history from its earliest incarnation on the soul against the islands in the white sea through its spread across the far north and then around the country approving in fact that prisoners gossip as it was sometimes dismissed was not as inaccurate as as many people thought in the years though that I spent researching my book I conclude that archives can make a difference to how we understand Soviet history there are a lot of stories now that archives closing but just to be clear I was able in the 90s to work in archives in Moscow and Corellia and I had access to documents from archives in saint-petersburg perm or Kuta Colima and Novosibirsk at one point I was handed a part of the archive of a small camp kind of lagged called it could drove his 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 sir-sir 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 lag Punk's 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 executions nevertheless they were at times very lethal nearly a quarter of the glogs prisoners died during the war years that they were also very fluid that 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 were 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 ways of the rest 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 six or seven 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 in Stalin's Soviet Union could have run as high as 25 million or about 15 percent 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 the pickaxe there were also camps in central Moscow where prisoners build apartment blocks or designed airplanes they were camps in Crest New York where prisoners a 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 you know from a cube instea woods 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 and as a kind of ad-hoc emergency measure to contain the enemies of people and prevent counter-revolution we also have known that he and his sex successors expanded them to the sole of Biscay islands in the early 1920s but the archives shed a good deal of light on why stalin 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 percent annual increase in the soviet union's industrial output and to collectivise agriculture this plan is 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 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 the sofa 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 camp's this solution made a lot of sense and so here's how Alexi logging off who's the former deputy commander of the neural scamp's north of the Arctic Circle it justified the use of prisoner labor in it 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 the chimney and they survive prisoners in gulag documents are very often referred to as continent II contingents you know 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 now none of this is to say that the camps in addition to their economic function we're not also intended to terrorize and subjugate the population certainly it's true that prison and camp regimes which were dictated in very minut 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 and 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 Volga lag a railroad construction camp in Tartarus town and 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'd 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 prison is a neural lag in northern Siberia and Norilsk had no warm boots that the number of prisoners unfit for hard labor in Corellia 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 the these reports reminded me very much of the inspectors of Gogol's era you know the forms were observed the reports were filed the effects on actual human beings were ignored you know there would be a 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 is in control of the camps you know that and this is 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 it become mechanized now prompt larp all kinds of problems were solved just by calling for more workers with so many famously ports 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 where kuja'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 place where temperatures rarely drop to minus 30 or 9 is minus 40 in the winter and where the Sun does not shine for six months of a year where in the summertime the flies and 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 for kudos 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 Hokuto 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 at a year was astronaut far more than as it turned out in 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 to week or four weeks 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 now the truth of course is that Vorkuta was and still is completely unnecessary with why build kindergartens and university lecture halls in the tundra you know why build a puppet theater in 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 you know I asked them for example of genja who's 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 one solid structure complete with a Colin Stalinist portico and a red star on the pediment and although Jenna's polish parents have been deported to Vorkuta in the 1940s although she knows and willingly recounts the city's history Jenya never lets been 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 been built at all but if genja 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 which I would like to ask why the Gulag about which historians soviet historians and russian historians and 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 victims already mentioned in the minute ago yes there are a few scattered memorials there are places as in Vorkuta there is a prisoner cemetery in Colima 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 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 Gorbachev's rain during blasts smells and is 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 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 the perpetrators of torture or mass murder even those who were identifiable at the time there were no truth Commission's either of a 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 so and the result predictably is that half a century after the end of World War two the Germans still conduct regular public debates about victim's 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 a 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 now I should say and that those of you who know Russia will notice that some level the reasons for this are not hard to fathom Stalinist era was really a long time ago and a great deal has happened since it ended a 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 camp's our state post communist Russia the memory the camps is also confused in Russia by the presence of so many other atrocities the 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 question of pride like genja and many experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a personal blow you know perhaps the old system was bad they now feel that at least we were powerful and now that we aren't powerful we don't want to hear that it's bad was that 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 checklist 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 war World Wars 1 or 2 under his watch Soviet flags have returned to anniversary parades and the Soviet national anthem has been revived I'll be it 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 you know that's 1989 was not a moment of liberation but the beginning of economic collapse the hardships and the deprivation of the 1990s were not the result of decades of communist neglect or widespread thievery but of western-style capitalism and democracy you know 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 disgust 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 you know this it helps to explain for example why so many Russians are not bothered by certain kinds of censorship or by the the FSB the new incarnation of cable you change KGB's ability to open mail tap telephones or enter private residences without a court order I think there's a deeper significance to 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 it's not politically irrelevant you know after 1991 the secret police kept their apartments their dodges and their large pensions their victims remained for a marginal and still are and to most Russians it now seems is if the more you collaborated in the past the wiser you were you know by analogy the more you cheat in line the present the wiser you are now personally what bothers me the most about Russia's lack of interest past is the way it is 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 schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better they would find something 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 I many such places have changed surprisingly little some years ago I visited a criminal prison in our hangul sck 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 I was walking into the past you know into one of you have Ganga Ginsburg's descriptions of her Stalinist era prisons in one in one cell I met a sobbing fifteen year old girl who've been accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of ten dollars 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 borders are rude because they're badly paid the ventilation is bad because building is old and needs repairs electricity is expensive so we have to keep the carters dark trials are delayed because there aren't enough judges now I wasn't convinced you know money is a problem but it's not the whole explanation now if Russia's prisons still look like a scene from a blog 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 judges jailers or businessmen yeah but then very few people in contemporary Russia feel the pass 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 border lands of the Soviet Union and although of course largely positive it contained the following line quote here he meaning here meaning Ukraine and Belorussia here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians and 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 and many people think so indeed and I've just added the 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 I knew 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 Yara's else key or even a Brezhnev although of course both were responsible for a great deal of destruction besides archives were closed the 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 two you know 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 a Western socialist 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 apart not all but a part of the Western Left struggled to explain and sometimes excused the camps and the terror which created them precisely because they wanted to make use of some aspect and even if even distantly of the Soviet experiment at home now if 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 at the then American vice president Henry Wallace who was fortunately next replaced by by Truman actually went to Colima 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 quotes Soviet Asia reminded him of the Wild West quote 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 the boss of Colima later wrote for Baria head of security services Wallace did ask to see prisoners but he was kept away he was not alone of course and refusing to see the truth and you can hardly blame him Roosevelt and Churchill had their photographs taken with Stalin - all of that contributed to our firm conviction that the Second World War was a holy just war 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 tears 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 well there was still American academics who went on describing the advantages of East German healthcare or polish peace initiatives you know 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 then 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 two now belongs to a previous generation the Cold War is over too and the alliances and the international fault lines produced have shifted for good the West are left in 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 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 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 you know or was there something more important happening you know I'm not sure we still remember what it was 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 and I could go on you know every single one of these vents had different historical and philosophical origins and they arose in circumstances that will never be repeated but our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow man has been and will be repeated again and again our transformation of our neighbors into enemies our reinvention of our victims as low or lesser evil beings were the only of incarceration or its boljan or death the more we understand about how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens into objects the more we know the specific circumstances that which led to each episode of mass murder the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature you know I wrote my book about the gulag knot so that it will never happen again as the cliche has it but because it will happen again we need to know why you know each story each memoir and each document is a piece of the puzzle without them we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are thank you very much thank you very much and that was that was excellent you're on the lining of the historian screen at the end was very moving um I wanted to start by asking you a question that was maybe somewhat more precise character but it goes to the heart of one of your arguments let us to do with the economic effect of the gulag system in the Soviet Union where you've said that one way everything happens when you really get to several places this could be approached one way of looking at it was that it actually held Soviet economic development back to the south mixer in terms of the development presumably than a water sectors of the economy but is it quite possible to think about it in those terms it wasn't a coolant system in a way in a vehicle I don't buy an inn for the Soviet system I mean where it was very difficult to imagine that the Soviet economy I think the way developed during the Stalinist era could have existed at all without a system of in-home Lisa delivered in extensive more extensive me I mean there are two answers to that question and 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 I think in that too that part of your question yes you're right it's hard to imagine it may be the better expression to use not that it held the Soviet system back than helm Russia back and it held crane back and then the you know the development of this part of the world was not so much not so much underdeveloped as miss developed 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 is far too much development in the very expensive far north where it costs far more to cities for this is part of a course of a bigger mentality which is so you know bizarrely given how obsessed they were with economics Soviet planners we're 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 what we need is coal let's have lots of miners living up there let's build a lot of buildings for them and but there was never any never any way of estimating what what costs what and what what's the real expense involved in building the city and so the 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 it the Politburo the Soviet leadership itself understood this at the end I mean you know not Stalin but you know Baria and and people around you were very clear that the gulag was it was it was an economic problem ironically of course it started as a you know the point of it first on Stalin's use of it was for economic reasons it if you want to believe that spreading the gulag he'd read a lot of Peters grade and he thought well if you can we could just you know create slave labor all over the place like he did then we'll then we'll misread then you know then that will never do story because I was just saying about seven historians of Imperial Russia in the room I don't want to offend them but but you know but he thought well yes that this will increase our re cannot purchase actually by the by the end of the 30s it was clear that this was a problem and by the early 50s berry of 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 physicists to dig coal it was an immense waste of human resources and even they knew it that was that was part of the original decision to begin mantling it in the inefficient the whole system was inefficient at the Gulag was kind of the most inefficient part of the inefficient system I mean in India no horse it appealed to sell and not only for economic reasons but in of course it had other another purpose to which is probably the real reason why it wasn't dismantled because it served another function which was was a part of the system of tariffs what a pleasure yes at the end over there I am thanks a lot that I found out today I found this quite remarkable that the day in the life of the event is not a I think was published in what 50 years ago 62 but then I haven't read it but I have read vastly Grossman's wonderful life and fate and Grossman died in 64 and I think he and I'm 9 correct he and sludgy knits and we're writing there to 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 well I think it's literally 1962 but then loginid sins book is is published wise I mean how does that work why did the Soviet system now slows units and stuff to be published and that's recent yeah there is there's a very clear reason for it it was the 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 as part of it sort of it was published because Khrushchev was fighting against a group of people who roughly one would call Stalinist so became the bridge device imagine I want to go into boring detail but it was a it was a political gesture and actually although it was published and then it was unbelievably popular and read everywhere it caused immense comment and debate it was actually bad reviews of it began to appear soon after

Channel: LSE

Views: 32,662

Rating: 4.6346602 out of 5

Keywords: University, College, Public, Lecture, Event, podcast, Seminar, Talk, Speech

Id: XOHNjJtemCg

Length: 45min 55sec (2755 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2012