The Wrath of Kan: A Soviet-Born Anthropologist on Stalin’s Gulag

half a century ago alexander solzhenitsyn published the gulag archipelago bringing the world's attention to the soviet union's internment camps now that the camps are gone now that the soviet union is gone how bad was the gulag really professor sergey khan of dartmouth college addresses that question uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson born in the soviet union just a few months after the death of stalin sergey khan came to the united states in 1974 at the age of 21. he received his undergraduate degree from boston university and his doctorate in anthropology from the university of chicago noted for his field work with the tlingit people did i pronounce that correctly yes got it the plinget people of alaska dr khan is a member of the faculty here at dartmouth college where we're shooting today where he teaches courses on the native peoples of alaska on the jewish diaspora and on russia next year the 50th anniversary of the publication of the gulag archipelago dr khan will teach a course titled red terror the history and culture of the stalin labor camps dr khan has been kind enough to give me an advanced copy of his syllabus so what you're about to witness is a seminar between a masterful professor and a very slow student sergey khan welcome thank you it's a pleasure to be here all right i'm quoting from bits and pieces of the works that you cite in your syllabus so this is i've done my reading and i'm i'm coming to office hours with you sir okay all right well i hope you passed the test all right this is from gulag one of the basic books that you place in your syllabus by anne applebaum the word gulag is an acronym for the russian for main camp administration but over time the word gulag also has come to signify the system of soviet slave labor itself a vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the soviet union from 1929 when the gulag began its major expansion until 1953 when stalin died some 18 million people passed through the system another six million were sent into exile deported to the kazakh deserts or the siberian forests and they too were forced laborers why does it still matter it matters first of all because you know it's a cliche but those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it we we need to know what happened it's besides the nazi holocaust of the jews and some other groups of people it's the worst crime of the 20th century horrendous destruction of human life and yet as i point out in the syllabus my feeling is that while the gulag certain aspects of the gulag is addressed in courses in russian literature russian history we don't have a stand-alone course i couldn't find one yet we've had over my 30-some years at dartmouth teaching here we've had a dozen courses on the nazi holocaust there is a kind of almost a preoccupation and for good reasons we don't want to forget that holocaust with with that event but um there seems to be less interest in in the stalin's crimes so that's the first answer the second answer is uh i did not anticipate when i developed the course last summer that putin was going to invade ukraine i see your ukraine your flag i'm a big supporter of ukrainian people my wife was born in ukraine we're both jewish but we have roots there and ties i'm from moscow but nonetheless not only has this war presented to us a very dark picture of russian government and particularly its leader there's also and there's tremendous violence and we can talk about it briefly maybe but there are aspects of this war that strongly remind me of the nazi war against the allies in world war ii but there's also as i'm sure you know uh this war has been accompanied preceded by gradual um elimination of those few freedoms that russia still enjoyed under mr putin and then of course with the declaration of war the country has gone completely radical as far as persecution of war opponents of the war we haven't seen yet any sentences based on this new law but it's on the books by simply calling this a war rather than a special operation you could go to jail for 15 years this is unprecedented so i would argue and i don't think i'm alone that the country which in 1991 rejected communism and we were all celebrating it which tore down the statue of zorzinski the head of the the founder of the kgb we were ecstatic when we saw that on tv the country has gone almost completely full circle and in some ways there are certain things that is government doing today that are even more vicious than late soviet we'll we'll come back to but that what i'm saying is um there's a destalinization going on and i just said one more thing i wanted to say when when you say that the gulag is done in fact there are new glugs or some old golox that are still running in russia yeah the number of prisoners is smaller much smaller than under stalin or even brezhnev but people have been sent to the camps for political reasons you know yeah he's there for on trumped up charges so in some ways it's still going on yeah not of course on that massive scale but but it's there all right sergey let's go i want to come back to contemporary russia and what it means for us but let's just establish what the gulag was again from anne applebaum's book gulag lenin reckon the bolshevik revolution takes place in 1917 london stage is a coup in effect and takes power london reckoned that the creation of the soviet state would give rise to a new kind of criminal the class enemy from the earliest days in other words people were sentenced not for what they had done but for who they were by 1921 there were already 84 camps in 43 provinces close quote the gulag did not arise because communism somehow went wrong it was there from the very beginning is that correct absolutely vladimir lenin dies in 24 by 1929 joseph stalin his successor has consolidated power he becomes dictator and he puts the gulag prisoners to work and you have a note in your syllabus about the importance of the white sea canal i've looked this up it's 140 miles construction begins in 1931 the canal opens in 1933 it connects the white sea in the arctic ocean with with the baltic labor force of 125 000 prisoners and at least 25 000 died during the project what does stalin think he's doing what do ordinary russians hear about this how can this happen i think that they're sort of two two sides to this story or to my answer i think initially and you're absolutely right the arrests and persecution of people after the bolshevik coup centered on not so much on what they did against the government although there were people who fought the government white army officers there's a civil war yeah but um selecting the enemies by social economic or sometimes even ethnic categories so uh even if a person himself or herself didn't do anything illegal or anti-soviet the fact that they were from the family of merchants or nobility they were already a suspect and so that made it possible to to send to be sent there however in the early years of uh gulag particularly salaf ki which i mentioned in my syllabus and zolofke is the name of yeah it's actually an old russian orthodox monastery in northern russia it's a beautiful place but they since they shut down the monastery they already had a building or actually a large compound with a wall and they use that to house prisoners and the initial idea was that criminals anti-soviet elements as they were called would be rehabilitated and in fact they were called um labor dash correctional camps i mean we use it at correctional institutions as well in in the west and so there were some elements of trying to rehabilitate them salaf compared to later camps did have some venues for cultural activities and it published its own newspaper anyway the idea was that there was also a lot of cruelty wasn't it by by rehabilitation are we talking about a re-education re-education change in ideology rejection of previous views and the idea was at least for propaganda purposes and i think initially even for some practical purposes that these people could be redeemed now solovky also you know they had their own theater but they also had horrible uh places for torturing people and i mean they already had uh i mean just give you one example um if you were a difficult inmate and they just couldn't deal with you um they could take you to the forest tied you to a tree naked and then have the mosquitoes which are in abundance this is above the arctic circle close to it and close but awful or they would put women stripped naked and and force them to sit on on an ant hill and the ant would crawl into their bodies you can imagine how and it was awful but there was still this element that maybe some of these people could be redeemed and um when delegations of soviet writers come they're present to the camp they're presented with this potunkin village as we call them where they have theater they're making a movie they're athletic competitions and these either naive or simply people who are writing what they're told to write but they write these descriptions of highly enthusiastic accounts of this wonderful camp including maxim gorky yes bellamore canal as well um and they make a point that unlike bourgeois capitalist prisons and camps ours are different because we will rehabilitate people but i think eventually they kind of dropped the rehabilitation part or at least lowered the importance of that whereas they realized that they have free labor the the this canal it's a huge as you said there's 140 miles yeah they actually um had as far as my reading of the story of the canal they didn't have a lot of machinery a lot of the digging of the earth was done just by bare hands and so these poor people had to work under incredibly difficult conditions and the irony of course is that eventually canal turned out to be too shallow so today very few ships can go through it but at the time it was hailed as an achievement of the soviet uh system it wasn't just stalin there were some very clever administrators of these camps some of them former inmates who were promoted because they were so smart and i we're good with numbers and so forth or organizers they figured out that you can get a lot of things done you can mine gold you can mine uranium which of course is a dangerous contagious um you can mine coal you can build roads the gulag system at its height which i think would be 1940s uh was a major part of soviet economy and if you take siberia and the north probably the major part of the economy to continue here with the so there are other reasons that why they existed i think besides free labor like terrorizing the population well that's so again to go back to your syllabus you've got the collectivization you've got at the heart of stalin's revolution is a new program of hysterically rapid industrialization and also collectivization where millions of peasants are forced to give up their land holdings and forced onto collective farms and a lot of people resist both of these off they go into the gulag we get the great purge or the great terror in the 30s where stalin is purging the party the west is aware of show trials but as these show trials which involve a small number of prominent people take place there are huge numbers of people being purged and a lot of them end up in the gulag here's a question during the 1930s when this is taking place stalin has now consolidated power the agricultural collectivization is accompanied by a famine there's some debate about the extent to which the famine is engineered or the extent to which the government simply permits it to happen but one way or the other the government is clearly complicit and then we have western journalists including walter durante of the new york times sydney of beatrice webb in england the socialist great socialist figures and they write about the soviet union as this gleaming new future on the one hand then we have a few figures george orwell as far as i'm aware never visits the soviet union but he understands somehow he understands what's going on he met the soviets in spain during the civil war yes of course he encountered the communists in spain and malcolm muggeridge british journalist visits moscow and writes the truth how how how is it that westerners have these double this kind of double perception and one is a total fantasy or maybe not a total fantasy there is industrialization there is they do dig a canal these they do use this forced labor to dig mines there is some kind of economic output but it's forced labor it's inhuman and a very small number of people see it and a very large number of people don't see it refuse to see it how do you account for these dub this double perception complicated question um based on what i've read or stories i've heard um it's probably a combination of things for some westerners particularly of the more liberal left persuasion i think they wanted to believe of course they saw what they wanted to see the west was going through the depression and there were problems economic social and and others and so so with russia for many of these people was um a kind of beacon of light and justice and an alternative model there was some fascination with this socialist project um so that's which to a certain extent is sort of honest understandable you can understand the impulse yeah but i also think that um some were gullible um they i think durante uh spent most his time in moscow with a lot of partying and and you know having a good time drinking and i don't know he i don't know if he made an effort to see the reporting and and the earlier version of the kgb the ncaa did they probably made it difficult to travel but as you point out correctly a few brave souls and smart people did see the the deception the the truth behind the um the facade of that enthusiasm so i think combination of wanting to believe believing being cynical being lazy and not doing the homework or being afraid that if i really do investigative journalism i could get in trouble and of course the media itself for example the two leading journals for for sort of american intellectuals the nation and the new republic they were pro-soviet they eventually began to criticize the trials but they they were pretty soft on on stalin and what i've read they would say things like yeah maybe the the big show trials are too much maybe some of it is fabricated but there must be something wrong with it it can't be that it's all invented that's just not impos that's not possible so you know if your employer and i and probably new york times as well was at least mildly pro-soviet um and so when you um your own employer back home wants to to have that kind of reporting you probably comply unless you you're a rebel or a brave person the second world war hitler invades the soviet union on june 22 1941 the very same day the prisoners prisoners convicted of quote betrayal of the motherland are forbidden from leaving the gulag in other words their sentences the very same day moscow decides the sentences become indefinite nobody's getting out an apple bomb again in gulag the result of these extended sentences coupled with massive food shortages were dramatic close quote in 1942 one in four prisoners in the gulag died 24 of a population of about 2 million died in one year the following year 1943 another one in five dies it's just a catastrophe death wards scattered across the country all right after the russians invaded ukraine one of president zielinski's first moves in ukraine which he made reluctantly but he gave a speech saying i we have no choice was to open the prisons because whatever these criminals had done he trusted that more rather than fewer we're going to fight for the country yes why didn't stalin do the same to the coulomb now i must say eventually some prisoners were allowed to enlist first of all you know you probably know that in the late 30s during this the height of silence trials and the mass terror the entire top layer of the soviet red army marshall generals colonel wiped out arrested accused of spying many of them killed some survived and were sitting in gulag and so when you know the initial months of world war of german invasion were disaster for the soviets they were running they were losing people and so forth surrendering um some of these top people were released a few we have example including some that eventually became the heroes of world war ii that's a small group and then and i don't know all the details i'm still doing some reading i think there were some opportunities to enlist there was this phenomenon in the soviet army which was called the penalty battalions it's it's a military detachment of people who were former prisoners or people who cannot be fully trusted and they were basically destined to die first you send them to the most dangerous engagements with the enemy they're sort of like the the stormtroopers except they have their arms are not as good um nobody cares if they die there's a famous anecdote after the war where eisenhower is talking to zhukov and they're comparing techniques and eisenhower says how do you handle minefields and zhukov says oh we just merged soldiers straight across them right unthinkable to isis so some gulag prisoners as i understand were enlisted into these battalions right but nonetheless um and it's ironic and it's not logical that the country that was really not doing well for the first year and a half and stretched to the limits as far as its human power its finances right its industry and where citizens were strongly encouraged even pressured to donate gold and money to the war effort every single thing you had you could donate or should donate and yet the government was spending a lot of their resources on keeping these people locked up locked and i want to go back to something i said when we say that gulag was favored by the regime because of free labor but it's debated and the literature i've read is divided on this but while you're getting free labor you're also first of all you're treating these inmates very poorly so they're hungry they're barely moving they're not your robust builders of you know new factories and stuff so you're not getting a lot of bang for your buck if you wish and secondly there's some new work that i find really fascinating that claims that in fact uh while the soviet gulag camps were not the equivalent of hitler's death camps a lot of deaths did occur physicians some physicians were complicit because they were not supposed to write in the death certificate that the person died of starvation or abuse they invented some diseases also there was a method that one of american historians points out that i just learned about where prisoners who were really really sick malnourished very close to dying they were released so to keep them off the books yeah that way the numbers for people who died were much lower than the reality so so you're describing a system that is mad yeah that is insane yes that even if you you stalin you say all right he was brutal but at least he built canals right at least but actually it doesn't even make economic sense yeah i'm not saying they didn't contribute to the crew they built some new cities in siberia and roads and stuff but i think if these were well-paid free volunteer laborers they would have done much better all right the apex which takes place again i'm quoting anne applebaum you have a number of sources for some reason i she's very good she's very good there's no doubt contrary to popular assumption the gulag did not cease growing in the 1930s but rather continued to expand throughout the second world war and the 1940s reaching its apex in the early 1950s reaching its apex in the early 1950s what do we know about the early 1950s stalin has consolidated power totally he's crushed all his enemies at home killed a lot of them in the purges with the united states and the united kingdom he's crushed hitler he is unchallenged in the soviet union and he still keeps throwing people into the gulag what i guess the question here is siri is are we studying something we would abhor but that's rational that's an instrument of control or do we see in stalin in the final few years of his life someone who has really simply gone mad i think a little bit of both first of all i think once the system is in place it's like a machine it's running and you have to feed it fuel in this case you have to provide people because you have a a giant investment to protect yeah you have it's an archipelago as solution instance said it's a giant it's a country within a country and um there are hundreds of thousands of people employed to run it guards supervisors soldiers cooks bureaucrats i mean there's so many people that are actually benefiting you know they're getting good they they were fed well they had good warm clothing they had decent salaries particularly as you go up in the hierarchy people at the top i'm sure who are running the gulag were interested in having more bodies brought in so that's part of it it's a self-perpetuating bureaucracy like the department of motor vehicles yes but secondly keep in mind that what happened right before uh the world war ii and after in 1939 hitler's town signed a treaty right yeah hitler occupies poland most of poland stalin occupies um eastern poland which becomes ukraine western ukraine western belarus he occupies the three baltic republics moldova and all the suspect people again those who belong to the social classes that are not kosher if you wish intelligent sam businessman um clergy former military they're from those countries yeah so the high-ranking polls yeah the estonians the lithuanians into the camps with them some go to exile and they live uh there are two systems there's the camp and then there's people living in exile internal exile internal exile in very difficult conditions but they're not in the camp but a lot of these people are sent there then of course you have german prisoners of war we're talking millions of people japanese prisoners of war who very few people know about uh who i think were treated even worse than uh german prisoners of war and then you have resistors there were real resistors such as ukrainian forest brothers and estonian forest brothers who actually fought the kgb um during the war but also after the war they were the ukrainian uh partisan army uh finally was crushed only in the mid 50s so for 10 years the red army and the kgb are hunting for these guys in the mountains of western ukraine so it's an interesting development because it's it's a different kind of population and actually uh what we have in memoir literature is that these especially national polish ukrainian estonian inmates they were better organized they knew that they were there for a reason and they hated the system unlike you know former bolsheviks who ended up in gulag and said why am i here i'm innocent comrade stalin doesn't know about me i'm sure i'm innocent these guys knew why they were there so they're an interesting and they were did that do do we know that they were they able to was their survival rate higher i think they were organized they helped each other i see and then also i mean we think of the 30s or the worst but the 40s and early 50s there were still a lot of people being arrested who were innocent just ordinary or it or if they were guilty there were things like you know after the war there was this sense that we won the war we bid hitler maybe there will be more freedom in our country and you have this really interesting development of youth underground youth organizations often very small but they're kind of true communists they want a country that is really based on land and not on stalin and and these high school kids they gather and they talk about how unjust the soviet system is so stalin had his hands full is what you're saying even when he appears to be at the peak of his power oh and the collaborators the people who collaborated with the nazis okay which often become guards in the camp is that so he uses them yeah because these are from people who they don't really have strong values they they weren't collaborators because they believe in fascism they wanted to survive they wanted to be on the winning side yeah all right the end stalin dies march 5th 1953 a few months later you were born he dies in 1953 and then this is totally shocking the person who takes power first is lavrent lavrenti barry and beria is a very very nasty figure he rises through the secret police is smart but he's a killer and he's the one who very quickly ends most of the big forced labor projects that are then taking place he grants wide amnesties all pregnant women all women with young children all prisoners under the age of 18 all prisoners with sentences of five years or less and forbids the police from using physical force so he he grants a wide amnesty he effectively abolishes torture nikita khrushchev and the rest of the politburo think he's getting uppity they have him arrested barry is eventually executed and nikita khrushchev comes out on top but he doesn't repeal any of barriers reforms the gulag is over not completely over but the number of prisoners drops to the tens of thousands from the couple of from the lowerings what on earth is going on there do we know why beria this very nasty figure is the one who if barrier grants the amnesty and khrushchev in effect ratifies it it looks as though all of stalin's henchmen know that the system is crazy and they can't wait for him to die to end it is that correct is that a fair interpretation is a mysterious character while he was definitely nasty and ambitious um and also you know there are all these stories about him abducting young women on the streets of moscow and raping them and then sending them home but he's also very smart and there seems to be new research and archival work that suggests that he actually wanted to kind of tone down the the viciousness of the regime that i think he he was beginning to see as did khrushchev that the system is is self-destructive that if we don't stop it first of all it will destroy us the the leadership and that it's just not working anymore and maybe even he realized that the cost of um running it um outweighs the results that what they produce so maybe he saw that that it was a kind of a dead end thing and he wanted to so where stalin is beginning to become just crazy where there's a madness in the system berry is at least rational right is that fair yeah a couple of last questions after the war germany undergoes denotification nazis people who had served the nazis up at a certain level are forbidden from participating in public life you can't hold office if you were a nazi of a certain rank or higher right and we know that germany has spent all these decades putting distance between itself and that passed payments to israel in all kinds of ways germany to this day just despises its own nazi past russia never undergoes any kind of decommunization if it had vladimir putin who's a former kgb this is known he was a colonel in the kgb he was a kgb officer he's now running the country poll after poll indicates that stalin is still revered in russia so to what extent i just who am i to write off a whole country but it feels as though unless there's some sort of formal repudiation of this decades-long crime of the gulag against against over 20 million people there's a kind of sickness in russia is that fair i completely agree when we were watching from this country how they were getting rid of soviet symbols they were now russia as opposed to soviet union we were hoping that and then yeltsin briefly actually outlawed the communist party yes and we thought that was a good idea because it was a nasty institution he even organized the trial of the communist party but that kind of petered out and nothing happened and they were very reluctant to admit complicity their attempts to to shame people for example some writers who voted against the other writers and were responsible for the persecution of those writers they were exposed but they said it's not my fault it was dangerous you know i was protecting myself um none of the people worked in the kgb system unless they were you know vicious murderers some of them probably were arrested but the majority either retired quietly or went on to work so yeah the the kind of denatification decommunization that did occur as i understand in the czech republic in the baltics in poland russia never had and in fact in the last decade there's a partial reverse reversal it's kind of complicated that putin authorized the building of a monument to the victims of stalin but at the same time um you know stalin won the war he was a great uh he's a great manager lenin's embalmed corpse he's still right there on red square in a place and and they uh you periodically we get these glimpses of decentralization for example they were celebrating the anniversary of the atomic project or some major scientific project that russian scientists created in in the 50s or 40s most of them were prisoners so there's another interesting a lot of top level physicists were prisoners but barrier was the supervisor of that giant project so like the manhattan project right right and they wanted to to honor him build a statue for him at in that capacity and um i saw letters from children and grandchildren of these great scientists who many of them later became you know nobel prize winners academics and they're begging the government not to do it that it would be a sacrilege but the government does or there are now celebrations in some northern russian cities that were built by gulag inmates there's celebrations of the gulag administration who helped create a particular unforced labor town sergey last question here's you in an interview in the dartmouth review quote i look at the free speech movement in this country in the 60s those people were fighting for the right to say anything they wanted now a significant segment of the left in this country is fighting for restricting those freedoms what really frightens me is when you hear students and some faculty say that they don't want freedom of speech in this country that they don't need it anymore that really frightens me close quote you don't mean to suggest that anything like what took place in the soviet union could happen here uh i don't although there are russian immigrants including some very close to me who think that we're going in that direction i personally have you seen anything in this country where you say ah this reminds me of something i'd rather not political correctness students afraid to speak their mind because they'll be branded you know conservative or right-wing or racist or whatever um a kind of hounding people for you know on campus before they've even been tried in in the court of law presumption of innocence doesn't seem to be present but i i must say i believe in america i love the country i think there's a healthy core that will still carry us through but i think we we are hitting some rough bumps and and it is disappointing it is scary yeah professor sergey khan who next year will be teaching some very fortunate dartmouth students about the gulag thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and filming today on the campus of dartmouth college in hanover new hampshire i'm peter robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 370,687

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Sergei Kan, Soviet Union, Russia, Stalin, The Gulag Archipelago, Labor Camps, Stalin’s Gulag, History

Id: 1QlM7TXkl00

Length: 42min 8sec (2528 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022