By Stephen F. Cohen
"How the number of victims grew so large is horrifying to consider but not hard to explain." Pg 3
"Headed by two of Stalin's political creatures - a tiny, bi-sexual, drug-addicted fanatic, Nikolai Yezhov, and then by a kind of personification of evil, Lavrenti Beria- the NKVD arrested, interrogated, shot, transported, and guarded the victims." Pg 3
"But it was the conspiratorial theory behind the terror, formulated by Stalin and promoted into a national mania, which systematically multiplied the number of victims. According to Stalinist ideology, the country was full of covert enemies posing as loyal citizens - assassins, saboteurs, and traitors - who were conspiring to destroy the Soviet system and betray the nation to foreign powers." Pg 4
"interviewing victims for this book about the few million people who somehow survived Stalin's torture prisons and labor camps I was constantly reminded not to forget the many more millions who did not return. Nor should my readers." Pg 6
"For ....., the announcement of Stalin's death 'was the first time I felt happy' because 'he died and I still had not.'" Pg 26
"Who had survived and why? Many attributed it to 'pure chance' or a 'miracle,' but there were also specific reasons. Some people endured because of strong bodies and unrelenting wills, the good fortune of less arduous work, or early release into exile. Others did so by becoming informers, providing sexual favors, or collaborating in different ways with camp authorities. Returnees I knew usually did not want to discuss the issue or did so without recriminations, but several accused other survivors of perfidious behavior. Unfairly, I thought, accusations were often directed at women." Pg 27
"The fate of children who had been 'careless in choosing their parents,' another bitter remark attributed to Gumilyov, was especially tragic. As a result of the terror, orphaned children and their 'destroyed childhoods' - a few even killed themselves - became a 'commonplace story.' Early in Stalin's mass repressions, he issued a particularly cynical declaration: 'The son is not responsible for the father.' In reality, the NKVD had orders 'to take' most of the children as well. Older ones, like those I knew and mentioned earlier, were usually sent to the Gulag, but so were many young ones. According to one source, 4 to 5 million children passed through special NKVD-run or Gulag facilities over the years, though not all of them orphaned by the terror." Pg 28- 29
" Krushchev's historic assault on Stalin's still cult-like reputation at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, before more than 1500 delegates, was the turning point. The new leader did not tell the full truth about the terror, or even mention the Gulag, but by accusing the dead tyrant of 'mass repression' over many years, Krushchev tacitly exonerated millions of falsely condemned victims. Viewed in retrospect, his courageous, frequently explicit revelations before a still largely Stalinist assembly of the Communist Party elite made possible, albeit twenty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev's more far-reaching anti-Stalinism. Certainly that is the belief of the many Russians who even today blame Khrushchev for having mortally undermined the Soviet system." Pg. 37
"Those returning directly from the camps, without a term in the harsh but relatively recuperative conditions of exile, had the appearance of 'shattered people.' One described himself as merely 'bones in my body and skin stretched over them.' Seeing themselves for the first time in a train mirror, their 'faces eaten away by the cold of Siberia and foul air of overcrowded camp barracks,' was often a shock." Pg 39
"But while Sozhenitsyn espoused the possiblity of personal and moral redeption in the Gulag experience, Shalamov insited there was only dehumanization and death." Pg 65
"To conceal the mass executions, Stalinist 'justice' contrived a false sentence, 'ten years without the right of correspondence.' In reality, it meant the victim had been shot." Pg 68
"One social group did have reason to be fearful. Millions of people had been implicated in some way in Stalin's nearly twenty-five-year terror, from party and state apparatchiki who implemented his orders and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of NKVD personnel who arrested, tortured, executed, and guarded victims to countless petty informers and eager slanderers spawned by the blood-ridden plague. Millions of other citizens had been implicated indirectly, inheriting the positions, possessions and even wives and children of the vanished. Two generations had built lives and careers on the terror's consequences, which killed but also 'corrupted the living.'" Pg.80
"But by 1956, as the return from the Gulag grew into a mass exodus, a profound antagonism was unfolding between two Soviet communities - the victims of terror and their victimizers." Pg 80
"One returnee dropped dead upon coming face-to-face with the man who had tortured him, while another saw 'fear of death' in the eyes of his NKVD interrogator." Pg 84
"By some reckonings, the mass terror had been possible only due to mass guilt. An estimated five percent of the nation had been secret informers and at least one million people had been Gulag camp employees, including economic managers and bookkeepers." Pg 101
"Readers instinctively saw their own recent experiences in depictions of the Hitler cult, Gestapo, Nazi concentration camps, and widespread German complicity. When the powerful American film Judgement at Nuremberg was shown in Moscow in 1963, reactions were even more pointed. In light of that analogy, graphic accounts of Stalin's terror, and mounting calls for justice, 'fears of being made to answer for their crimes' understandably spread through Soviet officialdom." Pg 108
"In November, in a televised speech to the nation, Gorbachev personally rehabilitated the names of both Bukharin and Krushchev." Pg 143
Books referenced in this work:
Eugenia Ginzburg - Journey Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind
Lev Kopelev (Red army officer and loyal Stalinist at the time - accounts of his journey from Stalinist to democratic humanist) - The Education of a True Believer and Ease My Sorrows
Pavel Negretov - All Roads Lead to Vorkuta
Gulag returnees in Western and Russian fiction:
Vasily Grossman - Everything Flows, Life and Fate
Vasily Aksyonov - The Burn
Andrei Bitov - Pushkin House
Martin Amis - House of Meetings
Reality TV show in Russia called Wait for Me about the reuniting of family members torn apart by the Gulags.
http://www.economist.com/node/9982824
Yevfrosiniya Kersnovskaya drew illustrations of almost every episode in her voluminous memoirs
26.5 million dead in the war against Germany
Author's documentary about Anna Larina:
http://filmakers.com/index.php?a=filmDetail&filmID=1025
Book 66
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