The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin

> Throughout history, human beings have periodically slaughtered people of other countries, races, and religions. But self-inflicted mass murder is far more rare. How could a country do this to itself? Our awe also comes from the scale. In the late 1930s, according to figures cited today by Russian government officials, more than one out of every eight men, women, and children in the Soviet Union was arrested—the great majority of whom were shot, or died in prison.

> The most obvious one, of course, is the old Russian tradition of absolute power at the top and passive obedience at the bottom. Until Peter the Great made a law against it, citizens of the capital would lie down in the street when the Tsar's carriage passed. You could show more compile an encyclopedia of such features of autocracy, but the most important one was that until the middle of the last century, nearly half the Russian population were serfs. For almost all the Soviet period, historians treated serfdom merely as one more evil of the old order. Today, however, writers are much more likely to talk about it as the source of a deep passivity that allowed dictatorship to flourish long after serfdom itself had ended.

> Another important ingredient of totalitarian culture in Russia is the country's long love affair with creeds that promise a millenarian deliverance from all suffering. You can easily trace this strand from the schismatics of the medieval Russian Orthodox Church through some of Dostoevsky's characters to the rigid arrogance of the early Bolsheviks.

> the insistent pressure for everyone to join in the scapegoating. It was never enough for the NKVD merely to brand men and women "enemies of the people" and shoot them. The director of any school, factory, or office had to countersign the papers ordering an employee's arrest. And when the victims were prominent, millions of people joined in condemning them by signing group telegrams or open letters, or by voting for unanimous resolutions at compulsory meetings at their workplaces.

> "We must execute not only the guilty," said Nikolai Krylenko, Lenin's Commissar of Justice. "Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."

> "I'd like to tell you something about perestroika,"added Major Kirillin earnestly. "In the West, they count its days from 1985 [when Gorbachev took over]. But we Chekisti count it from 1982, from when Andropov came to power. When the government was made up of seventy-five-year-olds, they didn't realize what the real situation in the country was. The apparatus that surrounded them met their needs, and they played their game. But Yuri Vladimirovich [Andropov], having spent fifteen years in this organization, knew the situation in the country from A to Z." Echoing the assessment made by many others, he added, "Without Andropov there would have been no Gorbachev."

> Rehabilitations in the 1950s proceeded very slowly, one case at a time. Someone once asked Anastas Mikoyan, an adroit survivor who served in the Politburo both under Stalin and long after, why this was so. Couldn't all these myriad "enemies of the people" simply be declared innocent all at once? "No they can't," he replied. "If they were, it would be clear that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters." He paused, then added, "Which, in point of fact, we were." The fiction that the millions of Great Purge arrests were a string of individual mistakes required each case to be laboriously proven a miscarriage of justice

> "In the documents there were orders with exact numbers given. You would be ordered to arrest and shoot, say, ten thousand people. But you could arrest twenty, thirty, forty thousand. The more 'enemies of the people' you arrested, the higher your score. As a result of such orders, the Tomsk NKVD challenged Novokuznetsk to a socialist competition. The cities were the same size. Who could arrest more people? It turned out that Tomsk arrested and executed more people than Novokuznetsk." The Tomsk authorities did indeed win the contest hands down; by some estimates, the NKVD shot roughly one out of every six residents of the city show less

When I reviewed Mr. Hochschild's ealier book King Leopold's Ghost I found it wonderfully researched and written, and I couldn't put it down, nor could I forget it. I believe he has done it again. There are many reviewers here who have done a terrific job of describing this book in detail.However,what I find fascinating about Mr. Hochschild's writing is his ability to, in the main, allow the reader to make his own judgments about these horrifying subjects. I appreciate that opportunity- too many writers bludgeon us with their own judgments and moralizing.

It is interesting to read a book that accounts the events of the past through the prospectives of the people that lived them. You begin to ponder on your prospectives influence of how you view these events and how only through generations will the events be lost. We try to remember through the teaching of history but the cultural impact of historical events are lost as new generations grow old. People remember and are influenced to view the events by how they were impacted. The best line from the book reflects on Stalinism as a cancer that swept across the land.

This book opened my eyes to the Soviet Union. Thought-provoking. Knowledgable. Reads like a novel. A truly great book.

Excellent. Highly readable and compelling.

Engaging, astounding, and heartbreaking; excerpts at: http://uvula-fr-b4.livejournal.com/75387.html