Thursday 16 December 2010

A million tragedies


An important new book was published earlier this year. It’s called Drawings from the Gulag, containing an extraordinary and disturbing collection of sketches by one Danzig Baldaev, a former official in the NKVD, Stalin’s security police. I was fully aware of the horror of the Soviet camp system from the work of people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov among others. But these graphic drawings give the sheer savagery of it all a terrible immediacy.

Baldaev himself has an interesting history. The son of a rich Mongolian intellectual, he was born in 1925 in the south-east of the USSR. Like so many others, his father was arrested during the Great Terror of the 1930s, while he and his sister were consigned to an NKVD orphanage, set up specifically for the children of ‘enemies of the people.’ One does not have to imagine too hard to conjure up the treatment children received in places like this.

Later, after leaving the orphanage, Baldaev was ordered to become a guard in one of the NKVD labour camps. To amuse himself he starred to sketch the various tattoos displayed by the criminal fraternities. On learning of this his superiors encouraged him to continue, believing such designs supplied valuable intelligence on the links between inmates and the criminal underworld outside the camp system. Baldaev was therefore given permission to travel from camp to camp, recording tattoos along the way.

Unbeknown to his superiors he was compiling a secret dossier, detailing the various outrages that were such a feature of the whole gulag system. His sketches show scenes of torture, degradation and execution, by the NKVD as well as that practiced by prisoner upon prisoner. There are scenes of sexual torture, of mass rape, of an axe being raised as criminals make ready to decapitate one of their fellows. For once the cliché applies: an image really is worth a thousand words.



Compared with the flood of information about the Nazi camp system, including movies like Schindler’s List, so many people in the west are still comparatively ignorant over the horrors of the gulags. So far as I’m aware the only English-Language film featuring the Soviet camp system is the British adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, made in the early 1970s. Hollywood has never tackled the subject.

I discovered from a review article by Olrando Figes in The Times that a new movie touching on Stalin’s camps is to be released this month. The Way Back is really about a prison break, a highly improbable one at that, only featuring camp life in a fairly brief slot at the beginning. There is still something lacking here, something revealing about our lack of interest in the mundane horrors of the Soviet camp system compared with the grotesque horrors of the Nazis. Figes makes an excellent point:

We do not feel as close to Russian peasants as we do to Western European Jews. We’re not sure that the Russians are “like us” at all. Maybe that’s why there hasn’t been a film to engage us in the tragedy of the gulag. It is in part a legacy of the Cold War. Perhaps we feel that the Russians brought their suffering on themselves – victims of a revolution that went wrong. Or perhaps, in some former left-wing quarters, we still cling to the old romance about the Soviet Union that puts its victims out of sight – a rose-tinted view of the revolution that can be seen in Reds (1981), Warren Beatty’s love song to Bolshevism, which still colours views in Hollywood. In 2008 it was voted one of the ten best epic US movies by the American Film Institute.

It is, I think, time for a new song, a song to all the victims of Bolshevism, a song that will help us understand the terrible human suffering involved; to understand that a million deaths is a million tragedies.





32 comments:

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  5. Ana, when you remember the gulag, remember also Kolyma ; and remember especially the name Adam Kaznowski. I knew his daughter - as brave a lass (in her own way) as was her father.

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  6. Jamie, of course. Have you read Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales? If not it’s a brilliant collection, simple truths made all the more real by his taught, limpid and undemonstrative style, a kind of Russian Maupassant.

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  7. Who is responsible for Communism in Russia ? Carl Marx was a ?

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  8. The American Revolution was a success, while most others have failed, because America's Founders understood the true nature of relations between government and men. Few men have expressed it better than America's first President, George Washington:

    "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

    Understanding this, the Founders created a government of strictly limited power - which lesser, corrupt politicians have never ceased attempting to expand.

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  9. The ranks of the Western media and the lesser intellects of academia are still riddled with Stalin's useful idiots - self-deceivers never perceptive enough to see beyond the Kremlin's propaganda and the seductive lies of socialist theory. Many of those zealots have resolutely turned their heads from the truth even in the face of terrible evidence from Russia itself and are still infecting new generations. It is pathetic, and tragic that no irresistible voice has yet emerged to sing the truth so loud and clear as to shatter the hollow myths of statism. History needs to be rewritten by scholars who reject statism, progressivism, perfectibility, and dialectical materialism and understand instead that real advances arise from voluntary cooperation, altruism, individual genius, individual effort, and liberty.

    Could you be one of those scholars, Ana?

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  10. Jamie, reading her posts was one of the best experiences brought to me by MyT, a real privilege. I miss her voice very much.

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  12. Calvin, I will do all in my power to correct the balance.

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  14. Adam, Calvin's view is my view almost exactly, and it has nothing at all to do with John Wilkes and Issue 45. It has to do with the constant renewal of concepts of liberty and freedom against abominations like the USSR, in whatever form they come. At the risk of being misunderstood my avatar, my ideal, is the minute man of 1777. As Gentleman Johnny understood, a new race of giants was striding the earth.

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  19. Well, I'm a grown person and I subscribe to the 'liberty thing.' This blog is an example of what happens when the 'liberty thing' is denied. My contempt for helots is absolute.

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  21. Adam, there would seem to be some deep etymological and philosophical confusion here. Opposition to political liberalism is not the same as opposition to liberty. Your reading of Weimar history is way off beam. Nazism is not the offspring of liberalism or democracy.

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  22. You really must stop reading modern political history through a narrow nineteenth century prism.

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  25. Thanks for reminding me..I heard this was coming..there was an article in the Weekend Australian Magazine a couple of years ago about Baldaev.

    These drawings remind me of the work of Albrecht Durer. For example, see:

    http://www.masterworksfineart.com/inventory/durer/prev_durer2152.jpg

    There's recently been a Gulag movie made by Peter Weir, titled The Way Back, which is derived from a purported memoir. Unfortunately, the memoir turned out to be bogus, although Anne Applebaum has stuck up for the thematic content as being plausible; it tells of an escape from the Gulag of a type which some zeks succeeded in making.

    Years ago I saw an American film about a US family who lived in the USSR, one of whom was imprisoned for refusing to identify himself as a Soviet citizen after scoring some record in the field of aviation. I think this was called "Gulag" but the only movie listed under this title that I can find isn't the one I saw. It may have been released under another title in the US.

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  27. Adam, can I just draw your attention to part of what Calvin wrote;

    History needs to be rewritten by scholars who reject statism, progressivism, perfectibility, and dialectical materialism and understand instead that real advances arise from voluntary cooperation, altruism, individual genius, individual effort, and liberty.

    This is what I identify with, a declaration of the most fundamental principles of libertarianism and personal liberty, not to be confined by narrow doctrines, not to be confused with Liberalism as a political movement in its Gladstonian or its modern form. Soviet Russia and all of the other perversions of the human spirit which followed in its wake is the antithesis of all I believe in. I really can’t emphasise enough how the worship of the state and state power, those appalling modern idols, fill me with a sense of existential and philosophical disgust.

    Nazism was not a reaction against the ‘liberality’ of the Weimar Republic; it was a reaction against the modern world in general, against all progressive notions of personal freedom, against the Enlightenment tradition, against democracy itself, associated with the perceived humiliation of Versailles. From 1930 onwards the Republic was dying, under assault from Nazis and Communists, who, in most particulars, were little different, one from the other.

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  28. Retarius, The Way Back opens here on Boxing Day. I would like to see it but it will have to wait until I get back from a coming trip to Austria. I'll see if I can track down the American film you mention.

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  31. Adam, you made the point about identifying with the USSR. I think for myself; I write to please myself, with as much honesty and integrity as I can manage. If you chose to see me as a "mad liberal propagandist" so be it. This sort of thing never makes any impression on me.

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