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- 02.22.2008 - 4:45 PM• Why are so many Americans unaware that Joseph Stalin was as brutal, systematic and effective a killer as Adolf Hitler? One reason is because so much of the Old Left looked the other way at Stalin’s nefarious activities, and was unwilling later on to admit that it had done so. Another is that the Soviet Union remained a closed society long after the killing stopped, making it vastly more difficult for interested Westerners to study the Great Terror in the way that the Holocaust became a subject of detailed historical inquiry. As a result, we know far more about the individual innocents who died in the Holocaust than about those who were murdered at Stalin’s command.
Will this situation continue? Now that the Old Left is dying out, it has become somewhat more acceptable for American academics to study the Great Terror and report on it in a straightforward way, which doubtless explains the publication of The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale, 295 pp., $30), a new book by Hiroaki Kuromiya, a professor of history at Indiana University. For the past several years, Kuromiya has been examining the files of the secret police in Kiev, which in the 30’s was the Soviet Union’s third-largest city. (Now it is part of the independent state of Ukraine, whose rulers are more willing than their opposite numbers in Moscow to let outsiders study what Stalin wrought.) Like all bureaucrats, the killers of Kiev kept detailed records of their activities, right down to the late-night death warrants that were signed minutes before their prisoners were hustled out of their cells, shot in the nape of the neck and dumped into mass graves. In order to write The Voices of the Dead, Kuromiya examined the surviving dossiers of several dozen victims of the Great Terror, paying special attention to the handwritten notes in which official interrogators recorded the results of their attempts to extract confessions out of their prisoners prior to having them executed. The result is a book whose deliberate flatness of tone does not make it any less sickening.
Kuromiya’s own description of The Voices of the Dead is no less eloquent in its plainness:
The present book is a modest attempt to allow some of those executed in 1937-38 a voice. The focus is on individuals, in particular those whose lives meant absolutely nothing to Stalin: innocent people who were swept up in the maelstrom of political terror he unleashed. Most of the people discussed here are “unremarkable”: they left no conspicuous imprint on history. . . . Stalin was certain that no one would remember them. The “all-conquering power of Bolshevism” condemned them to oblivion, but it could not suppress their voices completely. Ironically, Stalin’s efforts to extinguish their voices helped preserve them, in the depths of their case files.
The people we meet in The Voices of the Dead are indeed “utterly unknown, ‘ordinary’ Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, beggars.” All they had in common was that they ran afoul of Stalin’s killing machine. Many appear to have been tortured before being sent to the execution chamber. Some confessed to crimes that they may or may not have committed, while others went to their graves swearing that they had done nothing wrong. To read about them is a jolting experience, no matter how much you may already know about the regime that sentenced them to die.
The Voices of the Dead is illustrated with reproductions of some of the documents examined by Kuromiya, including two harrowing “mug shots” of a pair of victims that appear to have been taken not long before they were executed. The book also contains contemporary photographs taken at the site of the mass graves on the outskirts of Kiev where tens of thousands of Stalin’s victims are buried. It is now a memorial park dotted with crosses, though few go there: “Except on commemorative occasions…the graves are deserted—dark, serene and eerie. History weighs on visitors here.” The main grave is marked with a monument inscribed with just two words: Vechnaya pamyat—eternal memory. It is a devastatingly simple reminder of the evil that men do in the name of ideas. So is this disturbing, invaluable book.
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February 22nd, 2008 at 5:44 PM
Stalin was a monster. Had he lived longer, he probably would have started to kill the Jews of the Soviet Union. But during World War II, he allowed many Jews, perhaps a million, to flee from Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union to Uzbekistan, where they spent the war. Their situation was not a good one, but they survived. One of them was a cousin of mine from Krakow, who managed to get to the Soviet Union, lived through the war, and is now in Israel.
Even a monster may possibly commit a good deed.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:45 PM
Terry,
this book would be a good learning tool for students, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it to replace “A People’s History of the U.S.S.R.” on required reading lists.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:51 PM
Even to this day, we see traces of Old Left behaviour in today’s left. They will spend hours spewing about how horrible the US is, what a “gulag” Guantanimo is, and not a peep about places like North Korea, a country that exemplefies the worst of Stalinist brutality. Cuba is a place where people get free health care, but not a word about the political prisoners languishing in Castro’s jails. Hugo Chavez is idolized because he stands up to the “devil” Bush.
Lord knows, if Pot Pot were around and said something disparaging about Bush, folks like Danny Glover and Sean Penn run to his defense.
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:42 PM
There are tons of Marxists on campuses that act just like “revisionists”. They simply deny that Stalin killed more than 35 million plus people. Last summer, I got into a heated argument with one of these silly Marxists in the classroom over the number of people killed by his beloved hero and he flatly denied it. That could be one of the reasons why the public doesnt know much about Stalin’s regime.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:17 PM
The person who caused more deaths than anyone else in human history was Chairman Mao. The famine of 1959-61 was at least in part the result of the fact that everyone, including farmers, had to melt their tools in backyard furnaces in order to support China’s growing industrialization. The metal retrieved from these furnaces was worthless. The lack of tools led to at least 30 million deaths and possibly 60 million. And this doesn’t count the people killed in the Anti-Landlord Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:25 PM
Terry Teachout wonders:
The temperament and instincts of the Old Left are alive in the New, and the situation promises to grow worse not better. While the Old Left was really only protective and defensive of atrocities committed by socialists, the New is prepared to tolerate and trivialize any act of savagery aimed at America or her friends.
An example is the Islamist insurgency in Iraq. It openly proclaims freedom of speech, religious toleration, gender equality and democracy - hateful to God. It decapitates journalists, uses suicide bombers, and crashes exploding cars into random crowds. Yet the New Left today sides with these fascist fanatics against an Iraqi govt elected by 10.5 million voters, and supported by the US. The Left’s desire to see the US fail trumps everything.
An example of how the Old Left infuses the New is Victor Navasky. He, incidentally still refuses to concede that Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs were guilty. A few years ago he left The Nation magazine after half a lifetime there as its owner and managing editor. Now Navasky heads the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review, the standard setter for professional American journalism. The irony is that his old magazine continues on, under editors and correspondents he installed, as one of the most tendentious and rigid spewers of Leftist polemics. When one of its writers, Christopher Hitchens formed an independent opinion on the Iraq war, he was unable to remain on the magazine.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 PM
The History Channel not long ago had a two-hour special on Stalin and talked about his mass killing machine. The scale of it and the number of people he murdered was just bewildering. I, too, have often wondered why Stalin does not seem as infamous to people as Hitler. Hopefully one day, more voices from the past will be revealed and the memory of their lives and that time in history will not be forgotten.
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:23 PM
It’s profoundly strange how little trace is left by the murder of 50 or 100 million ordinary people who had the misfortune to run afoul of the Bolshevics in the USSR and the Maoists in China and elsewhere. A generation or two passes and they are all but forgotten along with their millions of murderers. And all this was done to bring about a Workers’ Paradise on Earth. Beware, you young idealists. Beware.
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:01 AM
Leaving aside the somber (Stygian?) context of these posts for a moment, it’s nice to see Ol’ Salty make sense.
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:58 AM
Why are we wondering that the average American Homo-Consumus-Degeneratus is completly unaware of the unimaginable barbarity of the Stalinist regime. Some 90% of the Scandinavians, who have been living with THE BEAST just across the border for 70 years, have NEVER bothered to learn anything about that subject and are even more ignorant of that part of their sinister neighbour’s history. Im also sure that the rest of the so called Western Europe is equally dark minded. Hence the Eurabian’s infantile leanning towards Socialism. Appart from that, the Europs have for too long been dependant on the US protection against the USSR and lost their collective instinct of self-preservation. However, once enslaved by ISLAMOFASCISM, they will be eagerly studying the real history of the Europe in the darkened cellars during their conspiratorial classes. Then they will get to know…