Does the literature of the gulag capture the essence of the
Soviet experience during the 1930s? Unprecedented numbers of Russian citizens
(as well as many other categories of people) found themselves in a Siberia work
camp during this period, and those who escaped the gulag were very likely to
spend a considerable amount of energy anticipating execution or arrest. But can arbitrary imprisonment and twenty year
terms of hard labor capture the experience of a whole generation of Soviet
citizens, many of whom surely supported Stalin and the Bolshevik project in
general? After all, camp memoirs reveal
the extent to which even Soviet prisoners could defend the Soviet leader by
claiming that Yezhov or Beria, and not Stalin, were to blame for prosecutorial
or prison guard excesses. If only
somebody could get word to Stalin about what was happening in his name, the
world would be put right again.
Anya Bremzen, author of a wonderful memoir entitled Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, recently
noted the problem with understanding the second full decade of Bolshevik rule. The 1930s were a schizophrenic episode. You might
well have been swept up in the purges, but if you remained “free” from arrest,
you were very likely to be immersed in a state of “totalitarian joy,” i.e., an
unending series of Communist festivals to celebrate Soviet achievement. Understanding this dualism, it’s useful to
read a book like Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey
Into the Whirlwind in the context of a larger book about totalitarianism
such as Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece, The
Origins of Totalitarianism. On the
one hand, Ginzburg’s book details the madness of Stalinism in which a loyal and
dedicated Bolshevik leader could find oneself under arrest for no apparent
reason at all. Ginzburg’s classic tale
of the Great Terror describes a typical cycle of Soviet justice, including
arbitrary arrest, family disgrace (followed by imprisonment of both her husband
and parents), psychological and physical torture, summary military trial,
extended sentence, prolonged solitary confinement, barbaric transportation to
the edges of Siberia, and brutal work conditions in the taiga. On the other hand, Arendt’s theory of
totalitarian government reveals that such a cycle of arbitrary terror was
intrinsically linked to the nature of the Bolshevik’s ideology, an ideology
that required an unending pool of enemies.
What exactly is totalitarianism? Arendt’s treatise on the subject,
groundbreaking at the time of publication, remains acutely perceptive. In some ways, Arendt made the original
argument that you can’t understand Stalinism without looking closely at
Hitlerism. In both cases, the ruling
party became almost synonymous with the state.
Beyond that, the party made radical claims to represent all of
humanity. The case for fascism
representing a claim to global government is perhaps controversial. However, Arendt points out that fascist parties
sprang up everywhere in Europe even as the Nazi platform clearly called for the
conquest of large portions of the globe.
The communist plan for global government is much clearer, although Arendt must remind us not to take
Stalin’s call for “socialism in one country” too seriously. Once the totalitarian party makes a claim to global
suzerainty, it’s not hard to begin to treat its citizens as traitors, and
foreign citizens as either natural saboteurs or spies.
The radical nature of totalitarian government expresses
itself in another way. According to both
Nazism and Stalinism, the party is a movement rather than a traditional
government, If the party is a movement,
it must continuously encounter new categories of enemies. Arendt’s claim is that Nazism constantly
found new enemies, and would have done so long after it had eliminated the last
Jew from any of its territories. The
Nazis, after all, had already declared war against Slavic peoples, and indeed
various categories of German people, including Communists and the allegedly
“un-hygienic.” So too did Bolshevism
continue to identify new opponents long after subduing any hint of opposition
from former aristocrats or bourgeois intellectuals.
In fact, Arendt notes that totalitarian regimes thrive on
the logic of arbitrary terror as described by Ginzburg in Journey Into the Whirlwind. According to Arendt, totalitarian governments
are politically powerful but economically chaotic and inefficient. Ginzburg’s memoir proves this rule. On the one hand, Stalin had turned all Soviet
citizens into potential spies, complicit in the country’s perpetual state of
terror. The fact that all citizens could
be arrested for no reason whatsoever also meant that the entire country had
reason to worry. Indeed, Stalinism, like Nazism, had essentially made
the very idea of rebellion irrelevant.
In mere despotism, a man or woman might decide to oppose the government
and court death as a consequence of his brave act of defiance. In totalitarianism, rebels were likely to be
put to death for their opposition, but so too were perfectly loyal supporters
of the system such as Ginzburg, a professor of Leninist history. If Old
Bolsheviks suffered and died, what would genuine opposition to Stalinism have
really signified?
Ginzburg’s memoir also illustrates the chronic inefficiency
of totalitarianism. Over and over again,
the Bolshevik government sacrificed economic efficiency at the alter of
ideology. Hundreds of thousands of
productive and even largely loyal citizens were thrown into the most barbaric
and disastrously inefficient work camps system imaginable. Many died for little or no reason at every
stage of the journey between arrest and productive labor. The parallel with Nazism is obvious. As Arendt reminds us, the Nazi economy and
war effort were repeatedly undermined by the racist ideological aspirations of
Hitler.
On a mundane level, Arendt explains the logic of
totalitarianism by discussing a fictitious request from Moscow for more
pipes. In a traditional setting, an
economic logic would dictate why more pipes are needed. Under totalitarianism, nobody but the secret
police can really be certain why more pipes have been ordered. Does the factory need the pipes to increase
output? Yes, perhaps, but even if this
is true, why is more output needed? Does
one agency want to embarrass another by increasing production at this
factory? Does someone in Moscow want to
blame the factory’s managers for overproduction? According to Arendt, nobody but the secret
police—ultimately controlled by Stalin—can know the answer to questions such as
these. In fact, both Hitler and Stalin
created complex, overlapping, and even competing governmental structures. These structures were always confusing. The net result was that multiple and often
competing policies were proposed simultaneously, which only the will of the
supreme leader (expressed through the vehicle of the secret police) could
resolve.
Whether outlined by Ginzburg or Arendt, totalitarianism doesn’t
seen like a very gratifying system of government. Yet even totalitarianism has its
pleasures. For one thing, a system of
perpetual purges and spectacular falls from grace offers unprecedented
opportunities for career advancement.
Arendt argues that the purges inevitably implicated large numbers of new
recruits in the original crimes of the Bolsheviks and Nazis. Thus, while your own lifespan might be cut
short at any moment, you might well have had the opportunity to rise to great
heights before your inevitable fall from the dizzying heights of power. These then are the joys of
totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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