“Hell on Earth: Brutality and Violence Under The Stalinist Regime.”

by Ludwik Kowalski

Published in August 2008 (the ISBN number is 798-1-60047-232-9), available online at:

http://www.wastelandbooksonline.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=367

and at:

http://www.amazon.com

It can also be ordered in a large bookstore, such as Barnes&Noble or Borders.

About the author (the back cover of the book):
The author’s father, a civil engineer, left Poland for the Soviet Union in 1931. An idealistic communist, he believed it was his duty to emigrate, and to contribute to the  building of a new society. His wife and his infant son followed soon after. In 1938 he was arrested and sent to a GULAG camp in Kolyma, where he became a slave in Stalin’s  state of proletarian dictatorship. Two years later he died, most likely from exhaustion, working in a gold mine. 

The author, who is a retired physics professor (Professor Emeritus at Montclair State University, New Jersey), shares what he knows and thinks about Stalinism. Educated in the Soviet Union (elementary school), in Poland (high school and master’s degree) and in France (Ph.D. in nuclear physics), he came to the United States in 1964. He deliberately avoided talking about Stalinism and concentrated on professional activities--teaching and research. 

Approaching retirement, however, he wrote an essay on Stalinism entitled “Alaska Notes.” It describes the gruesome Soviet reality, focusing on Kolyma, and on Stalin’s inner circle. The essay contained comments on what has been published by some survivors of Stalinism, and by authors of several scholarly books, such as Leszek Kolakowski. “Alaska Notes” was posted on the Internet discussion list at Montclair State University. This public forum revealed a wide range of opinions about communism. The animated discussion, mostly among professors, convinced the author to transform the essay into this book. It is dedicated to all victims of Stalinism, and in particular to the author’s father, a naive idealist deceived by propaganda. Royalties will be donated to a  Montclair State University scholarship fund.

Introduction
July of 2000, while vacationing in Alaska, I noticed a plaque with the name of the Russian town Magadan in an Anchorage souvenir store. That name had been engraved in my memory since 1939, when I was eight years old, living in Russia. The address: “Kolyma, Magadan, Buchta Nagayevo” was where my father, arrested one year earlier, had died in a concentration camp at the age of 36.

Not too many Americans know that the number of lives lost in Stalin's death camps in the Magadan area (between 1930 and 1960) was comparable to the number of those wasted in Hitler's Auschwitz. My wife and I purchased the plaque. Oval in shape, it has a white carving of a jumping reindeer against a black background. The young lady who sold us the plaque happened to be from Magadan. She told us that "it is a rapidly growing industrial town. It has a great future. Buchta Nagayevo now has tall buildings and discotheques.” At that point I told her why I was interested.

She immediately knew what I was referring to and expressed sympathy by giving me a celebratory T-shirt on which “Magadan 1939-1994 Anniversary” was printed. She also told us that Magadan was a sister city of Anchorage, and suggested I contact City Hall for details. There I found a description of Magadan as a modern town which used to be a “peaceful village” at the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk. The horrible Stalinist history of the town was not mentioned. This disturbed me.

One week later we were in Fairbanks, where The University of Alaska library has a large archive of materials (books, maps, interviews, photographs, etc.) devoted to the polar regions. I quickly found books about Magadan, some in English, others in Russian. This book is based on materials found in Fairbanks, and later in other libraries. An inner voice told me that I had to share what I learned, in the name of the victims of Stalinism. I called my compilation “Alaska Notes." My fellow professors at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, were the first to read Alaska Notes.

A discussion that followed guided me toward the second part of this book. Starting with the Chapter entitled Gruesome Soviet Ideology, it provides additional testimonies and focuses on the ideology of the Soviet state of proletarian dictatorship. That ideology must be studied to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union. Referring to the prevailing attitude toward Stalinism, Vladimir Putin said, on May 5, 2005, “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain." I can understand this. Is it not ironic that the President of Russia had been a Soviet KGB officer. Equally ironic is the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted from initiatives of M. Gorbachev and B. Yeltsin - both high offcials of the Soviet Communist Party. They knew what was going on.

Prison Ships (Section 1.4)
Conditions under which slaves were delivered to Magadan are described in (7), a book published in 1947. They were as horrible as those on the infamous slave ships between Africa and the New World. “In the summer of 1932, for the first time in the history of Nagajev Harbor, the steam whistles of ships began to disturb the tranquil air. The holds of the steamers had been made over for permanent service in carrying a live cargo. They contained built-in plank beds mounted one above the other in three or four tiers. These were always so packed with prisoners [for 6 to 8 days] that walking or even sitting was impossible; one had to lie on a plank bed hardly able to turn over without disturbing a neighbor. Walks on deck were of course out of question; nobody was allowed to leave the hold during the entire passage and even bucket slots were not always taken out.

Such a tightly packed steamer could carry from 8,000 to 12,000 passengers. It sailed past Japan with holds covered by tarpaulin, with not a soul on its deck. Special measures were taken to suppress disobedience or mutiny. Strong iron grilles cut the hold into several completely isolated sections. Armed guards walked constantly along narrow passages between the grilles. At carefully selected spots there were nests of machine guns which could cover every corner of the hold. In addition there were fire pumps, so arranged that at a moment's notice a powerful jet of cold ocean water could be turned on insubordinate persons." Various forms of slavery, and their impact on society, are discussed in the same reference.

Interesting information about Stalin's slave ships, and atrocities during cruel journeys, can be found in Bollinger's book (8). The author presents a realistic estimate of the number of prisoners that were delivered to Kolyma camps between the early 1930's and 1953. That number, close to 900,000, was calculated on the basis of known capacities of individual ships (typically 3000 prisoners), on population in individual camps, and on the attrition rates (on the average, about 35% of prisoners died each year). The number, close to one million, is about two times smaller than what was published before new information became available. It is said to be in good agreement with recent analyses of the Soviet-era archives.

Exaggerated ship capacities, 8000 to 12,000, as above, were probably responsible for the discrepancy. Was Kolyma, the most horrible part of Gulag, very different from other regions in which slave labor was used on a large scale? What about other northern camps, such as Norilsk, Varkuta, and Murmansk ? What about numerous camps in the Ural region, and in Kazakhstan? I do not know the answers to such questions. One thing is clear; the so-called “proletarian dictatorship" was a horrible thing.

On The Way To Gold Mine 1 (Subsection 1.5.2)
The author continues: “One prisoner records: `In March of 1933, 600 prisoners were sent to Gold Mine 1of the Mining Administration of the North . . . We had to travel 370 miles in deep snow and during terribly cold weather to the Khatenakh sopka. We had to make 16 miles a day, after which we spent the night in tents set up on the snow. After our scanty rations in the morning, we set out again. Those who were unable to survive this long gruelling march and died on the way were left with the snow for their only tomb. Our guards forbade us to give them a proper burial. Those who lagged behind were shot by the guards, without stopping the column. For thirty long days we trudged along over the immense expanses of snow, arriving at last exhausted at the sopka of Khatenakh, where we were quartered in tents already awaiting us.’... “

Two Ideologies Of Mass Murder (Section 1.7)
My essay, composed after return from Alaska, was named Alaska Notes. Shortly after that, it was posted on the website of the university at which I worked. In that way the essay became available to many people over the Internet. At the same time, I also started looking for Magadan and Kolyma over the Internet. Here is one of my findings: “To whom it may concern: I am one of the millions of slave laborers who were part of Kolyma's tragic past, and who, like so many nameless others, were slated to become historical dust and pass into oblivion in the Great Soviet Plan. I am one of those who experienced Stalin's cruel terror, through painful incarceration in Kolyma's gold mines and the hard labor camp at Magadan, in the severe arctic climate of Siberia. As one of the fortunate survivors of this insane era of Stalinism, Communism, and dehumanizing slave labor, I feel obligated to write about those who suffered and perished, and to preserve the truth of these events for future generations. Those few of us who survived must ensure that posterity holds these crimes as a warning against ambitious and cruel rulers who have neither understanding nor compassion for their fellow human beings.”

The author of the above, Stanislaw J. Kowalski (no relation), has a web site with nine very short chapters of his unpublished mini-book (12). In addition to narrative the book contains many interesting illustrations, references, maps and statistical charts. Here is an interesting quotation from Chapter 3: “With the dismantling of the slave labor camps in the late 50s and 60s the memory of these murdered slaves and war victims also perished from the history books of Kolyma's libraries and schools, and from the records of government offices.''

A friend from California, after reading the draft of my essay, wrote: ``Well, Ludwik: I have NEVER been able to understand man's inhumanity to man and I suppose I never will. This is all so sad.” In the answer I wrote that extreme inhumanity is beyond understanding. But then I returned to Solomon (10) where there is a chapter entitled “Reflections on Violence.'' Referring to the main architect of soviet cruelties, Stalin, the author wrote: “He was not a learned man - no great orator like Trotsky nor a military genius like Blucher. Stalin merely knew better than anybody else the value of terror. He raised it to the rank of a state dogma. It became the raison d'etre of the Soviet state and the source of its advancement. The ruthless suppression of millions in the desolated camps would have meant nothing if the `others,' those who temporarily remained behind, did not learn the lesson. The rules of Stalin's game of terror were desperately crude and desperately simple. They told you about them as soon as you entered the compound: In order to survive you must work, and in order not to die from work you must know how to make others work. Hunger was the regime's other whip. A man of culture looking for food in rotten garbage would have certainly exclaimed `It took a million years to make a human being from the animal, but it takes less than a few weeks to reduce him to that status again.' ''

Preconditions To Genocide (Section 1.8)
Are mass killings avoidable? Hitler's holocaust was based on racism; Stalin's slaughter was based on the concept of class struggle. Can we say that these two ideologies of intolerance are responsible for mass killings? Or should the tragedies be attributed to the evil nature of leaders? The two tyrants were not alone; it is impossible to kill millions without favorable social conditions. Can such conditions be identified? Can they be eliminated? How can this be done? I am not sure how to answer such questions. But I strongly believe that all occurrences of mass genocide should be analyzed and exposed, not hidden or forgotten.

Mass murder occurs when brutal and sadistic criminals, to be found in every society, are promoted to positions of dominance, when propaganda is used to dehumanize the targeted population and when children are inoculated with intolerance and hatred. It occurs when victims (“inferior races” or “class enemies”) are excluded from the norms of morality, when ideological totalitarianism is imposed and when freedom is suspended. Fear and violence, the preconditions of genocide, are likely to be found in societies with large numbers of thieves and informants. Stalin and Hitler were fanatical leaders inspired by a gang mentality and by the concept of “historic mission.” They believed that intolerance and large scale brutality were necessary ingredients of social order. Each of them was also supported by the “cult of personality.”

Two Wings Of One Satan (Section 2.3)
“A Book About Kolyma” (13) is actually much more than a reference to a concentration camp song. Written in 1947 and published in 1950, it is a detailed description of what happened to the author in Soviet hands. The horrors ended with the 1942 amnesty and formation of a Polish Army. The army escaped from the Soviet Union to fight Germans in Africa and Italy. The book, according to the author, was written during this escape, in Teheran, Baghdad and Jerusalem. It was finished in London. Reflecting on what happened, he wrote:

“From a group of close friends only two of us, or perhaps three, if the third is found, are alive. I am surrounded by names and horrors, not alive, not alive, not alive. Terrible cemetery, the cemetery of German executions. Where is the bottom? Then other names and other horrors appear. They too are not alive, not alive, not alive. This is the terrible cemetery of Kolyma. So where is the bottom? With outstretched hands I realize that the bottom does not exist.

There are books in front of me, I can read them now. My work is finished and I am not afraid to face horrors. I read, think and make comparisons. Auschwitz is a heavy subject. Auschwitz, Kolyma. Two extremes of human tragedy, the essence is the same, suffering without limits. Two very different worlds. Yes, two extremes but the system is the same. Smoke over Birkenau and smoke over taiga. Sudden horrible death by gas and slow decay in which flesh separates from bones; scurvy. Red crematoria and winter-white crematoria. `Wernichtungslager Auschwitz' - and `Uprawlenije Sewierowostocznych Isprawitelno-Trudowych Lagerej - Kolyma'.

Abandon all hope! One does not return from Kolyma either. Kolyma is the same government secret as Auschwitz used to be. Camps and camps, barbed wires, degenerate capos. Here "Strafcomando" there `Strafcommandirowka', the same name, the same nature of things. ... Comparisons and analogies multiply in my mind. There can be nothing worse, I say to myself. But what about Kolyma? If Satan has wings then these are the wings of one Satan! Nothing can be worse than Kolyma. And what about Auschwitz? Milions are covered under two wings of Satan, they suffered and they suffer, they bled and they bleed, they endure, they rot, and death is their liberation. I am making a horrible discovery: There is no end of human suffering.”

Other Comparisons (Section 2.4)
How can I avoid making more comparisons? They could not have been made in 1950. The evil empire of Hitler was destroyed from outside, the evil empire of Stalin was destroyed by his own followers; its downfall was triggered by reforms introduced by Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Leading Nazi criminals were judged in Nuremberg and punished. How does this compare with the liquidation of Beria, and of his collaborators? The SS camp commanders, and other Nazi criminals, had to hide, often in far away countries and under new names. This did not happen to their counterparts in Russia. Economic conditions in West Germany improved rapidly after Hitler's fall while economic conditions in the post-Stalinist Russia did not improve until very recently.

There is a recent book (15) about how German people cope with the legacy of Hitler's crimes. It analyzes the trauma of those who lived in the Third Reich and those who learned about mass killings from textbooks. Are there similar books analyzing attitudes of people from the ex-Soviet Union countries? How do Russians, and others, view Stalin's crimes? Do they learn about them in high school? How do they debate them? What is similar and what is different in attitudes of German and Russian students toward their country's history of mass killing?

An article by Mark Kramer entitled "Why Soviet History Matters in Russia" was distributed recently (January 2001) over the Internet. The author is the Director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies and a Senior Associate at the Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University. He writes: ``The task of confronting unpleasant historical episodes is difficult for any country, even the long-established democracies. The Germans had a term for this process after World War II, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, but it was not until the 1960s and afterward that most Germans truly acknowledged the enormity of Nazi Germany's crimes.

In France today, many citizens are still reluctant to look closely at the Vichy period; in Austria many people still pretend that their country was a victim of Nazi aggression; and in Japan political leaders still frequently downplay the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in China, Korea, and Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s. In the United States, too, many tragic aspects of history--the enslavement of blacks, the campaigns against American Indians, and the internment of Japanese-Americans at the start of World War II--have often been glossed over. Difficult as the process of historical reckoning may be for these Western countries, it is even more onerous in Russia....''

Innocent people became victims of murderous ideologies. In my opinion, Germans and Austrians were no less victims of Nazism than Russians and Poles were victims of Communism. The wings of Satan were peculiar ideologies. A well known Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, wrote several books about Soviet ideology. Some of his ideas are presented in a later chapter.

A Painter Remembers (Section 2.7)
Nikolai Getman, a Soviet painter imprisoned in Kolyma (after WWII), produced fifty paintings based on his experience. These pictures can be seen at the webside of The Jamestown Foundation:

http://jamestown.org/getman_paintings.php?painting_id=1

Each picture has an interesting caption; I strongly recommend the gallery of Getman's paintings to all readers. Picture #22, for example, shows a tortured prisoner. He is attached to a tree and exposed to mosquitoes. The caption tells us that “for even an insignificant misdeed, such as a harsh word to a guard, a prisoner could be stripped naked, hung crucifixion-style to a pine tree, and left to be fed upon by mosquitoes. Within thirty minutes to an hour he would be taken down. By that time, however, he would have lost so much blood that a slow and painful death was almost inevitable.” Such punishments were most likely not part of camp regulations. But they are indicators of sadism on the part of those who were in charge of prisoners. Similar examples of sadism have been reported by survivors of Nazi concentration camps. What was the crime for which Getman was sent to Kolyma in 1946? He did not denounce a fellow artist who drew a caricature of Stalin, at a private gathering of friends....

Returning From The Spanish Civil War (section 2.8)
It is well known that both Germany and the Soviet Union participated in the Spanish Civil War. Hitler’s specialists assisted Nationalists while Stalin’s specialists assisted Republicans. German experts were probably received home as heroes. Hitler already had plans for them. But reception for Soviet military experts was often very different. Many of them became victims of Stalin’s terror. An interesting episode, found in (19), describes a Soviet fighter returning home after the war ended. ...

Man-made Calamities (Section 3.2)
Is moral sensitivity of people sufficient to protect world societies from mass murderers? Probably not. What else is essential? Elimination of extreme poverty and injustice. How can this be accomplished? Many sociologists have asked this question. Karl Marx was one of them. He believed that the “proletarian dictatorship” was the answer. I suspect that the 20th century will be named after this kind of dictatorship. The idea was tried in many countries and failed. It did not create justice; it replaced old tyrants with more brutal tyrants. Lenin, Stalin and Mao are well known examples.

So where is the answer? I do not know. Is man's inhumanity to man avoidable? Perhaps not, perhaps it should be accepted as part of human nature. If this is accepted then episodes of mass murder can be compared with other calamities, like epidemics, earthquakes and wars. (The black death epidemic did kill about one third of Europe's population in the Middle Ages; the Aids epidemic is rampant today; disasters caused by global warming are predicted, etc.) But scientific understanding of epidemics has often resulted in great improvements. Likewise, constructing less vulnerable buildings, or avoiding certain locations, can minimize consequences of earthquakes. What happened in the Soviet Union should not be attributed only to Stalin's despotic inclinations; it should also be attributed to the ideology he inherited from Lenin.

We do not accept natural disasters passively; we do everything possible to prevent them, or at least to reduce their undesirable consequences. Why should man`s inhumanity to man be accepted as unavoidable? Humanity is also part of nature. Most people want justice and deplore suffering. Shouldn't this be the basis for working toward elimination of man-made calamities?

A Fund Raising Operation (Subsection 3.3.1)
Stalin's “fund-raising” activities after the 1905 revolution (extortion and robbery to support Lenin's program) indicate that he was familiar with terrorism. Several years later he was accused by Georgian Mensheviks of participating in the famous 1907 armed robbery in Tiflis. The sum of 300,000 rubles was stolen during a bomb attack on an escorted shipment of money to the State Bank (23). Several people were killed. A German writer, Emil Ludwig, asked Stalin about this incident during an interview in 1931. Stalin did not deny it. But he did not confirm it either. He could have said ``it is a fabrication'' but he ignored the question.

I suspect he was proud of his pre-Revolutionary adventures. That is why there was no denying. Furthermore, there were still too many comrades in arms alive and he did not know how some of them would react. The systematic liquidation of associates was only an idea at that time. That idea, as revealed by Khrushchev, started to materialize in 1934, when Kirov was assassinated at Stalin's order. First the assassins were killed, then those who organized the event, and finally those who knew, or could have known, about the sequence. Subsequently numerous Bolsheviks were accused of being involved in the assassination of ``dear comrade Kirov.'' All of them, and many more, were executed.

Those Who Are Not With Us Are Against Us (Subsection 3.3.3)
Stalin believed that the masses must be brutally manipulated and that punitive organs were essential tools for governing. Those ``who are not with us are against us'' was the slogan of the day. The class struggle, he wrote, must naturally intensify after the victory of the revolution. The opponents, and potential opponents, were declared guilty of so-called “counterrevolutionary crimes” and either eliminated immediately, or condemned to slavery in any one of numerous concentration camps.

Stalin was a master of criminal activities. He used the methodology of the underworld (extortion, killings, infliction of fear, the code of silence, etc.) to fight the old Russian government. It was only natural for him to continue using these methods later. The forms changed but the underlying principles did not. The ideological justification for brutality was one change; promotion of urkas (criminals) in camps, to paralyze possible resistance, was another. Theft, street crime and corruption, theoretically "disappearing byproducts of capitalistic mentality," flourished everywhere in Soviet Union. Criminal gangs were often used to beat up political opponents, and to inflict fear.

Russia was nearly always governed by despotic rulers but its post-revolutionary history was unprecedented. What happens there today is likely to be influenced by decades of brutality, by cynicism and demoralization, by poverty, criminality, and other wounds inflicted on society in the name of an ideology of class struggle.

A Personal Testimony From A Friend (Subsection 3.4.2)
In browsing the Internet I discovered a schoolmate, Kazia (Kazimiera Cottam Ph.D., specialty Russian/Soviet History). I have not seen her for nearly 60 years. We were in the same Polish orphanage in Zagorsk (the Soviet Union) during the war. In those days, even children were aware that talking about the Gulag was dangerous. That is why I knew very little about what happened to her and her family. We were glad to find each other and started to communicate by email.

Out of seven family members deported to the Soviet Union in 1940, Kazia was the only one to survive. She wrote "Your phone call made me so excited, I just can't get to sleep tonight.... Both my parents died in Syktyvkar, Komi ASSR, in 1943. [Komi is relatively close to Northern Finland].... I was in the Polish children's home in Dodzha, Komi, 30 km from Syktyvkar, after my parents died, and we were starving following the breakdown in relations with the Polish government in London.... '' In another message I became aware of Kazia's 1939-1946 memoirs. They can be seen at:

http://www.geocities.com/jeancottam/

and at my own website:

http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/kazia.html

Other classmates, from the Polish orphanage in Zagorsk would probably have similar stories to tell. Unfortunately, we belong to a dying generation. It is our moral obligation to share what we know. I am glad that Kazia feels the same way.

Cold War Propaganda? (Subsection 3.4.2)
In a discussion thread on Stalinism, at Montclair State University, one professor accused me of rekindling Cold War propaganda and of misrepresenting reality. He wrote: ``Your web pages on Soviet labor camps and the number of deaths in them and in the USSR during the '30s generally are a gross distortion of reality. There has been a great deal of research on these subjects in the past 20 years. Your web pages show zero familiarity with it.... According to the NKVD archives, in every year between 1934 and 1953 more inmates were released from the hard regime camps than died there, usually 2-5 times as many.... It is revealing that you lump together Hitler, Stalin and Mao. This is a relic of Cold War disinformation. Stalin did not `kill tens of millions,' neither did Mao.''

Messages from the Stalinism thread are shown in the last chapter. For the time being let me say that, according to (27) ``the consensus among Western historians had for some time settled at around 20 million [dead], which would appear to be in line with the drop in the Soviet population of about the same figure for the period 1929-1953 (excluding war casualties).... The only historian to try to qualify the figures for the worst period of 1937-1939 with any clarity and consistency remains Robert Conquest. In a 1990 reassessment of his 1968 study, he suggested that between 7 and 8 million people were arrested during 1937-1938 alone, 1 million of whom were executed. Two million people died in the Gulag during the same period, and by the end of 1938, a further 7 million were still in the Gulag, resulting in the total of 17-18 million victims. But if one had to add those who also died as a result of the wider ramifications of the Great Terror - collectivization, the famines, and the postwar revival of terror under Beria until Stalin's death in 1953 - the figure rockets to around 40 million.''

Holodomor Exhibit (Subsection 3.5.2)
What follows was composed after visiting the above-mentioned exhibit in New York City. According to one poster, Stalin wrote (in January 1933): ``As the result of fulfilling the Five-Year plan, we have managed to eliminate totally the last remains of the enemy classes from their productive base [agriculture]. We smashed kulaks and prepared the way for their annihilation.'' I also read a poster displaying what Molotov wrote in 1932 about massive confiscation of foodstuffs. “If we get the grain, we can impose the Soviet rule. If we do not get the grain, the Soviet rule will die. And who got the grain now? The reactionary Ukrainian farmer and the Kuban Cossack. They will not give us grain willingly. It needs to be taken.” I was impressed by photographs showing consequences of grain taking -- dying children, dead bodies transported like logs of wood, mass graves, etc. -- and by testimonies of survivors of holodomor.

I also saw a memorandum about death statistics from one region, written by two secret police officials (Osinin and Gubarevich) to Kasior, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Among other details they mention 245 cases of ``necrophagy and cannibalism'' Kosior was in charge of collectivization in Ukraine. People like him believed that human sacrifices were worth the benefit -- the superior collective farming of land. A revolution, they used to say, is not conducted by wearing white gloves. It is ironic that several years later Kosior was eliminated as an enemy of the people, together with other Stalin's faithful lieutenants.

Another thing that impressed me at the exhibit was a poster based on 115 letters received by the Central Committee of Ukrainian Communist Party. Some of them were addressed to Stalin. These “were returned from Moscow to Ukraine with orders to punish the writers as enemies of the people.” One of the authors, Mykola Reva, wrote: ``Dear Joseph Vasirionovich; because you are our friend, teacher and father, I had a bold idea of writing to you the whole truth ... The grain lay in the Zahotzero storehouses ... while people were dying of starvation. And at the same time you, Joseph Vasirionovich, said that people are the most valuable capital....” For writing this letter, Mykola Reva was sentenced to 6 years in prison. . . .

Bolsheviks Against Nationalism and Religion (subsection 3.5.3)
Stalin’s 1913 paper, entitled “Marxism and The National Question,” written in Vienna, ends with this sentence: “Thus, the principle of international solidarity of the workers is an essential element in the solution of the national question.” The author is identified as K. Stalin, where K stands for Koba, his revolutionary nickname. Stalin came to southern Poland to visit Lenin, and then traveled to Vienna to visit Bukharin. In those days, Southern Poland was part of the multinational Austrian empire. It is very likely that Lenin and Bukharin contributed significantly to Stalin’s paper. After the revolution, Stalin became a commissar of nationalities. Some consequences of his “social engineering” in this capacity are well known.

Unfortunately, I am not competent to deal with this “national question” component of Stalinism; let historians write about military methods used to build the multi-national Soviet empire, after the Civil War. Let them also write about elimination of leaders of national movements, about deportations of Tartars and Chechenians to Kazakhstan, about the policy of Russification, and about the role of national tensions in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Note that most nationalists supported Lenin’s revolution because independence from Russia was promised to them. Another important component of Stalinism was the war against religions ....

Stalin Was Not Alone. (Section 3.6)
Not many people know that the publication of Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago (28), was actually precipitated by the KGB. According to Orlov (26), the author wanted to publish it much later but called his lawyer in Geneva and ordered immediate publication after a hidden copy of the manuscript fell into the hands of the KGB. Orlov also tells us about a proposal made by Moscow intellectuals (in 1975), to create an international tribunal (like that of Nuremberg) to investigate the crimes described in The Gulag Archipelago.

“I thought then, and still do, that given the passage of so many years after the crimes of the `Red Terror' -- no matter how nightmarish its methods and scale -- there should not be executions or imprisonment of those criminals who are still alive. The former leaders, the members of `troika,' the prosecutors, the interrogators, the guards, the writers of false denunciations, the numerous theoreticians and propagandists of that terror -- let them live. But they must be publicly tried. And the atrocities must be publically investigated, regardless of whether the criminal are living or dead.”

Yes, Stalin was not alone; it would be impossible to kill millions without an efficient social structure and without numerous collaborators. Why didn't the idea of having a trial of Red Terror criminals ever materialize in Russia? Even Yeltsin, the most radical reformer, but also a child of the old regime, failed to initiate public trials in Russia. In another section of his autobiography, Orlov describes a dilemma facing many Soviet intellectuals during the post-Stalinst period. They sympathized with those who were agitating for speedy democratic reforms but feared unpredictable negative consequences. His physicist friend, Kobzarev, for example, was afraid of “the dark instincts of the masses.” Many kinds of dark forces emerged from ruins of the collapsed empire and it is remarkable that people like Kobzarev were able to anticipate them. Stalin knew about dark forces and used them skillfully to destroy the “loveliest dreams on earth.” How long will it take to regenerate truly the loveliest dreams on earth in Russia?

Morality Is A Weapon In Class Struggle (Subsection 3.7.1)
Cleverness was not enough to become a supreme ruler of a large country. To succeed, Stalin also needed loyal secret police with practically unlimited resources and access to all branches of government, including the military. In addition, a new kind of morality was needed to inhibit traditional defenses against evil. According to Lenin and Stalin, morality should be subordinated to the ideology of proletarian revolution. Denying the validity of religion-based morality, they wrote: what is useful to us is moral, what is harmful to us is immoral. Morality is a weapon in class struggle. Party and Komsomol members were drilled to accept that position, and to act accordingly.

The justification was simple. The world is full of injustice and immorality. We want to replace it by a much better “scientifically designed” social structure -- communism. That is why what we do is right, by definition. Here is a good illustration. An act of torture committed by our enemy should be exposed as unspeakable barbarism. We do this to gain sympathy and support of naive people believing in “bourgeois morality.” But an act of torture committed by us to punish an enemy of revolution is not immoral. It is a historical necessity. Likewise, Auschwitz elimination was considered immoral while Kolyma elimination was considered moral.

What distinguishes these two cases? It is not the methodology of killing, gas versus cold; it is the ideology which is being served. Comrade Dzerzhinsky, the first director of punitive Soviet organs, was referred to as a highly moral communist. This honor was a reward for extremely brutal handling of declared class enemies, as ordered by the party of Lenin and Stalin. Other bolsheviks, including those who were later eliminated by Stalin, were also extremely brutal; they were leaders of Red Terror, Civil War, War Communism and Collectivization campaigns. Immorality is probably older than civilizations but Hitler and Stalin elevated it to new heights (29). How long will it take to repair social structures affected by twelve years of open brutality and cynicism in Germany, and by at least fifty years in the Soviet Union? Who should be in charge of organized efforts `of caging and taming monsters inside us'? Some of the monsters, as enumerated in (30), are:

a) Pure, amoral self-interest.
b) Sadism and the thrill of the battlefield.
c) Tribalism, which elevates the group above the individual and turns personal enmity into feuding, war and genocide.
d) Ideology, which can convince people that a struggle between groups - races for the Nazis, classes for the Marxists - is inevitable and necessary for progress.

Molotov And His Wife (Section 3.8)
V. M. Molotov was Stalin's Number 2 man. According to the 1939 stenographic minutes of an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet [quoting Roy Medvediev (34)] Molotov said: ``The ideology of Hitlerism, like any other ideological system, can be either accepted or rejected - it is a matter of political view. But everyone will agree that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force. Therefore it is both senseless and criminal to wage a war `for the liquidation of Hitlerism' while flourishing above it the false flag of the struggle for democracy.''

This was a new party line to endorse the “German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty.” One of the secret protocols of that treaty spoke of the prohibition of Anti-Fascist and Anti-Hitler propaganda. The above words were not for diplomats, they were for comrades in arms. It was a call for accepting Hitler as an ally. In one day the communists were asked to forget about fighting against fascism and to approve new agreements. Hundreds of German communists who escaped to the Soviet Union (comrades in arms, veterans of the Spanish Civil war, etc.) were turned into the Gestapo as an act of good will after the protocols were signed. But the whole affair was not an ideological rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler.

Let us focus on Molotov's private life. It is a good example of a man for whom the will of the party \index{will of the party} was above all other considerations. According to Medvediev (34), Molotov “bears responsibility for the repression of the practically all the members of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Soviet Jews and for the expulsions of many Soviet nationalities from their national territories that had taken place earlier. A victim of one of those repressive campaigns was none other than Molotov's own wife, Polina Semyonovna Zhemchuzhina.” Polina had joined the Party in 1918, when she was still a young girl; only a few years later she was running the women's section of a Party provincial committee in the Ukraine. After marrying Molotov Polina became very close to Stalin's wife. According to (34) “Stalin's marriage was going from bad to worse'' at that time. One night Stalin was rude to his wife during a formal Kremlin dinner. Accompanied by Polina, she left the dinner party and killed herself, later that night. “To Stalin, vengeful and suspicious, Polina Semyonovna was instantly persona non grata, but he knew how to wait and to hide his feelings.” The purges of the 1930s did not affect her.

Polina was Jewish, and, until 1939, she corresponded with a sister who had emigrated to Palestine. During WWII Polina became the leading member of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Soviet Jews. In that capacity she was in contact with Golda Meir the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR. But friendly relations between the two countries deteriorated after 1949. According to Medediev “This was a good moment for Stalin to settle the score with the woman who had once been his wife's close friend and who, in his view, knew too much. Naturally, this was not the charge that was brought against her openly. Polina Semyonovna was accused of `treason against the Motherland' through her links with international Zionism and so on. . . . ‘ All the members of the Politburo voted for her arrest except Molotov, who abstained, although he did not speak in her defense.…” She was arrested at once.

According to (35), “the former General Secretary of the Israeli Communist Party, S. Mikunis, met Molotov in the Kremlin Hospital at Kuntsevo, where he was sent one day. He wrote: `Quite unexpectedly, one day I ran into Molotov in one of the corridors. I went up to him and asked, why did you let them arrest Polina Zhemchuzhina? Without moving a muscle in his steely face, he replied, Because I am a member of the Politburo and I must obey Party discipline....’ It happened that the day of Stalin's funeral, 9 March, was also Molotov's birthday. As they were leaving the mausoleum, Khrushchev and Malenkov wished him a happy birthday, despite the occasion, and asked what he would like as a present. `Give me back Polina,' he replied coldly and moved on. “

Before Stalin's death, Polina, who had been sentenced to several years in exile, was delivered to Moscow in preparation for a trial against Jewish doctors. She had been interrogated and tortured. A week later Beria told her ``Polina! You are an honored Communist.’ '' She fainted, and was then reunited with Molotov. This story shows how “the will of the party” was accepted by one of the leaders. Did he believe that the imprisonment of his wife was necessary or was he simply afraid of Stalin?

4.2.3 Stalin Will Fix It (Section4.2.3)
Another interesting conversation took place two years later, in the locked prison car, traveling toward Kolyma. The women knew that the chief of the Soviet Secret Police, Yezhov, was executed and replaced by Beria. They also knew, and accepted it as just, that Yezhov replaced Yagoda, who was also executed as an enemy of revolution. Stalin did not want those who knew too much to be alive. But that is not how they evaluated the situation. Twenty of them (out of seventy in that car) asserted “with lunatic insistence” that Stalin was not aware of what was going on, and that Beria would set things right. Stalin, they believed, was a highly moral individual and he would correct injustices.

This was not an ordinary trainload. The prisoners were
not defeated civil war opponents or Mensheviks and SRs hit by the sword of proletarian dictatorship. Nor were these women nationalists or kulaks or members of uncommon religious sects. A large fraction of them were past members of the Bolshevik Party who believed in the necessity of the “intensification of class warfare in the process of building socialism.” For many years they had enthusiastically participated in this warfare until they became victims. Personal tragedies of these women are well described in the autobiography.

Foreign Communists Accept Ridiculous Accusations (Section 4.7.2)
Foreign communist leaders, who knew Bukharin personally, immediately accepted Soviet accusations. According to (42), “virtually every Communist party in every country of the world held a wave of meetings and published manifestoes in 1938 supporting the execution of Bukharin, Rykov, and their fellows. Take, for example, the French Communist party, whose leader Maurice Thorez stood up at one of the numerous workers’ assemblies on 3 June 1938 and spoke as follows: ‘Justice in the Soviet Union has performed a service of inestimable value in the cause of peace by striking down without mercy those Trotskyite Bukharinite traitors, murderers, and Gestapo agents, those fifth column elements, those canting hypocrites, mourned by one or two people in England, for having been punished with the necessary severity.’

A large group of Communist and members of the Communist Youth movement sent a telegram to Yezhov in the spring of 1938. Part of it read: ‘Your resolution and your unbending will have led to the exposure of vile agents of fascism.... Please be assured of our total confidence in the justice of the people who have punished the traitors.’”

People who once glorified Bukharin as the leading party theoretician had no trouble accepting the absurd accusations. Khrushchev was one of these people. I suspect that this was the main reason for not rehabilitating Bukharin in the 1950s, when many other prominent Bolsheviks were rehabilitated. The formal posthumous rehabilitation occurred only in February of 1988, under Gorbachev. According to (27), the writer Edvard Radzinsky (38) studied forty-three letters which Bukharin wrote to Stalin during his year in prison. The victim was presumably able to accept his fate as a necessary sacrifice toward achieving ”some great and bold political idea.” Bukharin’s widow, Anna Larina who survived the Gulag, memorized his last message before the arrest and published it in her memoirs (44).

How Did Stalin and Beria Die? (Section 4.3)
There are several versions of Stalin’s death. All agree that Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin came for a late dinner on February 28, 1953. They left the dacha at about 4 A.M and Stalin went to bed. The guards were used to his sleeping during the day but in the evening they entered the room and found him on the floor. He was not able to communicate. It took four hours before the doctors arrived. According to (38, 39) Beria knew that he was about to be declared the next enemy of the people. He would be eliminated, like his predecessors, together with Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and others. It was going to be 1937 all over again. The social architect felt that another wave of human sacrifice was needed on the altar of communist ideology. Ignatiev, a Party official unconnected with Beria, had already been appointed to a sensitive State Security position by Stalin. Was it Beria who eliminated the boss to save himself? . . .

Beria was soon eliminated. According to the same reference the description of his execution has survived. “They tied his hands behind his back and attached him to a hook driven into a wooden board. Beria said. ‘Permit me to say ....’ but the Procurator General said, ‘Gag his mouth with a towel.’ One protruding eye glared at them wildly over the blindfold. The officer pulled the trigger and the bullet struck him in the middle of the forehead.” For eight years the mummified body of Stalin remained in the Mausoleum; it was afterwards moved into a grave by the Kremlin wall.

Was It A Police State? (Section 5.2)
Here is how this question was answered by Kolakowski (49). “It is important to notice, in considering the purges, that Stalin’s Russia was at no time governed by the police, nor was the police ever ‘above the party’: this was an alibi used by would-be reformers after Stalin’s death, who maintained that their task was to restore party supremacy. True, the police under Stalin could arrest and murder party members
at will, but not on the highest level, where all such procedures had to be ordered or approved by the top party authorities and in particular by Stalin himself. Stalin used the police to rule the party, but he himself ruled both party and state in his capacity as party leader, not as a security chief....

This also explains the special part played by ideology.Ideology is not simply an aid or adjunct to the system but an absolute condition of its existence, irrespective of whether people actually believe in it or not. Stalinist socialism created an empire ruled from Moscow, the basis of whose legality is entirely derived from ideology: in particular, from the doctrine that the Soviet Union embodies the interests of all working people and especially the working class everywhere, that it represents their desires and aspirations, and that it is the first step towards a world revolution that
will liberate the toiling masses wherever they may be. The Soviet system could not do without this ideology, which is the sole raison d’etre for the existing apparatus of power. The apparatus is essentially ideological and internationalist in character and could not be replaced by the police, the army, or any other institution.” On the other hand, the Soviet political system would rapidly collapse without a powerful, effective, and brutal, secret police.

Truth Is Relative (Subsection 5.4.1)
Dialectical materialism was an ideological component of Marxism-Leninism. According to (49), “... that ideology was used by the governing bureaucracy to glorify itself and justify its policies, including those of imperialist expansion. All the philosophical and historical principles of which Marxism-Leninism is composed reach their culmination and final meaning in a few simple propositions. Socialism, defined as state ownership of the means of production, is historically the highest form of social order and represents the interests of all working people; the Soviet system is
therefore the embodiment of progress and, as such, is automatically right against any adversary.

... To this category also belongs the assertion ... that truth is relative. If this is no more than to say, as Engels noted, that in the history of science received opinions are often not abandoned altogether as a result of later research but that their validity is recognized as limited, there is no reason to dispute the accuracy of the statement, but it is in no way specifically Marxist. If, on the other hand, it means that ‘we cannot know everything’ or ‘a judgment may be right in some circumstances but not in others,’ these again are ancient truisms. We did not, for example, need Marx’s intellect to discover that rain is beneficial in time of drought but not in flood-time.... ”

Yes indeed, one does not have to be very sophisticated to accept the following four principles of diamat: (a) everything is in constant change; (b) things, in a given system, are interconnected; (c) slow accumulation of quantitative changes often leads to sudden qualitative changes, for example, a car is no longer drivable; and (d) the world is full of internal contradictions. But let me go back to Kolakowski (49). “If these observations are correct then one is left to wonder why so many sophisticated thinkers accepted Dialectical Materialism as a good theory, a master key able to unlock all the secrets of the universe, including those of history and politics. I am referring to intellectuals (historians, economists, political scientists, philosophers, etc.) who lived in Western countries and who had access to books forbidden behind the Iron Curtain.”

6.3 Interesting Speculations (Section 6.3)
How can we understand people who showed outstanding courage in conspiratorial work, revolution and civil war and who failed to resist their own destruction? That question is addressed in an interview between a historian A.B. Ulam and a political scientist G.R. Urban (24). There is no clear answer to this question, except for later times, when Stalin made himself irreplaceable. According to Khrushchev, the opportunity to replace the supreme leader existed in June 1941, after the country was invaded by Germans. Stalin was in shock and totally unable to function. Instead of trying to replace him, various Soviet leaders called on him urging him to snap out of it and to take hold of the reins of the country. And what about generals and marshals involved in the 1937 Tukhachevsky trial, and in other military trials? At that time, shortly before the non-aggression pact was signed with Germany, “3 of the 5 marshals, 3 of 4 full generals, all 12 lieutenant generals, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 of divisional ones were liquidated.” Perhaps Stalin was trying to show Hitler that he had no military ambitions to attack him.

Another question has to do with morality. Lenin wrote: “We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas that transcend class conceptions. In our
opinion, morality is entirely subordinated to the interest of the class war.... Communist morality is identical with the fight for the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” But who was to decide what does or does not promote the victory of the proletariat? It was he himself. And later it was Stalin. Millions of innocents were eliminated under the banner of that morality. Why did the country accept it without resistance? No clear answer to this question is given.

According to Ulam, “Sergo Ordzhonikidze [Stalin’s Georgian friend, a Politburo member since 1926] shot himself after his brother had been tortured and executed.... Why did he shoot himself and not Stalin with whom he had a long personal conversation one day before his suicide?” Probably because he realized that by killing Stalin he would become a killer of the system to which his entire life was devoted. I recall that, during our return (by train) from a resort called Anapa (probably in 1937, when I was six years old), my father proudly explained that a new kind of locomotive, built in the Soviet Union, was named Sergo Ordzhonikidze.

Aryan Supremacy and Proletarian Dictatorship (Section 6.6)
It is remarkable that the two most destructive ideologies of the 20th century were conceived in a highly civilized country, Germany. Marxism, which subsequently became the ideology of the Soviet Union, was based on the idea that the proletarian dictatorship would lead to social harmony. Hitlerism, the ideology of the Third Reich, was based on the idea of race superiority. The world, according to Hitler, would be better without Jews and other inferior races. Stalin and Hitler viewed themselves as agents of historical destiny. Moral reservations against mass killing, according to them, were totally irrelevant. Morality had to be modified to make killing possible. Both “final solution” ideologies were rooted in the concept of supremacy of one group of people over another. For Hitler it was the idea of Aryan domination; for Marx, Lenin and Stalin it was the idea of proletarian domination. The concept of supremacy is not consistent with the concept of social harmony. Were Hitler’s Nazi state and Stalin’s Bolshevik state deplorable aberrations or were they precursors of what may come in other forms?

An Odd Interpretation of Stalinism (Section 6.7)
In browsing the Internet I became aware of interesting contemporary Russian attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and Beria. The authors, such as Yuri Zhukov and Iurii Mukhin, are probably members of The Communist Party of the Russian Federation. They claim that Stalin was not the supreme ruler of the party and the state, that the blame for horrible things that happened in the Soviet Union, such as GULAG, massive executions and other secret police injustice, should not be placed on Stalin and Beria. The blame should be put on local party secretaries, such as Nikita Khrushchev and Robert Eikhe.

The authors also claim that executed top Red Army officers, such as Tuchachevski, were guilty of conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet system, that nearly all Crimean Tartars drafted to the Red Army deserted and enlisted in German anti-Soviet military units, that what was reported by Khrushchev, in the famous speech denouncing Stalin, was nothing but lies, etc. etc. Khrushchev himself, they claim, conspired to overthrow the Soviet Union in the 1930s. But he outmaneuvered the secret police and deceived the party by implementing terror with exceptional zeal.

Stalin and Beria, according to these Russian historians, were good communists trying to restrain abuses in the state of proletarian dictatorship (in the 1930s and after WWII). But local party secretaries, and other party apparatchiks, prevented them from introducing desirable reforms. I do not believe that such propaganda, presumably based on Soviet archives, can be productive in today’s Russia; too many people affected by Stalinism, and their children, are still alive. But it can be productive in countries which never experienced proletarian dictatorship, especially if people know nothing about Soviet disaster. It is interesting that crimes committed against a large number of Soviet people, in the name of a faulty doctrine, are not totally denied; they are only reinterpreted, to shift the blame from communist ideology to overzealous party bureaucrats.

Who are the authors of new interpretations of Stalinism? For some reason I think of them as professional propagandists, probably trained to teach Marxism-Leninism at Soviet Universities. These are probably the same people who would tell me, “Unfortunately, one cannot make an omelet without breaking the egg.” And they would repeat that the omelet received by Soviet people is much better, and more plentiful than omelet received by working people in capitalist countries. They would quote what Engels wrote about miserable conditions of workers in England and insist that present situation is even worse.

Dedicated to the doctrine, such professors probably believe that the ideology of proletarian dictatorship, on which they were raised, is infallible and that interpretation of empirical data to fit the theory is their duty. In physics, which is my profession, it is usually the other way around; a theory that does not fit all known experimental data must be replaced by a better theory. Unfortunately, my data base is very limited, as far as information about Stalinism is concerned. Writings of those who survived Kolyma are more important to me than what is written by propagandists. On the basis of what I know, I hold Stalin responsible for killing my father, and other good people. Their suffering should never be forgotten.