How do you write the history of a political movement which killed between 100,000,000 and 150,000,000 men, women, and children? You gather some of the best historians in Europe under the direction of the Director of Research for the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris and have them examine the archives in the former Soviet Bloc to reveal the crimes committed by generations of those who felt they could change human nature.  Instead, they tortured, murdered, deported, starved, and exploited the hundreds of millions under their control.

This classic of political writing features essays by some of the brilliant intellectual minds from the 1930s through the mid-1950s.  The studies include those of Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender.  All had joined (some for only a few days) their local Communist parties and all had rejected it for a variety of reasons.  Each sought to find a solution to the problems they faced, such as the fall of Capitalism (often predicted, none accurately yet), artistic freedom, someone to stand against Fascism, the end of racism, etc.  Each found that while the theory was supposedly “scientific”, the practical application of the theory in fact worked against the solutions they sought and were run by humans with the same emotions, fears, etc. that have always existed

Although Valentin Berezhkov was not Stalin’s primary interpreter, he did attend many important meetings with Stalin during the Second World War, including Yalta and in Moscow.  With a natural flair for languages, Berezhkov found that he was chosen for important work by Molotov and was suddenly thrust into the middle of history making events.  His memoirs are interesting as they reflect the mind set of suspicion, fear and ambition at the very highest levels of Soviet government. The leaders of the State were constantly looking over their shoulders and testing the ground beneath their feet as their leader, Stalin, the consummate politician watched them for any inking of disloyalty or lack of duty.

A few years ago, I was in St. Petersburg and on a tour to the Hermitage.  The guide was a big man, over six feet tall, impressively built with a scar on one cheek.  I was able to ask him a few questions about his life and I found that he had been a Colonel in the Soviet nuclear missile forces stationed in Siberia. When asked why he left such a responsible position to end up on a bus loaded with tourists, he explained that when the Soviet Union collapsed, he was deactivated and yet he preferred his new job.  Why?  As he explained, his base was in the middle of a great forest, snowed in for most of the year, surrounded by vicious bears and all there was to eat was gruel.  The look on his face and the way he said the word “gruel” brought home to me more than any book what his life, which was relatively privileged must have been like for those who were imprisoned in the Gulag.

In 2008, Tim Tzouiadis wrote a book entitled, The Forsaken, An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia in which thousands of Americans left for jobs and security in the Soviet Union during the Depression.  Led to believe the stories of American journalists (such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times) and “intellectuals” like George Bernard Shaw, they saw the Soviet Union as the wave of the future after the “failure” of Capitalism.  Hundreds were also offered positions on a contract by Henry Ford who was helping the Soviets build auto plans; they were skilled tradesmen and their skills were lacking in that war-torn land.  Of all the thousands who took the trip, only a handful survived and returned to the U.S.; most of those were children who were sent home for some reason or some workers who quickly turned around and returned. Later, having lost their U.S. passports, most were arrested and sent to the Gulags or executed outright as being “spies” and “wreckers”.  Only one man and one woman survived terms in the Gulags to return to the U.S.

There is one great question that courses through this amazing book and that is, “Is there such a thing as Russian Culture?”.  In just under 700 pages, Figes, one of my favorite historians, traces Russia from its roots through the collapse of the Soviet Union, reviewing art, music, literature and culture in general.  To say the least, Russians (let’s exclude the peasant class for now) have been torn between their experience with Asia (Mongols, etc.) and their disillusionment with the West.  They have moved first one way then the other, all the time denying the worse of their history while attempting to create a new world for themselves.

Nedrasov who fought as a sapper in the trenches of Stalingrad does not present a sweeping, patriotic novel of individual bravery, but rather a story of small episodes where individual soldiers flit in and out of the main characters life during the battle.  Some are brave, some are stupid, some seek to earn medals while others wait for their end. 

Andrei Vyshinsky rose to fame as the chief prosecutor during many of the infamous show trials of the late 1930’s in the Soviet Union.  A brilliant student, lawyer and lover of academia, he was a second level (never entering Stalin’s inner circle) bureaucrat who managed to use the deaths of those he prosecuted to advance his career.  Although the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, Joseph E. Davies felt that the trials were conducted to the highest legal standards (his book, Mission to Moscow was made into a terrible propaganda movie in 1943) they could only be viewed in that manner if you wondered why defendants who recanted were taken from the court room and then their written statements reversing their recanted statements were admitted and they were convicted (many who recanted were so badly beaten that they could not be taken into the public eye and were quickly executed).  As a side note, Ambassador Davies spent most his time antique hunting and sent hundreds of “finds” back to his home in the U.S.

For decades, Robert Conquest, before his death was considered the premier expert on the rise of the Soviet Union.  His research was often criticized by those on the left but with the opening of the Soviet archives, his excellence was proven beyond a doubt.  In this book, he lays out what may be the greatest genocide in the world’s history, that of the Ukrainians especially during the years of 1929-1933.  During that time, as many fourteen million people were executed or starved to death in a deliberate policy designed to break the back of Ukrainian nationalism and the will of the peasants to resist Soviet power. 

According to Marxist “scientific thought”, man is shaped by his environment; change the environment and you can create a “New Man”.  The same belief applies to plants and animals.  Thus, it was that while the Soviet Union spent more on scientific research than any other nation, they also managed to produce some of the worse examples of what we would call “junk science”.