THE VICTIMS RETURN: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin
by STEPHEN F. COHEN
Publishing Works, 2010, 216 pages, $45 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
When President Boris Yeltsin's 'shock therapy' of rapid transition to free-market capitalism plunged post-Soviet Russia into economic collapse, poverty, corruption and Mafia-like crime, the reputation of the former tyrant, Joseph Stalin, rose on a "tidal wave of social pain, anger, and nostalgia for Soviet times", writes Stephen Cohen in The Victims Return.
Stalin's austere economic policies could, in retrospect, seem like social justice, whilst the new order of "flagrant wealth and privilege" could recast Stalin's repression as the sort of retribution needed against a new array of 'enemies of the people'. This is some achievement of capitalism in Russia - to make even Stalin, and his quarter century of grotesque terror, look good.
Cohen estimates that some 12-20 million people perished under Stalin's rule from 1929 to 1953. Most were ordinary peasants and workers sacrificed during Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture and rapid industrialisation, whilst a secret police and labour camp apparatus targeted political opponents, real and imaginary, of Stalin. During the Great Terror (1936-1939), millions of political victims were arrested, tortured and summarily shot or sent into punishing labour camps (the Gulag) where bitter climates, crushing work, brutal guards and malnutrition laid waste to them.
The cover for this blood purge was to allegedly protect the Soviet Union from a giant conspiracy of anti-socialist saboteurs and traitors in league with foreign capitalist powers. These 'traitors to the Motherland' included thousands of prominent Bolsheviks, amongst them nearly all of Lenin's original 1917 Central Committee, tortured into degrading 'confessions' at farcical Show Trials.
The terror nightmare only began to abate following Stalin's death in 1953 when his successor, Nikita Kruschev, began a de-Stalinisation reform, albeit one limited by the blood on Kruschev's own hands as a member of Stalin's ruling coterie. Kruschev's early reforms met strong opposition from Stalin's other heirs, those with much greater complicity in Stalin's crimes, who thwarted Kruschev's initiatives and resorted to ponderous bureaucratic procedures to delay the release of the fifteen million remaining political prisoners.
Only after Kruschev's speech denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, which was read to all 25 million Communist Party members across the country, did the pace of release quicken. By 1959, most surviving political victims had been freed.
Ever fearful of a repeat persecution, most returnees slipped back into a quiet anonymity, choosing political conformity, but some went on to play important political roles as dissidents within or outside the ruling Communist Party, Many former members of the party rejoined, believing that Kruschev was fighting to "restore original Leninist values perverted by Stalin".
Gulag returnees also had considerable trouble getting jobs or welfare through unsympathetic Stalinist bureaucrats who still dominated the large party and state administrative structure. By comparison, the authors and agents of the terror fared much better. The crimes of the Stalin era victimisers greatly exceeded their punishments, amounting to little more than loss of job, pension, rank or party membership. Less than thirty of the most brutal interrogators and camp commandants were sentenced to death, less than a hundred imprisoned. Many political police hung onto their victims' property which they had 'inherited', whilst many terror administrators retained their new career built on the "holes left by those who were 'taken'" in the Terror.
The terror beneficiaries, however, were 'now trembling for their names, positions, apartments, dachas' following the return of the Gulag prisoners. They were 'afraid of History'. The truth about the callous and huge human cost of the Gulag, harsh Stalinist economic policies and the Soviet victory against the Nazis would threaten their power and privileges.
Thus, after Kruschev's 'Thaw' came the freeze. Strict censorship of the entire Stalin era was reimposed under post-Kruschev leaders from 1964 to 1985, and selective repression used to ensure the rule of the neo-Stalinist party-state administrative bureaucracy without the fear of itself again being consumed by a renewed paranoid Stalinist terror. Stalin's terror victims disappeared from this new political and cultural landscape whilst many of their persecutors were rewarded with early release from prison, readmittance to the Party, and restoration of their jobs, rank and pensions.
It took the collapse of the eastern European neo-Stalinist regimes to propel the emergence of another reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, in an attempt to forestall the same fate in Russia. All Stalin's victims were exonerated under Gorbachev but the suite of his de-Stalinisation reforms, however, merely whetted the popular appetite for total overthrow of bureaucratic rule which came in 1991.
Since then, there has been "open political struggle" over Russia's Stalinist heritage, with the terror victims pitched against "Gulag-deniers", a "Stalin renaissance" and the liking of current Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, for authoritarian policies.
Although Cohen is a liberal, not a Marxist, historian, he avoids the triumphalist crowing of anti-Marxist political conservatives for whom every victim of Stalin is a nail driven in the coffin of socialism. Cohen spurns what he has elsewhere called the "malignant straight line" theory which claims a genetic political link from Marx to Lenin to Stalin, roping in anyone who has ever dreamt of a more equal society.
Cohen's historical temperament is less close to anti-Marxist dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, than to one of Cohen's sources, Roy Medvedev, a Marxist-Leninist dissident who "valued facts over polemics" and whose father, a Red Army officer and professor of philosophy, perished in the Gulag.
What is missing from Cohen, however, is a systematic materialist analysis of Stalin's rule and how the use of terror served not just one evil man but the interests of the large bureaucratic class which was Stalin's support base in a society whose economy and working class had been drastically impoverished by counter-revolution, civil war, imperialist invasion and famine.
In the context of such economic backwardness, terror not only plays a political role in preserving bureaucratic power and privilege but authoritarian regimes can use forced labour for primitive capital accumulation (the Gulag's mining and lumber camps were particularly crucial). The perennial problem of forced labour's chronically low productivity, however, makes it unsuitable for more developed stages of economic growth, like Russia in the decades after Stalin.
This undermining of the economic role of Stalin's forced labour camps thus set the stage for anti-Gulag political reform but reformers like Kruschev needed a shove from below. Cohen, however, believes that "political reform has always begun at the top" and he skates over the history of Gulag rebellions which made the camps increasingly unmanageable and politically costly.
Also absent from Cohen is a consideration of the role played in Stalin's rise to power by the Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bukharin, whom, rather than Trotsky, Cohen considers to be the "real Soviet alternative to Stalinism". The alliance in the 1920s of the Stalinist 'Centre' with the pro-market Bolshevik 'right', represented by Bukharin, however, defeated Trotsky's Left Opposition and, after Stalin's turn against the Bukharinists, doomed the revolution to total degeneration and a terror-fuelled police state.
These analytical gaps aside, Cohen's book is a commendable account, with considerable political and human interest, of Stalin's Gulag victims who are a tragic reminder of Stalin's utter betrayal of the Russian Revolution and of democratic socialism.