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New
York Review of Books Review In
Cannibalistic Times By Tatyana Tolstaya,
Translated by Jamey Gambrell The
Great Terror: A Reassessment by
Robert Conquest Oxford
University Press, 570 pp., $24.95 Last
year Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was translated into
Russian and published in the USSR in the journal Neva.
(Unfortunately, only the first edition was published. I hope that the
second, revised and enlarged edition will be published as well, if it
is not suppressed by the censorship so recently revived in the Soviet
Union.) The fate of this book in the USSR is truly remarkable. Many of
those who opened Neva in 1989–1990 exclaimed: "But I know all
this stuff already!" How did they know it? From Conquest himself. The
first edition appeared twenty years ago in English, was translated into
Russian, and infiltrated what was then a closed country. It quickly
became an underground best seller, and there's not a thinking person
who isn't acquainted with the book in one form or another: those who
knew English read it in the original,
others got hold of the Russian text, made photocopies at night, and
passed them on. The book gave birth to much historical (underground and
émigré) research, the facts were assimilated, reanalyzed, argued,
confirmed, elaborated. In short, the book almost achieved the status of
folklore, and many Soviet people measure their own history "according
to Conquest," sometimes without realizing that he actually exists. This
is why many readers, especially the younger ones, thought of Conquest's
book as a compilation of "commonly known facts" when they read it for
the first time. The author should be both offended and flattered. This
is a book about the Stalinist terror, about the Great Terror, which
began in the Thirties and continued—growing and fading—until the death
of the Great Tyrant in 1953. The
very expression "Great Terror" leads to the idea of the "Little Terror"
which remains necessarily outside the confines of this book. Of course,
no one can write a book about Russia that includes everything, explains
everything, weaves together the facts and motifs of history, revealing
the root system that every so often puts out shoots and suddenly
blossoms into the frightful flower of a Great Terror. I'm reminded of
the protagonist of Borges's story "Aleph,"
who tried to create a poem that described the entire universe—but
failed, of course. No one person can possibly accomplish such a task. The
Little Terror in Russia has been around from time immemorial. It has
lasted for centuries and continues to this very day. So many books have
been written about the Little Terror! Virtually all the literature of
the nineteenth century, which is so valued in the West, tells the story
of the Little Terror, sometimes with indignation, sometimes as
something taken for granted, and tries to understand its causes,
explain its mechanisms, give detailed
portraits of its victims: individual personalities, entire classes, and
the country as a whole. What is Russian society and why is it the way
it is? What can and must be done in order to free ourselves of this
all-permeating terror, of total slavery, of fear of any and everyone?
How do we ensure that an individual's fate does not depend on others'
whims? Why is it that any revolution, any attempt to rid Russia of
terror, leads to an even greater terror? Russia
didn't begin yesterday and won't end tomorrow. The attempts of many
writers and researchers to explain Russian horrors by the Bolshevik
rise to power are naive. The sigh of relief that in recent years has
been heard more and more often in the West is naive as well: the cold
war is over, Gorbachev has come, everything
will soon be just fine. (The events of the last few months have shown
the West what has been clear to Soviet people for almost two years:
nothing good can be expected from Gorbachev.) Human
life is short. For many people, delving into history's depths is
boring, frightening, and they have no time for it. Furthermore, in the
West the sense of history has weakened or completely vanished: the West
does not live in history, it lives in
civilization (by which I mean the self-awareness of transnational
technological culture as opposed to the subconscious, unquestioned
stream of history). But in Russia there is practically no civilization,
and history lies in deep, untouched layers over the villages, over the
small towns that have reverted to near wilderness, over the large,
uncivilized cities, in those places where they try not to let
foreigners in, or where foreigners themselves don't go. Even in the
middle of Moscow, within a ten-minute walk from the Kremlin, live
people with the consciousness of the fifteenth or eleventh century (the
eleventh century was better, more comprehensible to us, because at that
time culture and civilization were more developed in Russia than in the
fifteenth century). When you have any dealings with these people, when
you start a conversation, you feel that you've landed in an episode of The
Twilight Zone. The constraints of a short article don't allow me to
adequately describe this terrifying feeling, well known to Europeanized
Russians, of coming into contact with what we call the absurd, a
concept in which we invest far greater meaning than Western people do.
Here one needs literature-- Kafka, Ionesco; one needs academic scholars
like Levy-Bruhl with his study of prelogical thought. Archeological
digs have been carried out in the ancient Russian city of Novgorod,
once an independent republic carrying on independent trade with the
West. The earth reveals deep layers of the city's history. In the early
ones, from the eleventh or twelfth century, there are many birch-bark
documents and letters written by simple people that testify to the
literacy of the population. And there are also remains of good leather
footwear. In the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, when Novgorod
was conquered by Moscow, letters disappear, and instead of leather
boots lapti appear, a kind of shoe
made from bast. The
sixteenth century, when Ivan the Terrible ruled, was also a time of
Great Terror, perhaps even the first government-wide terror on the
territory of what was then Russia, a terror that is horribly
reminiscent of Stalinist times. It is particularly appalling in what
would seem to be its inexplicableness, its lack of precedent: after
all, there wasn't any Lenin, there were no
Bolsheviks or revolutions preceding Ivan the Terrible. It was during
his reign that someone said: "We Russians don't need to eat; we eat one
another and this satisfies us." The
backward motion of history, the submersion of culture under a thick
layer of gilded, decorative "Asiatic savagery," governmental piracy,
guile elevated to principle, unbridled caprice, an extraordinary
passivity and lack of will combined with an impulsive cruelty;
incompletely suppressed paganism, undeveloped Christianity; a blind,
superstitious belief in the spoken, and especially in the written,
word; the sense of sin as a secret and repulsive pleasure (what
Russians call Dostoevskyism). How can all
this be described, how can one give a sense of the ocean from which the
huge wave of a Great Terror periodically rises? Robert
Conquest investigates only the Great Terror, not touching on the Little
one. He sees its roots in the Soviet regime that formed before Stalin,
in the very principles and organization of the Soviet state. In his own
way he is absolutely right; this is true, and every investigation must
begin somewhere. I merely wish to remind the reader once again (and
Robert Conquest knows this very well) that the Soviet state was not
created out of thin air, that its inhabitants were the inhabitants of
yesterday's Russian state who awoke one fine morning to find themselves
under the so-called Soviet regime. The Revolution and the civil war
that soon followed led to the exile and destruction or decivilizing of the Europeanized Russian
population (by Europeanized I mean people who were literate, educated,
who possessed a work ethic, a developed religious consciousness,
respect for law and reason, and who were also familiar with Europe and
the achievements of world culture). Those who survived and remained in
Russia lost the right to speak their mind and were too frightened or
weak to influence anything. Russian society, though it wandered in the
dark for centuries, had nonetheless by 1917 given birth not only to an
educated class, but to a large number of people with high moral
standards and a conscience, to honest people who were not indifferent
to issues of social good. This is the intelligentsia—not really a
class, but a fellowship of people "with moral law in their breast," as
Kant put it. Lenin hated them more than anyone else, and they were the
first to be slaughtered. When Gorky wrote to Lenin in their defense,
saying that "the intelligentsia is the brain of the nation," Lenin
answered with the famous phrase: "It's not the brain, it's the shit." The
savage, barbaric, "Asiatic" part of the Russian empire was invited to
participate in the "construction of a new world." and its members
received certain privileges, some people in word alone, others in fact.
What this section of the population really represented, what it was
capable of and what it aspired to, no one actually knew, particularly
the Soviet leaders, whose notions about the "people" derived
exclusively from their own theories; the model for the "worker" was
taken from the German or English working class, and the peasant was
entirely dreamed up. Arrogant, impatient, cruel, barely literate people
took advantage of the historical moment (the war dragging on, the
military leadership's lack of talent, thievery in the army and the rear
guard; a weak tsar; and after the February Revolution, a weak
transitional government, widespread disorder, chaos, a dissatisfied
people, etc.) to carry out what they called a revolution, but what was
actually a counter-revolutionary coup. As is
well known, Lenin's initial idea was to hold onto power for no less a
period than the French Commune once did. This desire to become a
chapter heading in a history textbook is quite characteristic of
bookish, theoretical thinking. Then he intended to suffer a defeat, go
underground, and work for a real coup. However, no one ended up taking
power away from the Bolsheviks: they were better organized and much
more cynical and unscrupulous than any of their opponents. Seizing
power turned out not to be too difficult. But governing the Russian
empire was almost impossible. (Even today no one knows how.) Terror
came into use. In
one of his telegrams Lenin exclaims indignantly: "We're not shooting
enough professors." Isn't this a portent of typical Stalinist methods:
destruction by category? Under Stalin arrest by category became a
regular thing: today they're killing miners, tomorrow they're
destroying railway engineers, then they'll get around to peasants, then
historians of local customs (students of local lore, history, and
economy were almost completely destroyed for being "spies"). One of my
grandfathers, Mikhail Lozinsky, a
well-known translator of the poetry of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega,
Corneille, who spoke six languages fluently, was frequently
interrogated in the early 1920s for participating in the "Poets Guild"
literary group; the ignorant investigator kept trying to find out where
the "Guild" kept their weapons. This was under Lenin, not Stalin. His
wife (my grandmother) was jailed for several months at the same time,
perhaps because so many of her friends were members of the Social
Revolutionary party. She later remembered that she had never before or
since had such a pleasant time with so many intelligent and educated
people. In 1921 my mother's godfather, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was shot on a false accusation of
involvement in a "monarchist plot." (There were other deaths in our
family, but fewer than in some. The hatred many felt toward our family
because of this was typical, and was expressed in the following way:
"Why is it that they've lost so few family members?") Gumilev's wife, the famous poet Anna Akhmatova, referred to these relatively peaceful
times as "vegetarian." Cannibalistic
times didn't emerge out of thin air. The people willing to carry out
Bolshevik orders had to ripen for the task. They matured in the murk of
Russian villages, in the nightmare of factory work conditions, in the
deep countryside, and in the capitals, Moscow and Petersburg. They were
already there, there were a lot of them, and they could be counted on.
"God forbid we should ever witness a Russian revolt, senseless and
merciless," our brilliant poet Pushkin remarked as early as the first
quarter of the nineteenth century. He knew what he was talking about.
Was Lenin counting on the senselessness and mercilessness of Russians,
or did he simply fail to take them into account? Whatever the case, by
fate's inexorable law, he, too, was victimized by his own creation: his
mistress, Inessa Armand, was apparently
killed; power was torn from his paralyzed hands during his lifetime; it
is rumored that Stalin murdered Lenin's wife, Nadezhda
Krupskaya, by sending her a poisoned cake. Apparently, it is
rumored-- because no one knows precisely. (The vision of this somewhat
stupid, self-assured old woman-- who forbade children's stories because
they were "unrealistic," but who was honest in her own way and not
malicious-- eating a spoonful of cake with icing and poison provokes
mixed feelings in me. Mea culpa.) And
how could a Russian revolt be anything but senseless and merciless,
when the Russian government had exhibited a senseless lack of mercy
toward its own people for centuries? From time immemorial the
subjugated Russian classes have been required to inform their sovereign
of anyone who for whatever reason seemed suspicious to them. From the
mid-seventeenth century on, the law prescribed the death penalty for
failure to report a crime committed or intended. Not only the criminal,
but all of his relatives must be reported. Thus, for example, since
unauthorized flight abroad was considered a crime, the escapee's entire
family became criminals, and death awaited them all, because it was
supposed that they could not have been ignorant of the intended
betrayal. Interrogation was carried out under torture, and of course
everyone "confessed." The
Stalinist regime didn't invent anything three hundred years later, it simply reproduced the political
investigation techniques that were already a longstanding tradition in
the Russian state. Only more of the population was included, and the
pretexts for arrest became more trivial. But perhaps there was no
significant difference?… After all, neither
the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century had their Conquest, someone
to describe in scrupulous detail every aspect of what occurred. The
parallels between arrests in the eighteenth century and the twentieth
are so close that it's hard to shake the feeling that time has
stopped…. In an article on the history of denunciation by the Soviet
historian Evgeny Anisimov,
I read about something that happened in 1732. A man informed on a
certain merchant, claiming that the merchant had called him a
"traitor." The merchant was arrested (pronouncing "indecent words" was
a political crime which brought suffering, torture, Siberia). With
great difficulty the merchant was able to prove that the word "traitor"
referred not to the other man, but to a dog sitting on the porch (the
merchant was speaking out loud about the fact that the dog would betray
him: it would follow whoever fed it better…). A witness was found who
confirmed that a dog actually was wandering around the porch during the
conversation. This saved the merchant. Two
hundred years later, in the 1930s, a herdsman was arrested and sent to
the Stalinist camps for referring to a cow as a "whore" because she
made advances to another cow. His crime was formulated as "slandering
the communal farm herd." Of
course, those who don't agree with me, who see a fundamental difference
between the Russian and Soviet approaches, will say that totalitarian
thinking in the Soviet period becomes all-encompassing. Previously, a
dog was simply a dog, an animal; but now a cow becomes an integral part
of the regime; he who affronts the cow's honor is aiming-- in the final
analysis-- at the well-being and morals of the People. And they are also
right. I only want to say that totalitarian thinking was not invented
by the Soviet regime, but arose in the bleak depths of Russian history,
and was subsequently developed and fortified by Lenin, Stalin, and
hundreds of their comrades in arms, talented students of past tyrants,
sensitive sons of the people. This idea, on which I will insist, is
extremely unpopular. In certain Russian circles it is considered simply
obscene. Solzhenitsyn has often denounced those who think as I do;
others will inevitably try to unearth my Jewish ancestors and this
explanation will pacify them. I'm speaking not only of our nationalists
and fascists, but about a more subtle category: about those liberal
Russians who forbid one to think that Russians can forbid
thinking. In
1953, when Stalin died, I was two years old. In one of my earliest
childhood memories it is summer. There's a green lawn, bushes, and
trees—and suddenly from the bushes emerge two huge people, many times
greater than life size; they are wearing long white overalls and
pillows take the place of their heads; eyes and laughing mouths are
drawn on the pillows. Instead of legs, they have stilts. I remember the
childlike feeling of happiness and wonder, and something similar to a
promise that life would contain many more such wondrous surprises. Many
years later, in a chance conversation, I learned that this small group
of merry-makers was imprisoned that summer for an unheard of crime:
"vulgarity." When
I read The Great Terror, I carefully followed Conquest's
detailed descriptions of the lengthy, notorious trials of the 1930s,
the investigation of the police apparatus's cumbersome mechanisms, the
network of destinies, biographies. This is all assembled into such a
complex architectural edifice that I cannot help but admire the author
who undertook an investigation so grandiose in scale. The reader comes
away feeling that the author knows every event of the Soviet years,
that no remotely accessible document has escaped his attention, that he
hasn't neglected a single publication in the smallest provincial
newspaper if it might throw light on one or another event. Ask him what
happened to the wife of comrade X or the son of comrade Y—he knows. The
only question he can't answer is: Why? Conquest
does ask this question in regard to Stalin and his regime; he
meticulously and wittily examines the possible motives of Stalin's
behavior, both rational and irrational; he shows the deleterious effect
of Bolshevik ideology on the mass consciousness, how it prepared the
way for the Terror. A particularly wonderful quality of this book is
also that when questions, ideas, or suppositions arise in you, reader,
the author invariably answers these mental queries a few pages later,
develops the thought you've had and figures things out along with you,
bringing in more arguments on both sides than you ever thought
possible. I was especially struck by this in the third chapter,
"Architect of Terror," which sketches a psychological portrait of
Stalin, and in the fifth chapter, "The Problem of Confession," where
Conquest explores the motivations and behavior of Stalin's victims. This
book is not a storeroom of facts, but a profoundly analytical
investigation. Instead of getting tangled up in the abundance of
information, you untangle the knots of the Soviet nightmare under the
author's patient direction. Having finished this book, no one can ever
again say: "I didn't know." Now we all know. But
the question Why? remains unanswered.
Perhaps the only answer is "Because." Period. My
first English teacher, the daughter of Russian-Ukrainian immigrants,
was once married to an American. They lived several years in America,
and in the mid-1930s, like many other naive Western people who believed
in socialism, they came to the USSR. They were immediately arrested and
sent to prison. Her husband didn't return, but she survived. "But I'm
not guilty of anything!" she screamed at the investigator. "No one here
is guilty of anything," answered the exhausted investigator. "But why,
then?" "Just because," was the answer. What
lies behind this "just because"? Why were two merrymakers arrested for
"vulgarity?" After all, someone took the trouble to inform, someone
else to listen and apprise the authorities, a third person took the
trouble to be on guard, a fourth to think about it, a fifth to send an
armed group to arrest them, a sixth… and so on. Why, in a small, sleepy
provincial town in the 1930s did the head of the police, sitting on his
windowsill in an unbelted shirt, waving away the flies, amuse himself
by beckoning passers-by and arresting those who approached (they
disappeared forever)? Why, in 1918, as the writer Ivan Bunin wrote, did
peasants plundering an estate pluck the feathers off the peacocks and
let them die to the accompaniment of all-round approving laughter? Why,
in 1988, in Los Angeles (I witnessed this) did a Soviet writer, in
America for the first time, take in at a glance the pink, luxurious
mass of a Beverly Hills hotel, and day-dream out loud: "Ah, they should
drop a good-size bomb here…"? Why, in Moscow, in our time, did a woman,
upon seeing a two-year-old child sit down on the floor of a shop and
refuse to get up, start yelling: "Those kinds of kids should be sent to
jail! They're all bandits!" And why
did a group of women, including the saleswomen and cashiers, gather
around her and join in: "To jail, to jail!,"
they shouted. Why do Russians immediately start stamping their feet and
waving their hands, hissing "Damned beast" if a cat or dog runs by? This
question Why? has been asked by all of
Russian literature, and, of course, a historian cannot answer it. He
almost doesn't have the right—facts are his domain. Only some sort of
blind bard, a muttering poet or absurdist playwright can answer this
question. In
Russia, in contrast to the West, reason has traditionally been seen as
a source of destruction, emotion (the soul) as one of creation. How
many scornful pages have great Russian writers dedicated to Western
pragmatism, materialism, rationalism! They mocked the English with
their machines, the Germans with their order and precision, the French
with their logic, and finally the Americans with their love of money.
As a result, in Russia we have neither machines, nor order, nor logic,
nor money. "We eat one another and this satisfies us…." Rejecting
reason, the Russian universe turns in an emotional whirlwind and can't
manage to get on an even footing. Looking into the depths of Russian
history, one is horrified: it's impossible to figure out when this
senseless mess started. What is the source of these interminable
Russian woes? The dogmatism of the Russian Orthodox Church? The Mongol
invasions? The formation of the empire? Genetics? Everything together?
There is no answer, or there are too many answers. You feel there's an
abyss under your feet. The
enslavement of the peasants, which continued for three hundred years,
provoked such a feeling of guilt in the free, educated classes of
Russian society that nothing disparaging could be said about the
peasants. If they have certain obvious negative characteristics, then
we ourselves are to blame-- that is the leitmotif of the nineteenth
century. All manner of extraordinary qualities--spirituality, goodness,
justice, sensitivity, and charity-- are ascribed to the Russian peasant
and to the simple people as a whole-- everything that a person longing
for a normal life among normal people might hope to find. Some voices
of alarm break through Russian literature, the voices of people trying
to speak about the dark side of the Russian people, but they are
isolated, unpopular, misinterpreted. Everyone deceives everyone else
and themselves in the bargain. The revolution comes, then another, and a third-- and a wave of darkness
engulfs the country. The cultured classes are destroyed, the raw
elements burst forth. Cultural
taboos forbid us to judge "simple people"—and this is typical not only
of Russia. This taboo demands that a guilty party be sought "high up."
It's possible that such a search is partly justified, but, alas, it
doesn't lead to anything. Once an enemy is found "up above," the
natural movement is to destroy him, which is what happens during a
revolution. So he's destroyed, but what has changed? Life is just as
bad as ever. And people begin ever new quests for enemies, detecting
them in non-Russians, in people of a different faith, and in their
neighbors. But they forget to look at themselves. During
Stalin's time, as I see it, Russian society, brutalized by centuries of
violence, intoxicated by the feeling that everything was allowed,
destroyed everything "alien": "the enemy," "minorities"—any and
everything the least bit different from the "average." At first this
was simple and exhilarating: the aristocracy, foreigners, ladies in
hats, gentlemen in ties, everyone who wore eyeglasses, everyone who
read books, everyone who spoke a literary language and showed some
signs of education; then it became more and more difficult, the
material for destruction began to run out, and society turned inward
and began to destroy itself. Without popular support Stalin and his
cannibals wouldn't have lasted for long. The executioner's genius
expressed itself in his ability to feel and direct the evil forces
slumbering in the people; he deftly manipulated the choice of courses,
knew who should be the hors d'oeuvres, who the main course, and who
should be left for dessert; he knew what honorific toasts to pronounce
and what inebriating ideological cocktails to offer (now's the time to
serve subtle wines to this group; later that one will get strong
liquor). It is
this hellish cuisine that Robert Conquest examines. And the leading
character of this fundamental work, whether the author intends it or
not, is not just the butcher, but all the sheep that collaborated with
him, slicing and seasoning their own meat for a monstrous shishkabob. —translated
by Jamey Gambrell |