Several years ago, I was preoccupied, in a probably unhealthy way, with the Soviet Union and specifically, Stalin's purges. I'd taken a class on 20th Century Europe, and from there, I read Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin, Anne Applebaum's Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and then, just for contrast, Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary.
The biotech company where I used to work employed a number of Russian scientists, engineers, and technicians. Although they were a socially mixed group, which included Ph.D.-level senior scientists and considerably less-educated manufacturing technicians, the group ate lunch together nearly every day, drinking steaming tea from styrofoam cups, and eating cafeteria food supplemented with homemade Russian dishes brought by one or the other of the group's members, and then shared among them.
The Russians, true to stereotypical form, seldom smiled, and when they laughed, it was with a touch of bitterness. It was easy to make fun of them, and we did sometimes, calling them "the Politburo" or "the Supreme Soviet." Individually, the Russians were all quite nice, though reserved. I'm a friendly person, and I became friendly with several of the Russians, although I sometimes wondered if they felt secret, Russian disdain for my smiling American bonhomie. "Americans," I imagined them sneering after I passed with a cheerful wave or hello, "why are they always smiling? Like eediot children." At that point, I had only the vaguest understanding of Russian history, and I probably thought that Stalin, while not a particularly good guy, was at least not as bad as Hitler.
In Koba the Dread, which is subtitled Laughter and the 20 Million, Amis asks a simple question: why do we laugh at the gulags and the KGB but not at Auschwitz or the Gestapo? The book is very personal, part of what was apparently a long-running argument with his friend and antagonist Christopher Hitchens, who, like a lot of writers and artists and intellectuals from the early 20th century on, were willing to ignore or excuse the worst excesses of the Soviet political system because they believed that Russian communism was the best hope for a socially just world. Some writers and artists continued to cling to that belief long after evidence to the contrary had become too overwhelming to ignore.
It was probably five years or so ago when I first read Koba the Dread, and my Stalin preoccupation eventually gave way to other, more immediate worries, but the idea of the purges has never stopped haunting me. Because I don't have enough trouble in life, I like to borrow it at high rates of interest, so I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now. I bought a hardcover copy of it for one dollar at the Friends of the Library book sale, and it had been waiting on my shelf since November.
First of all, it's very good reading. I'm 80 or so pages in, and although most of it, at this point, simply recounts details of arrests and sentences, each account is compelling and individual. Stalin is supposed to have said something like "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." He lost, though. I can't help but imagine the individual people, each unique, whom these short accounts represent. I don't know their names, but I know that they had names. I imagine them, and think about them, especially the ones who vanished and whose exact fates don't seem to be known. I guess they can't be statistics if I'm still thinking about them 80 years later.
*****
My sons and I were watching a rerun of "The King's Speech" last Saturday, which was the same day that I started on the book. As the movie version of George V asked who, if not for the English, would stand between the "Nazi hordes and the proletarian abyss," I wondered how we would answer that question. Was Charlie Hebdo the best we could do? Are blasphemy and obscenity the only reasonable responses to savagery? I've seen the cartoons, and I'm not in any rush to claim shared identity with that publication or its creators, God rest their souls. Je ne suis pas Charlie.
*****
As I tell my friends and my children, I completely understand now why old people move to Florida. My tolerance for winter diminishes with each passing year, and every November, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I realize that I won't really be warm again until Memorial Day. Every night, I think, just for a minute, that maybe tonight I'll just sleep in my clothes. It's that hard for me to face the thought of undressing in the cold. But I live in Maryland, in a house with central heat, and not in a wooden shack in Kolyma.
The chekists and the KGB always came at night. I usually wake up sometime around 3 AM, and just before I fall back to sleep, I think about the nest of warmth that my body heat and the blankets have created, and how little I want to move from that spot at that moment. When I think about it (almost every time), I pray for the people who were yanked from the warmth by the 3 AM pounding on the door, which led to the holding cell in the Lubyanka, and then to the freight rail car to the gold mines at Kolyma or the gypsum mines in Siberia. God help them, and all of us.
