Gulag by Anne Applebaum

This particular book won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back, which in itself isn’t always enough to make me stop and stare at a book but when combined with the subject matter was enough to make me break my No New Books rule when I happened upon it in the bookstore. And I have to say I’m thankful I did break the rule — Gulag both fascinating and horrifying at the same time, and could not be written more clearly and concisely (the latter being two significant criteria in my assessment of any history book, prize-winning or not).

Gulag by Anne Applebaum

The word gulag is one of those Soviet acronyms that became a word of its own, like Cheka (the predecessor of the NKVD/KGB) or SMERSH (Soviet counter-intelligence during WWII). ‘Gulag’ comes from Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or ‘Main Camp Administration’ — its original meaning only encompassed the actual organ of government that adminstered the camps as a part of the Soviet state. Over time, Applebaum explains, gulag became the general slang term for any prison or labour camp that was part of the system of Soviet corrective labour colonies, including the camps meant for women and children. As the word came into more common use over the years, gulag finally became the term used to refer to the entire Soviet prison system, particularly the aspects of the system which dealt with the sentencing of political prisoners.

In her book, Applebaum traces the origins of the camp system back to the prisons used by the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, through the early Bolshevik years, into the waves of terror and purges that characterised Stalin’s time, and all the way up to the collapse of the USSR and the end of the gulag as it was known in Soviet times. Along the way, she draws on a huge body of primary and secondary sources, mainly memoirs of those who had survived their time in the camps, as well as interviews with camp survivors, several camp administrators, and those who had lost family to the camps. She explores every aspect of camp life, from the feeding and housing of prisoners and the system of prisoner ‘informers’ to the actual socioeconomic impact that prison camps had on regions of the USSR. The result is a book that reads like a relaxed and friendly history lecture, almost like a story in some ways, and yet manages to convey a very real sense of the terror and suffering inflicted on well over two million individuals by the Soviet Union’s system of ‘justice’.

To go into more detail would be beyond the scope of what’s intended to be a basic review, but two things stand out in my mind. Applebaum never fails to point out how cautious one has to be in dealing with any numerical figures from the Soviet Union. She cites her sources well, but in doing so she deliberately highlights the discrepancies and the problems involved in trying to compare official figures and other amateur estimates. In a way, this careful citation actually keeps the book from being bogged down in nonsensical numbers. (A minor quibble on this point — I did wish at times that she’d give some equivalents for certain numbers. What’s the approximate size of 500 grams of bread, for example? If I want to have some idea of what 500 grams of bread meant to a prisoner in a camp, a visual equivalent would have helped me imagine it in terms of what fits into my hands.) And in addition, Applebaum stresses the importance of learning about the gulag not because of some vague notions that we are doomed to repeat the history we don’t learn about, but rather because without some knowledge of the gulag and the entire system of Soviet-era justice, we have no way of properly understanding the reasons why the gulag and the memory of the gulag still affects Russian and Eastern European society today.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

A little less than a year ago, I attended a talk organised by the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The subject of that talk was a recently published book about the October-November 1956 Hungarian crisis, where the Soviet Union sent troops into Hungary to crush an escalating series of protests by anti-government and anti-Soviet demonstrators. I picked up a copy of the book when I was there, and the review came surprisingly easily for a book on a subject that’s not really in my area of expertise.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

The violence and brutality of the Soviet action in crushing the 1956 Hungarian rebellion shook the faith of many left-leaning individuals outside of Soviet bloc — but at the same time, Soviet action also punctured the lofty rhetoric of ‘rollback’ and ‘liberation’ that American political leaders had favoured when speaking of Western policy towards the Soviet satellites. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolt occurring this past year, historians have been looking back at this major incident in the early Cold War in an attempt to figure out what happened to make things go so wrong so quickly. And Charles Gati’s point in his new book is essentially this: in Hungary in the autumn of 1956, everyone screwed up — everyone.

Attempting to summarise the full course of events in October 1956 is a bit beyond me, so I’ll do my best to summarise why things went so catastrophically wrong. There were many illusions in Hungary in late 1956. Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, the only Hungarian politician who had any real credibility with the people, was under the impression that he could keep hold of the situation even when his version of reformed communism was overtaken by events. The Hungarian demonstrators were under the impression that they could expel Soviet forces from Hungary all in one go — dreams further promoted by irresponsible agit-prop from Hungarian-language broadcasters at Radio Free Europe — and were also under the impression that the Western democracies would not let the Soviet Union get away with murder. The Soviet leadership in Moscow had been feeding their Hungarian comrades mixed messages for ages, but they were under fewer illusions than the other players involved. The only decisive message left for them to send was the one that involved tanks. And in America, President Eisenhower was facing re-election plus troubles in the Suez plus a complete lack of any actual military/intelligence plans to support an anti-Soviet revolution in Central Europe. American illusions that anti-Communist rhetoric would be sufficient to keep the Soviets out of Hungary were quickly destroyed. By the time the smoke cleared and all the illusions vanished, a new Soviet-backed Hungarian government had suppressed all political opposition and reasserted control over the country. Time magazine might have made the Hungarian revolutionary its ‘Man of the Year’ in 1957, but by then the revolutionaries were dead, imprisoned, or in exile. And Imre Nagy, who had fled to the Yugoslavian Embassy in search of sanctuary, would later be tricked out of hiding to face a secret trial and the hangman’s noose.

Failed Illusions is quite a solid history book. Granted, it isn’t always easy to keep the names of the historical figures straight even if you’re familiar with them from other sources, and I would have greatly appreciated a dramatis personae either at the front or the back of the book for quick reference and reminder. But even though Gati writes with the passion of one who is personally involved in the history being written (he had witnessed the turmoil as a young reporter in Budapest and was one of over two hundred thousand Hungarians to flee the country in 1956-57), he is able to keep the standard romanticised account of the rebellion at arm’s length. He examines the crisis from four different perspectives — the Hungarian government, the Hungarian people, the Soviet leaders and the American politicians and broadcasters — and manages to blend the perspectives together while still preserving the distinct motives and reasons behind the differing actions. It might not be the ‘definitive’ history of the failed revolution in Hungary, but the information Gati provides and the wealth of resources he refers to have laid out more than enough for future scholars of this time period to be getting on with.

Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking

When I studied modern Russian history during my undergraduate days, the professor assigned a hefty book by Geoffrey Hosking as the class’s general text. I found it to be quite well-written and a very good general history book all round, so when I heard that Hosking had written a new book about Russian history I thought it worth purchasing. The title alone was enough to intrigue me, because it touched on a thought that I’d had but never truly examined during some of my Cold War history classes: To what extent were ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ truly interchangeable terms?

Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking

To the outside (read: Western) world, the Soviet Union and Russia were the same thing, QED. But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in a sense precisely that — a union of republics, most of which did not actually have a majority of native Russians as a proportion of their populations. It was true that natives of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) had certain advantages that other citizens of the USSR did not. People outside the RSFSR tended to send their children to Russian-language schools to ensure that the children would stand a better chance of finding good jobs or getting higher education. Even quite a few Russians believed that Russia was and had to be the dominant partner, the strong force that had driven back the Nazis and liberated the European continent from the grip of fascism. And yet this sense of mastery went hand-in-hand with a sense of victimisation and near-helplessness — the unpopularity of Russia and Russians in the non-RSFSR republics only increased with each passing year as the republics chafed under the rule from Moscow. Just before the latent conflict between Russians and non-Russians came to a head in the last days of the Cold War, Russian writer Valentin Rasputin lashed out in response to the anger of non-Russian critics during a meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989:

Perhaps it is Russia that should secede from the Union, since you accuse her of all your misfortunes and since our backwardness and awkwardness obstruct your progressive aspirations?…We could then pronounce the word ‘Russian’ without fear of being rebuked for nationalism, we could talk openly about our national idenitity. We could set up at last our own Academy of Sciences….Believe me, we’re fed up with being scapegoats, with being mocked and spat upon.

Russians in the Soviet Union were in an odd predicament: they were both rulers and victims. And Rulers and Victims sets out to pick apart this strange juxtaposition of sentiments, looking at precisely where the splits occurred — and describing how the tensions between Russian mastery and Russian victimhood eventually struck the fatal blow for Soviet Communism and the USSR in the years between 1989 and 1991. Soviet leaders knew full well that Russian nationalism — in other words, the Russian people asserting an identity that distinctly separated Russia from the Soviet Union — was the biggest internal threat that the USSR could face. And while quite a lot of work has been done on the status of Ukranians or Balts or native inhabitants of the Muslim SSRs (the Central Asian republics, nowadays) in the Soviet Union as a whole, Rulers and Victims focuses specifically on the Russian identity separate from the Soviet identity that was supposed to replace it.

To be best enjoyed, Hosking’s book does require some background knowledge of twentieth-century Russian history. It won’t do much good without a general sense of why this topic is often overlooked in terms of nationality studies. The book charts the ways in which the Soviet system attempted to suppress or take over Russian national identity, from severely curtailing the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church to attempting to mush Imperial Russian and Soviet history together into some great grand unified theory of the traditional underpinnings of Soviet power. I do wish Hosking had devoted a little more space to Russian nationalism’s significant contribution the end of the Soviet Union (in the person of Boris Yeltsin, for one, or at least how he used Russian nationalism to further his political ends). The ending felt a little bit rushed in contrast to the rest of the book’s sedate pace. But I’m always fond of a book that gives me a new way of looking at history that is less ‘revisionist’ (if we are to consider it a dirty word) than it is a slight shift in perspective. If Hosking writes another book on Russian history in the near future, I’d definitely be interested in reading it.

The Mitrokhin Archive (Vols. I and II) by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin

I have more than a few previously written reviews, so I’m going to attempt to post at least one a day or every other day until I clear out my backlog and can start adding my current reading matter. If you’ve followed my reviews before elsewhere, please be patient — I’ll get to new material soon enough!

The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Britain and the West by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin

The story of Vasili Mitrokhin is so extraordinary that it is rather difficult to accept at face value. It is a truly stunning intelligence coup of Cold War history, even though it took place in that murky time at the end of the Cold War — a time when the various espionage networks in Europe were just coming to terms with the fact that the world was changing out of all recognition.

Simply put, Mitrokhin was a KGB officer who worked in the intelligence service’s archives, holding one of the less glamourous but no less important posts in the espionage hierarchy. He had held that position for many years, and in his time countless documents and files on the inner workings of the KGB had passed through his hands. But Mitrokhin had become disillusioned over the years with the Soviet system, having seen firsthand how the KGB manipulated the Soviet justice system and worked to stifle any and all attempt to truly reform society and improve the living standards of the ordinary Soviet people. And so, at great risk to himself, he began to smuggle different documents out of the archives and copy them by hand, returning the originals and hiding the copies in various locations around his home. He carried on this secret copying for nearly twelve years until his retirement in 1984, and though he often considered possible ways to escape from the Soviet Union and get his precious documents to the West, he remained patient. In March of 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin packed up sample of his documents, drove them across the newly-opened border into the new Baltic republic of Latvia, and visited the Western intelligence services to present his papers to those who might find them of interest. And once SIS got its hands on the papers and discovered the extent of Mitrokhin’s note-taking….

Both volumes of The Mitrokhin Archive are a fascinating attempt to make sense of all the documents that Mitrokhin copied. Some of the secrets in the files were utterly shocking revelations at the time — one example being the case of Melita Norwood, a British woman who had been one of the longest-lasting spies in KGB history, and who had passed low-level secrets on nuclear research to the KGB ever since the Second World War. Other documents reveal Soviet involvement in other Western European countries, particularly in connection with the French and Italian Communist parties. Still other documents shed light on Soviet counterintelligence during events like the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the clampdown on the ‘Prague spring’ in 1968, including information on how Soviet agents posed as sympathetic Westerners to infiltrate dissident groups throughout Eastern Europe.

The Mitrokhin Archive II focuses on the rest of the world, most specifically on the ‘Third World’ nations that the Soviet Union regarded as likely locations in which to build socialist or communist states. The book is divided into sections on Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with chapters focusing on either a specific country or time period for the KGB’s activities. For instance, Mitrokhin and Andrew devote two chapters to India, one of the premier targets for KGB activity, pointing out the extent to which the KGB promoted Indira Gandhi’s paranoia that the CIA and various other Western intelligence services were plotting to depose or murder her. The Soviet war of attrition in Afghanistan also gets two chapters of coverage, attempting to untangle the complicated connections between various factions and rival groups in the late 1970s through the 1980s. Other countries and regions also receive a careful study, with some intriguing revelations:

- Soviet espionage in China after the Sino-Soviet split was made all but impossible by the fact that the Chinese secret police knew all the identities of the KGB’s agents in the PRC and proceeded to kill them all off — a lesson on why it’s not always good to share everything with your allies
- Attempts to spy on China by way of Japan ran into problems when the Japanese Communist Party chose to ally itself ideologically with Beijing
- KGB involvement in starting and spreading the urban legend about Latin American children being kidnapped and killed to provide donated organs for rich Americans

(I’m not entirely certain if it’s a reflection on the fact that I’m not as ‘genned up’ on Third World Cold War history as I thought I was, but I found the second volume to be a little less readable than the first. It may simply be that I’m not as familiar with the names and events mentioned and discussed, in which case a little outside reading might be in order to see if the research makes more sense to me then. Just a bit of qualification that might explain why I preferred the first volume to the second.)

Vasili Mitrokhin died in 2004, shortly after the publication of the first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive. Christopher Andrew completed this second volume on his own, working with Mitrokhin’s original notes. There has been some controversy over the archive, particularly from scholars who question Mitrokhin’s credibility. How, they ask, could someone who never managed to rise above a middling rank in the KGB manage to evade the strict security surrounding the archives and spend the better part of his career making notes on extremely sensitive case files? When I think about some of the real-life spy stories that have shown up in the press since the late 1980s, I’m a little more inclined to take Mitrokhin’s archive at face value. Even if it’s exposed as a fraud at some point in the future, the Mitrokhin Archive would still be a great set of books to show just how engrossing a fraud can be.

Regardless, anyone with any interest in espionage and intelligence history will want to read these books. They are thorough and painstakingly detailed, remarkably comprehensive and written in a crisply academic style that suits the subject matter well. Mitrokhin’s vast collection of papers sheds light on Soviet intelligence activities around the world, from the early days of the October Revolution to the events leading up to the coup that all but toppled Gorbachev. Some of the real stories told in the archives would put any writer of spy fiction to shame.