The Other Archipelago

Tens of millions were swept up in the gulag, shipped off to exile, forced labor, and often death. The victims included ethnic minorities and the intelligentsia, but also, less well known, the so-called kulaks.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who documented the Soviet penal system in "The Gulag Archipelago," wrote of the nearly 2 million kulaks deported between 1930 and 1931: "This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it." ...

As the "resettlement" of the kulaks continued, millions of other "undesirables" joined them in internal exile. Yagoda's "grandiose plan" to cleanse Moscow and Leningrad of "socially dangerous elements" in 1933 forms the backbone of the French historian Nicolas Werth's absorbing new book, "Cannibal Island" ( Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $24.95). What transpired on the island of Nazino, 500 miles north of the Siberian city of Tomsk, is yet another chapter of what Mr. Werth calls the "hidden" gulag.

Who were the kulaks? "There are no national monuments to the kulaks," Lynne Viola writes in "The Unknown Gulag" ( Oxford University Press, 352 pages, $30). "Their graves lie scattered and unmarked across the vast expanses of the former Soviet Union, the death toll through the 1930s roughly half a million people."

"Kulak" was an amorphous term, literally a "fist," that variously denoted a rural capitalist, village exploiter, or "tightfisted" peasant. ...

In this meticulously detailed book, Ms. Viola, a professor of history at the University of Toronto and the author of "Peasant Rebels Under Stalin," describes what she calls "the other archipelago" of Josef Stalin's special settlements, which laid the foundation for the gulag. ...

As the "resettlement" of the kulaks continued, millions of other "undesirables" joined them in internal exile.

Black Famine In Ukraine 1932 - 1933

"WHEN SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL visited Stalin at the Kremlin in August, 1942 he asked: " ... Have the stresses of the war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of the Collective Farms?"

"Oh, no" he (Stalin) said, "the Collective Farm policy was a terrible srtuggle ... Ten millions," he said, holding up his hands. "It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary ..." "Stalin admits that a complete year of World War II to him was less of a struggle than Collectivization! How gigantic the opposition of the Ukrainian peasants must have been. Stalin went on to tell the British Prime Minister that some peasants "agreed to come in with us" and were given land to cultivate in Tomsk or lrkutsk (both in Siberia). "But," Stalin added, "the great bulk (of the 10 million) were very unpopular and were wiped out by their labourers (?)."

That model like all models is true only to a certain extent an within a closely defined, if purposely simplified, system. The model you refer to is actually much more valid if you use it to describe the United States, than Russia because here the separation between an "average Joe" and our government (both actual and emotional) is much, much less than in Russia. The detachment and alienation (both actual and emotional) of an averange Russian from the ruling elites, the feeling of being "represented" by the government and/or lack of faith it your own ability to control your life on a larger scale is and always has been much greater, maybe even orders of magnitude greater than that of an average Westerner. Therefore your model simply does not work on the same scale for "the society" in Russia as it does for the United States. I was born and grew up in USSR and witnessed its breakup. I can tell you that in 1988-1990 there was a good deal of general good will among ordinary people towards the West in general and the US in particular, almost to the point of being intoxicated with the inflow of Western media, music, culture, etc (as the Wall was coming down). A lot of "great expectations" from the liberalization of the country at the time, too. In the past decade both perceived and actual grievances (which stemmed from the economic and social hardships) have led many people in Russia proper to develop a sense of nostalgia for the Soviet past (which is a natural human thing, you first seek a way to stay fed, clothed and be relatively safe - remember the Maslow hierachy?) Also many people have began to associate the economic an social hardships of the 90s with both the loss of national prestige and Russia's position on the global arena, and the words "democracy" and "capitalism" with the rampant criminal "privatization" of the economy and significant rise in the levels of street/organized crime. All these sentiments of "dissillusionment" and "nostalgia" were later exploited by various ultra-nationalist groups and by the Kremlin elites to channel popular anger and dissatisfaction at an external "enemy". The point is, the current significant levels of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism that do exist in Russia today are mostly due to exploitation of psychologial trauma that the 90's have left in the psyche of many, many people. That can change, too. If the majority of Russian populace is satisfied with their own self-image and a general state of well being, and if the Russian mass media is not used by the Kremlin to incite anti-Western sentiments, all that can change too.

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