Course
Course note · Lecture 4 slides (file not included in this release)
Source status
Verbatim transcript supplied by Anthony for Lesson 4, “Poor Judgements, Harsh Realities,” on 2026-09-28. It has not been checked against the video. Transcription errors and unsupported historical assertions may be present; see the linked course note for selected source checks.
Transcript
H.G. Wells was not alone in his love affair with Joseph Stalin. George Orwell, whose name is still widely known to us today, could not get his publisher to publish his memoir of his work in the Spanish Civil War called Homage to Catalonia because he was too critical of the work of the Stalinists that he fought alongside. As he put it, “The upshot is that, if from time to time you express a mild distaste for slave labor camps or one-candidate elections, you are either insane or actuated by the worst motives.”
Other outlets like The Nation and the New Republic, which are still with us today, opined upon these trials. When The Nation heard about the so-called Trotskyist trial, they wrote, “It was to be expected that under the velvet glove of the new Soviet Constitution, there would be still the firm outlines of the Iron Hand. There can be no doubt that dictatorship in Russia is dying and that a new democracy is slowly being born.” As Eugene Lyons wrote, “The impending death of thousands of communists was thus another confirmation that the dictatorship was dying.”
Loyalty to family is a quintessentially bourgeois virtue, and this is something else that Stalin turned his guns against. Being married to an enemy of the people was in itself now a felony, one which you could very little say to proclaim your innocence against. Starting in 1934, if a military man was abroad and fled, not only his spouse, but his entire family would get sent to a prison camp. And under Soviet equality, this applied from the lowest to the highest. Mikhael Kalinin was the Soviet Union’s head of state, and in 1938, his wife was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to 15 years for supposedly being aligned with Trotsky.
Vyacheslav Molotov, who was the Soviet Union’s second-in-command—we still have his name from the Molotov cocktail, which was used not by the Russians, but against the Russians by the Finns—his wife was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. Stalin took out members of his own family. His first wife was widowed, and he arrested her brother, her mother, and his second widow’s brother-in-law was shot.
School children were taught the lesson of Pavlik Morozov, a young boy who turned in his kulak father to the authorities for supposedly hoarding grain, for which Pavlik was killed by his dad. There were statues built to him, and the lesson to the children was perfectly clear. If your parents are doing something that is against the law, meaning against the Communist Party, turn them in, even if it costs you your own life.
The children themselves were not immune from being arrested. It took only one night of interrogation to get a 10-year-old boy to admit that when he was seven, he had joined a fascist ring. Other children who were not suspects themselves were forced to denounce and approve of the arrests of their parents. They were brought up in front of their whole schools and berated until they confessed that it was a good thing that mom or dad had been taken away. This is not something that had been new to Stalin. This was happening from the very beginning. Sergei Maslov wrote about a May 1920 arrest of a group of Moscow pickpockets between the ages of 11 and 15. May 1920, this is when Woodrow Wilson was still in the White House.
As he wrote, “The children were confined in a cellar and isolated from the other prisoners. Threats and promises of reward were alternately used to make them point out their accomplices. They were dragged daily about the town on trams, in motor cars, and taken to railway stations to point out their accomplices. At first, they pretended they didn’t know anyone. Then they were beaten that night and began to betray their associates. This torture went on for two weeks. If the child had the bad luck not to meet or point out a comrade, he would be cruelly beaten. To escape the savage punishment, the children finally pointed out innocent boys who they did not know.” Maslov writes how the adult inmates “had never heard such heart-rending cries as those of the children when they understood that they were going back to the cellar.”
There was a moment when children in large cities tried to organize for their rights. They called themselves Revenge for Our Parents, and they issued a leaflet arguing against the mass arrest of so many loyal citizens. They were all arrested, as well as their siblings and their remaining parents. In this case, the parents were arrested for having failed to denounce the pamphleteers for their counterrevolutionary activities, those pamphleteers being their children. Calling attention to the needs of such children was in and of itself taken as criticism of the government because why are you being so soft on enemies of the people? One day there’d be a family, dad’s arrested, mom’s taken after, and the next day that kid is an orphan. But not only was he an orphan, he’s a pariah because no other families wanted to have anything to do with him.
There was much hand-wringing at the Kremlin about all these children who understandably began to take their own lives. We know of one story about a father who tried to take in their daughter’s friend, who was 13, who was left without parents after both were arrested. He went to the NKVD secretary for advice about what to do because he knew he was putting himself and his family at risk. The secretary said, “It’s a delicate matter, but it is improper for you to keep her. My advice to you is, try to get rid of her.” He did as he was advised, put her out in the street. Her fate can be imagined, but perhaps shouldn’t be.
Class warfare meant that people could be punished for the circumstances of their ancestors. It became commonplace for young people to denounce their families and repudiate their bourgeois origins, often with their parents’ support and approval, in order to save themselves. Things reached demented levels. The author Sheila Fitzpatrick recounts the story of one communist who informed on his mother-in-law before being arrested for being related to her.
Karl Marx very famously wrote that “religion is the opium of the people,” and the communists took particular pride in turning religious people against their faith. Soviet newspapers were full of letters from priests renouncing and denouncing religion. Even more intense were moments when worshippers in church sat in horror while their priest told them that religion was deceit and that he no longer wanted to be a weapon in the hands of counterrevolutionaries, whereupon he ripped off his vestments and left the church. The assault on religion was something that had been there from the very beginning and continued through the end of the Soviet Union’s existence. Instead of God, there was only one man, and that man was Joseph Stalin.
You might not know this man’s face, but you probably know his name. This is Upton Sinclair. His book, The Jungle, is still read in high school. It was an exposé, supposedly, about the unsanitary conditions in meatpacking factories. The book ends, spoiler alert, with a worker falling into a vat and being rendered into lard for sale for the general public. They couldn’t believe it’s not butter. After being serialized in a socialist newspaper, The Jungle was published as a book in 1906. Teddy Roosevelt was not a fan of the young Sinclair, but the novel worked its magic. And by June 30th, President Roosevelt was signing into law the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which became known as the FDA to this day. Sinclair had only been 27 years old, and he was already changing the face of America.
He was part of a new class of journalist activists called muckrakers, who used their influence to promote and help issues that are a great concern to society. Muckraker being, of course, a nice euphemism for shit-stirrer. His explicit purpose in writing The Jungle was to spread the message of socialism to the American people. As he put it, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident, I hit it in the stomach.” Sinclair was a democratic socialist, skeptical of communism. He ran for the House of Representatives in the 1920s as a socialist, the US Senate in 1922. When both those failed, he tried to run for California governor in 1926 and in 1930. In 1934, he chose to run as a Democrat, realizing that 50% of people are going to vote a certain ticket simply because their grandfathers voted that ticket, and in order to get anywhere, it’s necessary to have a party which has grandfathers.
He seized the Democratic Party nomination for California governor two years after FDR set record landslides in his defeat of Herbert Hoover. Sinclair had a plan—this is at the height of the Great Depression—called EPIC, End Poverty in California, which was heavily criticized because if the government was going to be guaranteeing work, why wouldn’t it cause everyone else from America to go to California and get jobs for themselves at a time when unemployment was at unprecedented levels and not budging? FDR met with Sinclair, and Sinclair left the meeting thinking that FDR was going to come out for his view of having production for use instead of production for profit. But of course, FDR being FDR, loved to have people think that he was on their side when he was on his own.
When FDR finally did give the talk that he promised Sinclair, he did not come out at all for production for use instead of production for profit. In fact, he doubled down and said, “America has what we call an accept as a profit system.” He reiterated his view of free enterprise as the basis of the American society. Needless to say, Sinclair did not win his race, and he took it very hard indeed. Sinclair went back and forth with Eugene Lyons, who had been a communist reporter, who went to the Soviet Union and whose views changed very heavily when he saw firsthand what was happening there. Together, they published an exchange of letters called Terror in Russia? The question mark being, of course, Upton Sinclair’s. As he put it, “It is a fact that the Russians have never learned to govern without killing.”
There’s something interesting about having Upton Sinclair, the great progressive socialist, advocating mass murder on the basis of tradition. Regarding the Holodomor, he said, “I would venture to doubt that 5 million people were permitted to die, permitted being a very odd choice of words, when people were being forced to hand over all their food.” As he put it, “My guess is that it’s nearer to 1 million, but that is enough.” A million here, a million there. What’s the difference? As he put it, “The Russians did it by force because that is the only way anything has ever been done in Russia,” even though supposedly the Soviet Union was a new society based on new principles and a complete repudiation of the failed tactics of the past.
He explicitly endorsed the deaths of millions of people, as he put it, and this was shocking to see in writing, to be honest. “My belief is that the million or 5 million lives which were sacrificed will mean the savings of hundreds of millions of lives in future times.” There was this expression, I think it was original to Walter Duranty, that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. We had the broken eggs; where were the omelets? And of course, these broken eggs meant millions of people who were starved to death. Sinclair further lied that there has never been in human history a great social change without killing, that our civil war cost a million lives, and if anyone argues that Lincoln and Grant were mass murderers, the only way you can answer is to point out the gains in the preservation of the Union and the ending of slavery.
Now, to compare lives that are lost in warfare, as opposed to a war against an unarmed citizenry of people who are just trying to feed themselves, is a dubious comparison at best, in my view. As for murdering all these so-called wreckers, Sinclair said, “If such persons were sent into this country and committed wholesale wrecking of machinery and destruction of human life, we would shoot them, and no doubt, other nations which were getting ready to make war on us, would denounce it as a terrible and barbarous action.” Needless to say, the amount of people who engaged in industrial sabotage in the United States who were executed for it was hardly in the hundreds of thousands, if any existed at all.
Sinclair insisted that the Russians did have free speech despite what Eugene Lyons saw for himself. How did he know this? Because “more than 3 million of my books have been translated and published in Russia.” As for the victims of these purges, he said, “When they started the war on Stalin, they did so at their own risk and perfectly well knowing it. If the medicine they had to swallow is bitter, the answer is that it is their own medicine, which they have been brewing and administrating throughout their political careers.” He compared those victims to Benedict Arnold, saying that “he would have been hanged if we had been able to catch him.”
Regarding the trials, which he regarded as obviously phony, he goes, “Over and over, I asked myself, is it conceivable that the revolutionists, trained in a lifetime of war against the Tsar, would go into open court and confess to actions which they had not committed? I ask, is there any torture, any kind of terror, which would induce him to such a thing?” If Upton Sinclair couldn’t think of such a thing, obviously it couldn’t have happened. That’s just how reality works. As historian Robert Conquest put it, “The Stalin epic is replete with what appear as improbabilities to minds unfitted to deal with the phenomena,” similarly with the argument that Stalin couldn’t have killed millions of peasants since that would have been economically unproductive.
Writing in 1994, the communist writer Eugene Genovese explained his thinking. He goes, “About 20 years ago, picking up on some passages in Roy Medvedev’s book, Let History Judge, I wondered if Comrade Stalin had not killed more communists than were killed by all the bourgeois, imperialist, fascist, and Nazi regimes put together. It can’t be true, said I. Has Comrade Medvedev taken up serious drinking? So I sat down to do some rough arithmetic. You do not have to be good at math to do that much arithmetic. Alas, Comrade Medvedev had not taken up serious drinking.”
Sinclair further defended Stalin, saying, “Having watched the international policy of the Soviet Union from day to day as it has developed, I say that its record is pretty nearly perfect and that upon that record is entitled to the trust of every friend of democracy and peace.” And he said, “I will leave a litmus test to determine whether the Soviet Union has now become counterrevolutionary. When Hitler learns that the Soviet Union has become counterrevolutionary, he will reduce the ardor of his crusade against it. When that happens, I will admit that Stalin has sold out the workers.” Not long after that, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Hitler and Stalin was signed, a non-aggression pact between the two. Needless to say, Upton Sinclair did not ever admit that Stalin had, in fact, sold out the workers, and he was not alone.
On August 14, 1939, a group of self-described 400 leading Americans, influencers of their time, wrote an open letter calling for, quote, “greater unity of the anti-fascist forces and strengthening of the front against aggression through closer cooperation with the Soviet Union.” There was no mention of Hitler’s crimes. There was no argument that if Hitler wasn’t stopped, millions of people would be killed. In fact, they insisted that, on the domestic scene, the reactionaries have “encouraged the fantastic falsehood” that the USSR and the totalitarian states, meaning Mussolini and Hitler, are basically alike. They insisted that it’s impossible for any honest person to come to any conclusion concerning their guilt or innocence of other charges or the nature of their crimes, if any, regarding those who have been put on trial by Stalin.
They defended the Soviet system. They had a list of 10 ways it differed from Hitler, including that the Soviet Union has emancipated women in the family and has developed an advanced system of childcare, as we have seen the children certainly were taken care of, so to speak. They insisted that “the best literature, from Homer to Thomas Mann, the best thought from Aristotle to Lenin, is available to the masses of the Soviet people.” They claimed that “the Soviet Union considers political dictatorship a transitional form and has shown a steadily expanding democracy in every sphere.” That the new Constitution grants Soviet citizens universal suffrage, everyone can vote for the Bolsheviks. It’s great. It’s universal.
Civil liberties, the right to employment, to leisure, free education, free medical care, to equality of the sexes in all fields of activity, and to equality of all races and nationalities. The list of credentials of the signatories of this letter is remarkably contemporary. We have Stanford, Smith, Columbia, Harvard, Wellesley, Sarah Lawrence, NYU, Syracuse, Yale, MIT, Vasser, Williams, the University of Chicago, Colgate, Bryn Mawr, the New Yorker, and The Nation. Specifically from Columbia, we had their professor of zoology, who certainly was in a position to advise on keeping beings in captivity. These men and women, it was their job to promote ideas to the American people. They were the creators of public opinion. They had the power to declare an ideology as being mainstream and desirable. Indeed, they defined what mainstream and desirable discourse consisted of.
Hannah Arendt, writing about these so-called fellow travelers, wrote, “The sympathizers who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow citizens in a non-totalitarian society can hardly be called fanatics. Through them, the movements made their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can make their propaganda in milder and more respectable terms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such, but which appear to be normal political reactions or opinions. The fellow traveler organizations surround the totalitarian movements with a mist of normality and respectability that fools the membership about the true character of the outside world, as much as it does the outside world about the true character of the movement.”
Days after the letter was published, Hitler not only reduced the ardor of his crusade against the Soviet Union, but signed that non-aggression pact. Shortly thereafter, Hitler invaded Poland from the West, and Stalin followed from the East. American organizations that advocated for involvement in Europe to fight fascism, literally overnight, changed their names to advocating instead of being anti-fascist before peace, fearing US involvement in what Stalin was doing.
As the 1930s drew to a close, the Great Depression was still plodding along with no end in sight, and the question became if FDR was going to run for an unprecedented third term. His vice president, “Cactus Jack” Garner, was quite a conservative, and before FDR even made his own decision, he announced that he would be a candidate for the presidency. As such, FDR had to find a running mate. The man he chose was his Secretary of State, Henry Agard Wallace. Wallace was regarded as a bit of a new ager at a time when the term didn’t even exist. There were a series of letters he exchanged with this weird Russian theosophist called the Dear Guru letters which were seen as a major scandal to be dealt with. FDR insisted that Wallace was not a mystic, but just a philosopher, a liberal philosopher. And while there was pushback from the Democrats, Wallace had until recently been a Republican, FDR still held power and managed to force his pick of vice president on the convention, something which presidential candidates had previously not been able to do.
In 1944, as FDR was thinking about running for a fourth term, Wallace got himself into a heap of trouble by publishing a pamphlet called Our Job in the Pacific. When Roald Dahl, the children’s author, got news back to Britain about what it contained, including advocating the decolonization of East Asia, Winston Churchill flipped his shit, got on the phone to the White House, and the Brits were not alone. Wallace had a reputation of being too much of a leftist, even by FDR and standards, when the Democratic Party held complete a monopoly of control.
On July 11th, 1944, three things happened. FDR officially announced that he would be seeking a fourth term. FDR decided to dump Henry Wallace from the ticket, and then FDR met with Wallace to strategize about their forthcoming campaign. Ten days later, and with FDR’s covert blessing, Robert Hannegan, who was head of the Democratic Party, and other party insiders, used all their power to make sure that Wallace was removed from the ticket, and Missouri senator Harry S. Truman was nominated as the vice presidential candidate instead. Five weeks after he was inaugurated for an unprecedented fourth term, FDR was posing for an artist, and he either said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” or, “I have a terrific headache,” before he keeled over and died.
Harry Truman had been having drinks with the Speaker of the House. The call came for him to go to the White House immediately. He asked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, is there anything he could do for her? Her husband had just died. And she goes, “Is there anything we can do for you? You’re the one in trouble now.” A year after he would have been inaugurated as president, Henry Wallace published a book called Soviet Asia Mission, which was about his trips abroad as vice president. As vice president, Wallace had visited Siberia and the Far East, and he discussed his impression of the people and the places that he saw. And while FDR was administrating concentration camps for Japanese Americans on American soil, his vice president was touring one in the Soviet Union and offering his approval of the conditions that these concentration camp prisoners faced.
There are very few words from Russian that have made their way into English. People think robot is a Russian word. In fact, it comes from Czech. People also think bistro is a Russian word because it’s Russian for quickly, quickly. Supposedly, it went from what Russians were yelling at French waiters and then became French, then became English. But there is one word whose Russian origin is not in dispute, Gulag. The Gulag Archipelago, which Solzhenitsyn wrote about very famously, was a series of concentration camps which spread across the Soviet Union, the biggest country in the world.
As one reporter put it regarding what the intellectuals thought of the Soviet Union, “To a good many onlookers, the Russian Revolution is a great experiment. The 160 million inhabitants are the raw material of the experiment, and a formula for economic perfection is its objective. The application of pressure here and there, as required by the research experts, the exiling or physical extinction of a portion of the population, it’s all part of the experimental process.” Those who are squeamish are just white-livered sentimentalists in a class with vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists. In other words, if you were worried about children killing themselves in concentration camps, you’re basically a soy boy. It was the guinea pig theory of revolution. Of course, the animals squeal, but why should superior people be concerned about the noise?
When you peer down from above, watching objectively, the Russians look quite small. Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous French existentialist, said, “As we were not members of the party, it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps.” And he said, “I find these camps intolerable, but I find it equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.” Sure, we’re imprisoning entire families and starving people to death, but it’s just as bad to make a fuss about it.
Theodore Dreiser was one of the great naturalist writers of all time. His books, Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, are still read today. As he put it, “It seems to me, whether badly managed or well managed, that it is at least a setup, the Soviet Union, which should be preserved and fought for. If that means serious and in some cases seemingly cruel sacrifices, it is, as we say, just too bad. But after all, if by any process whatsoever, this or any other, Russia is seriously crippled or destroyed, what good would freeing those prisoners do?”
As Henry Wallace toured the Gulag in the Siberian town of Magadan, he discussed how over 40 million people have taken the place of the previous seven million who existed there under imperial Russia, meaning under the Tsar. He compared it to the Wild West. In the same way that Americans pushed triumphantly to the Pacific and created Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, this is what the Russians are doing with Siberia and the Far East. He repeated the Russian propaganda when he said, “Twelve years ago, the first settlers arrived and put up eight prefabricated houses, and today, Magadan has 40,000 inhabitants and all are well housed.” He went on to say, “The remarkable fact is that this Siberian urban growth is taking place in advance of rail and motor road communications.”
He was oblivious to the fact that all these trips to Siberia were both one way and permanent. He insisted that “the people of Siberia today are a hardy, vigorous race, but not because they are whipped into submission. The only whip driving them is the necessity to master a vast new land.” They’re basically cowboys. It’s like the Lone Ranger. As of 2020, farmers were still uncovering dozens of bodies of people who had been executed over there by the secret police.
They literally put on a song and dance performance for Wallace, the prisoners did, and he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything better put on by the talent of a single city.” What he did not realize was that the conductor was a prisoner, the lead ballerina was a prisoner, and the choir were all prisoners. The captives had rehearsed all night and signed an oath to comport themselves as Soviet patriots, and the two singers who had known English were shipped away. And when the vice president’s show ended, the prisoner performers were loaded back into trucks and returned to the camp.
Wallace further insisted that there exist “no two other countries more alike than the Soviet Union and the United States of America.” This was the vice president. And insisted that the people of the United States should have been taught the truth about the Russian Revolution from the very start. I would agree with him. “There is nothing irreconcilable about our aims and purposes, and those who so proclaim are wittingly or unwittingly looking for war.” And that is, in my opinion, criminal. Why denouncing labor camps would lead us to war is a question I would leave for Wallace and his defenders to answer.
In fact, it was Orwell himself who pointed out that when Wallace was asked by a newspaper interviewer why he issued falsified versions of his speeches to the press, Wallace replied, “Oh, so you’re one of those people who are clamoring for war with Russia?” As for what Stalin had done to the Ukrainians, Wallace dismissed the concerns. He put it, “Collective farming to Stalin was a method of making agriculture more productive, of getting the food surplus necessary to support urban workers. We in the United States may regard the methods employed as too costly in human terms.” Killing millions of people, that’s just your opinion, man.
Decades after Wallace’s visit, the hidden history of the Gulag system was better understood. Its roots lay in the bizarre katorga system of prisons, which held so many revolutionaries before the revolution. That said, in 1916, there were fewer than 30,000 total prisoners held by the Tsar, but the Gulag routinely held 2 million people at a time. Though the Gulag system greatly was expanded under Stalin, by 1921, Lenin was already running 84 camps for potential enemies and those deemed to be undesirable elements. That number hit 30,000 camps under Stalin, and it was under his reign that the camps began to be used for slave labor.
Solovetzky is regarded as the first Gulag camp, and in 1926, that’s where the concept of using forced labor as a method of reeducation first began to be implemented. In 1923, there were a few hundred prisoners there, mostly political foes and former allies of the Bolsheviks. By 1925, there were 6,000, including those who fought that Kronstadt rebellion. That winter, a quarter of them died due to the terrible conditions they were under, including workload, poor food, and an epidemic of typhus, a disease which is spread by lice.
The guards regularly left undressed prisoners in the cold. They would put prisoners to the bench, meaning they were forced to sit on poles for up to 18 hours without moving, sometimes with weights tied to their legs and their feet not touching the floor, a position guaranteed to leave them crippled. Sometimes they were made to go naked to the baths up to 2 kilometers away in freezing weather. They were given rotten meat on purpose. They were refused medical help. At other times, they were simply given pointless tasks, simply for them to do something. In other words, to move snow from one place to another or to jump off bridges into rivers whenever a guard shouted “dolphin.”
Rounding a people and bringing them via train to the far east was hardly an idyllic trip. Lice and the diseases they carried were, of course, ubiquitous. The simple need to relieve oneself was used as a mechanism of control by the guards or simply in exercising cruelty. All it took was one prisoner losing bowel control or getting sick to turn the atmosphere in the carriage even more unbearable. It often took a month for the trip from Moscow to the Gulag region of Kolyma, a month in which a prisoner was literally removed from his former life and basic human civilization.
The captives would often go days without any water, and when they were fortunate enough to receive their one full cup, they would have to choose between drinking it all at once or rationing it throughout the day. Passengers who stuck their cups between the window bars to catch rain would be threatened with getting shot, and it was not an idle threat. Stops to discard the dead was a common occurrence, and it goes without saying that many of the children and infants aboard the train cars never made it to the camps. Mothers often killed themselves, slitting their throats with glass, or sometimes grew mad in the conditions, forcing their infants to be taken care of by others.
Those who survived the train ride were still not done because the Kolyma camps were only reachable by boat, and the juvenile delinquents who so plagued the prison system were found there as well. Now, they served a purpose of keeping the captives in a state of fear, for they reveled in being abusive toward the adults by spitting on them or urinating on them. And actual criminals were part of this trip as well, seizing control of the ship’s plank. Literal murderers and the like, they far outnumbered the guards who themselves were often too afraid to interfere or simply didn’t care. Indeed, the criminals were told explicitly, “You have broken the law and must pay the penalty for it. But you are not enemies of the people. The enemies of the people are the counterrevolutionaries, and they alone are responsible for everything that goes wrong in our country. They must be annihilated.”
Guards would be threatened or bribed by criminals to let men into the separate women’s hold, gangs of whom had their way with the female captives, one after another. One eyewitness describes such a raid. “Several men attacked each woman at once. The woman bit, cried, and wailed. The rapists smacked them back. When the rapists ran out of women, some of the bulkier men turned to the bed boards and hunted for young men. These adolescents were added to the carnage, lying on their stomachs, bleeding and crying on the floor. The male captives sat there watching the whole thing. Anyone who tried to assist would be crushed to death. And after the raid, the guards blasted the hold with water, and they went out and dragged out both the women who had been injured and those who had been killed.”
Much of the skepticism about the conditions in the Soviet Union was based on the very logical premise that this maltreatment made no sense, for a large number of the captives who finally reached the camps were useless in terms of labor, due to the horrors they had suffered en route, horrors that in some cases could have been prevented simply by giving them some water. But that would have been extra work for the guards who had little incentive to lift a finger to assist a group of people who had been officially declared to no longer be members of the human race.
Arriving at the camps, the guards were greeted by various signs, with one example being the claim that, “With just work, I will pay my debt to the fatherland,” something that the Nazis later mocked with their slogan over Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei,” work makes you free. Signs reminded prisoners that he who does not work does not eat, but even he who worked did not eat much either. Being too weak to fulfill one’s work quota was taken as evidence of being a counterrevolutionary. Here, at last, was proof that we have the wreckers, because they’re not fulfilling their quota, even in the camps.
In 1937, during the Great Terror, the nature of the camps took an even more dark turn. Stalin now sent regional quotas to the NKVD, telling them how many people he expected to be arrested with the numbers broken down by each given region. It became their role to find that number of men and women to arrest and send away. For example, if Stalin said he wanted to find 10,000 criminals in the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, the secret police would arrest 10,000 people, regardless of whether that many criminals existed there or not.
The Gulag became a place where the deaths of prisoners was not an accident or a cost, but a goal. Outdoor work in the camps was compulsory all year long, only pausing if the temperature reached 58 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Working inside was not much better. Coal miners had to deal with water dripping on them, causing severe short-term and long-term consequences. In 1937 as well, Stalin decided the prisoners were being treated too well. So afterwards, it was forbidden for them to use fur to stay warm, and they had to use wadding for protection and walk in canvas shoes instead of felt boots, if they had even been given shoes at all, which they often did not.
Soviet sources themselves admit that, in many of these camps, the death rate reached 97 to 98% of the inmates. When one free citizen tried to warn camp administrators what’s going on and all the people who are dying, he said, “What people? These are the enemies of the people.” Other officials were as blunt, saying, “We are not trying to bring down the mortality rate.” Not only do they have to work interminably, they’re also subjected to workshops where speakers blather political ideology at them. As one camp survivor recalled, “For hours and hours, the lecture went on, trying to prove that God did not exist, that he was some bourgeois invention, that we were lucky to be living in the greatest country on Earth. They didn’t just want to oppress us. They wanted us to thank them for it.”
Personers often had to be beaten in order to get them to bathe in the freezing cold rooms, where they would then have to stand around naked afterwards. The Gulag food was disgusting even by prison conditions. Sometimes it was watery soup with fish heads or a piece of fat floating inside. Some prisoners were forced to eat outside where the food invariably froze. Religious people were a specific target of the Soviet Union. One group of female prisoners refused to wear numbered clothing due to the dictates of their religion, so the numbers were stamped directly on their skin. In 1930, another religious group regarded Soviet passports, money, and the like as symbols of the Antichrist. They were shipped to an island in the West Sea and told they could have food only if they signed for it. When they repeatedly refused, they were simply left there to starve to death, which they naturally all did.
Diseases of malnutrition were almost universal in the camps. Peeling potatoes is a punishment in the American military, but in the Gulag, it was a highly coveted role because then you might have access to some food. The prisons developed their own rules. If a prisoner stole clothes, tobacco, or anything else, he could expect a beating. But if he was caught stealing another person’s bread, that earned a death sentence. In typical Russian dark humor, there was a little song about Kolyma. It goes, “Kolyma, wonderful land, 12 months winter, the rest summer.” For about two months in winter, there’s no sunrise at all.
The brutal cold forced inmates to get creative in order to try to stay warm. One of humanity’s earliest mechanisms for staying warm meant that female prisoners and guards often engaged in illicit activity. Any infants who were born as a result of this were taken away from their mothers after a year, handed over to the secret police. The women were told, “You have broken the regulations. Connections with men are not permitted. Therefore, the children are ours, not yours. They belong to the security organs, and we will bring them up.” Estimates range as to whether it was 500,000 or up to a million of such infants who were seized over the years who would never be reunited with their mothers.
Those infants still fared better than the children who had been imprisoned in the Gulag themselves, where even being seven years old was not enough to stave off beatings and humiliations. Parentless boys and girls were taken to children’s homes, and they had to deal with all of this, as well as sexual assaults, both from older children and the administrators. Those children who grew up in the conditions of the Gulag grew up to become themselves something inhuman, as one former prisoner recalled. “If one of the prisoner’s criminal leaders was gambling, lost everything and staked his life as well, the boys would kill him for a day’s bread ration or simply for the fun of it, and the girls boasted that they could satisfy an entire team of tree-fellers.”
As World War II came around, the regulations became even stricter, and a law was issued that any worker who left his job in a war plant for no matter what reason was subject to from 6 to 8 years of imprisonment. Hundreds of young girls between the ages of 18 and 20 were sent to the camps for running away to their villages because they could no longer endure the starvation in the cities where they had been forced to work. Some had only gone home for a few days to visit a sick mother, but the factory manager would not give them any days off, and when they returned, they were arrested. They came as teenagers to Kolyma and were transformed into full-fledged prostitutes.
Running the Gulag was not a particularly safe position. The chief of the Gulag, Feodor Eihmans, was shot in 1938, and his two successors shot one after another in 1939, all of this feeding into the mentality of “if only Stalin knew.” It was their fault, not his. Escape was impossible because there was simply nowhere to go in the Arctic wilderness. In fact, when prisoners escape, the guards often didn’t bother searching for them, knowing that they would either return or freeze to death on their own. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the entire economy of the Soviet Union was heavily based on the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of innocent people being kept in prison in the camps of the Gulag.
Contact with the outside world was mixed at best. Some prisoners could have visits with family members a couple of times a year, but even that was based on the family knowing where the captive had been taken. And worse, maintaining contact with someone who had been a counterrevolutionary or kulak was very risky. Foods and gifts that were sent to the camps were used as plunder by the guards, and letters were piled up in stacks of thousands by guards who couldn’t be bothered to distribute them.
In 1948, as President Truman ran for reelection, Henry Wallace ran against him as the candidate of the Progressive Party. He finished fourth with a little over 2.4% of the vote. But as time went on, information came out from the prisoners who had been there when he had visited Magadan. In fact, one schoolboy at the time said that he remembered the visit very vividly because the most unusual thing was that suddenly the windows of the shops were full of Soviet foodstuffs. God knows where this stuff came from. Of course, as soon as Wallace left, the produce left as well.
In 1951, a woman named Elinor Lipper, who had been a Swiss national before being caught in the Gulags, and was later liberated, wrote a book called 11 Years in Soviet Prison Camps. She had been there when Wallace had visited the camps. As she sneered, “Every prisoner who was there at the time owes Mr. Wallace a debt of gratitude, for owing to his visit, that for the first and last time, the prisoners had three successive holidays.” In order to make sure that Wallace never saw a single prisoner, they were put in a room and shown movies from morning till night for three days straight. Eventually, by 1952, Wallace realized how badly he’d been had. He said, “I had not the slightest idea when I visited Magadan that this far-north Pacific port was also the center for administering the labor of both criminals and those suspected of political disloyalty. Nothing I saw suggested slave labor. I had not the slightest idea that there were many slave labor camps in Siberia in 1944, and that of these, the most notorious was Magadan.”
In 1952, Wallace admitted, “More and more, I’m convinced that Russian communism, in its total disregard of truth, in its fanaticism, its intolerance, and its resolute denial of God and religion, is something utterly evil.” 1952 would have been the end of his second term in office if he had succeeded FDR when he had been FDR’s vice president. By this point, Robert Hannegan, who had been head of the DNC, who had worked with FDR to make sure that Wallace wasn’t the vice presidential nominee and that Harry Truman would be his replacement, had passed away at the very early age of 46. His tombstone just has his birth date and the date of his death, but he had joked that he had wanted it to read, “Here lies the man who stopped Henry Wallace from becoming president of the United States.”