This is an extraordinarily important and riveting story everyone should read repeatedly. I'm interested myself to find out why memory of Communist terror doesn't work this way. 1st, important to examine favorite meme of Americans about themselves this doctor helps debunk:
The meme of the American GI bursting into the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust and "saving" people even as they took horrible pictures of them and "revealing to the world this evil" is a very big staple of Holocaust memory, but it is only partially true as we find from a US doc
He *couldn't* save people and wept for 40 years, broken at the memory of a little girl who died and hundreds more, with his family hating him as his soul was poisoned & only his little grandson to hear the story. Horrible!
He burst in to the death camp, but it was too little and too late; boats had been turned back, America was late to the war, antisemitism in America too, all sorts of problems. Soviet people sacrificed more than Americans to end this horror BUT
Stalin with his Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, his decapitating of his own army before the war weakening defense; his mass murder of his own people in 1930s weakening struggle; his murder of Jews, too - it's amazing the Soviet people did what they did in Stalingrad BUT let's look
Why aren't the horrors of Communist mass crimes of humanity as compelling to people as the horrors of the Holocaust? Because they aren't tho should be, and you need not to compare different tragedies to admit that. Why?
Well, let me suggest that the "bursting in" meme is actually helpful to understand, and we now see the limits of the self-righteous meme for our own people through this doctor's broken horror. Burst all you will; too late.
But there wasn't any "bursting" in the USSR in the same way. There were no victors; the perpetrators stayed in power and remain today. They weren't tried, as in Nuremberg in part bc the Soviet party to the newly-establish laws said:
Nationality, race, religion could be used to define mass crimes vs. humanity but not class or political affiliation. They crippled int'l law as @anneapplebaum explains in her new book and Telford Taylor in his old. You couldn't try Communism under those laws. And if you tried
other ways of trying Communism, Bill Clinton might advise you that half or more of your members of parliament would go to jail, or Western liberals would scold your for human rights violations. It's a hard reality.
But more to the point, there was no "bursting in" to convey the full horror of the regime and its victims in a moment. Why was this? Let me recall my visit to Perm Labor Camp No. 35 in 1988 w AM Rosenthal, Phil Taubmann. Our little news crew couldn't burst nytimes.com/1988/12/13/opi…
It took Rosenthal years to get permission to see this camp where Soviet dissidents were held. Sovs wdn't give me a visa, the independent interpreter he preferred. He overcame those hurdles and a liberal perestroika newspaper was our reluctant host and editor was squeezed by KGB
He tried to convince us as did officials that there was nothing to see there, that the politicals had already been released, that it was all good, that we should take in shows & restaurants in Moscow instead. AM insisted we go. Freed inmates told us politicals still there.
One helpfully drew a map so we could inquire about some of the camp's darker parts where they might be held. So we flew on a plane lifting off straight up into the air as Soviet planes do, smelling of gasoline and ice to chip off the windows into the Ural mountains. Russia big!
We got there at dark -- AM had a lifelong leg ailment and barely walked around the stark town of Perm as we tried to plan our strategy outside earshot of our Prosecutor's Office & KGB minders, some doubling as journalists.
I didn't know how Abe was going to climb the 4 flights of stairs with elevator out but he did. Taubman was trying to keep up his spirits, which were daunted when the story he called into his editor on the very bad phone was beamed to him out of a not-working TV a half hour later
The TV was the way they bug your conversations, see, and sometimes they accidentally play back when the KGB tape recorder, like the Soviet TV, didn't work. We were lucky it didn't explode; they often did.
We were a little underfed and sleepless crew leaving the dreadful Soviet hotel breakfast the next morning but determined. Our hosts decided we need a stop-off at a delightfully picturesque town with people still driving horse carts & a lovely peasant home/restaurant w/ tayozhnik
A very tasty dish, a lots of vodka and cookies and chocolates strangely even unavailable in a hotel where foreigners had stayed were produced to induce us to extend our lunch to 3 hours. AM waved it away and said we need to get moving, it's getting dark. It was December in Russia
We reached this bleak property near dusk and a prisoner, at enormous risk to himself, raced out of his workshop to the yard and cried in English, which he had learned painstakingly, "They've hid them in the infirmary!" about prisoners we wanted to see -- the politicals.
He was hauled away by guards before we could even drop our jaws, agape. We were brought carefully rehearsed prisoners who told us of hot meals and clean beds but we wanted to get up to that infirmary! AM insisted he wouldn't leave until we did, and we could make do with camp beds
to stay overnite. When we went to infirmary, I hung back, trying to talk to a doctor w/out KGB to see what he cd tell me abt torture & death of Anatoly Marchenko who went on hunger strike to protest conditions, was transferred and died altho usually they forced fed them. Terrible
The stark look of terror on that doctor's face alone with me, like the stark look of terror of the woman at the concession stand who nodded speechless that yes, the chocolate I saw there was ALWAYS there, along with the caviar (!) - I'll never forget. They were victims, too.
So bc I hung back, I didn't immediately understand what all the shouting and hubbub was. It seems Mikhail Kazachkov, a political, got to a window and shouted, "Hey, Mr. Rosenthal! I'm up here! I'm not sick! Talk to me!" Abe began shouting questions back up. The guards hustled us
That "Man at the Window" became a repeated theme for Abe -- I'll never forget that pale face struggling to shout some news -- and his colleagues at NYT got mad at him for being so obsessed with this story. His column was "On My Mind" - they began to mock him saying "Out of Mind"
.So to continue as to WHY Lenin, Stalin's even Brezhnev's mass crimes against humanity have so little power to inform and change people so they don't argue against Magnitsky and a zillion other things in our time: no bursting in.
Our little news crew put stories on the front page of a newspaper read by every editorial office in America, but perestroika was bigger news for many like a lot of other things. Let me try to look more widely at the bursting issue.
My mother-in-law's horrible tales of the Stalin era & her father being hauled off to the GULAG to disappear, & her other relatives & her mom for awhile when she was a little girl always begin with two loud words: STUK STUK! Knock on the door in Russian. NKVD, KGB burst in.
Her little grandchildren -- my kids -- would always start involuntarily -- we all would -- the horror of her two repeated words for years: STUK! STUK! always chilled me. Everybody knows what the knock on the door means to Russians. Awful! The STUK worked in two directions, tho
In ways it didn't in the Holocaust story. Those doors had a reverse side and a softer "stuk" that gave rise to the word "stuchatl" which meant "to inform on your neighbour". The stukachi send people to GULAG to grab their apartments, or for zealous political reasons, or fear.
The stukachi -- soft knock-knock leading to LOUD STUK! STUK! later! -- were legion, endless, everywhere. Today's victim was tomorrow's perpetrator and a victim again - why Solzhenitsyn called it "The Red Wheel". It still turns.
I'll point out another interesting side to this just personally, don't know how widespread it is -- my dad lied about his age as a teen, got himself into the Korean War, and served as a Russian linguist, he was Irish but good with languages. He was a great story teller - Irish -
But when he came back from the Korean war, where he heard the evils of Soviet pilots talking & saw the evils of "comfort women" in Japan, and heard from others the evils of Korean villagers bombed - and I don't know what-all -- he didn't describe. He said, "Many soldiers return
"But you don't talk about war experiences in your family. It's wrong to take it into civilian life. It has to be compartmentalized. It is too horrible." So I don't know. I have his few medals, a pen knife, a picture of some war buddies, a night in a cafe with Japanese dates - AND
My Russian language. My dad didn't tell war stories. But he taught us Russian from Soviet children's books and said we must always respect our enemy and learn his culture and understand him. He would say of the Japanese:
"The Japanese lost the war. But they won the peace. We didn't." By that he meant "Toyota". or "Nikon". Or the joke on the TV in the 1970s. "Datsun?" remember? But you can't forget -- you lose a war, but you might win peace. The Soviets won both, in Eastern Europe. Terrible.
How many American GIs felt that way, about WWII or Korean War (the "forgotten war") or even Vietnam War? "You don't bring your war back to you to civilian life." So how much are we missing? But the "burst" is not there in Russia. I'll try to explain more.
Have I -- or you -- or anybody ever had an experience *about Stalin's terror* like one doctor, going to one camp, & having a destroyed life, that tells us EVERYTHING we need to know FOREVER and NEVER FORGET about the Holocaust? Well, no, I hope I've made clear why.
Not just perpetrators are still in power, there are no victors, and news and memory are suppressed and punished even tho brave committees of people try to change this; but look at head of Memorial in Chechnya now, hauled away by same types of people that hauled away great-grandpa
Over the years, I've sat with many victims or visited horrible places. The worst for me was Kuropaty in Belarus. A still forest like Narnia's "Wood Between the Worlds" but the worlds you jump into are mass graves. Depressions in the earth, repeating as far as the eye can see.
With victims in them, that were hidden from view while people picnicked above, or quietly brought a little flower as their parents were here -- somewhere. Some brave archeologists dug up and publicized in 1980s.
A prosecutor tried to investigate the case -- 100,000? 400,000? Soviet agitprop said they were Nazi not Stalin victims, a marker Bill Clinton brought to honour the victims of Kuropaty was defaced, dismantled. People arrested, demonstrating. Very hard to keep the memory.
Who remembers Kuropaty? Who even KNOWS about Kuropaty? A few old ladies in Belarus and maybe their grandchildren in the opposition? Even as I write this thread, some tweets disappear bc technical limitations - blogs are better. I'll stop soon.
I remember a man who tried to save his brother from wrongful psychiatric internment, both tortured by drugs used only on real mental ill -- wrongly - 50 years previously in the US but still active in USSR. Sulfazine. Horror stories.
This man failed to save his brother, he died when trying to escape, in the taiga, of exposure. He tried to save another man, known at least to some, Valentin Zek, the poet. He tried to "adopt" him to bring him home from psikhushka. BUT
Psychiatric doctors with shoulder boards under the gowns said he had "committed suicide". The man doubted this. Because officials turned over the man's few belongings, including his belt. With a receipt showing a date before his suicide, so he couldn't have used the belt.
I have the belt, and his poems smuggled out in samizdat. I have the man's toothbrush, whittled to a nub as the zeks did to hide in a pocket to be used bc they weren't allowed always. So when I die, can someone explain? About what the belt and the toothbrush mean. If not the poems
*stuchat' - which has a soft sign on the end.
