FACES AND PLACES: UPA in the Gulag (10/26/03)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

UPA in the Gulag

Of the many recently published books on Soviet crimes against humanity, one that stands out is "Gulag: A History," by Anne Applebaum.

Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," Ms. Applebaum's treatise is filled with portrayals and descriptions so abominable that one gasps. Mind and heart recoil at the unspeakable horror of it all.

Gulag is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (main camp administration), essentially a series of labor camps for "enemies of the people," conceived by Vladimir Lenin and perfected by Joseph Stalin. By 1921, there were already 84 such camps in 43 provinces of Russia.

"From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion until 1953, when Stalin died," writes Ms. Applebaum, "the best estimates indicate that some 18 million people passed through this massive system. About another 6 million were sent into exile, deplored to the Kazakh deserts or the Siberian deserts. Legally obliged to remain in their evil villages, they too were forced laborers even though they did not live behind barbed wire." It was not until 1987 that the Soviet leadership began to dissolve the camps.

It is clear from Ms. Applebaum's account that Ukrainians suffered more than any other group, first during the Terror-Famine, then during the contrived incorporation of western Ukraine into the Soviet Union, and finally during the forced repatriation of Ukrainian displaced persons after World War II.

In order to brutalize so many innocent victims, Gulag guards came to believe that the "enemies of the people" were somehow subhuman, not deserving of pity. "Most of the time ... the cruelty of the Soviet camp guard was unthinking, stupid lazy cruelty of the sort that might be shown to cattle or sheep," Ms. Applebaum writes. Political prisoners, more despised than common criminals in the camps, were subjected to a special form of de-humanization. "The Ukrainian nationalists who began pouring into the camps after the second world war were variously called 'snake-like slavish dogs of the Nazi hangman,' 'Ukrainian German fascists,' or the 'agents of foreign intelligence services.' "

Ukrainians were, nevertheless, the best organized. They had been nationalist partisans and were generally segregated from the other prisoners, a move that only increased their solidarity. According to some former prisoners, the arrival of the Ukrainian partisans (UPA) usually meant the elimination of informers among the prisoners. "The anti-Soviet partisan organizations in western Ukraine," writes Ms. Applebaum, despised turncoats in their ranks and "brought this obsession with them to the camps."

Ukrainians were usually in the forefront of strikes and uprisings in the camps, especially after the death of Stalin. One of the biggest strikes was in the Steplag camp, where nearly half of the 20,000 prisoners were Ukrainian. Writes Ms. Applebaum: "As in the other camp, the prisoners of Steplag were organized by nationality. Steplag's Ukrainians, however, appear to have taken their organization a few steps further into conspiracy. Instead of openly choosing leaders, the Ukrainians formed a conspiratorial 'Center,' a secret group whose membership never became publicly known, and probably contained representatives of all of the camp's nationalities."

"Even if they had not exactly planned it [the strike], step by step," Ms. Applebaum explains, "the Ukrainian-led center was clearly the motivating force behind the strike, and played a decisive role in the 'democratic' election of the strike committee. The Ukrainians seem to have insisted on a multinational committee: they did not want the strike to seem too anti-Russian or anti-Soviet, and they wanted the strike to have a Russian leader." They selected a former Red Army colonel who urged the prisoners to put up banners: "Long live the Soviet regime!" "Long live the Soviet constitution!" Eventually betrayed by the same Russian colonel, the 40-day strike came to a bloody end.

In her 677-page book Ms. Applebaum documents all aspects of the Soviet labor camp experience, relying on recently opened archives and memoirs of former prisoners. Twenty-seven chapters are devoted to such topics as the guards, the prisoners, women and children, the dying, strategies of survival, and rebellion and escape.

Like many of us, Anne Applebaum wonders why so few members of the political and literary left have broached the subject of Soviet atrocities. No Hollywood movies. Few monographs from academics. No museum dedicated to the crimes perpetrated by Marxism/Leninism. In mentioning the western republics of the Soviet Union, she writes: "Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler killed Jews. Yet how many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so - so boring, and so ostensibly undramatic. The crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler."

For the left, it seems, the Nazis were evil. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was merely an aberration, a beatific dream gone horribly bad because the wrong people were in charge. The dream, however, lives on.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected].

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