The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin

by Adam Hochschild

An in-depth exploration of the legacy of Joseph Stalin on the former Soviet Union, by the author of King Leopold’s Ghost.

Although some twenty million people died during Stalin’s reign of terror, only with the advent of glasnost did Russians begin to confront their memories of that time. In 1991, Adam Hochschild spent nearly six months in Russia talking to gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others. The result is a riveting evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Russian History, Politics, Soviet Union, World History

350 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 30, 1994

About the author

Hochschild was born in New York City. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would later write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the leftwing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones.

Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986), in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. His later books include The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990; new edition, 2007), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994; new edition, 2003), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (1997), which collects his personal essays and reportage, and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998; new edition, 2006), a history of the conquest and colonization of the Congo by Belgium's King Léopold II. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, published in 2005, is about the antislavery movement in the British Empire.

Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Hochschild's books have been translated into twelve languages.

A frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference and similar venues, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Hoc...

Reviews

[JJ Khodadadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

داستان ها و فیلم های ترسناک هیچ وقت به ترسناکی تاریخ نبودن! قسمتی از تاریخ وحشتناکی که گفتم در دوران استالین افتاده که بخشی از اون رو میتونید توی این کتاب بخونید. اینبار نمیتونم بگم بخونید و لذت ببرید، ولی بخونید!

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a long time I used to believe that Joseph Stalin was mad, but then I started rethinking my position. To dismiss him as crazy seemed like too easy an answer, allowing him to be relegated to the category of Other, remote from our own experiences. The problem with this is that if we decide we have nothing to learn from him, we have no defense when someone like him comes again. We need to directly confront his memory, to understand his motives and his actions. Only then will we be able to recognize his successors for what they are.

Stalin had read the Marxist theorists of the nineteenth century. He knew that the use of terror was to be an essential part of the destruction of the old ruling classes and the bourgeoisie in order to usher in the new era. However, terror was seen as an unfortunate, but brief, episode to clear the decks for the new society. When Lenin came to power it was amid the chaos of war, invasion, starvation, and societal collapse. He needed to establish order quickly and he needed to be ruthless about it. He found that terror worked. It was an effective force multiplier in that shooting a couple of people could make the rest acquiesce. “We must execute not only the guilty,” said Nikolai Krylenko, Lenin’s Commissar of Justice. “Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” In fact, terror worked so well that it became a hallmark of communist regimes everywhere: the secret police, the disappearances in the night, torture, exile, execution.

By the mid-1930s it was becoming obvious that the anticipated communist state of from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs was still far away and not getting any closer. People began to grumble, and some of the Old Bolsheviks began to talk about taking a different path, perhaps replacing Stalin with someone who had better ideas.

Stalin was not about to allow himself to be replaced. He declared that the Old Bolsheviks were the reason for communism’s failures: the state was not withering away because of them, the traitors and saboteurs. The fact that they were among the most honored leaders, former friends of Lenin, army generals, heads of industry, only allowed them to amplify the damage they caused. They were responsible, and they must pay. And with this declaration all sources of opposition to Stalin, real or imagined, could be swept away. He was not going anywhere.

Up to this point Stalin still seemed to me to be rational. A monster perhaps, but not a madman. But then, as the Great Terror steadily increased it scope, destroying millions of lives in an ever widening vortex of cruelty and murder, I began to reconsider my position again. Although the subsequent waves of the Purge were probably started intentionally, with the rationale that the wreckers at the top must have had help, who must also have had help at the working level, the machinery of terror spun out of control as it worked its way downward into the lives of everyday people. Were it not so tragic, it would have been absurd, like something out of Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil: “When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot. The new officials, not surprisingly, came up with higher figures.”

Did it at some point become unstoppable, its momentum beyond even Stalin’s control, or had he become so delusional that he truly saw plots and conspiracies at every level, so that even peasants could be spying for Germany or Britain or Japan, and even lowly workers could hatch elaborate nefarious plots to sabotage their factories? Millions were arrested, tortured, and shot or given long sentences in the Siberian gulag. In his book Travels in Siberia Ian Frazier writes, “A main goal of the Soviet labor-camp system was to take those citizens the Soviet Union did not need, for political or social or unfathomable reasons, and convert their lives to gold and timber that could be traded abroad.”

The numbers are monstrous. Historians estimate that Stalin was responsible for 20 million deaths, a third to half of them from starvation in the famines of the 1930s, the rest murdered outright or condemned to slow death in the camps.

Unquiet Ghost looks at the wreckage Stalinism left in its wake. The chapters focus on the memories of survivors, and expand on them to include the broader history of the era. The details put a human face on the inconceivable numbers. “In those years [the late 1940s] nobody asked questions, because nobody had fathers. Either the fathers had gone to the war and been killed, or they had been arrested. In my class at school, of thirty kids, only two had fathers.”

The book has an interesting discussion of the mind-sets of both the victims and the perpetrators. For instance, why didn’t the Old Bolsheviks band together to try and stop to Stalin’s excesses? Perhaps it was because many of them had spent their entire lives waiting for The Revolution, and this was the only one they had, so they did not want to do anything that might weaken it, and were willing to accommodate its excesses right up until they themselves were engulfed. “For these wavering Old Bolsheviks, who had been in the Party since before the Revolution, there was no possibility of salvation outside the faith: you were either on one side or the other, with the forces of the future or the forces of the past.”

There were arrest quotas, but they were considered minimums, and there were competitions among the NKVD regions to see which could exceed its quote by the most. For this reason it was not just the suspects themselves who were arrested, but their families, friends, neighbors and co-workers as well. It went on and on, so that, “In the late 1930s, according to figures cited today by Russian government officials, more than one out of every eight men, women, and children in the Soviet Union was arrested—the great majority of whom were shot, or died in prison.”

Whether or not Stalin was insane, by the late 1930s Soviet society was clearly out of its collective mind, and there was no stopping it. “One...similarity between the Great Purge and the witch hysteria is that the slightest expression of doubt in the overall enterprise was absolute proof that you were guilty yourself. The only top Soviet official who ever questioned the correctness of the Purge trial verdicts in a public speech—Grigory Kaminsky, the country’s minister of public health—was arrested the very same day and was never seen again.”

The book also sheds light on the perpetrators of the Purge and their techniques. Why did so many people confess to ridiculous crimes and clearly fabricated charges? Because confession led to the possibility of life and eventual exoneration. Refuse to confess and they took you down to the basement and shot you. Confess, and perhaps you had a chance to live. Perhaps.

The interrogators themselves were under great pressure to extract confessions. Failure to do so was seen as a sign of lack of faith in the mission and could lead to their own arrest and execution. However, even assiduous performance of one’s duties was not protection against arrest as the Purge swept on, and over 20,000 NKVD agents were themselves murdered or sent to Siberia. As a result, there were cases where an inmate working in the gulag could find that the prisoner beside him was the one who had sent him to camps just a few months before.

This book was first published in 1994, as the old system was painfully giving way to the new one. As a result, while it benefited from being able to talk with survivors before they passed away, it has little to say about the changing Russian state, although there are intimations of what was to come. For instance, “for many top Russian officials, talk of reform and privatization is merely a cover for taking state assets into their own hands.” This was exactly what happened with the rise of the oligarchs.

When Adam Hochschild was writing this book the archives were open and people could discuss what had happened and why. With the rise of Putin’s Russia, the old tyranny is back and even Stalin is being rehabilitated. The great tragedy of Russia under Stalin is being slowly suppressed and forgotten, which is a dangerous thing, for as the philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

[Alireza · Rating 4 out of 5]

آدام هاکسچایلد در این کتاب با دغدغه و وسواس زیاد سعی داشته پاسخی برای پرسش‌های مهمی از شرایط شوروی در زمان استالین پیدا کنه مثل اینکه محکومین و تبعیدشدگان به گولاگ‌ها چه تفاوت‌هایی میتونن با بازجوها و نگهبانان‌شون داشته باشند؟ اگر جای این دو گروه عوض بشه آیا باز این فجایع اتفاق می‌افتاد؟ پیشرفت‌هایی که در شوروی رخ میداد از روی خیرخواهی برای مردم بوده یا پروپاگاندا؟ آیا حکام از شرایط خبر داشتن؟ فرزندان و نسل بعدی بازجوها و محکومین چطور میتونن در کنار هم زندگی کنن؟
جالبه که بعد از سفر به خود شوروی و مصاحبه با کلی بازمانده از گولاگ و زندانی‌های قدیم نویسنده میگه بیشتر دچار گیجی شده و فهمیده چقدر مرز بین این انسان‌ها کم بوده. چطور یک نفر خودش رو قانع می‌کرده که کاری که داره میکنه درسته و شخص روبه‌روش دشمن خلق هستش.
نویسنده برای نوشتن این کتاب کار باارزشی کرده و از مخوف‌ترین مکان‌های شوروی که اسمشون لرزه به تن هرکسی می‌اندازه مثل کاراگاندان، ماگادان، کولیما و غیره بازدید کرده و سعی کرده با افراد مختلفی مصاحبه کنه. همین طور در طرح‌هایی که برای اعاده حیثیت زندانی‌های قدیم برگزار میشده مشارکت داشته و روایت میکنه که چطور مردم تلاش میکنند از پدر، مادر یا اقوام درگذشته خودشون هم اعاده حیثیت کنند و به یک آرامش ابدی برسند.
نویسنده تسلط خوبی هم بر ادبیات روسیه داره و جای جای کتاب بریده‌هایی از روایات نویسنده‌های معروف مثل آخماتووا، ماندلشتام، گینزبورگ و خیلی افراد بزرگ دیگه در متن قرار بده که انصافا هم خوب با متن همخوانی دارند.
بعضی از روایت‌های کتاب بسیار تکان‌دهنده هستند مثل نحوه جابجایی محکومین و رسوندنشون به جایی که ته دنیا به حساب می‌اومده! و بعضی روایت‌ها هم بسیار عجیب مثل اینکه یوگینا گینزبورگ بعد از تموم شدن دوره محکومیت ۱۰ ساله‌ش توی ماگادان یه مدتی مجبور میشه همونجا کار کنه که بهش اجازه تدریس زبان روسی به بزرگسالان میدن که متوجه میشه شاگردهای کلاسش نگهبانان و بازجوهای همون منطقه ماگادان هستن!
عجیبه، کلا کتاب عجیبیه و یه جاهایی دود از سر آدم بلند میشه که آدمیزاد چه کارهایی میتونه انجام بده!
اگر به مطالعه در خصوص تجربیات گولاگ علاقه‌مند هستید حتما پیشنهاد میکنم این کتاب رو بخونید

[HAMiD · Rating 4 out of 5]

انکار می کنیم و ندیدن را شیوه ی زیستن. خود را به نفهمی زدن حکایتی شگفت آور و بهت آور است و هنگامی که رو در رو می شوی با فاجعه آن سوی می ایستی که دامنت تَر نشود هیچ! و این گونه است که صدای گلوله را نمی شنوی و خونِ ریخته بر کناره ی جدول را فرض می گیری که خونِ حیوانی ست که پیش پایِ مسافری که از راه آمده قربان کرده اند و خیالت تخت می شود که پیش از سر بریدن حتمن آبش داده باشند که دور از رسمِ جوانمردی ست موجودِ زبان بسته را تشنه کشتن. اما نجاست شَتَک می زند هر چه هم دور باشی و رد خون می ماند بر حافظه اگرچه بی حافظه گی شیوه ات باشد
انکار می کنیم تا به زیستِ سراپا نکبتْ شَتَک زده به آن ادامه دهیم! خوش به حال آنکه خَر آمد و گاو رفت! چه ستایش شکوهمندی ست برای انسانِ دوره ی انکار! چه شکوهمندی ای ست حماقت را گرامی داشتن. و نمی شود هیچ باور کرد؛ پذیرفت؛ اینهمه عیانْ را ندیدن، خیره شدن به خورشید و روز را ندیدن! و روحِ ناآرام حکایت همین انکار و ندیدن است؛ شهروندیِ شب را کردن در زمانه ی لال پرست

1399/12/26
#
سپاسگزارم از حسام که کتاب را سپرد مرا و سپاسگزاری از خانم قیصری برای بازگردانِ جان دارِ متن و نزدیکی فاجعه

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

> Throughout history, human beings have periodically slaughtered people of other countries, races, and religions. But self-inflicted mass murder is far more rare. How could a country do this to itself? Our awe also comes from the scale. In the late 1930s, according to figures cited today by Russian government officials, more than one out of every eight men, women, and children in the Soviet Union was arrested—the great majority of whom were shot, or died in prison.

> The most obvious one, of course, is the old Russian tradition of absolute power at the top and passive obedience at the bottom. Until Peter the Great made a law against it, citizens of the capital would lie down in the street when the Tsar's carriage passed. You could compile an encyclopedia of such features of autocracy, but the most important one was that until the middle of the last century, nearly half the Russian population were serfs. For almost all the Soviet period, historians treated serfdom merely as one more evil of the old order. Today, however, writers are much more likely to talk about it as the source of a deep passivity that allowed dictatorship to flourish long after serfdom itself had ended.

> Another important ingredient of totalitarian culture in Russia is the country's long love affair with creeds that promise a millenarian deliverance from all suffering. You can easily trace this strand from the schismatics of the medieval Russian Orthodox Church through some of Dostoevsky's characters to the rigid arrogance of the early Bolsheviks.

> the insistent pressure for everyone to join in the scapegoating. It was never enough for the NKVD merely to brand men and women "enemies of the people" and shoot them. The director of any school, factory, or office had to countersign the papers ordering an employee's arrest. And when the victims were prominent, millions of people joined in condemning them by signing group telegrams or open letters, or by voting for unanimous resolutions at compulsory meetings at their workplaces.

> "We must execute not only the guilty," said Nikolai Krylenko, Lenin's Commissar of Justice. "Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."

> "I'd like to tell you something about perestroika,"added Major Kirillin earnestly. "In the West, they count its days from 1985 [when Gorbachev took over]. But we Chekisti count it from 1982, from when Andropov came to power. When the government was made up of seventy-five-year-olds, they didn't realize what the real situation in the country was. The apparatus that surrounded them met their needs, and they played their game. But Yuri Vladimirovich [Andropov], having spent fifteen years in this organization, knew the situation in the country from A to Z." Echoing the assessment made by many others, he added, "Without Andropov there would have been no Gorbachev."

> Rehabilitations in the 1950s proceeded very slowly, one case at a time. Someone once asked Anastas Mikoyan, an adroit survivor who served in the Politburo both under Stalin and long after, why this was so. Couldn't all these myriad "enemies of the people" simply be declared innocent all at once? "No they can't," he replied. "If they were, it would be clear that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters." He paused, then added, "Which, in point of fact, we were." The fiction that the millions of Great Purge arrests were a string of individual mistakes required each case to be laboriously proven a miscarriage of justice

> "In the documents there were orders with exact numbers given. You would be ordered to arrest and shoot, say, ten thousand people. But you could arrest twenty, thirty, forty thousand. The more 'enemies of the people' you arrested, the higher your score. As a result of such orders, the Tomsk NKVD challenged Novokuznetsk to a socialist competition. The cities were the same size. Who could arrest more people? It turned out that Tomsk arrested and executed more people than Novokuznetsk." The Tomsk authorities did indeed win the contest hands down; by some estimates, the NKVD shot roughly one out of every six residents of the city

[sarah Mtz · Rating 4 out of 5]

حكومت ستمگرانه كار دست ملت هاست و نه شاهكار يك نفر.

[ratherread · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not my usual genre of books to read. After reading the fabulous epic "The Bronze Horseman" trilogy, I wanted to read more about Stalin-era Russia.
This is a great book. During Stalin's reign of terror (1924-1953), he was responsible for the mass murder of 20+ million of his own citizens, either by execution or by working them to death as slaves in his many gulags (forced labor prisons). Not until almost 40 years after Stalin's death and the end of the Cold War (1989), did "The Great Silence" about what Stalin had done to his country end. In 1991, Adam Hochschild, an American journalist traveled for 6 months thoughout Russia and interviewed prison survivors, retired gulag guards/officers, secret police officers (NKVD / KGB), and family members of the dead and missing. He was also able to visit galug sites and even spent the night in one of Stalin's many luxury vacation homes, where he interviewed one of Stalin's retired housekeepers. Given the age of the people interviewed (50 to 90 years old), this was indeed a very rare opportunity.

This book reads like a novel. I found the stories mesmerizing and the people he interviewed fascinating. Out of empathy and respect, Adam does not go into detail about tortures. I agree with "The New York Times Book Review": "The characters and dramatic situations Mr. Hochschild encounters are nothing short of magnificent."

[Aliz · Rating 3 out of 5]

شروع خوب ، سیر نسبتا ضعیف و پایانی مطلوب.

Where do you begin, if you need to deny that someone is a human being? First, you call them animals.This is the key to denial: your enemies are not people, but rabid dogs, rats, pigs, vipers.
This habit of thinking gradually spreads from executioner to bystander.
It must, for without separating those before you into us and them, you cannot remain peaceful and untroubled in a society where imaginary enemies are shipped to the gulag or Jews are sent to the gas chambers, or
the poor starve, or the homeless lie on the sidewalks.

[Tamsin Ramone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Hochschild's writing abilities are unsurpassed. The manner in which he handles this sensitive topic is well researched, informative, interesting and respectful. Hochschild hasn't found it necessary to embellish on the terribly sad stories he has been told and as such you get a very clear picture of how Russians remember Stalin, the great purge and the times and silences surrounding the life and death of this dictator. Even after speaking to people who worked as guards, or relatives of guards, Hochschild still respects the situation they found themselves in, how their actions were truly barbaric, and the life they are trying to consolidate in the wake of this barbarism.

If you have any interest in Russian history, in Stalin, communism, or just how a situation can snow ball until the occupants are truly stuck, I highly highly recommend this book. It's a true work of literary genius.

After reading Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild my sisters and mum all found the need to write to Hochschild and commend him on a brilliant novel. As brilliant as I found BTC (and I did find it brilliant!) it is this book that inspires me to write to him as he put himself in to the research. He lived in Moscow, meet and interviewed many people who spent time in gulags across the country, spent time inside the KGB agency and even went to Kolyma (an infamous gulag).

All this commitment to delivering an unbiased version of the horrors of Stalin's USSR deserved recognition. Even if it's just from little Ol' me.

[Sooz · Rating 5 out of 5]

i enjoyed this book so much, because it didn't just explore the horrid things that had occured during the Stalin years -though there was enough of that to get a REALLY clear idea of what had happened - but it also explores the years immediately after.... the years before glasnost. if Stalin's great purge was Russia's apocalypse, the post-apocalypse was the great silence that followed it. AND i really like the study Hochschild makes of the phenomenon and his reluctance to blame, as if he wrote it hoping we could actually learn something about ourselves. here are some of my favourite quotes ... this one about opening the records from that time: 'not for vengeance. How could Russia ever stage a Nuremberg Trials ... when those complicit in the gulag included practically the whole country - one part denouncing, one part judging, a third shooting people, a fourth guarding the camps. It wouldn't stand to reason to try to find out who are more guilty ..... it would trigger the same conflict all over again ..'

this one on the question everyone asks ... how could the Russians have gone along with it: 'the most absurd statements, the most implausible lies begin to take effect if repeated day in day out. arrests and accusations on such a scale CANNOT be arbitrariness ... once an apparatis is in motion, it is bound to gather momentum and it's progress cannot be controlled. Vigilance! Are you blind? Can't you see the enemy? Vigilance became a matter of competition. Haven't you discovered an enemy yet? You mean to say your organization is the ONLY one without an enemy? How strange. How suspect.'

and this one: 'God merely decrees the future ... the tsar can remake the past.'

and more about how it could have happened: 'Soviet communism from the beginning was, psychologically, a religious culture. Just as the Great Purge was Inquistiorial in its fervor, so rehabilitation, and posthumous restoration of Party membership, have offered a kind of sainthood to martyres.

and: 'The closest parallel to the Purge is the great witch craze of early modern Europe. There too, the victims were accused of possessing powers, and there too, the whole epidemic is still difficult to understand. ... Belief in a devil can be as attractive as belief in a god. ....

Hochschild goes on to explain the political and social conditions that spawned both the witch hunts and later the Russian purge and how those conditions lead to an irrepressible NEED for a scapegoat. Hochschild does a great job of creating a very clear and detailed picture that tries to encourage healing and unity rather than further scapegoating ... as evident by this last quote:

'perhaps some people are born saints and some devils, but most of us are somewhere in between, influenced, in the end, by what the people around us are doing.'

[Garrett Rowlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

for someone whose knowledge of Russian history didn't go much beyond its literature and a vague notion that "bad things happened under Stalin" this book was an eye-opener. What was remarkable about Stalin's Great Purge is not the number of deaths--well into the millions--but how senseless and counter-productive it was; for example, the number of Russian generals executed at the dawn of WW2 and how this made them unprepared for the German invasion. The picture of the labor camps in Siberia is, not to make a pun, chilling. This kind of human misery is almost impossible to understand. Is the Stalin the most evil man in history? Admittedly, there is much competition, but this book makes a strong case for--yes.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tough book to read, not because it isn't good - its as good as Hochschild's others - but because the story isn't over. There is a sense of beginning and end with WWI and even the Congo atrocities - clearly the events affect today, but they are generally considered part of the past. The Purge lives on in survivors, in the education system, in pretty much every part of Russian life. Hochschild could not be a detached observer, telling a story and providing analysis - the open wounds were everywhere, perhaps because there was no clear bad guy. As he points out, the Russians did this to themselves - not an external invading power - and the Revolution had been greeted with such hope for good and positive change. I think the toughest story to read was of meeting a woman whose father was in charge of sending thousands to their deaths. She clearly adored her father, and her stories of him were quite sweet, but she knew and was still dealing with knowing that he was responsible for all those deaths.

Excellent, but tough and painful to read.

[conec · Rating 2 out of 5]

Adam Hochschild spent 6 months in Russia in 1991 and interviewed Russians who were grappling with their memories of the Stalin Era. He was lucky to visit Russia at a very opportune moment. Former gulag camps were available to visitors, plenty of people who lived in the Stalin era were still alive, and mass graves had recently been opened. Through his talks with perpetrators and surviving victims, Hochschild explores the extent to which Stalin’s legacy still casts a shadow over Russia. His book is organized into five major sections, which we will briefly discuss the contents of. There are several criticisms of the book to address, but most of the issues in his book fall under his writing style and use of sources.
From the very beginning of the book, Hochschild forms very ambitious assumptions that draw from just a few spoken words which he applies facile psychologizing to. In the introduction, he discusses an early encounter he had with a Russian at the beginning of his travels. A few Americans that he was with were recalling in a jovial manner arrests that were made during protests decades earlier, and a Russian rebuked them for talking so lightly about imprisonment. The way he approaches this very quick incident is repeated throughout the book. From one comment the man made, Hochschild “guessed this man must have had someone from his family...sent to prison or shot during Stalin’s time. He still could not talk about it openly, however, especially with a group of foreigners…”. The issue with writing style here is very plain to see - Hochschild admits that he has no idea why the man made such a comment, so he surmises that the man must have had a family member who was killed or sent to prison. It is fair for him to make this assumption, but he takes it even further. He states that the man was incapable of talking about “it”, and finally he weaves in highly illustrative and metaphorical language talk to further his reflection on the miniscule moment.
A notion that Hochschild tries to push is that we can better understand our own capacity for destruction and cruelty through examining the Great Purge and its aftermath. Very similar notions have been offered by genocide scholars, such as Christopher Browning or James Waller. I think it is quite possible that Hochschild may have even synthesized some of Browning’s arguments, given that Browning’s famous book on the Nazi police battalion came out two years before Hochschild’s book did. Another reason to believe that Hochschild may have drawn from Browning’s book is that he spent two pages discussing Robert Jay Lifton’s book on Nazi doctors. Lifton is a widely received genocide scholar, so we know that Hochschild has at least been inspired by genocide scholars. His reference to Lifton was unsurprising, because Hochschild did not resist drawing comparisons between the Soviet Union under Stalin and Nazi Germany throughout the entirety of the book. This is a major flaw in his work. Even if we embrace the higher end of the death counts or totalitarian understanding of Stalin, the comparisons to Nazi Germany and Hitler are superficial. Between the two regimes, there are clear and undeniable distinctions. The extent to which Hochschild connects the two regimes results in a normalizing of Nazi Germany or other genocidal regimes. In studying genocide, we are presented with plenty of grey area. What Hochschild does is create an even broader scope of grey area, merely because he defaults to this easy retreat so many times in his book. We should appreciate some of his efforts to spot similarities, but not entirely. For example, in the final chapter of the last section of the book, Hochschild discusses the connection his interviewee, Biryukov, has to Kolyma and the public square in Magadan specifically. The public square of Magadan was once surrounded by the administration of the Kolyma camps, NKVD offices, a prison, courts and an interrogation center. Hochschild notes that “more human misery was directly administered from this square than from anywhere else on earth, except possibly the arrivals platform at Auschwitz, where Dr. Mengele decided who would live and who would die.” Structural and spatial observations are usually very profitable for substantiating our understanding of the repressive apparatuses of authoritarian systems. Though Hochschild created an easily understandable analogy, we can still spot a major difference and we can see it embodied in one person: Dr. Mengele.
As previously mentioned, the book is split into five major sections. Each section deals with a period of his traveling Russia and is titled after the region he was in. Throughout the book, Hochschild indicates either where he was, where he was going, or the particular building or outdoor location that his conversations took place in. This repetitive description turns the book into a journal, and it is quite easy to perceive much of the points he makes about his conversations as matters of his opinion. This, in some ways, detracts from his efforts to dispel ignorance as to how the Great Purge could have happened, or why so many kept quiet about their experiences in the Gulag. Hochschild tells us in the preface that he had not set out to grapple with how evil the actions under Stalin were, but the lines of thought necessary to even allow such atrocities. Perhaps the most lucid and coherent answer Hochschild gives can be found in Chapter 8, “The Stalin in Us”. Midway through this chapter, he starts to offer us certain “habits of thinking that dominated Russia” which he identified through research and through his experiences with Russians. Of these habits of thinking, he says the most obvious one is the Russian tradition of absolute power at the top and passive obedience beneath it. He also goes on to explain Russia’s tendency toward creeds which claim to deliver from suffering, Russians’ tendencies toward scapegoating, and the immense pressure for everyone to join in the scapegoating. None of these points are poor ones. On the contrary, they are all viable and worth investigating. What he wants us to see, is that the utopian dream of socialism in the Soviet Union was implemented in ways that both exacerbated pre-existing predispositions and also devastated many. A culture was formed where deviation, even verbalized discussion, was forbidden. He says rather eloquently, “In a society that demanded group condemnations, many rushed to condemn before even being asked.”
Adam Hochschild certainly cites valuable sources in his book, such as writings from Solzhenitsyn and poems from survivors. The most common source he has is direct quotations from the people he happened to brush shoulders with. Memoirs and books which share the stories of victims and perpetrators are undoubtedly important. This is because we hear from the very mouths of those who experienced the extraordinary times under discussion. The problem we run into with Hochschild’s book is that Hochschild has ten or twenty sentences to say for every one sentence an interviewee says. We get the impression that after Hochschild formed the beliefs behind his claims given in the chapter “The Stalin in Us”, he then took the liberty of applying those claims to the words of the people he quotes. Aside from that, he took far too much liberty in constructing characters out of the people. Early in the book Hochschild tells us of his talks with Shuv, an elderly retired mechanical engineer. Just based off the pace at which Shuv spoke, Hochschild says that Shuv spoke “with the anxious methodicalness of an elderly person afraid that he might forget something”. It’s almost degrading for Hochschild to make points like this about the people he includes in his book. His dubious assumption about the pace of Shuv’s speaking points toward where Hochschild came up short in answering the main questions of his book. Hochschild dedicates the second chapter in the book to memory, and the amazing resilience human memory can have through decades. Oddly enough, Hochschild mentions Primo Levi and how Primo Levi never had his identification tattoo removed. I say this is odd because Primo Levi says in his book about Holocaust survivors, The Drowned and the Saved, that memory is extremely contingent and unreliable. Levi asks “How much of the concentration camp world is dead will not return, like slavery and the dueling code?”. To paraphrase Levi: The anxiety that such unconscionable realities can arouse in people are often deformed in the individual’s mental discourse and replaced with a personal, falsified and convenient reality. I will not say that this take on memory is necessarily and entirely correct, but I do think it is worth considering. We also know that most of the people Hochschild presents to us were quite old. If Hochschild thinks that Shuv was struggling with his memory, then the majority of his book does not serve to convince us of his answers.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 3 out of 5]

"واسلاو هاول از «ترس از تاریخ» حرف می‌زند که مردم را به‌سوی اجتناب از همدستی و مشارکت در جرم و گناه هدایت می‌کند. اما گاهی گذشته را به‌سادگی محو می‌کنیم تا خود را از رنج غیرضروری حفظ کنیم. اغلب کسانی که حافظه را به وظیفه و شغل خود تبدیل کرده‌اند، تشریفات را برای کمک به این افراد دگرگون کرده‌اند. الکساندر سولژنتسین هر ساله در سالروز بازداشت‌اش چیزی نمی‌خورد به‌جز جیره ۶۵۰ گرمی نان و چند حبه قند در آب گرم. پریمو لِوی، برعکسِ بسیاری از نجات‌یافتگان آشویتس، خالکوبی شماره شناسایی‌اش را از روی بازو پاک نکرد. او می‌خواست مردم آن را ببینند و بدانند و بپرسند که جریان‌آن چه بود.

لِو رازگون نیز نمایانگر همین روحیه بود. در هشتادوسه سالگی، چالاک و خوش‌نقش، با لباس بادگیر، تقریباً هفتاد ساله به نظر می‌رسد، با سیمایی گرم و مصمم و چشمان آبی که شما را مدتی طولانی و متفکرانه میخکوب می‌کند، گویی پرسشگرانه شما را در ذهنش واکاوی می‌کند. به نظر می‌رسد با خودش به صلح رسیده، درباره همه چیزهای اطرافش کنجکاو است و باورش نمی‌شود که هنوز زنده است و می‌تواند همه این‌ها را ببیند. رازگون عضو هیئت‌مدیره مموریال، نویسنده و ویراستار کتاب‌های کودکان است. او بیش از پانزده سال در اردوگاه‌های کار بوده که بیشتر آن را به قطع درختان در نزدیکی قطب شمال سپری کرده است.

با رازگون در «دهکده نویسندگان» مشهورِ پری‌دیلکینا، با حدود چهل‌وپنج دقیقه رانندگی به بیرون مسکو، ملاقات کردم. بوریس پاسترناک اینجا زندگی و کار می‌کرد و بسیاری از نویسندگان دیگر هنوز اینجا زندگی می‌کنند. رازگون در اتاقی در طبقه بالای مهمانپذیر اتحادیه نویسندگان که پنجره‌هایش رو به شاخه‌های بیشه درختان غان باز می‌شد، اقامت داشت.

او گفت: «مدرسه را پیش از انقلاب شروع کردم، در تمام کلاس‌هایمان آواز می‌خواندیم، خدا نگهدار تزار باشد.» در جوانی با دختر یکی از اعضای عالی‌رتبه حزب کمونیست که در پاکسازی استالین جان باخته بود ازدواج کرد. سپس اِن.ک.و.د، رازگون، همسرش و بسیاری از بستگانشان را دستگیر کرد. «استالین نه‌تنها مخالفان بالقوه خود بلکه همه اعضای خانواده‌شان را هم نابود کرد. او در این راه از ایوانِ مخوف پیروی می‌کرد. همسران و فرزندان را دستگیر می‌کرد... تنها دخترم دستگیر نشد چون پانزده ماهه بود.» همسر رازگون در بیست‌ودوسالگی در قطاری در راه زندان جان باخت.

من هنوز پنجم مارس، روز مرگ استالین، را تعطیل و جشن می‌دانم. این جشن برایم از همان سال اول مرگش شروع شد. حتی در اردوگاه توانستم ودکا گیر بیاورم. ما پول جمع کردیم: دویست روبل به‌اضافه ده قوطی کنسرو گوشت به یک نگهبان دادیم و او برایمان یک بطری ودکا آورد...

رازگون بیش از بیست سال پیش نوشتن خاطراتش را شروع کرد. آن زمان «فقط می‌توانستم برای کشوی کُمد بنویسم، بدون هیچ امیدی به انتشارشان. گاهی آن‌ها را با صدای بلند برای خانواده و دوستانم می‌خواندم.» اما چند سال پیش، بالاخره کتابش چاپ شد و چند جایزه برد؛ ترجمه آن به فرانسه، اولین فرصت زندگی‌اش را برای رفتن به خارج فراهم کرد. در هشتاد سالگی، ناگهان به نویسنده‌ای مشهور تبدیل شد. رازگون تعداد زیادی از افراد را در اردوگاه‌ها و زندان دیده و خاطراتش نمایشگاهی تصویری از همه آن‌هاست. یکی از هم‌سلولی‌هایش پیرمردی بود که در زمان آخرین تزار، دقیقاً توی همان سلول زندانی بود. روزی بازجوها آن مرد را کتک‌خورده و بیهوش از بازجویی برگرداندند. آن‌ها او را داخل سلول انداختند و رفتند و بعد با پزشک زندان، یک زن، برگشتند.

نمی‌توانستیم از او چشم برداریم. آن زن زیبا در روپوش سفید و کفش‌هایی باریک و شیک‌، بدون آنکه خم شود، دست مرد افتاده روی زمین را گرفت و سپس بازوهایش را که روی کف سیمانی به شکل صلیب قرار گرفته بودند و بعد پاهایش را تکان داد، سپس رو به زندانبانان گفت: 'هیچ جاش نشکسته، فقط کوفته شده.' بعد برگشت و انگار که ما را اصلاً ندیده باشد، از سلول خارج شد.

رازگون می‌نویسد، در آن لحظه، چنین افرادی را درک می‌کرد که «مثل ما نبودند... یا شبیه چیزی که همیشه خواهیم بود.»"

[Katelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. Definite 5 stars. For a nonfiction book, it was never dull or dry. SO fascinating to learn about the Great Purge under Stalin and death camps, such as the ones in Kolyma. Kolyma is/was the far Northeastern region of Russia where they sent prisoners - virtually all innocent people - to work until they died. The area held dozens of mining operations which funded the Industrialization of Russia in the 1930s-1950s. I read so many personal accounts from not only victims and survivors, but also interviews with the children of interrogators and executioners.

There was the story about a town called Kolpashevo on the river Ob where in 1979, the high waters washed away the banks and revealed a mass grave of bodies and skeletons dating from the Great Purge, underneath the local NKVD (predecessor to the KGB, secret police) building. The bottom layer of bodies was preserved by the permafrost, a bullet hole in each skull, and the KGB tried badly to hush it up by sinking the bodies in the river, rather than giving them a proper burial.

I could have read a 1000 page version of this book.

[Daniel Porcel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book by Adam Hochschild.
He has a unique way of writing history books , not as a regurgitation of facts and dates as is often times the case with other authors but by true investigation through travel, in this case in Russia and by interviewing several survivors and perpetrators of the gulags in the times of Stalin’s rule.
He really tries to understand how people thought at that time, why some otherwise “good hearted people “ committed atrocities against their own fellow citizens and why there was almost no resistance to Stalin’s sadistic and paranoid extermination system.
I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in Russia and this dark period of it’s history.

[Aidan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The knock is bound to come.

This was a great read for me as someone who knew about the Gulags but didn't know the true extent of them. I learned a lot about the human condition in this wonderful study of post-Stalinist Russia. There are some fascinating stories from primary sources: prisoners, victims, and executioners. The first chapter and the chapter on entering Kolyma were my favorites. Great read, would recommend.

[Brian Skinner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in this book are extremely sad. Of course that is to be expected in a book about the people affected by Stalin’s monstrous crimes. The thing is most Russian people loved Stalin because they thought he was getting rid of bad people.

Even today they are conflicted about the things he did. Russia truly is a broken country. It will probably take at least a century to get it on a good path if ever.

[Megan Jelinski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflective, informative and edifying. Alittle bit of too much fluff, had to trim the fat and skip around. Pg. 130 stood out. Definitely a read to be informed of when history repeats itself.

“Enemy of the people.”

[David Groves]

Books that arise from oral history are often riveting, and since this one covers one of the most riveting and dramatic periods in world history, it is engrossing. The stories that the author tells have the ring of truth about them, featuring unexpected twists, unlikely victims, even more unlikely survivors, and double-reverse endings. More than one story left me with moist eyes, covering the breadth and depth of emotions and ambitions that make up a life. The author is a fine writer with good, straight prose, however, much of it feels like he didn't put a final polish on it. Still, with all the astonishing moments in it--it's filled to overflowing with such moments--it is still an extraordinary book. As a liberal, it changed the way that I think about Russia, the Soviet Union, and communism.

[Stu Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful book written right at the end of the Soviet Era.....about the Gulag's and the legacy of Stalin. It's prescient in picking up a pattern that's only exploded recently, in kinda glossing over the crimes of Stalin, especially in Russia. It looks at how people were in denial during the Great Purge, how their was little fighting of their fates and a general sense of forgetting. It looks at Memorial, the Russian group dedicated to preserving the history of the Gulag and who are under strenuous attack in Putin's Russia. All in all, a well done necessary history of a moment and a tragedy and still very relevant almost thirty years on

[Willie Kirschner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very well written and researched and provides interesting information that the author received from people who survived the Great Purge and some of their children. Hochschild certainly asks the right questions about why and how this happened, and provides some ideas on this, however it struck me that this would be a good time to do a follow up or revision to understand what Russians today think of Stalin and what happened and how that shaped the current country that we are dealing with now? Always more questions.

[Maia · Rating 3 out of 5]

i remember only one thing about this book, which made me keep searching for it decades after, now the internet's here i might finally reread it: there is only one group of people who rebel that he finds, a group of children who get together to discuss things and start questioning everything: and ran every risk and followed what they thought through to the end. I wanted to reread that bit, to learn: how do you question? How do you dare?

[Mike Brassfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up after having read King Leopold's Ghost. That book was heartbreaking but so well done.

This is even better.

I'll keep this review short: This is one of the most profound books I've ever read.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone interested in social-political tragedies and the human dynamics that generate neighbourly betrayal, mass atrocities, and other social horrors. Not a light-hearted read, but a very important one.

[CanadianReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Highly readable and compelling.

[Katie]

Not nearly as interesting as his book “King Leopold’s Ghost”.

[Rubin Minhas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of Adams Hochschilds book is a masterpiece, and this true for this, the last in his impressive bibliography that I've read. Before reading on, I should declare an interest - it's my view that Hochschild is the greatest and most perceptive historical writer I have ever read.

Hochschild's books should come with a health warning - once you open the first page and read the first paragraph you will not be able resist being sucked into another world, that is richer and more exciting than any fiction, then swept along through the decades of history, its ups and downs and sometimes ending in tragedy and sometimes in poetic justice.

Hochschild is the master story teller and he 'brings history alive'. His keen sense of humanity and ability to tell the story of the times as it affects every day people, rather than painting oversized depictions of great men and glorious nations, gives the reader a ring side seat of events as the unfold and affect the everyday man. If you want to read ethnocentric history, or accounts that play to your prior beliefs about the myth of your own great nation, whichever it may be, this book is not for you.

Anyone looking to travel back in time and experience what it might have been like to live in Stalin's Soviet Union will relish this book. The writing, as always, is clear, vivid, and gentle and Hochschild paints the canvass with the underlying moral and humanistic observations that separate mankind from beasts, or notes their abscence, as is sadly too often the case.

The book takes you through the whole enterprise of the Revolutionary Communist movement, beginning with the Tsars, briefly touching on the civil war and then long descent into the darkness of the totalitarian system enforced by the police state. Readers develop a sense of what factors in a civil society where present of absent, play into this descent, and the basic question of, "what was it about the situation that allowed this to happen?' The Great Famine and Great Purge are major themes and the roles of those who enabled them and made space for them are dealt with in meticulous detail and form the substrate upon which Hochschild dissects events in the search for insights into what makes us human and inhuman.

Hochschild draws out the meta-concepts of mass hysteria, acquiescence with evil and the role of the individual through a series of interviews, his mission being to explore whether each person has in their self, some part that is dark and can be turned against their fellow man, should the conditions permit it.

There is no book by Adam Hochschild that will not leave you feeling that you have grown a foot taller and can see more clearly for the benefit of having read it, and this is no exception.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptionally well-written book about Stalin’s rule that left a country’s people devastated—millions dead due to Stalin’s repressive regime fueled by his paranoia and drive for power. I chose this book as I wanted to learn more about Russia’s history—what happened after the revolution in 1917. I recently read Richard Pipes “Russia Under the Old Regime”; it covered Russia’s history up to the fall of the Tsar in 1917. Though a dense read, it was a good precursor to "The Unquiet Ghost".

Through the stories Hochschild shares of his travels throughout Russia in 1991 where he interviews family members of those killed in Gulags, Gulag survivors, government officials and other Russians with stories to tell, the reader learns of the devastating consequences of Stalin’s regime. I agree with other reviews that Hochschild’s writing is exceptional, he writes with sensitivity, thoroughness and sometimes humor without the melodrama. The story of Russia is sad; when reading of the repression, the fear that people have (and perhaps still do) lived with, it makes one appreciate living in a place that embodies democracy.

Hochschild includes excerpts from poems and letters of survivors and family members, and from well-known Russian authors. They reveal pain, fear and loneliness. The words below are from author Victor Serge, Russian revolutionary and author.

.If we roused the peoples and made the continent quake,
…Began to make everything anew with these dirty old stone,
These tired hands, and the meager souls that were left us,
It was not tin order to haggle with you now
Sad revolution, our mother, our child, our flesh,
Our decapitated dawn, our night with its stars askew…
—Page 143

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Hochschild is one hell of a reporter. In 1991 shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, he went to Russia to find out what Russians thought about Stalin, the man that carted 20 million Russians off to their deaths in his 25 year reign. Hochschild tracked down not only ordinary Russians, but Stalin's victims and their children. He talked to men who had been in the Siberian camps and miraculously survived (If you are ever imprisoned in a concentration camp, volunteer to work in the kitchen.) and men and women whose parents had been dragged out of their apartments on cold winters' nights. He interviewed a woman in Siberia whose father, a sensitive, kind man in his family life, had been in charge of one of the gulags and had murdered many people.
What did Russians think of Stalin 25 years after he died? How long would it take for Russia to get rid of Stalinist thinking? A long time, people told Hochschild. A newspaper published by one of the new political groups used words like "eliminate," "unmask," "liquidate," "dispossess," "put an end to," "bring to court." The idea is to slap a derogatory label on one's opponents, and not engage. (Sound familiar?)
This is a well written, thoughtful book on an extremely important subject. It's not enough to declare that a country is now a democracy and that the people are all free. They have to free their minds.