Brian’s Reviews > Gulag: A History > Status Update

In 1836, the Russian philosopher Pyotr Chadaev wrote an essay critical of the regime of Czar Nicholas I: “Contrary to all the laws of the human community,” he declared, at the height of the Russian imperial regime, “Russia moves only in the direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.”

Wow. Not much has changed in 200 years.

The combined effect of the deportations and the war on the demographics of the Baltic states was shocking: between 1939 and 1945, the Estonian population declined by 25 percent.

In fact, this question—“Did they believe in what they were doing?”—is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were were doing?