Timeless Wisdom - Learn History with Dennis Prager - Part 4

Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs. And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com. Hello everybody and welcome to the Dennis Prager Show. I periodically, I periodically have A History Hour featuring a recently published major work on some vital issue in history, because if we understand where we came from, we will understand where we are. And I am speaking to a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and despite that fact, I adore her. It's somewhat like the Nobel Prize. Sometimes it's suspect, but she deserves it. Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, who writes extremely important columns and extremely important books, and this one is on a theme that touches my heart, my conscience, and my mind. It's titled Gulag: A History, and I had asked Anne Applebaum prior to coming on If she thought that the average person, let's not even say person, the average American, let's even say the average American who has attended college could identify Gulag, what do you think, Ann?

I think they can probably identify the name and they've heard the term, not least because it's now used popularly, but I doubt very much that they have a mental image of what it was, that they can picture something or think of something. Something or even assign it to a particular part of history. People have heard of it, but they're not exactly sure about it.

I, I don't normally do this, but I'm going to ask you a question for which I only want an emotional answer. Does that bother you?

No, it would depend what the question is.

Oh no, does it bother— I'm sorry, does it bother you that so many people cannot identify Gulag? Oh, I see.

Not does it bother you that I'm asking you an emotion-based —Um, it bothers me because the history of the Gulag and its role in the history of the Soviet Union is a crucial part of our history. So it bothers me that Americans don't know this piece of their own history. In other words, I'm not sure that most Americans, and I'm being very general because there are of course many, many exceptions, but I'm not sure that many Americans, I should say, really remember what the Cold War was or why we fought it. In retrospect, it can now seem like a giant waste of money. What was that all about? The military industrial complex, we built up so many weapons and so on. What were we fighting against? And if you know the history of the Gulag and what happened in Soviet history between 1918 and 1989, then you understand why. You understand what the system was that we were fighting against, why we considered it so important, why we organized our foreign policy around it. And if you don't remember that, then it's, I think, very hard to understand the 20th century, not only in the Soviet Union, of course, but also in the United States.

The book is Gulag, and it's probably the finest one-volume history. And the only reason I say one volume is because of the legendary three-volume history of Gulag, which is, I think, less readable, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who shook the world, uh, when he published that. So let's, let's tell everybody exactly, uh, what it means. Of course, it's a, it's a, uh, an acronym, as it were, for the, the Russian word. I think it's gasudostveni lagar. Is that right?

Yes, it basically means state concentration camp system, and that's essentially what state camp system is. What the— it's an acronym, um, that was used to describe the whole system. The system was at its height a mass system. In other words, it wasn't just a few prisons. It wasn't just a few political prisons, which is what it became by the very end. But at its height between about 1929 and about 1953 when Stalin died, the Gulag was a mass camp system containing many hundreds of camps each of which consisted of many more, many thousands of more little tiny camps. It was a major part of the Soviet economy. Some 15 to 18 million people probably went through it, certainly went through it between, in that period of time. How many? How many? That's an important, that's a hard question to answer because it depends who you're talking about and when, but a number I'm happy with is 18 million.

Of those 18 million, how many died?

That's an even harder question to answer because of the way records were kept, because not everybody who died because of the Gulag died in the Gulag. And so it depends how you count. But you can, you can, at times the camps were very lethal. So during the 1940s, during the war years, something up to 50% of the people who were in them died. At other times they functioned more like labor camps and they were less lethal. The baseline figure of how many actually died in the camps is about 2 million, but when you add in people who died before they got there, people who died afterwards, people who died in other ways, once again you begin to get numbers in the tens of millions.

Wow. So what is your estimate? Because I have seen estimates from as low as 15 million or even less to 40 million. How many people do you believe Stalin is responsible for killing?

It depends how you— you know, I'm sorry, I keep saying this, it's annoying, I know.

No, no, it's not annoying.

It depends, but it depends how you— who you mean and how they were killed. I mean, there were people— I, I talked— that's why I said the words 'as a result of.' As a result of, you know, but do you include the children who were orphans because their parents were arrested and then they died in orphanages, you know, you're— it's very hard to—

yeah, I wouldn't— I wouldn't— yeah, that's a result of Stalin. Yeah.

Yes, I think you can easily get a number, you know, you can easily get a number of 25 million.

So a lot of Soviet citizens were murdered who did not enter Gulag?

Oh yes, many. I mean, there were people who were murdered by mass murder in the forests and during the purges in the 1930s. There were several million people who died because of artificially organized famine, particularly the famous one that took place in Ukraine in the 1930s. There were people who died because of, during the Civil War, because of neglect, because of disease, because of, there were many, many people who were in effect politically murdered outside of the Gulag as well as inside it.

Do you believe that Stalin is the one who said, it's always attributed, but I've never seen confirmation, What is it? One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic?

I mean, I'm afraid it's one of those quotes I can't tell you whether he really said it or not, but it's clear that that's how he thought. I mean, the only question I wonder whether he thought one death was a tragedy. He didn't seem to mind when people he knew died, so I'm not sure that—

Who started these state camps? Lenin or Stalin?

Well, Lenin began them. Lenin and Trotsky founded the first ones. And what distinguishes their camps was these were camps, they were not prisoner of war camps and they were not criminal camps. These were camps for enemies of the people. So for people who were, for whatever reason, were not people they didn't want them to be living in the Soviet state. They were not acceptable to society. They were the wrong political class. They didn't agree with the philosophy. They were meant to be held outside of the system. And at different times, sometimes they were meant to be reformed and then brought in, and sometimes they were meant to be eliminated depending on the period of— the different periods of history. But they were begun absolutely in 1918 during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, and they lasted all the way from that time through to the end. So even in the very end of the Soviet Union, in Gorbachev's period, there were still people in prison camps which were directly descended from the Gulag. They belong to the history of the whole system.

In a nutshell, since whenever anyone uses the word camp, let alone concentration camp, they think of the Nazis, what's the biggest difference or differences— what are the biggest differences between the Nazi camps and the Soviet camps?

The Nazi camps existed for a much briefer period.

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Time, and they were much narrower in function. And so the kinds of camps that we think of— I mean, the Nazis actually did have labor camps in addition to death camps, which are somewhat similar to the Soviet camps. But the Nazi camps were aimed at the war effort. They were eventually aimed to destroy the Jews. They had a narrower function. Soviet camps, as I say, they existed from the beginning to the end, during the war, before the war, after the war. And they were— they ranged over— there were many different ways in which you could be in a camp. So there were camps that were essentially collective farms. There were camps that were in coal mines. There were camps that were inside cities. There was a much wider range of experience that you could have in a Soviet camp. And they were not initially— most of the time, they were not designed to kill people. That wasn't their purpose. Their purpose was to to supply cheap labor to the state and, as I say, to sort of eliminate the people who were a problem for the society. In effect, they wound up killing people through—

Yes, which we'll talk about when we return. I'm speaking to Anne Applebaum on this hour on History. She is the author of Gulag. We're talking about that, and we'll return in a moment. Dennis Prager here, and And this is a History Hour featuring a recent compelling work of history, Gulag, by Anne Applebaum. She is with the Washington Post. She has won the Pulitzer Prize. Everything she writes, in my opinion, is important. Her latest book, incidentally, is Iron Curtain, and I'd like to have her on on that as well at a later point. Gulag is about the other, if you will, It's an odd way of putting it, but the other infamous camp system, the Nazis being the most infamous, and doesn't mean the worst, but I guess they were the worst because they were death camps. But that's what I had asked Anne Applebaum. What is the difference? And that is between the Nazi and the Soviet camps. Remember, 18 million is a, is a responsible figure for those killed in the Soviet camps. Of course, it's over a much longer period of time, and, and it of course raises the obvious question of, were any of the Gulag camps designed, as were many Nazi camps, to kill its prisoners?

Stalin generally didn't use camps to kill people because he had a much simpler method. He would take people to the forest and he would machine gun them. And that's, for example, the famous Katyn massacre of Polish officers during the war and a number of famous other massacres in the 1930s. That's how they were conducted. The purpose of camps wasn't to kill people. In effect, though, at some periods of time, the camps functioned as death camps because one of the ways— the way they were run was that people were— they were meant to be laborers. They were prison labor camps, but people were fed according to how much they worked. And as you can quite imagine, this created a vicious cycle. So people who were weakened or were not able to work so much were fed less and less, and the impact of that was that they starved to death. And so food, in a way, was used as a weapon.

Who devised that method? Was it the camp commanders, or was it Stalin who did so?

It was one of the camp commanders in the 1920s who first started using that method, and it appealed to Stalin because of the sort of super rational idea, right, well, people who can't work for the state, we don't need them. We don't need to spend money keeping them alive. We will just deprive them of food.

And that was how people died. Sadism was a fact of life in a Nazi camp. Was it an aberration or a fact of life in Gulag?

You know, the Gulag was much— was not run with the same kind of the sort of machine-like attention to detail that the Nazi camps were. And so some of them were very sloppy and disorganized, and there were ways to get out of things, and you could trade your way up to better jobs and so on. But sadism was certainly a part of it, and it was very often a kind of sadism that was almost neglect. And, you know, people would not— you know, the guards would not bother to give water to a train full of prisoners on a very hot day because they couldn't be bothered, because they didn't care, because these people didn't count as human beings. So there was a sort of sadism of neglect that was very common in the camp system, the Gulag system.

How is this for another possible difference that just occurred to me? You knew more or less what type of person was being sent by the Nazis to a camp. A Jew, a communist.

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It's homosexual, a gypsy. But with this, with Stalin, you didn't know who would get a knock at the door, on the door at 3 AM. Is that right? That, that's absolutely right.

It was a much wider range of people. And I mean, there were some patterns. There were certain kinds of people who were more likely to be arrested, but it was a much broader range of people. And once you were inside the camp, the categories could shift. So you might have been sent there as a political prisoner, but as I say, you might bribe the guard or you might do a deal or you might make a friend or you might— you could sort of weasel your way through the system in a way that you couldn't in a Nazi camp because the Nazis' sort of racial categories were so much clearer. If you were a Jew and you went into the Nazi system, you had almost no chance of surviving, whereas The Soviet system was bigger and messier and more complicated.

Well, if 18 million people died in Gulag, how many people were in Gulag?

It's gotta be double that. Well, 18 million people went through it, and the number, the death numbers that I—

Oh, I'm sorry, okay, okay, I got you. That's right. 25 million is about the total murdered by Stalin. But most of them were not in Gulag. But Gulag has 18 million, of whom about what again were killed or died?

Between, I would say between 2 million, 4 million.

Okay, so in other words, only, only, I mean, I'm using this term obviously without moral reference, but at most a quarter of those who went into Gulag died is what you're saying.

Yeah, that's it. And it was a higher rate at some times. Yes.

Right, so you didn't think it was a death sentence when you were on a train to one of the camps?

No, you didn't necessarily know that, no.

And you had reason to believe it wasn't? You had a 3 out of 4 chance.

Although after some time, people began to learn that many people didn't come back, and people were not expected to come back. Once you were sent there, you would die, or you would live out your life there, or you would not appear. It's— to be sent to the Gulag was very much like being sent out of society or sent out of the world. And, you know, the people around you often assumed they might never see you again. They would probably never see you again.

But was that true? How long did the average prisoner spend in Gulag?

It was often true. I didn't know what the average is. Again, it depend— it was different over different times, but there were people who spent 10, 20, 30 years in the camps. And because of the way the camps were structured, many people who were released who were then released with a sort of special passport that said there were only certain places in which they could live. In other words, they were released, but they couldn't necessarily go back to Moscow, or they couldn't go back to Kiev where they'd come from. They had to stay in the east, or they had to stay in the north. So people did disappear. They went to the camps and they just didn't make it back for decades. So that was a very common experience.

Were they in contact with loved ones?

Some people were through extraordinary systems of smuggling letters and so on, and some people lost all contact. There were many divorces that took place. You know, if your husband was sent to the Gulag, you might want to protect yourself and your family by divorcing him because it could reflect badly on you. People would cut themselves off, and sometimes prisoners would want their loved ones to cut themselves off because they wouldn't want them to have the stigma of having a prisoner relative or prisoner spouse. So yet people were often cut off. Some people found amazing ways to stay in touch and some people cut off. So when you have those kinds of numbers of people, you know, you have really almost as many stories.

The social disruption is so much larger than 18 million.

The social disruption is many millions.

I mean, the echo of the Gulag I mean dozens of millions. I mean every family member, every friend. Absolutely. All right, we'll be back in a moment. This is a History Hour and the book is Gulag. It is up at DennisPrager.com. Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is my guest. 18 million people, all— and this is the amazing interesting thing, virtually every single one a member of the country that created the camps in which they were sent. This was not done to foreigners, this was done to their own people. This is the Gulag system in the Soviet Union, and the, the book is Gulag. This is a History Hour on my show. I'm Dennis Prager. I devote an hour periodically to some superb new work of history. This is one of them, Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum, she of the Washington Post. And to review, you never know, you never knew who would be sent to Gulag, and you never went, at least under Stalin, you never went back home. You might be released, but you, you didn't go back, as you pointed out, to Moscow or Kiev. Is that right? It is.

I mean, of course, after Stalin died, some of that was repealed, right?

As I say, during Stalin, which is 1929 to 1953, guaranteed that you would come home.

Yes, that is true.

Right. So when you were arrested, did the, the secret police— I guess then it was the NKVD prior to the KGB— would they say to you So, Comrade Dennis, uh, you're arrested on charges of— or, or not.

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Were any charges ever stipulated?

You, you— what's interesting, there were often charges. You didn't necessarily know them right away because first you would be interrogated and you would not necessarily be told what it was, the crime that you committed, because they wanted you to confess to it. And later on you might find out what the crime was. But actually the process of the legal process, you know, very often it was farse. You know, it was, you would have a trial and it would last 4 minutes and there would be 3 judges and they would do, you know, 10 trials every hour. You know, so they were very farcical trials. They were quite important to the system though because they gave the guards and the people who were perpetuating the system the sense that what they were doing was legitimate. So, oh well, these are criminals, these are bad people. We don't have to take their humanity seriously. So it was important. It functioned as a way of keeping the system going, this system of trials, although it was often very— Right. So what would a typical charge be? Well, counter-revolution. You know, you've been plotting against the state.

I got it. So the prisoner's thinking, you've got to be kidding. You've got to be kidding. I'm lucky I can eat.

People very often thought it was a mistake.

Yeah, oh, oh, right, that's right. And that if only—

I'm a good person, you don't mean to arrest me.

And didn't some of them say—

A lot of time trying to profess their innocence and say that was not right. But if you had been arrested, then that you were almost always presumed to have been guilty. They wouldn't arrest you unless they were pretty sure.

Right, and as you point out, it's a catch-22 because if they found you not guilty, then it would put the system in a bad light. Yes.

That they're arresting not guilty people. They did occasionally find— as I said, it was such a big system and so complex that they did occasionally let find people not guilty, and people did get released.

So this is to me the 64,000 ruble question. With all my study of Soviet history, I never quite figured out how did they choose who to arrest? There were patterns.

I mean, they were looking for certain kinds of people. They were looking for people, for example, with foreign contacts. So you mentioned people who had relatives abroad, people who might have traveled abroad, people who lived near the border territories and might have had contact, people who— at certain times there were particular ethnic groups that they focused on. They focused on Poles, actually, people of Polish descent, Polish background in the 1930s. Later they focused on— during the war they focused on Chechens. They had particular groups and kinds of people who at different times were suspected of conspiracies. And there was always a weird logic to it. So there was always a kind of an explanation of a criminal case involving hundreds of people who had some connection to one another. So there was often a pattern within a particular city, you know, people who knew one another might suddenly all be arrested. But in a deeper sense, of course, it was random because people weren't guilty. I mean, or they weren't guilty of what I would call guilty, a crime.

All right, we'll be back in a moment on this History Hour. Gulag is the book. Why it's not better known and why Stalinism and communism don't have quite the horrific reputation of the Nazis. I want to talk to her about that. The book is up at DennisPrager.com. We return. Welcome back, or welcome to The Dennis Prager Show. It's these special hours that I devote to a great new work of history called The History Hour, and this time the book is Gulag, that staggering pattern that used to be called the Gulag archipelago because it was like an archipelago of these, like it's a string of islands. This was a string of camps throughout the Soviet Union where about 18 million people were sent, and about a quarter, up to a quarter of whom were killed or died in those camps under Stalin. And as she points out, Anne Applebaum the writer of this. She is with the Washington Post, and it's a— it's— she, she has the virtues of being a historian and a columnist, so she knows how to write interestingly as well as knowing her history. Again, the book is up at DennisPrager.com, and it's now out in paperback. Gulag. Her latest book is the follow-up, if you will, Iron Curtain, which is extremely significant book. And, uh, well worth your reading, and especially your children who may not, may not know a thing about the Cold War. Anyway, we're back to Gulag and, and the, the crazy, the Kafkaesque world in which a Soviet citizen lived. I was going to say, when you, when I asked you about, did they ever get charged, and you say, yeah, they, they were charged, and usually counter-revolutionary activity, which meant nothing, obviously. That's why I laughed. And I remember from my studies how often, especially the higher-ups during the '30s, the higher communist officials who were arrested and then killed would say, oh, if only Comrade Stalin knew what was happening, this wouldn't be happening. Did the prisoners in Gulag think Stalin's a good guy and these crackpots are responsible for my arrest?

You know, it was such an irrational system that people sought explanations, and so people would explain it to themselves that way. You know, if only— it can't really be this crazy. If only Stalin knew about it, he would fix it. It must be something going wrong at a lower level. Very often after a few years in the camps, they shed that kind of illusion, but it was quite common among prisoners to imagine that there had been some grotesque mistake made. And yes, they did often He doesn't think like that.

Who became a guard?

Often very poor, very uneducated people, people who had very few options. It was a job that had a certain number of perks to it, although it wasn't a very attractive job. If you think about being a guard in a prison camp in the far north, it's not a— they did have to pay people well and give them vacations and so on. But it was not a job that most educated people or people from cities would want to have.

Were they nearly all located in frozen areas?

No, they weren't actually. There were all kinds of camps, and there were some, as I said, in cities. There was a famous series of camps, actually Solzhenitsyn wrote about one of them, that were actually for scientists. So they would arrest scientists and they would have them work in a kind of prison laboratory. So that was a slightly more civilized kind of camp. There were camps that were in collective farms all over the country. There's a photo album in the Soviet archives that I once looked through and it showed prisoners with their camels in Central Asia. So they were really all over the country. I mean, the worst camps and the camps that produced and that, you know, that in a way stick in the memory most are the ones in the far north, the coal mining camps and so on. Right.

Mm-hmm. Were men and women separated? I assume they were.

Men and women were separated theoretically, but in practice, the walls between camps often broke down. And actually, some of— I have a whole chapter in my book about women's experiences female experience in camps, which was different from male experience, not least because of the threat of rape and also of the possibility of bribing your way or selling yourself to get better treatment and a better job and so on within the camp system by having a relationship with one of the guards. Well, was rape common? Very common, yes. I mean, particularly on the transports on the way to the camp There was also, part of the, one of the other strange aspects of the Gulag is that the camps also at certain times in history mixed criminal and political prisoners. So there were in effect criminal gangs within the camps that would sometimes prey on the political prisoners who were of a different class and were unprepared to deal with that kind of pressure.

Were there any romances between male and female prisoners?

There were romances. There were people who smuggled letters to one another across walls. There were people who had relationships with each other who never saw one another, who wrote, who managed to find a way of writing back and forth. You know, it was almost— you have to think of the Gulag as it was a kind of alternative civilization. Right, right.

Everything that happened in real life happened there too, except under the shadow of this bizarre And, and, well, I'll never forget, I was there at the height of the Cold War, uh, and I remember one Soviet citizen saying to me, he described it as drugoy mir, another world. Yes, it was, it was, it was so, so the Soviet Union was another world and the Gulag system was another world in another world. Indeed, yes. So it was another world squared, as it were. Yes, yes. Now I asked you, I mentioned before the break that I would ask this large question. Uh, you say Nazi. Nazi has become the term for true evil, but not communist. I have a whole bunch of theories as to why. What's yours?

I, I would, I would have a lot of reasons actually. I have a bunch of theories too, but I would, I would focus on 2 or 3 of them. One of them is because it was far away and we didn't have archives. And only now that we have archives, we can see the real evidence. We understand what really happened. We didn't have archives. We didn't have photographs. Another reason was because Stalin was our ally during the war. And it's always been very hard for us, for the United States, but also for Britain and others, to admit that we fought one criminal criminal regime, the Nazi regime, with the help of another criminal regime. You know, it doesn't make us look so good, and it's always been a very difficult—

Very, very interesting. We'll be back in a moment. Final segment coming up with Anne Applebaum and her superb book Gulag: A History, up at DennisPrager.com. Dennis Prager here on the final segment of this History Hour where we take take some recent great book of history and talk in depth with the author. In this case, it's Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post. And if this hasn't, uh, had you salivating to read it, I don't know what would. And again, it is up at my website. Well, in, in all your writing and your research Did anything truly surprise you, or did you basically learn facts that corroborated what you had already known?

Gosh, many things surprised me. Very often, you know, the book actually contains a lot of stories. You know, they're individual stories of people and how they coped with the camps and how they survived and how they learned to live inside the system. And I think in some, the humanity that people discovered in themselves surprised me. You know, that people found ways out of it, either through faith or through friendship. They found ways to cope with it and live inside it. You asked me a minute ago about romance. You know, that was another way in which people tried to find positive aspects of their imprisonment and tried to survive using those. And I kept coming across stories like that that impressed me.

Yeah, I would imagine that it would, because it could have two effects— suffering embittering and you become mean-spirited to others, or ennobling.

Yes, I mean, many people did become mean-spirited. Many people survived by doing horrible things, they— by, by becoming informers or by becoming murderers. There, there were, there were, there are awful stories of survival as well as positive ones, but You know, when you're doing that kind of research and you're reading these stories and reading the archives, inevitably it's, you know, you find the positive stories. And in a way, it's what kept me going while writing the book, this, you know, looking for something positive to say about humanity.

Did you meet survivors?

Oh, I met many survivors. There were several dozen.

Were they happy to tell you their stories?

Some were and some weren't. Some people were very eager to speak and very excited to talk to me, and some people were very wary and careful. Some people were still frightened. When I started doing the research, it was only a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, and some people were still nervous about, you know, were they allowed to say this to a foreigner.

Well, you know where I hope they read your book? In Gori, in Georgia, where they're putting his— statue back up, and they have a Stalin museum. I hope everybody reads your book, Anne Applebaum. It is Gulag, and thank you for your time and all you do.

Thank you.

You're very welcome. It's an important work on an important subject. I wish everybody knew more about it because it's— I always feel it's a moral obligation to know what people have gone through. Gulag: A History This has been a History Hour. I'm Dennis Prager. Don't go away. This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles.