I have never cared for the aphorism Homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man, because I think better of wolves than I do of men, but spend time reading about Stalin and his henchmen and what they did to Russia and any ideals you may once have harbored about the inherent noble nature of our species will dissolve. Unchecked by law and humanity, or driven by a tyrant, a nation will devolve into a slaughterhouse. Men are capable of anything.
This has been a dark year. It feels as if that darkness is accelerating like some sci-fi fantasy of warp speed, each bit of news outrunning light, the power and intensity of the darkness being amplified. But none of us can see the future. So for two years now I have been reading 20th century history, looking back for perspective on tyranny and tyrants, looking for how they gathered ultimate power and how they used it.
In The House of the Dead Dostoyevsky describes how ‘tyranny is a habit; it grows upon us, and in the long run, turns into a disease.”
Russia was wrenched from a monarchy into a dictatorship in 1917. State sanctioned murder and organized famines began almost immediately. The country’s closest brush to the rule of law came for a few years under Boris Yeltsin. Then Putin took power and effectively transformed it into a mafia state, a kleptocracy. In Russia, the disease Dostoyevsky speaks of has been a part of the body politic for over 100 years and has never been cured.
Midway through The Great Terror by Robert Conquest, the reader comes across the story of the NKVD slave ship the SS Dzhurma, one of a fleet of freighters tasked by Stalin with transporting Russian slave labor to Siberia. The Dzhurma became caught in the pack ice and was abandoned by the authorities. Over 12,000 prisoners were locked in the holds. Every one of them died. Frozen to death, massacred, cannibalized.
Stalin’s Soviet Union did run a fleet of ships carrying slave labor, culled from every sector of Russian society, to bring prisoners to the gold mines of Kolyma, one sector of the country’s vast Gulag, but this incident never happened. The Dzhurma was a legend, a myth that grew out of the terrible years of 1937-1938 when 5% of the Russian population* was arrested by the NKVD under orders from Stalin to crush every vestige of independent thought and potential opposition.
The power of Stalin’s tyranny to terrify was so great that one believes the story of the Dzhurma to be true for Stalin’s “whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable (309).”
For example, imagine this: “In 1937 and 1938, Yezhov sent to Stalin 383 lists containing thousands of names of figures important enough to require his personal approval for their execution (234).” In this way a minimum of 40,000 were personally approved to be shot in the back of the neck at close range with a small caliber pistol. The maximum may have been 230,000. In those two years, at least three million Russians were murdered by other Russians, under Stalin’s direction, and 8 million were arrested and sent into the Gulag (485).
An entire society broke apart, atomized under the pressure of fear. Conquest writes that “just as Nazism provided an institutionalized outlet for the sadist, so Stalinist totalitarianism … automatically encouraged the mean and malicious.” People “betrayed comrades and friends, wives disavowed husbands, … sons heaped abuse upon hapless fathers (253).” One gained favor through denunciation: “In one district in Kiev, 69 persons were denounced by one man, in another, over 100. In Odessa, a single Communist denounced 230 people. In Poltava, a Party member denounced his entire organization (253).”
In any dictatorship the great monster summons forth aspiring monsters to do his bidding. Stalin operated “at the apex of a pyramid which widened gradually toward the base and was composed of many ‘little Stalin’s’: … they were the creators and guardians of the ‘cult of personality’“, the enforcers, the willing mechanisms of Stalin, the men who kept him in power because they were afraid and because he gave them the capacity to fulfill their own dreams of revenge and domination. Man is wolf to man.
In Soviet Russia (and today), the law was designed to facilitate lies, reward servants of power and crush opposition. The rule of law, applied fairly to all classes, income levels and races, and used to seek factual truth and justice not favoritism and ruthless power, is the primary instrument that stands between potential tyrants and the fulfillment of their dark intentions.
*the equivalent current US number for 5% arrested would be 16 million.
Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
