The Gulag Archipelago: A Selection from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005)

“If one were seeking a symbolic moment when . . . post-war Europe’s self-understanding turned, it came in Paris on December 28th 1973 with the first Western publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Reviewing the English translation in the Guardian, W. L. Webb wrote ‘To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool, missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.’ The irony, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged, was that the message of the book—that ‘real existing Socialism’ was a barbaric fraud, a totalitarian dictatorship resting upon a foundation of slave labour and mass murder—was hardly new. Solzhenitsyn himself had written about the subject before, and so had numberless victims, survivors, observers and scholars. . . .

But timing was all. Intellectual critics of Communism had never been lacking; however their impact had for many decades been blunted by a widespread desire in Western Europe (and, as we have seen, in Eastern Europe through the 1960s) to find some silver lining, however dim, in the storm cloud of state socialism that had rolled across much of the continent since it first broke upon Russia in 1917. . . .

It was one thing to sneer knowingly at Stalin, now long dead and anyway condemned by his own heirs. It was quite another to acknowledge that the fault lay not in the man but the system. And to go further, to impute responsibility for the crimes and misdemeanors of Leninism to the project of radical utopianism itself was to mine the very buttresses of modern politics. As the British historian E. P. Thompson, something of a cult figure to a younger generation of ‘post-Communist Marxists’, wrote accusingly to Leszek Kołakowski (after Kołakowski published a damning indictment of Soviet Communism in the wake of 1968): your disenchantment is a threat to our Socialist faith.

By 1973, however, that faith was under serious assault not just from critics but from events themselves. When The Gulag Archipelago was published in French, the Communist daily newspaper l’Humanité dismissed it, reminding readers that since ‘everyone’ already knows all about Stalin, anyone rehashing all that could only be motivated by ‘anti-Sovietism’. But the accusation of ‘anti-Sovietism’ was losing its force. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Prague and its repressive aftermath, and of reports filtering out of China about the Cultural Revolution, Solzhenitsyn’s root and branch condemnation of the whole Communist project rang true—even and perhaps especially to erstwhile sympathizers.

Communism, it was becoming clear, had defiled and despoiled its radical heritage. And it was continuing to do so, as the genocide in Cambodia and the widely-publicized trauma of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ would soon reveal. Even those in Western Europe—and they were many—who held the United States largely responsible for the disasters in Vietnam and Cambodia, and whose anti-Americanism was further fuelled by the American-engineered killing of Chile’s Salvador Allende just three months before the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, were increasingly reluctant to conclude as they had once done that the Socialist camp had the moral upper hand. American imperialism was indeed bad—but the other side was worse, perhaps far worse.

At this point the traditional ‘progressive’ insistence on treating attacks on Communism as implicit threats to all socially-ameliorative goals—i.e. the claim that Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, nationalization, central planning and progressive social engineering were part of a common political project—began to work against itself. If Lenin and his heirs had poisoned the well of social justice, the argument ran, we are all damaged. In the light of twentieth-century history the state was beginning to look less like the solution than the problem, and not only or even primarily for economic reasons. What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing. . . .

It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less. Power, position and privilege cannot be directly bought, but depend instead upon mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism. Legal rights are replaced by sycophancy, which is duly rewarded with job security or advancement. To achieve even modest and legitimate objectives—medical treatments, material necessities, educational opportunities—people are required to bend the law in a variety of minor but corrupting ways.

This accounts in large measure for the marked increase in cynicism in these years. One example can stand for many: Tractor plants, or truck manufacturers, did not bother to make sufficient spare parts because they could more easily meet their ‘norms’ by building large machines—with the result that when these large machines broke down, there were no replacement parts available. Official data published only the total number of machines of all sorts produced in a given sector; they did not say how many were still in working order. The workers, of course, knew better. The Socialist social contract was tartly summed up in the popular joke: ‘you pretend to work, we pretend to pay you’. . . .

Economic stagnation was in itself a standing rebuke to Communism’s claims to superiority over capitalism. And if not a stimulus to opposition, it was certainly a source of disaffection. For most people living under Communism in the Brezhnev era, from the late Sixties through the early Eighties, life was no longer shaped by terror or repression. But it was grey and drab. Adults had fewer and fewer children; they drank more—the per capita annual consumption of alcoholic spirits in the Soviet Union quadrupled in these years—and they died young.”—Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)