The Unquiet Ghost is a book published in 1994 about Stalinist Russia by the historian Adam Hochschild. It is a powerful work, for the book was written as Hochschild interviewed for six months survivors of the Gulag and other figures who survived Stalinist Russia. This book clearly illustrates the importance of memory and history in relation to the present.
In the preface of The Unquiet Ghost, Hochschild acknowledges that when he went to Russia to interview those he described in his book, he was somewhat lucky, as “It was a time when mass graves had been newly opened, and I was able to walk through several of them, seeing, in one, skull after skull with a bullet hole through it” (v). 1991 was a time “when it was finally possible to see the old gulag camps,” and Hochschild describes that he will never forget standing in Butugychag, “a place so cold cold and remote and surrounded by barren snow-streaked rock hills that it seemed like another planet” (v). Hochschild then describes the security of the gulag camps, as even camps located in isolated, freezing regions still had internal prisons including “thick stone walls and cross-hatched iron bars on the windows” (v). 1991 was also a good time to conduct interviews because many of the interviewees were already very old, and had died not long afterwards. Hochschild describes that Stalinism had created an atmosphere so potent that it continues to cripple democracy whenever it is attempted, seeing that during Stalin’s rule, “voicing any opposition to the government could get you dispatched to a minus-40-degree camp in Siberia for years of hard labor” (viii). Consequently, even when Stalinism was lifted, people were somewhat afraid and were passive, considering that “Over time, stark fear turned into passivity” (viii). However, despite “the heritage of fear and passivity,” many Russians had come into terms with their troubling history, and have attempted to face it to the best of their ability (viii).
Hochschild writes in the introduction that Stalinism murdered millions of Russians due to its inclination to use violence to solve all problems. He mentions that a Russian satirist once drew an illustration in which “Stalin comes back to life, looks around, and asks who started all the changes” (xv). When he was notified it was Khruschev, Stalin ordered him to be executed, but was then told that Khruschev was already deceased. Stalin orders nonetheless for him to be executed posthumously. Despite the potential hilarity of the comic, it shows that Stalin viewed execution as the best solution “to every problem, including those caused by previous executions” (xv). For instance, “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,” causing the new officials to inflate the population to please him (xv). Hochschild describes that Stalin, between 1929 (“when Stalin had vanquished his rivals and concentrated power in his hands”) and 1953, was “directly responsible for the deaths of somewhere around 20 million people” (xv). When it came to the body count, Hochschild describes that “between a third and half the dead” died in famines (including the infamous Holodomor) in the early 1930s alone as a direct result of collectivization, while millions of others were killed in waves of mass arrest, such as the “Great Purge, a nationwide frenzy of jailing and killing in the late 1930s” (xv). Hochschild then describes that Khruschev discovered via secret police files that between 1935 and 1941, a mere six years, “the authorities arrested more than 19 million Soviets,” shooting many millions without trial. Those who weren’t shot were sent to Gulags, where a majority died of starvation and exposure to the elements.
Hochschild describes that the Great Purge was a very unique and terrible event in history because, unlike genocides like the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the destruction of the Congo by the Belgians, it was “a religious or political movement” which “turns inward and begins devouring its own” (xvii). Hochschild then remarks ironically that the vast majority of those who were arrested were in fact loyal, but were punished anyways. After decades of repression under an authoritarian state, only with the advent of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) did people finally begin discussing Stalinist atrocities, considering that “By 1987, previously forbidden books about the Stalin era began to appear, and in 1988 they became a flood. At public meetings, victims of the Great Purge stood, wept, and told their stories of torture, prison, and exile” (xxiii).
The book begins with a real story about a father and a son, whose name was Nikolai. The father was an officer of the Red Army, and before the end of WWII he abandoned his family and fled to America, where he married the woman who had given him refuge. Hochschild describes that from an individualistic perspective, the father made the correct decision, since the Soviet Union sent most of their veterans to Gulag camps or shot them once they were no longer needed. The reason this was done was because Stalin and other authorities didn't want any “outside” influences to permeate Russia, and they also viewed any Russians who surrendered as traitors. The father made a wise decision since “he had already been arrested once as an ‘enemy of the people’ before the war. People who had seen the inside of NKVD cells in the 1930s lived in constant fear that at the slightest false step they could fall back into the hands of the secret police. Second, as a Soviet officer, Danilov’s father would have been taught that the worst possible crime for a Red Army commander was to let his unit be surrounded and his soldiers captured” (10-11). Hochschild describes that in the beginning of WWII, ill-trained and unprepared Russian soldiers were captured by the hundreds of thousands by the trained Nazis, “But that made no difference,” considering that after WWII “almost all Red Army soldiers who survived Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were sent straight to the Soviet gulag” (11). Nikolai didn't feel angry at his father for leaving and marrying again, as not only did he ensure his own life, but “by abandoning his family he helped them as well,” as it was viewed as an honor for a family to have suffered a loss in WWII, as it brought material and social benefits (13). Before his father died in a hospital, Nikolai visited and talked to him.
Another story, “The Uses of Memory,” involves Vaclav Havel. When he was young he married the daughter of a powerful Communist official who was later purged by Stalin. Hochschild discusses that Stalin enjoyed destroying entire families, so when he arrested the official most of his family, including Razgon, were arrested. Razgon’s wife “died in a prison train, at the age of twenty-two” (22). Razgon describes he was very happy at Stalin’s death, as he regards it as a holiday - when he was in the Gulag he even managed to get some vodka. Years later, when he was in the hospital, he noticed a fellow patient, Grigory Niazov, who was unusually attentive and suspicious. It later turned out that Niazov was a member of the NKVD and had executed many people for his job. Razog questioned Niazov, and Niazov described that the facility we worked at was only for executions: the prisoners were kept there for a maximum of three days before being shot. Niazov felt no remorse, saying that he has no conscience, and that he liked the job because he could drink as much wine as he wanted to. He also revealed that while he worked as an NKVD officer he wasn’t married, as the secret police didn't want variables that could increase an individual’s sympathy, and that he could sleep perfectly well after executing people. He also described that during the day he would sometimes hike in the vicinity, where he enjoyed nature. He even remarked that the job was boring, as there wasn’t much to do for leisure save drinking, hiking, and sleeping.
Hochschild describes that people view themselves too highly when it comes to looking back at history, for it is relatively easy for a person to believe they would have acted bravely or rationally. Of course, merely hypothesizing about possible action is vastly different to acting on it, as there was very little resistance to Stalin: very few people who didn't suffer in the Gulags saw the regime for what it was, and “These were the days when thousands of schoolchildren happily carried the dictator’s portrait in May Day parades, and when cities all over the country were changing their names to Stalingrad, Stalinsk, Stalino, Stalinbad, Stalinir, Stalinkan” (28). Hochschild interviewed a survivor of a real conspiracy in Stalinist Russia, Susanna Pechuro. Pechuro describes that she was in a group of five other teenagers who didn't agree with Stalin’s ideas and harbored dissident opinions and illegal texts. When they were caught, their defiance was so surprising that Pechuro was personally tortured by Victor Abakumov, the minister of state security. After the trial, three of the group of six were shot, while two were sent to the Gulags where they perished - Pechuro was the only survivor.
In another story, a person who was sent to a Gulag noted the terrible weather and that the storms and blizzards, which could last for days, commonly killed people. Regardless, when it was announced that Stalin died, many people wept. Hochschild describes this as a kind of cognitive bias, as it is a common tendency of people to believe more strongly and with more unity in an extremist belief once their initial expectations failed. For instance, many groups who believed in UFO’s and in the Second of Coming of Christ kept mostly to themselves before the supposed date, but once their initial expectations failed, they didn't want to accept the fact that they made a mistake and wasted resources and time, causing them to double down their efforts, which made them want to recruit new believers. Hochschild describes that those who were sent to the Gulag “were suffering so much that they were willing to delude themselves and to deny the obvious” - those who were sent to the Gulag didn't want to believe that the life they had lived before was only a lie and that Stalin wasn’t the great leader he was believed to be, which caused them to delude themselves only further (59). Hochschild elaborated further that “Without the denial, all the terrible suffering would have seemed purposeless. Many people wanted to believe that the camps, the deaths, the collectivization, the famine, the privation and shortages, like the suffering of a noble war, were for some reason necessary” (59).
Hochschild later interviewed Colonel Volkov, who became an officer in 1949. When he was questioned about his actions, he intentionally used bombastic language to refrain from answering, indicating his obvious guilt. Nadezhda Mandelstam, a survivor of the Soviet Union, stated that people couldn’t see Stalin for what he was because they believed in a potential Utopia: “‘In the pre-revolutionary era there had already been this craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring about universal harmony at one go. That is why people so willingly closed their eyes and followed their leader’” (71). This kind of denial was seen in the Soviet Union during the Purge and on those who were sent on trains to Auschwitz (“Most of the people who boarded the trains for Auschwitz believed they were heading for ‘new resettlement areas in the East”), begging the question as to why they couldn’t see the situation with unclouded eyes (71). Hochschild answers gracefully that this is a kind of willful ignorance and stupidity, and it is still seen today in many instances - many deny they or people they care about are terminally ill, while others deny global warming and the terrible effects of pollution on sentient life.
Hochschild then discusses Soviet history and the earliest Stalinist show trials. One of the earliest and most absurd was that of Kamenev and Zinoviev, two loyal, high-ranking Bolsheviks. They were both arrested on spurious reasons by Stalin, and he offered them an ultimatum: confess to all the ludicrous charges or die. They both agreed to go along to save their lives, and “for the first time a shocked international audience saw the spectacle of high-ranking Old Bolsheviks, the makers of the Russian Revolution, pleading guilty to taking part in conspiracies, that were not only absurd but impossible - Kamenev had been in prison or exile for most of the period of the alleged plot” (82). Almost hilariously, Kamenev went so far as to say that he and Zinoviev have “‘served Fascism,’” and went so far as to state that the Soviet Union was a fair and merciful state (83). Hochschild writes that “Stalin’s genius lay in getting others to do his work for him - not only his subordinates but his victims. Brave souls who refused to confess to anything were executed in secret; the show trials were for those who had agreed to plead guilty” (83). After the trials, they were both sent back to prison and paraded around to show Stalin’s mercy, but then they were both “taken down to the basement and shot” (83). Robert Conquest, author of the definitive book on the Great Purge, described how Kamenev was still alive after being shot, “‘and the NKVD lieutenant in charge became hysterical and kicked the executioner with a cry of ‘finish him off’” (83). Even worse, before Kamenev was executed, he told his children to love and obey Stalin. After he was executed, his hope was shown to be misplaced, as “the NKVD seized almost everyone named Kamenev whom they could find. And, most people long believed, they killed Lev Kamenev’s entire extended family” (84).
Hochschild elaborates more on the nature of totalitarianism and Russia’s difficulty in coming to terms with its past. In one instance, a friendly old woman was an ardent admirer of Stalin. She admitted that the Great Purge and the Gulags destroyed innocent lives, but she refused to fully accept the sheer number of lives which have been ruined. Hochschild describes that she isn’t an isolated case, as many remain devoted to Stalin’s memory, especially before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hochschild later interviewed Igor Dolutsky, a writer of high school history textbooks. Dolutsky was very realistic and down-to-earth, and stated that a major problem involving textbooks is that they commonly show history in black and white, and that things should be looked at for what they are before being compared to other instances. For instance, he states that “‘Our education is designed so that the author of a textbook, or a teacher, imposes his views on a student’” (134). Dolutsky describes that students should come up with their own opinions after investigating the evidence thoroughly, and just because someone is good at teaching doesn’t mean they’re a good person. Dolutsky then compared the Bolsheviks to the Czars, remarking that a significant number of people viewed the Czar as a victim, a saint. He specifically mentioned that while it was true that the Bolsheviks “‘shot demonstrators who were supporting the Constituent Assembly [the first democratically elected national legislature],’” it should also be remembered that the Czar in January 1905 also put down petitioners by shooting them (135). Ironically, the education board refused to renew his teaching contract due to his unorthodox methods of teaching, but he was fine with that, seeing that when people oppose things like Stalinism, they need to know why they oppose it. Or as John Stuart Mill put it, when a truth becomes self-evident from the viewpoint of society, it will commonly stagnate, so when people call into question these “self-evident” truths, they may be at a loss as to why they really feel that way.
Hochschild later describes that one of the main focuses of the NKVD was on charging prisoners with political crimes that involved treason by aiding other countries. The NKVD tried their best to get confessions out of people, and through torture were greatly successful, briefly satiating Stalin’s bloodlust. Hochschild describes that officers in the NKVD were under pressure to procure results, as those who failed to live up to expectations could be arrested and executed themselves for their inefficiency. In one instance, an NKVD officer practiced sympathy by opening a closed church and by not arresting some people - he was executed once the news reached his authorities. Hochschild eventually comes to discuss Russia’s staggering number of fatalities during WWII (27 million), and states that a major reason for the death toll was due to Soviet mass murder. As stated before, many veterans of WWII and those who were even briefly captured were sent to the Gulags or executed, which is noted in the following statistic: “Stalin’s sweeping purge of the Red Army on the very eve of the war. Some 43,000 army and navy officers were shot or sent to the gulag. More Red Army officers were executed or died in Soviet labor camps than died in the war itself … Some six hundred Soviet generals were killed in action during the four years of World War II; one thousand were shot by Stalin just before the war” (192). The Nazis recognized Stalin’s schizophrenic delusion, so “In the late thirties, German intelligence eagerly watched the purge of the Red Army, and tried to fuel Stalin’s paranoia still further by planting false papers that showed various generals to be in touch with Berlin. Meanwhile, NKVD agents, eager to advance their careers by proving that top Soviet generals were Nazi spies, were themselves forging similar documents in German. Today, researchers are still trying to figure out which papers are which” (192).
Hochschild then describes that one of the biggest issues the Soviet Union faced was Stalin’s insanity, as he absurdly and stupidly “killed millions of imaginary internal enemies but ignored the danger from without: the 3 million German troops massing on his border” (193). Stalin, when it comes to delusion, is one of the most extreme instances out there. In one of the most powerful stories in the book, a village in Russia saw a terrible sight, for as the local river underwent its spring floods, “the earth and sand that crumbled down into the water gradually disclosed a mass of human skeletons. Below these bones was another layer, more ghastly still: hundreds of whole corpses. Embedded in the riverbank were more than a thousand skeletons or bodies in all” (199). It was noted by Hochschild that a poem by a Russian spoke of “the great rivers of Russia moaning and weeping at what they see along their banks” (198). When the locals found the bodies, they were horrified but not surprised, as they knew that the area was used as an NKVD prison in the 1930s. Horrifyingly, “some Kolpashevo residents recognized bodies of people they knew, still wearing the same clothes they had been arrested in some forty years earlier. One older woman reportedly identified her husband’s body” (199). This isn’t an isolated incidence, as many mass graves have been uncovered in Russia over the years. When the authorities learned of the uncovering of the mass grave, they decided not to lay the corpses to rest but to hide them from the public once again to protect the reputation of Stalin (it was 1979, six years before glasnost): “The KGB cordoned off the site. Special crews of soldiers and laborers worked in relays for some two weeks to destroy all traces of the grave … they announced that these were … World War II deserters” (199). Hochschild describes on the next page that he felt extremely unhappy once he learned of the case, as the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once stated that “To forget an atrocity is to kill twice.” In a sense, the people who were executed and dumped into the Kolpashevo river had been “killed twice: once by the executioners of the Great Purge, and then again by the modern-day KGB, who had tried to sink their bodies in the river some forty years later” (200).
One of the locals of the area, Inna Sukhanova, had an NKVD commander as her father. Though he was responsible for the torture and murder of many, she described him as “‘a gentle person, a man of integrity. He was not a malicious person. I always believed that he was an ideal, in all ways. He wanted very much for me to become a doctor’” (213). Sukhanova, despite her love for her father, loathed the regime he worked for, as she wasn’t as delusional as the Russians who worshipped Stalin: “her pain has not lessened with the passing of time, but has become more intense. For with each month that goes by now, more information comes to light or is released from police files” (214). One of Sukhanova’s friends lost her father to the NKVD, which is quite interesting, as Sukhanova’s father basically murdered the father of one of her friends. Sukhanova noted that in her house they didn't worship Stalin - they didn't even have a picture of him. Sukhanova’s father fell victim to the Great Purge, as he was convicted on a false charge and sent to jail. However, he wasn’t shot, and when he was released, he was assigned to be the manager of hospitals in the Gulags.
Hochschild mentioned in the introduction that what was Auschwitz for the Holocaust was Kolyma for the Soviet Union. Kolyma was a police state within the Soviet Union which had freezing weather, so most of the people sent there to work as slaves died from the cold, starvation, and disease. Kolyma is quipped to be in a constant state of winter, with abundant rivers and mountains that are 10,000 feet tall. Kolyma is so cold that Hochschild remarked that “parts of Kolyma are colder than the North Pole” (236). When it comes to the death toll of Kolyma, there are many estimates, but they are hard to make, considering Stalin ordered the archives to be destroyed: “One estimated it at 250,000, one at 300,000, one at 800,000, and one at ‘more than 1,000,000’” (237). Many of those who were sent to Kolyma died on the transit there, as one prisoner, Vladimir Petrov, “was locked in a railway car for forty-seven days,” and the prisoners were given basically no water - one of their few methods of sustenance was salted fish (237). If the prisoner survived the railways, they would then be “locked up, sometimes for months, in huge ‘transit camps,’” and if they survived that, they would be forced to go onto a ship to Kolyma which would be “controlled by the NKVD itself” (238). In one instance in 1933, the Dzhurma “sailed from Vladivostok for Kolyma too late in the season, and got caught in the ice for the water. The ship, its crew, and the NKVD guards on board survived; the several thousand prisoners below decks did not” (238).
If the prisoners survived all the terrible experiences listed above, they would be evenly distributed among the more than 100 camps in Kolyma, where most of them would die soon afterwards from the brutal labor and freezing temperature. One of the main purposes of Kolyma involving prisoners was to find gold, and though gold was found, it was at an enormous human cost. Hochschild visited Kolyma himself, noting that the Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace, went to Kolyma himself in 1944 to oversee an alliance between America and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union specialized in presenting a false picture of reality to people, so when Wallace went to Kolyma he was pleased with what he saw, convinced of the humanity of Stalin. Four years later, he realized he had been conned and “publicly apologized for how he had let himself be fooled in Kolyma” (270). Hochschild describes damningly of how many who went to the Soviet Union and knew of the atrocities not only went along with the illusion, but defended it. Among the worst offenders include “U.S. Ambassador Joseph Davies, a staunch capitalist, and New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty. Both sent home all-is-well messages from Moscow at the height of the Great Purge. Davies thought the arrests ‘cleansed the country’ and ‘rid it of treason.’ Duranty agreed, and totally whitewashed the great collectivization famine as well” (271). Despite the massive denial of many, not everyone complied with injustice. For instance, Andre Gide, a member of the French Communist Party, described the terrible conditions of the Soviet Union in unflattering terms in his 1936 book Le Retour de l’U.R.S.S.. Two of the first Westerners who exposed the Soviet Union included Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman - “Both visited the infant Soviet state soon after the Revolution. Each met Lenin, and was struck by his cruelty; each writes of hearing shots in the night in Petrograd - the sound of political prisoners being executed. Both visitors upset their Soviet hosts by asking for various things not on the program. Goldman demanded to see a prison” (272).
Hochschild notes that both Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman were very progressive figures, and they wished earnestly for communism to work, seeing that they “would have loved to see a land where workers had power, women could vote, and socialism worked. Both did not hesitate to dream, in the best sense of the word, in Utopian terms” (273). Regardless, when faced with damning and contrary evidence to their dreams, they weren’t afraid to accept reality and to denounce fiction for what it was. Bertrand Russell himself once stated that the world would be a much better place if people would only accept facts as they were, and this instance clearly demonstrates his quote. Hochschild describes that both Russell and Goldman weren’t afraid to stand up for what they felt was right, even if that landed them in trouble: “Russell had gone to jail in England, and Goldman in the United States, for their principled opposition in World War 1. No social pressure to conform is stronger than jingoism in wartime … Russell and Goldman were both reviled as traitors who stabbed their countries in the back in an hour of need. People strong enough to survive that could reach their own judgements about Russia, without help from tour guides or the political fashions of the moment” (273). Hochschild includes a brilliant quote from George Orwell, stating that there is indeed strength in accepting reality, even if it doesn’t appeal to one’s emotion - it is the “‘power of facing unpleasant facts’” (273).
Hochschild ends his book by describing the nature of change and humanity’s malleable nature. The Bolshevik Revolution was supposed to create a utopia by changing the environment which surrounded people, but they failed, for the change in environment which they brought was for the worse, for “It is not only the empire of a Tsar that can turn someone into an exploiter of other human beings, but every other kind of unlimited power as well … Tsar or Party, dictator or corporation, guru or sacred texts” (286). Hochschild offers a glimmer of hope and respite from all the potential darkness of the human heart, as even though humans can act for the worse, “We all carry in us the embryos both of an executioner and of a teacher or healer; it is the communities we built for ourselves that call forth a little less of the one and a little more of the other” (286). Hochschild then states that when he was in Kolyma, things have changed drastically for the better, showing how quickly circumstances can change, though let us hope it is for the better: “That this once-feared harbor of death is now only a peaceful fjord at sunset, and that a ship is unloading tractors instead of slaves, is testimony that such change is possible, even if in Russia it is still uncertain and incomplete, filled with setbacks and wrong turnings. And if it can begin here, in Kolyma, perhaps it can happen anywhere” (286).
Personal thoughts:
The Unquiet Ghost by Adam Hochschild is a true gem of a book, for not only does it discuss major historical events in detail, but it also incorporates many tales from survivors and perpetrators, truly bringing history to life. The sheer variety of the stories is something to behold, for Hochschild clearly demonstrates that the survivors and the perpetrators weren’t too different, as both categories of people were human beings. I highly recommend The Unquiet Ghost to anyone interested in the Soviet Union, individuality, the relationships governments have with their people, and how time calls forth change.
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