Historical Memory and the Gulag

In a previous post on the Milton Friedman Institute and the critique of professors on the left, Steve Horwitz correctly points to the experience with communism throughout East and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as in Cuba and Latin America (and we can add in China and Africa as well).  The horror of socialism in practice in terms of mass murder and economic depravation must never be forgotten.

When I was a visiting fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the early 1990s, there was talk of establishing a permanent monument to the victims of Stalinism outside of the former KGB building, it has never really materialized.  Back in DC, there was a movemnt led by Lee Edwards to establish a Museum of Communism to remember those who suffered under this ideology world-wide similar to the Holocaust Museum, but it also hasn't broken ground.  When I was teaching in Prague, I actually required the students to visit the Museum of Communism there so they might remember the devastating destruction this ideology wrought through the 20th century.  However, the best source to my mind easily available on the delusion and destruction of communism is probably Bryan Caplan's web-site Museum of Communism (written primarily I believe when Bryan was just an undergraduate at Berkeley --- I wonder how many visitors he has gotten in the last decade, I have often recommended to my students --- especially those in my comparative classes --- to spend a lot of time at Caplan's site and learn the history of, and the ideas that motivated it, communism/socialism in practice in the 20th century).

Tyler Cowen has a nice post today remembering Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died of heart failure on Sunday in Moscow.  Whatever flaws Solzhenitseyn had as a man, courage was not one of them --- he was the man (as Bryan Caplan has put it) who stared down Soviet power at its height and outlived it by 17 years.  His literary monument to the victims of communism will hopefully be more lasting than the efforts to date to establish a physical monument to honor those who sufered so much for so little due to communist ideology.

Comments

[Bogdan Enache]

The harshest gulag of all was not in Russia, but - as Solzhenitsyn himself stated in the Gulag Archipelago - in Pitesti, Romania. It was an experimental re-education camp set-up by the NKVD/KGB contingent in Romania and the local Securitate. The basic idea was to brainwash the prisoners by physical and psychological torture applied not by the guard, but by prisoners against each others (who where sometimes related or longtime friends) to the point that they would denounced anyone, even their parents, and would confess any crime (truth was not required from the start) against the working class, the party and the communist ideals...Here's an English language movie on this grim episode of communist repression : http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Torture/dp/B000TJLGFK

Visit also this former extermination jail, turned into museum, where basically the entire elite opposed to communism in the country(intellectuals, politicians, businessmen, jorunalists, students, priests, military personal etc) was exterminated: http://www.memorialsighet.ro/en/default.asp

An anti-communist monument in front of Lubyanka? - Haven't you noticed? The red stars are still on the building.

Ah! check also some biographies of the major European political leaders on the left today, maybe that will answer some of your questions regarding their reluctance to condemn communism, an ideology which killed several times more people than nazism...All humanitarians know that communism was a good idea badly applied.

[Rafe Champion]

It is important to keep alive the memory. It may have been Isiah Berlin who told the story of a hopeless and haggard old woman in Moscow, with a son in the gulag, who clutched his sleeve and implored this western writer "let us be remembered".

Remember others in the west who fought the good fight to hold the thin anti-red line, like the people of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, written up by Peter Coleman. http://www.the-rathouse.com/PeterColeman.html

And the way that one evil led to another, when the western democracies formed partnerships with unsavory regimes to resist the real or perceived threat of communism. As Lord Acton wrote of classical liberals, we may feel obliged to form alliances with others who have very different ends from our own, and this has often proved fatal to the credibility of our cause.

[Daniel J. D'Amico]

relevant:

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/17168

[Rafe Champion]

This is a vivid and moving essay by Roger Sandall on the limited film record of death and deportation in the Baltic states and the Ukraine. http://www.the-rathouse.com/RS_Cinema_of_Witness.html

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