Donald Boudreau - Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

The people became more educated and cultured, Leninist ideas penetrated everywhere. Proletarian influences reached the petty bourgeois masses; the authority of the Communist Party increased markedly. But at the same time the masses were educated in another, unproleterian spirit of blind subjection to the authority of the chiefs, above all Stalin. [41] Cf. Medvedev, at 537.

Conclusively, the Soviet Union is not so much to be reproached for taking authoritarian measures considering the mitigating circumstances. Almost all systems of law contain martial law for such occurrences. Yet, Stalinism was an extreme phenomenon in that despite its rhetoric to the contrary, martial law went undistinguished. This is unforgiving and invites reproachment. And, in The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich (1970) the Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, eloquently brings the relevant issues to light. He finally concludes that

[T]he responsibility for this failure falls heavily on the working masses of people themselves. Unless they learn to rid themselves of authoritarian forms of government. No one can help them; they and they alone are responsible. This and this alone is true and affords hope. The Soviet government cannot be reproached for reverting to authoritarian and moralistic methods of control; it had no other choice if it did not want to endanger everything. It is to be reproached for neglecting self-government, for blocking its future development, and for not creating its preconditions. The Soviet government is to be reproached for forgetting that the state has to wither away. IT is to be reproached for neglecting to make the failure of self-government and self-regulation of the masses the point of departure for new and greater efforts; for trying to make the world believe that, despite everything, this self-regulation was developing and that “complete socialism” and “genuine democracy” prevailed. [42] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism , pp. 299-300.

The basic principle of a free society is that no single individual can come to know absolute truth. Thus, it is believed that the interchange of different ideas will serve to facilitate the maximum attainment of relative, approximate truth. This position is untenable to the Soviet Union with its long tradition of associating freedom with total chaos. The operative ideals of our root orientation in the West are diametrically opposed to those made manifest throughout Stalinism.

The evidence at hand dictates a failure to falsify the hypothesis. In the Gulag archipelago, there existed no channels representing the equities and grievances of the population at large, through which injured parties would have been permitted to seek recourse without threat of governmental retaliation. There existed neither any governmental implementation nor public support of a criminal justice system acting in the interests of Russian citizens. Thus, dissent was blatantly suffocated by Joseph Stalin’s draconic measures.

Dissent was weakened, in that when it did sporadically arise, there was tragically no one in a governmental position who was receptive and willing to act. Let us recognize the genius of our Founding Fathers in the United States, who by adopting the separation of powers — rejected Draconian dictatorships that would serve to jettison the free marketplace of goods, services, and ideas.

Hunger strikes proved ineffective as the government went about implementing coercive counteracting tactics (i.e., patience and deception on behalf of the prison administration, coercive feeding, directives telling the prisoners to go ahead and starve themselves to death-government assuming no responsibility therefore). As D.M. Sturley (1964) (16) observed, many of the peasantry class did resist Forced Collectivization. Rather than hand over their livestock to the state, peasants slaughtered and ate them and also refused to till the fields. Unfortunately, we are discussing a predominantly peasant culture faced with mass illiteracy and famine on an extensive scale. Peasants were ultimately forced into forced labor at the point of the machine-gun.

I concur wholeheartedly with Solzhenitsyn’s conviction that war crime criminals of the Stalinist era must be brought to justice through the Soviet criminal justice system. As he illustrates in The Gulag Archipelago, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals have been convicted on such charges in West Germany (p. 175). In the past quarter century, not one of Stalin’s accomplices has been brought to trial. These statistics, do not at all balance, with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous secret 1956 denunciation of Stalin. Unless the Soviet system recognizes and facilitates legal action with reference to these crimes against humanity, the process of extirpating the Stalinist ethos from the soil of “Holy Russia” will be drastically prolonged.

The right to life as a basic tenet of liberalism is desirable to all. Individual fulfillment is inextricably interwoven with the freedom of expression. The bell of the Gulag will continue tolling throughout the course of history.

Donald G. Boudreau

Montclair State College

Upper Montclair, New Jersey

Fall 1974

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