Rationality and the GULAG

Anne Applebaum's new history of the Soviet Gulag has been getting a lot of favorable attention. Today's opinionjournal.com has yet another glowing review mixed together with some interesting ponderings by reviewer Stephen Sestanovich. For my money the most interesting bit is his reflection on the perennial question: why did they do it?

Anyone tackling the enormity of the Gulag comes up against this question, and Ms. Applebaum canvasses the explanations, from the ambitions of Lenin and Stalin to the boredom of camp guards ("fourth-class people, the very dregs," one of their commanding officers called them). Many readers are likely to be surprised by how much attention she pays to the economic logic behind the camp system, but she does so for good reason. As an institution the Gulag reflected the Bolshevik drive to remake the human personality by remaking the world of work: hence the term "corrective labor." To achieve this aim, Soviet leaders were ready to enforce their own ideas, however bizarre, of what constituted a "rational use" of the manpower at their disposal.

Coercion and "rationality" went together: hence the euphemistic term "command economy." Did Moscow want to tap the natural resources of the Russian far north? The Gulag could help. As the commander of one of the largest northern mining camps explained: "If we had sent civilians [instead of prisoners], we would first have had to build houses for them to live in."

Killing them wasn't the goal, as it was for Hitler. Remaking them into the New Soviet Man was. Brutality, scientifically applied, could liberate those who did not want to be liberated.

Sometimes, it seems to me, genocide is easier to understand; if, admittedly, less "rational".