Preface On Forgetting to Read Solzhenitsyn

It was in 1974 that I first picked up a copy of The Gulag Archipelago. I didn’t finish reading it until this century. It is a very long book—seven books to be precise, published in three volumes that together run to roughly two thousand pages in English translation. But it shouldn’t take forty years to read a book, even a very long one. Why it took me four decades to finish reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s crowning achievement requires a little backstory and can serve as an entry point into the present book.

Solzhenitsyn’s epic work documents one of the great crimes of the modern era, the Gulag—the network of prison camps in the former Soviet Union, which more than any other institution came to symbolize Stalinism—the authoritarian political system derived from the name of the Soviet Union’s long-time ruler, Joseph Stalin. Gulag is an abbreviated form of “Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei,” or the “Chief Administration for Corrective Labour Camps.” But the term has come to signify much more than this. It refers, as Anne Applebaum notes, to an entire array of “labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women’s camps, children’s camps, transit camps.”1 It was not just a prison system, but a system of forced labour.

An archipelago is, of course, a chain of islands. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the series of prison camps extending across the Soviet Union formed “that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people”2— zek being camp slang for “prisoners.”3 This archipelago, Solzhenitsyn continues, “crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a giant patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence.”4 The Arctic city of Vorkuta was a principal site in the Gulag archipelago. Michael Allen traces Vorkuta’s origins to the summer of 1932, when a secret-police supervised “geological survey group, primarily made up of prisoners” arrived in the area. The city that grew from these small beginnings was constructed entirely by forced labourers.5 According to Alan Barenberg, the two labour camps associated with the city, “Vorkutinskii lager’ (‘Vorkuta camp,’ better known as Vorkutlag) and its twin, Rechnoi lager’ (‘river camp,’ better known as Rechlag) saw approximately half a million prisoners pass through their gates by the middle of the 1950s.”6

Barenberg suggests that, in employing the archipelago metaphor, Solzhenitsyn was exaggerating the extent to which the Gulag was an “almost invisible, almost imperceptible”7 world of its own—that, in fact, the borders between the Gulag and the rest of the Soviet Union were more porous than Solzhenitsyn implies. Pointing to the constant churn of prisoners entering and leaving the system, at a rate far more rapid than was previously recognized, he joins historian Lynne Viola in insisting that our understanding of the Gulag system must be extended to include what Viola calls “the other archipelago”—the massive resettlement of former “kulaks”8 (a controversial term about which much will be said in the following pages). This approach brings the Gulag system into focus not as one of exception but rather as an extreme point on a continuum of unfree labour and “follows the conclusions of historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Donald Filtzer, who separately argued that ‘free’ labor could hardly have existed under Stalin, particularly from 1940 until 1953”9—that is, from the 26 June 1940 introduction of a law making it a criminal offense for a worker to leave their job without the employer’s permission, to the 5 March 1953 death of Stalin.

One aspect of this approach is both necessary and important, bringing into focus the massive, forced resettlement of millions of peasants. The resulting exile colonies need very much to be understood as part of the Gulag.10 However another aspect—the notion of placing the Gulag experience on a continuum of “unfree” labour—while compelling on an abstract level, in the concrete can have the effect of obscuring the unique and terrible experiences of those condemned to the Gulag prison camps per se. Besides the appalling death rates, there were the hidden injuries of broken relationships and damaged lives.

Suzanne Rosenberg was one of the hundreds of thousands who were labelled “enemies of the people” and unjustly incarcerated in the forced labour camps of the Gulag. She did survive and was eventually released, but she returned home to a cold reception—including from her own young daughter, who at one point “tore to shreds a photograph” of her mother. “Longing to disassociate themselves from their arrested parents,” writes Rosenberg, “such children all the more eagerly proclaimed their loyalty to the socialist regime.”11 Over several years, Rosenberg repaired relations with her daughter, but her story helps bring into sharp relief the different life experiences of those within and those without the Gulag prison camps. Even if the category of “free” labourer did not exist in Stalinist Russia, Solzhenitsyn and others are absolutely right to emphasize the extreme circumstances faced by “residents” of the Gulag prison camps. The experiences of those confined within these prisons merit separate treatment from the experiences of those who managed to remain in regular society.

Estimating the total number of people who, at some point in their lives, experienced the forced labour regime of this archipelago is not a straightforward exercise. Applebaum, in the appendix (“How Many?”) to her monumental Gulag: A History, calculates that between 1929 and 1953, some eighteen million Soviet citizens were incarcerated in the camps of the Gulag. If we add to this figure the four million (mostly German) prisoners of war interned during World War II; the approximately seven hundred thousand former Russian prisoners of war who, once released from German camps, were sent to the Gulag; and the six million “special exiles” (including “kulaks deported during collectivization, Poles, Balts and others deported after 1939, and Caucasians, Tartars, Volga Germans, and others deported during the war”), then “the total number of forced laborers in the USSR comes to 28.7 million.”12 We don’t know how many died. A very conservative estimate is close to three million.13 Many of the millions who were sent to the Gulag were political prisoners. According to Solzhenitsyn, of these political prisoners “on whom the thunderbolt of arrest at one time or another fell … I doubt whether a fifth, I should like to think that an eighth lived to experience this ‘release.’”14

The Gulag Archipelago was, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, an “experiment in literary investigation.” It was an experiment conducted in the laboratory of the author’s own bitter experiences. A captain in the Red Army taking part in the war with Germany in 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, as he puts it, “because of my correspondence with a school friend,” in which the two “indulged in fairly outspoken expressions of our political outrage and in derogatory comments about the Wisest of the Wise,” i.e., Stalin.15 This correspondence was, according to Solzhenitsyn, an example of “childish stupidity.”16 According to the authorities, it was counter-revolutionary and he was sent to the Gulag, where he survived eight years in the camp system before being released into exile just in time to learn, from the radio, of the death of Stalin. It was “the moment for which every zek in Gulag (except the orthodox Communists) had prayed! He’s dead …! The villain has curled up and died!”17

It was an experiment conducted in almost impossible circumstances. “I had to conceal the project itself,” he explains, “my letters, my materials, to disperse them, to do everything in the deepest secrecy. I even had to camouflage the time I spent working on the book with what looked like work on other things.” He hid various portions of the book in different apartments and offices of friends and supporters, so that “never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time!”18

Despite these constraints, Solzhenitsyn accumulated the “reports, memoirs, and letters” of 227 individuals who had experienced the horror of the camps.19 Their names were to have been listed when the book was published, but because of the repressive conditions in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, they had to remain anonymous. Solzhenitsyn persevered in overcoming all these obstacles and produced a work that will no doubt continue to be read for generations to come.

In 1974, when the paperback version of the English translation of the first volume became available, I was a teenager from small-town Ontario, Canada—newly arrived in Toronto. Before my move to the big city, an interest in Russian literature and history had taken me to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. During my first summer in Toronto, I added Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to my reading list, among other long and compelling literary products of Russian culture. So, when the paperback edition of Gulag Archipelago, volume 1, appeared, it was quite natural to add it to the reading list. In October 1974, I bought a copy for $1.95 and began reading and carefully underlining portions that I, an impressionable small-town teenager just discovering politics and history, found relevant.

October 1974 marked not only my introduction to Solzhenitsyn, but also my introduction to student and Left politics in Toronto. At the end of one student council meeting, a Leading Member of the Toronto Left suggested that he and I have coffee. We did, and we talked about revolution, Russia, the Cold War, and other things political. That I had read Tolstoy did not impress. That I was studying Russian impressed a bit. That I was reading Trotsky—along with Lenin, the most well-known figure from 1917 and, in the years since, the most well-known of Stalin’s opponents—impressed greatly. But when the subject of Solzhenitsyn came up, the Leading Member frowned.

“Gulag is not a good book. Solzhenitsyn is not reliable. His views of events are distorted.”

I felt myself blushing with shame. The Leading Member was an important person. Everyone knew him. I didn’t want to be reading a bad book. I asked the Leading Member what exactly made it a bad book.

“Well,” he said, “Solzhenitsyn is very colourful and impassioned about the Gulag. And it was a horrible thing, the Gulag. But he’s made himself a member of a Cold War chorus which insists that the Gulag is not just about Stalin. They say it’s about Lenin as well. Solzhenitsyn says the Gulag begins with Lenin. He says that Lenin led to Stalin. He’s an anti-communist.”

I was mortified. The book I was annotating, the book that had me hooked, was a bad book. It had a bad line on Lenin. It was anti-communist. I felt terrible. The early 1970s were profoundly shaped by the long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Those on the Left who were opposed to the crimes of the United States in, for instance, Indochina experienced tremendous pressure to be suspicious about any criticism of the Soviet Union, since such criticism might open the door to anti-communism. Solzhenitsyn’s book went on the shelf and stayed there for almost four decades.

Flash forward to 2013. In addition to returning to the study of the Russian language, I was picking up threads of old research and acquiring material on the Mezhraionka, the Inter-District Committee, a four-thousand-strong organization of radical, mostly young workers that in July 1917, along with Trotsky, joined Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks—the left-wing party that, along with its counterpart and rival the Mensheviks, originated as a faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia, or RSDRP).20 I was also writing conference papers on three generations of class struggle in the Arctic coal-mining town of Vorkuta (pronounced with the stress on the last syllable), research that forms the basis of part 1 of this book. Vorkuta, a town surrounded by multiple prison camps, was one of the principal “islands” comprising the Gulag Archipelago. From 1936 to 1938, Vorkuta’s prison camps were the site of the last stand of anti-Stalinist socialists, many of them Trotskyists (followers of Trotsky), who waged a heroic hunger strike and, against all odds, won their demands, only to be taken into the Arctic tundra and massacred en masse. In the period from 1947 to 1953, Vorkuta became one of the principal sites of the strike wave that sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And, in the years from 1989 to 1991, coal miners in Vorkuta—many of them descendants of the former camp inmates, including the murdered Trotskyists—stood up, organized independent trade unions, and struck again and again and again, until Stalinism was swept into the dustbin of history. I wanted to know everything I could about this town called Vorkuta.

I knew that Solzhenitsyn had mentioned something about the first generation of resistance—the 1936–37 hunger strike (and subsequent massacre) of the Russian Trotskyists. I also encountered in his work references to the second generation of resistance, the 1953 camp rebellions. But the bits I managed to gather together weren’t systematic; they were more a series of elliptical remarks in one of his most famous novels, The First Circle.21 Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn was a novelist, not a historian. It didn’t occur to me to look at The Gulag Archipelago. Truth be told, I had almost forgotten that it existed. I had also forgotten that it wasn’t a novel but a historical document of the first order.

However, in the course of my research, The Gulag Archipelago kept appearing in this or that footnote. When I tried to follow up on the references, I realized something else I had forgotten—that it was a three-volume work. All I had was the first volume. So, I went out and bought used copies of the two missing volumes. Especially valuable for my research was volume 3, in the 1978 English translation. What I encountered in those pages was one of the twentieth century’s greatest chronicles of heroic mass workers’ resistance.

And let’s be clear, this is a workers’ story. Many years ago, the great W. E. B. Du Bois persuasively argued that chattel slaves toiling on the plantations of pre–Civil War United States—their exclusion from the wage system notwithstanding—absolutely had to be included in the category “working class,” and their long history of collective rebellions included in the category of “class struggle.”22 The analysis developed in these pages accepts this framework. The twenty-eight million forced labourers who were chewed up in the Gulag system constituted a forced labour proletariat, grinding out under compulsion the goods and services deemed necessary by the Stalinist ruling class to creating a modern, industrialized society. The Stalinist ruling class was wrong. The industrialization created through this coerced labour proved to be a mirage, melting away into irrelevance upon the disintegration of the Stalinist system in 1991. The Lada could not compete with the Corolla. The Zenit B could not compete with the Nikomat. Like the Confederate slave-holding rulers before them, the Stalinist rulers demonstrated at some cost (to others) that coerced labour does not work well as a method by which to modernize.

But coerced or not, the zeks were workers. Any book that tells the life stories of these workers, and even more, any book that documents their struggles and forms of organization, is a chronicle of the movement of workers and the oppressed seeking liberation. Anyone who is a partisan of the workers’ movement needs to take such a chronicle seriously.

The second wave of rebellion, culminating in the year 1953, saw a series of strikes sweep through the Gulag. I had learned something of these strikes through memoirs and accounts that came out in print in the years that followed, particularly the key strikes that occurred at Vorkuta.23 But I had yet to read Solzhenitsyn’s account. When I finally had in my hands the third volume of his Gulag, I knew from the chapter headings that I was holding something exceptional—“The First Whiff of a Revolution,” “Chains, Chains …,” “Poetry Under a Tombstone, Truth Under a Stone,” “Tearing at the Chains,” and “Behind the Wire the Ground Is Burning.” These chapters form the bulk of part 5 of The Gulag Archipelago, which comprises most of the first three hundred pages of the third volume. What Solzhenitsyn has written here is a beautiful, moving chronicle of workers’ resistance against exploitation, resistance in horrendous conditions and against impossible odds. Here is a sample.

In early August 1953, “eleven truckloads of soldiers drove up” to Vorkuta’s struck pit No. 29.24 “The prisoners were called out onto the parade ground, toward the gate. On the other side of the gate was a serried mass of soldiers. ‘Report for work, or we shall take harsh measures!’” At the sight of the soldiers, some of the strikers melted away into the background. “But there were others, who forced a path through the ranks—to stand in the front row, link arms, and form a barrier against the strikebreakers.” Bullets ended the stand-off. “There were three volleys—with machine-gun fire in between. Sixty-six men were killed.” Not all the soldiers could stomach the murdering of unarmed striking workers in cold blood. “A number of thin wood patches appeared on the roofs of huts at pit No. 29, covering the bullet holes made by soldiers firing over the heads of the crowd. Unknown soldiers who refused to become murderers.”25

The Vorkuta prisoners would not have known it, but one week earlier, eerily similar events had taken place in far away Noril’sk. A clandestine “self-help group” in which Danylo Shumuk was a key activist helped organize a strike that for several weeks stopped production in the Noril’sk-area mines. But 4 August 1953, the strike—like the one at Vorkuta—was violently broken. Massed soldiers appeared at the camp gates. In response, hundreds of unarmed prisoners “took up their positions, empty-handed, opposite the companies.” When after a brief stand-off, the soldiers opened fire, 79 prisoners were killed and 280 were injured.26

At Solzhenitsyn’s own camp, located at Ekibastuz, in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, resistance had already taken the form of a three-day hunger strike in January 1952:

None of those who took part will ever forget those three days in our lives. We could not see our comrades in other huts, nor the corpses lying there unburied. Nonetheless, the bonds which united us, at opposite ends of the deserted camp, were of steel….

This was a hunger strike called by men schooled for decades in the law of the jungle: “You die first and I’ll die later.” Now they were reborn, they struggled out of their stinking swamp, they consented to die today, all of them together, rather than to go on living in the same way tomorrow.27

In the near term, many of these individual strike actions failed, drowned in bloody repression. Yet, in the longer term, the strike movement as a whole was victorious. The strikes were crucial in forging a new class consciousness, a commitment to solidarity that, as it grew, made the forced labour system more and more untenable. The mass resistance by the united zeks ultimately helped to force the rulers of the Soviet Union to dismantle the camp system, ending the practice of forced labour, at least on a systematic mass scale.

Some “mainstream” historians are uninterested in the deep stories of the workers’ movements, fixated instead on developments “at the top” of society. When workers struck en masse against the communist state, the official communist historiographers adopted a mainstream attitude: they wanted nothing to do with it. “Like all embarrassing events in our history … these mutinies have been neatly cut out, and the gap hidden with an invisible join,” writes Solzhenitsyn. “Those who took part in them have been destroyed, and even remote witnesses frightened into silence; the reports of those who suppressed them have been burned or hidden in safes within safes within safes—so that the risings have already become a myth.”28 We need to rise above both mainstream indifference and Stalinist opprobrium and read Solzhenitsyn’s master work.

There is much to learn from Solznehnitsyn’s three volumes. There is also much with which to disagree. If the third volume of The Gulag Archipelago reveals a hidden story of workers’ resistance, the second displays a deeply problematic, latent, and not-so-hidden antisemitism. One of the most powerful memoirs to emerge from the Gulag, that of Mikhail Baitalsky, critiques Solzhenitsyn’s second volume on precisely this point.29 Solzhenitsyn clearly documents the sexual violence against women that existed in the camps. To illustrate his point, however, Solzhenitsyn focuses in on and names just one perpetrator: “the fat, dirty old stock clerk, Isaak Bershader … nauseating in appearance.”30 Baitalsky challenges Solzhenitsyn’s choice:

This is the only rapist named in the entire chapter. There is not another hint as to the nationality of the men who bought women’s bodies. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn knows as well as I do … that the entire practice of buying women originated with the camp criminals; that it was the camp criminals who played cards for women; and that in the criminal world there were very few Jews….

He named Isaac; he named a Jew. It does not matter that for every Isaac there were many thousands of non-Isaacs. He was specific about the nationality of only one. This is a half truth.31

Solzhenitsyn’s approach is reprehensible. However, this does not mean we should leave his book on the shelf unread. Baitalsky himself, his biting critique notwithstanding, takes Solzhenitsyn seriously as an indispensable source for our understanding of the Gulag.

I doubt that the Leading Member whom I encountered more than forty years ago intended to adopt the restricted horizons of Stalinist and mainstream historians. However, discouraging a young enthusiast from reading a magnificent chronicle of workers’ resistance simply because one disagrees with one aspect of the story—linking the Gulag not only to Stalin but also to Lenin—was, at the very least, bad mentoring. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago—in particular, its third volume—helps bring to light a hidden story of workers’ resistance. It is a book that should be an acknowledged part of the literature for all who study the great story of the collective resistance of workers and the oppressed, the resistance that is at the core of all human progress.

In the years following my encounter with the Leading Member, my political activism and that of my friends followed a trajectory that will be familiar to some others of my generation. We took our inspiration from the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. We saw at the heart of those revolutions—both the “dress rehearsal” of 1905 and the monumental events of 1917—the great hope of freedom for the workers in the form of soviets (workers’ councils) and for the peasants in the form of access to land. We saw the great hope of life for the planet in the end of the slaughter of the so-called Great War. We saw as central to the story of the Russian revolutions the singular individual figure of Vladimir Lenin and the singular collective figure of the Bolshevik Party.

We were also anti-Stalinist. We detested Leonid Brezhnev, head of the Russian state from 1964 to 1982. We breathed the hope created by Poland’s magnificent Solidarność union. We shed no tears when the Berlin Wall fell. During the Tiananmen Square protests, we were with the young man and against the tanks he faced. And we insisted, with Trotsky, that there was “between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood”—which is, in fact, historically undeniable.32

But what of Solzhenitsyn’s insistent question: Where did it begin? This book will not pretend to answer this question. It will ask something more modest: What can we learn? For me, this learning has happened over many years and in at least three phases. The first phase, which dates back to the years following the encounter with the Leading Member, was organized around a simple epistemology that denied any connection between the Lenin moment of revolution and the Stalin moment of counter-revolution. Some of us were even uncomfortable with the thoughtful position of Victor Serge.

It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning.” Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse—and which he may have carried in him since his birth—is that very sensible?33

The second phase evolved in the context of the new radicalizations of this century, which emerged in opposition to the effects of globalization, to imperialist war, and to the stubborn persistence of settler colonialism. As in any such moment of radicalization, a new generation of young people was looking to examples from the past for inspiration—and some were drawn to the figure of Lenin in the context of the Russian Revolution. But, problematically, some of the material from which they were learning their Lenin was rehabilitating not only Lenin but also Stalin.34

In a 2009 article, “Leninism: It’s Not What You Think,” I tried to draw out the democratic and self-emancipatory side of the Leninist moment. Following Marcel Liebman in Leninism Under Lenin, I pointed out how democratic centralism did not emerge as a concept in Lenin’s 1903 argument for greater centralism, but rather in his 1906 argument for greater democracy. Following Liebman again, I insisted on seeing the overly centralist and sometimes sectarian aspects of Lenin’s theory and practice as determined by the repressive and authoritarian conditions of tsarist Russia (“tsarist” being derived from the name for the ruling monarch of the Russian empire, “tsar”). I argued that when this veil of repression momentarily lifted—during the revolutionary upheavals in 1905 and 1917, for instance—Lenin strove to overcome that sectarianism and authoritarianism. In the same article, I reminded readers of one of Lenin’s last public appearances in November 1922, his closing remarks to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern). Lenin referenced a resolution, adopted at the previous congress, regarding “the organisational structure of Communist Parties” and “the methods and content of their activities”—a resolution he described as “almost entirely Russian,” in that it reflected the conditions prevailing in Russia. While praising the resolution itself, Lenin warned the gathered delegates, “we have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners.” He went on to argue that

our most important task today is to study and to study hard. Our foreign comrades, too, must study…. Among other things they must learn to understand what we have written about the organisational structure of the Communist Parties, and what the foreign comrades have signed without reading and understanding. This must be their first task…. The resolution is too Russian, it reflects Russian experience. That is why it is quite unintelligible to foreigners, and they cannot be content with hanging it in a corner like an icon and praying to it. Nothing will be achieved that way.35

In other words, one cannot simply cut and paste Leninist methods into the context of the very different conditions prevailing in, for instance, western Europe.

The book you are reading represents the third phase in this evolving epistemology—and could very well have been titled “Leninism: It’s Not What I Thought.” The theme of self-emancipation versus substitutionism runs like a thread throughout the chapters in the book. The concept of self-emancipation has at its core the idea that liberation from oppression can be achieved only by the self-activity of the oppressed, who must become the agents of their own emancipation. By contrast, substitutionism refers to attempts to substitute the actions of others for the agency of the oppressed. A serious, unfiltered study of the Russian Revolution reveals that, while there was a profound self-emancipatory current at its heart, that current can only sometimes be located within the section of the Left that we retrospectively call Leninist. Certain aspects of the Leninist epistemology, which emerge at certain moments in Leninist history, are completely substitutionist, run completely counter to an emancipatory politics, and must be rejected.

To get at this concept of self-activity, this book is framed by an introductory chapter sketching both the hope and the horror associated with the Russian Revolution and its aftermath and a conclusion linking self-emancipation and substitutionism to ethics and the relationship between ends and means. The intervening chapters relate a narrative divided into three parts.

Part 1, “Vorkuta: Anvil of the Twentieth Century,” provides a three-chapter historical pivot for the book, telling the story of the three generations of class struggle mentioned above—three moments of mass resistance to Stalinism centred in the Arctic settlement of Vorkuta, concluding with the 1989–91 wave of strikes “that heralded the collapse of the Soviet Union.”36 “The vengeance of history,” said Leon Trotsky in his last book, “is far more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary.”37 The story of Vorkuta certainly makes real these prescient words. It also provides an indispensable foundation for our understanding of the arc of history from 1917 until today. No theory in the social sciences can be more than an approximation of the lessons of experience. All such theories require a concrete grounding in knowledge of the collective resistance of workers and the oppressed. In these chapters, I attempt to create that grounding by sketching three remarkable moments of workers’ struggle and self-organization.

Part 2, “Self-Emancipation Versus Substitutionism,” provides a four-chapter conceptual pivot for the book. Chapter 4 centres on the forgotten insights of Iulii Martov and Raphael Abramovitch, both of whom theorized the central importance to the Russian Revolution of the mass actions of a temporary new class: peasants-in-uniform. The role of this temporary new class, and in particular the way in which the Bolsheviks leaned on these peasants-in-uniform, represented substitutionism—peasant-soldiers for workers—on a truly grand scale. Chapter 5 provides some clarity on the political economy of the agrarian question—the complex political and economic problem of the relationship of the peasants to the land on which they worked and to control over the products of their labour. Such clarity is indispensable to evaluating the competing claims as to the role of peasants, in uniform or otherwise. The chapter also outlines a conceptual confusion in the use of the category “petit-bourgeois,” a confusion in theory that was to have tragic consequences in practice. Chapters 6 and 7 outline case studies in substitutionism—the former focussing on the 1920 invasion of Poland and the 1921 invasion of Georgia, the latter on the 1921 German “March Action” and the 1919 Hungarian “revolution”—and the politics surrounding each that dominated the early congresses of the Communist International.38 The German and Hungarian events bring to light the forgotten insights of another key political theorist, Rosa Luxemburg’s close ally Paul Levi.

Part 3, “The Rear-View Mirror,” is comprised of four chapters organized around two twenty-first-century contributions to our understanding of the Russian Revolution and its legacy. Marshall McLuhan made famous a tragic and pessimistic view of how we use historical knowledge. “The past went that-a-way,” he wrote. “When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavour of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future.”39 A similarly tragic, but somewhat more optimistic approach comes from Greek mythology, where knowledge and understanding are symbolized by the owl of Minerva, famously referenced by the German philosopher Hegel: “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering”40—tragic because, as with the rear-view mirror analogy, it asserts that knowledge and understanding are always clearest retrospectively; optimistic because at least understanding is possible, even if only in hindsight. Looking into the rear-view mirror, chapters 8 and 9 develop themes broached in Leon Trotsky’s path-breaking political biography of Joseph Stalin, written in 1940 but only published in full in 2016. Chapters 10 and 11 examine themes introduced by Tamás Krausz in his ambitious political biography of Lenin, published in 2015, but based on forty years of research.

The conclusion explores ends and means, a binary as stark as the “hope and horror” duality that begins this book. Many readers will recognize the issues raised in this text as real and problematic. Some will nonetheless ask: Didn’t it turn out all right in the end? Didn’t the ends justify the means? Any serious confrontation with Vorkuta—and the reactionary reality of which it was a fragment—can lead to only one conclusion: it did not turn out all right. The ends were shaped by the means deployed.

The conclusion takes its last subheading from a phrase famously coined by Rosa Luxemburg in her 1918 pamphlet “The Russian Revolution”: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”41 Here again, we are drawn back to Martov. He and his co-thinkers were among those who dared to “think differently.” Their much maligned, ethically based, and creative class analyses of the events of 1917 need to be pulled out from under a century of opprobrium and taken very seriously. The conclusion does not try to answer the tired question: Did Lenin lead to Stalin? The utility of such a question in the twenty-first century is not clear. There was a revolution. Lenin’s party played a key role in that revolution. What can we learn from that experience? There was a counter-revolution. Stalin’s party played a decisive role in that counter-revolution. What can we learn from that experience? That learning will only happen with our eyes wide open. Not forgetting to read Solzhenitsyn (and Martov, and Abramovitch, and Levi) are steps in that learning process.

Let us return to the Trotskyists at Vorkuta in the terrible years of 1937 and 1938—the years of the Great Terror. Even when denied books, paper, and pens, they fought, to the end, with their minds. One anonymous “thin man,” who was one of the only survivors of the infamous Vorkuta-area prison known as the Brickworks (described in more detail in chapter 1), recounts how—in the face of death at what was to be the site of mass executions—the prisoners found ways to resist even under appalling conditions:

We had a verbal newspaper, Truth Behind Bars, we had little groups—circles, there were a lot of clever, knowledgeable people. Sometimes we issued a satirical leaflet, The Underdog. Vilka, our barrack representative, was editor and the illustrations were formed by people against a wall background. Quite a lot of laughing, too, mostly young ones there. When everything suddenly came to an end, the part of the Brickworks for those sentenced to death was closed down.42

The word for “truth” in Russian is pravda—the iconic name associated with newspapers of the Soviet regime. So, the name of their newspaper, Pravda za reshetkoi, or Truth Behind Bars, had a bitter, ironic meaning for the anti-Stalinist socialists imprisoned in the Gulag. It seems appropriate, as a tribute to those defenders of truth from behind bars, to borrow their newspaper’s title for this book.

Incarceration was a weapon frequently deployed against opponents of tyranny in the era of the Great War and the Russian Revolution. A minority of those imprisoned were women: in 1942, in the Gulag, for instance, women accounted for just 13 percent of those interned.43 Minority or not, women prisoners experienced extreme suffering. Those classified as “political” lived with the constant threat of sexual violence from, in particular, male prisoners classified as “criminal.” Edward Buca provides graphic detail of the fate of one woman political prisoner, a university student, who successfully fought off the advances of one predator only to be brutally gang-raped by him and his friends.44 Some members of that gendered, oppressed minority put pen to paper, among them Aleksandra Chumakova, Brigitte Gerland, Maria Joffe, Nadezhda Joffe, Elinor Lipper, and Suzanne Rosenberg, all from the camps of the Gulag, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, writing from a German prison cell. They provided analyses and memoirs indispensable to our understanding of this era. It is not coincidental that many of these were Jewish women. The Jewish community experienced extreme oppression under kaiserism, tsarism, and Stalinism, the opposition to which led thousands toward political activism.

Most readers will recognize the name Rosa Luxemburg. While the events of 1917 were unfolding, she was in prison because of her antiwar agitation, and by January 1919, she was dead, brutally murdered by military thugs acting with the complicity of the social democratic government of the day. Her insights into the dynamics of the Russian experience were necessarily preliminary, given her brutal murder when that revolution was not yet two years old. Preliminary or not, her analysis—on which this book relies heavily—remains central to any attempt at evaluating those fateful years.

Some readers will recognize the surname Joffe. The 1927 suicide note that Adolph Joffe penned to his close friend and comrade, Leon Trotsky, is a fitting epitaph to the tragic close of the first decade of the revolutionary epoch.45 Few people today know the name of Joffe’s second wife, Maria. Her memoir documenting her time in the Vorkuta camps, captured in the riveting One Long Night, has been central to my understanding of the essence of incarceration and the forced labour experience.

It seems appropriate, as a tribute to all those who spoke truth from behind bars, to dedicate this manuscript to Rosa Luxemburg and Maria Joffe.

Mackenzie Paul Kellogg

July 2021