Comin' from the land of the ice and snow

On a bitterly cold dark night last week, Dr. Deborah Kaple spoke to a full room at the Highland Park Public Library about a place much colder and much darker than any of the audience members could ever imagine: the Gulag, the Soviet Union's infamous system of prison camps.

In her newly published work of non-fiction, Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, Kaple delivers the harrowing history of a Gulag administrator, Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky (1918-1999). The book follows the repressive Communist society from the unique vantage point of a man who worked as a foreman and boss at Pechorlag Gulag from 1940 to 1946.

Most Gulag memoirs known to Westerners have come from the prisoners themselves, such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; but Kaple's edited translation of Molchulsky's memoir allows the reader to see how the Gulag made victims beyond those imprisoned.

Kaple, a Princeton researcher and expert on the Soviet social system, began her talk by describing the brutality of these hundreds of work camps, where between 20 and 30 million Russians and others were sentenced to help build the Soviet industrial state before, during, and after World War II.

Millions died in these camps – a full quarter of all prisoners every year during the years 1941-1945. Prisoners were arrested for two primary reasons: concern that they were not loyal and, more commonly, the simple need for bodies to do harsh manual labor.

They lived in inhuman conditions – bitter cold, ramshackle sweeping quarters, minimal food or water, and horrible sanitation. Kaple provided estimates of between 800,000 and 7 million executions in the Gulag or en route to Gulag camps during the quarter century from 1928 to 1953.

She notes in the book that the Gulag "surely ranks as one of the most evil political creations of the twentieth century, along with Hitler's Holocaust in Europe, Pol Pot's slaughter of millions in Cambodia, and Mao Zedong's serial campaigns that killed millions of Chinese citizens. The Gulag stands alone as the longest running program of state sponsored killing in that very bloody century.”

Gulag Boss focuses on a short period, 1940 to 1946, and a particular work project – the building of a rail line in the area north of the Arctic Circle, in Pechorlag. This mammoth engineering and construction project would bring coal from northern mines to meet the Soviet’s industrial needs in the rest of the country. Due to the remote location and bitter weather, the region was not directly affected by the Nazis’ 1941 invasion of the USSR.

In 1940, Mochulsky was a 22-year-old engineering student in Moscow. Suddenly, he found himself sent to the frozen tundra of the northern-most USSR, to be a civilian boss over Gulag prisoners building a rail line. Shocked at conditions there, he had prisoners build shelters and helped them survive, so he could finish his project.

Mochulsky, as Kaple said, “considered himself a good man in a bad system.” Yet, only in the introduction to the memoir, long after a succession of better jobs and foreign postings, does Mochulsky suggest any regret or sense of shame for how the state treated its citizens.

His memoir comes from the detached perspective of an engineer, although Kaple says that Mochulsky was always troubled by the gap between socialist theory and the Soviet reality of slave labor and mass murder. In spite of that, he remained a communist party member his entire life, and would later become a diplomat.

The fact that so many suffered and died under his command bothered him a bit, but not enough to truly question the system. “He thought it was basically sound, though perhaps in need of better implementation,” she said. “And that is the way he saw his role: he was improving the system without ever asking whether the system itself was bankrupt. Of course, looking back [in the 1990s] on what he did, he has regrets. But he had none at the time.”

For Dr. Kaple, who met Mr. Mochulsky in Moscow in 1992 when she was there as an academic researching Sino-Soviet relations, translating this one man’s story offered an insight not just into the Gulag itself, but into how evil occurs. “If you really want to understand why seemingly ordinary people did what you feel are truly awful things, you have to listen to them explain why,” she says.

In Gulag Boss, Kaple gives us just this opportunity to look at the organization of evil and the thinking of the ordinary people who help run systems of terror.

Gulag Boss was published in November 2010 by Oxford University Press.