Soviet terror, American amnesia: there has been a striking asymmetry between the American responses to the two great mass murders of our century, the Nazi and the Soviet. Why? - Cover Story

National Review, May 2, 1994 by Paul Hollander

There has been a striking asymmetry between the American responses to the two great mass murders of our century, the Nazi and the Soviet. Why?

IT HAS been customary in our times to make reference to the Holocaust whenever we wish to allude to some unrivaled evil. The Holocaust became the undisputed reference point for self-evident evil, and for good reason. By the same token, words like "Nazi," "Auschwitz," "Storm Troopers," and "Gestapo" are reflexively appended to political or social phenomena we wish to discredit conclusively.

It rarely happens that self-evident evil is denoted by reference to the mass murders committed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Words like "Soviet," "Soviet Communist," "Kolyma," or "KGB" are rarely used to discredit political movements and practices. It is doubtful that one in a thousand Americans knows what Kolyma was, or would recognize the name of a single Soviet concentration camp. It is just as unlikely that one in a thousand Americans has heard the names of Beria, Serov, Yagoda, or Yezhov, who used to be in charge of the Soviet mass murders.

Indeed, as Soviet mass graves have been discovered, one after another, in the last few years, the American media have greeted the discoveries with remarkable equanimity. One alone, in Kuropati, near Minsk, was estimated by Soviet sources to contain over a quarter-million remains; Bykovnia, near Kiev, a similar number, killed during the 1930s. No Russian reporters or officials appeared on our television screens to comment on these discoveries, and no American television correspondents reported breathlessly from the scene. We were also spared the reflections of academic specialists regarding the significance of these findings for a reassessment of the Soviet mass murders.

It is not my purpose to dispute the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The question here raised is why, in comparison to the intensity of the moral outrage evoked by the Holocaust, the Soviet mass murders have stimulated so little moral energy.

Genocide or Mass Murder?

IT IS tempting to suggest that the differences between the character and procedures of the Nazi and Soviet mass murders account for the different moral responses to these slaughters.

In Nazi Germany the state set up highly efficient extermination plants (gas chambers, crematoria) with no less a goal than the total elimination of the Jewish population of Europe, perhaps some day of the whole world. It was a carefully planned, highly organized operation that had spectacular results: the killing of six million Jews and smaller numbers of other "undesirables."

These mass murders gave rise to the term "Holocaust" and popularized the concept of "genocide"--so much so that since the 1960s it has been applied with diminishing discrimination to far lesser outrages, such as the "cultural genocide" of some minority underrepresented in institutions of higher education, or policies of proposing birth control to unwed mothers. Radical feminists called pornography "genocide"; for some "experts" of the "recovery movement," childhood is a "holocaust"; the homosexual organization Act-Up asserted that "Dinkins's policy is genocidal."

The Soviet mass murders were in significant ways different from the Nazi ones. There was no plan corresponding to the "final solution" (the killing of a group of people in order to purify the world of evil); no particular ethnic group was singled out for total elimination; indeed, the victims came from every social stratum and ethnic group of Soviet society. There were no extermination camps using modem technology and machinery. The victims were killed in relatively old-fashioned and inefficient ways: either shot or allowed to die of starvation, cold, and disease in what the Soviet authorities called "corrective labor camps." (According to Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, two Russian emigre historians, "it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the first Europeans to use the terin |concentration camp"' as early as 1918.)

On the other hand the total number of the Soviets' victims was far greater than the Nazis', if we add in those who were victims of politically induced famine and deportations. According to General Volkogonov, head of the parliamentary commission on rehabilitation, "from 1929 to 1953 . . . 21.5 million people were repressed. Of these a third were shot, the rest sentenced to imprisonment where many also died." These figures did not include famine victims and deported ethnic groups.

A large portion of the Soviet victims, some might argue, were not actually killed, they just could not survive the harsh living conditions in the camps, including the bad weather, not subject to human control. These living conditions, some might further contend, resulted less from ill will or deliberate policy than from overall backwardness, sloppiness, and even the needs of the economy. After all, slave labor was badly needed to carry out the great projects of the early five-year plans, and if mortality rates were high, these regrettable sacrifices were exacted to accomplish worthy objectives. There was one striking expression of a matchless cynicism the two camp systems had in common. At the entrance to the Nazi camps were signs reading "Arbeit macht frei" (Labor liberates), while over the gates of Kolyma there was the inscription "Labor is a matter of honor, courage, and heroism."