Napoleon's Legacy Leads to the Gulag; Two new books about Napoleon and the Soviet Gulag delve into the origins of modern dictatorships and the evils they since have unleashed on millions of people

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 2, 2003

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Dramatic subtlety has become an oxymoron in book marketing and among the reviewers who serve it, so it is not surprising that the prestigious journals that review literature didn't see anything to link these two new books. They should have.

Paul Johnson's concise and closely argued Napoleon is a biography of only 199 pages about the man who conquered most of Europe during the early years of the 19th century. It is part of the highly regarded "Penguin Lives Series" of the world's great men and women.

And, at 667 pages, Anne Applebaum's powerful and magisterial Gulag: A History isn't short at all. It is a detailed and deeply moving look at one of the 20th century's great evils, the vast network of Soviet concentration camps known as the Gulag where millions of men and women suffered, were starved and forced to do slave labor in the decades between 1917 and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991.

The first of these books is set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and is about one man; the other encompasses much of the 20th century and tells the stories of millions. But in truth the two works tell us much about the same thing: the origins of modern dictatorships and the evils unleashed on the world by those dictatorships.

The prolific, conservative English author of such classics as Modern Times, A History of Christianity and many other works, Johnson finds in Napoleon Bonaparte's legacy the roots of much that's wrong with the world today. What is that legacy? Johnson argues that Napoleon bequeathed us those traits regarded as the worst and most inhuman of modern times: "the deification of force and war," for example, and "the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda to apotheosize the autocrat [and] the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power."

If that murderous and ruthless legacy weren't sufficient for any one man, Napoleon also set an example that has spawned many imitators, some of whom far outdid their master. Napoleon's legacy, in Johnson's view, "came to hateful maturity" a hundred years and more after his death in 1821: "No dictator of the tragic 20th century from Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong to pygmy tyrants like Kim Il Sung, Castro, Pern, Mengistu, Saddam Hussein, Ceausescu, and Gadhafi was without distinctive echoes of the Napoleonic stereotype." For Johnson, there is a direct line that connects Napoleon with the Soviet Gulag. "The totalitarian state ... was the ultimate progeny of the Napoleonic reality and myth," he writes.

It is the great horrors of that progeny the earliest totalitarian state of them all, the U.S.S.R. which Applebaum describes so unforgettably in her book. While Johnson predicts that future historians likely will call the 20th century "The Age of Infamy," it is Applebaum who shows us in brilliant detail why that name fits perfectly.

The Gulag was very large, the word being an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or "Main Camp Administration." At its most expansive, "there were 476 complexes in the realm of the Gulag," each of which "contained dozens, even hundreds of smaller camps," Applebaum writes. Those complexes were located throughout the U.S.S.R., from the area around Arkhangelsk in Russia's far north to the most remote and unlivable areas of Siberia and the deserts of Kazakhstan. She estimates that all tolled more than 28 million men, women and children passed through the gates of the concentration camps or were forced to live in distant exile from their homes, a fate that was very similar, in her estimation, to life in the camps.

Millions died, though the exact number probably never will be known. They died on the way to the camps, stuffed in vastly overcrowded trains or boats. They died in the camps from starvation or from the bitter cold. Many of the camps were in the far north or Siberia, where summers were very short and where winter temperatures often fell to 50 below zero and lower.

Bread was severely rationed, hard and tasteless. The camp cooks made soup from rotting cabbage and potatoes and sometimes threw in fish heads. According to rules set in Moscow, which often went unfulfilled, prisoners were to receive "a new towel every year, a pillowcase every four years, sheets every two years and a blanket every five years."

Many children inhabited the Gulag. In Ukraine and elsewhere, there were camps for children alone, set up to deal with the enormous number of orphans that mass arrests, famine and disease had wrought in the big cities. Workers and peasants, not intellectuals, made up the vast majority of prisoners. Most were men.

Applebaum writes: "By concentration camps, I mean camps constructed to incarcerate people not for what they had done, but for who they were." The masters of the Soviet Union, like those in Nazi Germany, she explains, "legitimated themselves, in part, by establishing categories of 'enemies' or 'subhumans' whom they persecuted and destroyed on a mass scale." In Germany, the subhumans were Jews and, to a lesser extent, Gypsies and homosexuals. In the U.S.S.R., they were "class enemies" and "saboteurs" bent on disrupting the Soviet Union's great experiment in socialism.