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

But in Russia that's precisely what has been allowed to happen. "The secret police kept their apartments, their dachas and their large pensions." And the Gulag's millions of victims? They have "remained poor and marginal," Applebaum observes, an injustice that calls out for remedy.

There is another reason that truth commissions and official investigations must look at the Gulag, one more important for the United States and the West. "For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history," Applebaum warns. She notes with concern that Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has made major films about Japanese and Nazi concentration camps, "but not about Stalinist concentration camps."

She regards this as a significant indictment, a wrong that needs righted. "Why did we fight the Cold War after all? Already, we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of 'the West' together for so long." Revisionist historians already have challenged the necessity of the Cold War and will continue to do so. The Gulag in all its horror and tragedy must be remembered as one of the reasons why the Cold War was fought and why it was a good thing that the West won that war.

At the end of her great book, Applebaum states that she didn't write Gulag as a way of perhaps staving off gulags of the future. That would be impossible. "This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again," she concludes. "Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people."

Johnson in his Napoleon reaches a similar conclusion. He notes how many prominent Western intellectuals in the 20th century praised brutal dictators and found great hope for the world's future in them: "This infatuation was to occur time and time again," he writes. "George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb fall for the Stalin image, Norman Mailer and others hero-worshipping Fidel Castro, and an entire generation, including many Frenchmen such as Jean-Paul Sartre, praising the Mao Zedong regime," under which 60 million Chinese perished by famine or in concentration camps.

Johnson's book, like Applebaum's, warns of the importance of preserving the past in public memory. "We have to learn again the central lesson of history: that all forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building are as nothing indeed are perilous in extreme" here Johnson quotes from the Ash Wednesday Collect of the Book of Common Prayer "without a humble and a contrite heart."

Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight.