Book review: Life behind the Iron Curtain.
Anne Applebaum: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe
Doubleday
BY LOUIS MENAND : Applebaum wants to give flesh to a concept. “I sought to gain an understanding of real totalitarianism, not totalitarianism in theory, but totalitarianism in practice,” she says. The term originated in Italy. According to Abbott Gleason, in his standard history of the concept, “Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War” (1995), it was first used, in 1923, by an opponent of Benito Mussolini, who referred critically to the Fascist government as a “sistema totalitaria.” Mussolini didn’t mind at all. By 1925, he was referring proudly to “la nostra feroce volontà totalitaria”—“our fierce totalitarian will.” By “totalitarian,” he meant a politics that aimed at the total transformation of society. In Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, the agent of this transformation was not the state. It was the party.
The state, especially the judiciary, was simply the party’s bureaucratic dummy. This was because the purpose of totalitarian transformation was not mere efficiency—“making the trains run on time,” as people used to say of Fascist Italy. Nor was it the enjoyment of power for power’s sake, as many representations of totalitarian regimes, such as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four,” suggested. The purpose was the realization of a law of historical development, the correct understanding of which was a monopoly of the party. In Hitler’s Germany, life was transformed in the name of a single goal: racial purity. (“The state is only a vessel,” Hitler wrote, in “Mein Kampf,” “and the race is what it contains.”) In the Soviet Union, it was done in the name of the classless society and the workers’ state.
The authority of these chiliastic ideologies is what made totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia different from traditional dictatorships, and what made them terrifying. They were not just static systems of hyper-control. They were dynamic and dangerously unstable. They regarded the present as a temporary stage in history’s unfolding, and the fantastic unrealizability of what was to be—pure Germanness, or the classless society—made what merely was something only to be destroyed or overcome. Everything was expendable.
When Germany invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, the date that W. H. Auden used for his famous poem—“I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”—Poland had commitments in hand from France and Britain to come to its aid if its independence was threatened. In Warsaw, in the first week of September, enthusiastic crowds gathered outside the French and British Embassies. They expected that Berlin would be bombed and that British and French forces would attack Germany from the west. But the British and the French did neither of those things, and the war did not take long. On September 27th, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans. Meanwhile, on September 17th, pursuant to an agreement between Stalin and Hitler, Poland was invaded from the east by the Red Army. That campaign lasted less than a month. By October, Poland was in the hands of its two ancient enemies.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/11/12/121112crbo_books_menand#ixzz2CvWObAgP
Doubleday
BY LOUIS MENAND : Applebaum wants to give flesh to a concept. “I sought to gain an understanding of real totalitarianism, not totalitarianism in theory, but totalitarianism in practice,” she says. The term originated in Italy. According to Abbott Gleason, in his standard history of the concept, “Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War” (1995), it was first used, in 1923, by an opponent of Benito Mussolini, who referred critically to the Fascist government as a “sistema totalitaria.” Mussolini didn’t mind at all. By 1925, he was referring proudly to “la nostra feroce volontà totalitaria”—“our fierce totalitarian will.” By “totalitarian,” he meant a politics that aimed at the total transformation of society. In Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, the agent of this transformation was not the state. It was the party.
The state, especially the judiciary, was simply the party’s bureaucratic dummy. This was because the purpose of totalitarian transformation was not mere efficiency—“making the trains run on time,” as people used to say of Fascist Italy. Nor was it the enjoyment of power for power’s sake, as many representations of totalitarian regimes, such as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four,” suggested. The purpose was the realization of a law of historical development, the correct understanding of which was a monopoly of the party. In Hitler’s Germany, life was transformed in the name of a single goal: racial purity. (“The state is only a vessel,” Hitler wrote, in “Mein Kampf,” “and the race is what it contains.”) In the Soviet Union, it was done in the name of the classless society and the workers’ state.
The authority of these chiliastic ideologies is what made totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia different from traditional dictatorships, and what made them terrifying. They were not just static systems of hyper-control. They were dynamic and dangerously unstable. They regarded the present as a temporary stage in history’s unfolding, and the fantastic unrealizability of what was to be—pure Germanness, or the classless society—made what merely was something only to be destroyed or overcome. Everything was expendable.
When Germany invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, the date that W. H. Auden used for his famous poem—“I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”—Poland had commitments in hand from France and Britain to come to its aid if its independence was threatened. In Warsaw, in the first week of September, enthusiastic crowds gathered outside the French and British Embassies. They expected that Berlin would be bombed and that British and French forces would attack Germany from the west. But the British and the French did neither of those things, and the war did not take long. On September 27th, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans. Meanwhile, on September 17th, pursuant to an agreement between Stalin and Hitler, Poland was invaded from the east by the Red Army. That campaign lasted less than a month. By October, Poland was in the hands of its two ancient enemies.
For the next five years, those enemies did their best to destroy it. And then, for forty-five years after that, Poland found itself locked in a totalitarian cage whose key was kept in Moscow. No one had come to the rescue of Poland in 1939, and no one came to its rescue after 1945. In the end, Poland had to rescue itself. The Polish story is the heart of Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, a book that reanimates a world that was largely hidden from Western eyes, and that many people who lived and suffered in it would prefer to forget.
Although eastern Poland was one of the most impoverished areas in Central Europe, it was better off than the Soviet Union. As soon as the Soviets gained control of it, in 1939, they looted whatever they could get their hands on. Representatives of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (also known as the N.K.V.D., predecessor of the K.G.B.) carried out an extermination program targeting the Polish élite. In the most notorious case, almost fifteen thousand Polish officers, most of them professionals in the reserve corps, were arrested and deported. More than four thousand were shot and buried in a forest outside Katyn, in western Russia. The rest went to special camps. Fewer than five hundred were ever heard of again. In all, 1.2 million Poles were deported to the U.S.S.R. by the Soviets from their half of Poland, an area with a population of thirteen million. Half of them died in captivity.
In the west, Hitler embarked on his plans to Germanize the country by ridding it of Jews, driving out the Slavic population, and resettling the land with Volksdeutsche. All the major Nazi death camps were situated in annexed or German-occupied Poland. Of the estimated 5.7 million European Jews killed in the Holocaust, some three million were Polish—ninety per cent of all the Jews in Poland. Although the British and the Americans knew of the extermination camps, they refused to bomb the railroad tracks used to transport the victims.
To Stalin’s astonishment, in June, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the start of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, which trapped Poland and the other nations of Eastern Europe in the middle of what Hitler planned as a Vernichtungskrieg—a war of extermination, a war without rules, total war. After nearly losing Moscow, the Red Army turned the tide and pushed the Germans back through the lands they had conquered: Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Poland, countries that were thus invaded twice in five years. As the Red Army “liberated,” it plundered, or disassembled and sent to the Soviet Union, virtually everything of value, from wristwatches to steel factories. The N.K.V.D. mopped up by deporting or executing “anti-Soviet elements”—those among the local partisans and nationalist political groups who had managed to survive the similar extermination policies of the Einsatzgruppen.
When the Red Army reached Poland, in the summer of 1944, it waited on the banks of the Vistula, just outside Warsaw, while the S.S., under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, killed fifteen thousand Polish partisans, who had staged an armed uprising, and more than two hundred thousand civilians. At the end of the fighting, half a million Poles were sent to camps, and the rest were deported as slave laborers to Germany. On Hitler’s orders, the city was razed. When the Red Army finally entered Warsaw, in January, 1945, the streets were filled with dead bodies. No one living remained...
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/11/12/121112crbo_books_menand#ixzz2CvWObAgP
