I'm not making some 'it wasn't real communism, man!' defense but those books are about the reality of prison life under the peak of (communist) totalitarian repression. There was a lot more to the reality. Even the Soviets eventually figured out that level of murderous control was an entirely unnecessary waste of human life and the communism communismed on for decades.
That's not entirely accurate. They did figure out that Stalin's level of repression was unnecessary, or at least they lacked the conviction to carry it out. But in "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn, he documents how much of the apparatus continued forward into Khrushchev's regime. He details the town of Novocherkassk, where workers went on strike in June of 1962. Tanks and troops were dispatched. The strikers were fired upon. The wounded were rounded up, and the families of the wounded and the dead were shipped off to Siberia. He talks about other incidents. He talks about how the religious were still treated the same as under Stalin. Life after (or even before) Stalin was not free from such abuses.
Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.
Is what I'm replying to. It's a very narrow slice of a much bigger thing.
Life after (or even before) Stalin was not free from such abuses.
I'm not sure why you think I said anything of the sort.
As to 'figured out', no, of course they didn't have a sudden epiphany while taking a shower one morning. The paranoid nutcase that ruled them died.
The thing that I was getting at, really, is that there is a fairly common but mistaken notion that the Soviet system was all about overt repression; that it depended, throughout its entire lifespan on the direct and immediate threat of deadly state violence. It didn't and that's, in many ways, a more interesting and disturbing thing to consider.
This isn't a particularly original or new thought - if you've run across, say, Masha Gessen's recent writing, it's often reiterated (as a kind of starting point) there as well.
While it did get quite a it better after Stalin's death, in a sense that people wouldn't keep an "emergency bag" of things one could take to prison by the bedside, with pretty much everyone knowing someone who had passed through the Gulag, a lot of Gulag has been internalized in the populace. The evil was very much banal, as it were, and the changes were mostly a matter of degree. Being seen reading "Kolyma Stories" would have you spending a few years on the "Sunny Kolyma" as it was called.
I find it odd that someone downvotes your comment. It's not snarky, or trivial, it just states an opinion. It appears someone doesn't like the opinion.
a lot of Gulag has been internalized in the populace.
Ah, exactly - I don't think that's why it continued to work. Consider, for example, how quickly and effectively the system replicated itself all over Eastern Europe. Those places had their bloody coups and brief periods of Stalinist terror but nothing of the Soviet scale and duration. Many avoided outright forced collectivization, a few didn't even require a permanent occupying Soviet army. And it still worked.
Ah, but was it really that effective? Sure, Eastern European countries stayed within the Soviet sphere (Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed what happens if you don't) but they split at the earliest opportunity. While Russia is backtracking if not to communism than to glorification of USSR and Stalin.
It was enormously effective. Forty years, in half a dozen countries. Forty years in which the rest of the world saw the Wirtschaftswunder from the ashes of Western Europe and Japan, decolonialization, the end of legally mandated racism in the US (on top of its own post-war economic and population boom). We got party meetings and retransmissions of Vremya on Friday nights. It still worked without anyone (statistically) going to the Kolyma, sunny or otherwise, without the voronki roaming the streets every night.
Even if we can't agree how or why, it's on us to always think about it in the hope it might in some small way prevent it from happening again. In the places that we left or the places we came to.
It lasted as long as Soviet troops were stationed nearby and ready to roll in at a moment's notice. As soon as it became clear that they wouldn't, the Wall fell, and the rest followed. In most places even relatively bloodlessly.
And because you didn't have the Big Terror to the same extent, life in Eastern Europe was quite a bit better than in the USSR. When we visited a friend in Prague in 1985, he had a collection of "anti-soviet" literature (including Kolyma Stories that would be enough to send anyone in USSR reliving Shalamov's experience. And he didn't even hide it...
