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Book
Review |
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Hochschild, Adam. The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2003). 296 pp, $14.00.
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The Unquiet Ghost was written
shortly after Adam Hochschild's 1991 trip to the USSR, four years before
his award winning King Leopold's Ghost (1998) and nearly a
decade before his most recent widely acclaimed Bury the Chains: Prophets
and Rebels in the Fight to Free the Empire's Slaves. The Unquiet
Ghost shares with those later works a keen interest in the human capacity
for evil and denial that coexists with utopian hopes. The Unquiet
Ghost, however, is a far more personal work – and therein lay both its
strength and its weakness. |
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Aimed at a wide audience, The Unquiet Ghost
explores both Stalin's Great Purge and, following de-Stalinization,
the Great Silence. "How could the Great Purge have happened," Hochschild
asks, "and why did so many so long keep silent about their experiences in
the Gulag?" What makes these questions important is not simply the appalling
number of Soviet citizens who disappeared, but the fact that, unlike other
genocides which targeted ethnic or economic outsiders, this genocide targeted
regime loyalists and the apolitical. Equally troubling for Hochschild
are the "habits of mind" that enabled both denouncers and the "unseeing"
to become complicit. |
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Unquiet Ghost is, at its best,
a kind of travel narrative into the depths of Stalin's system, skillfully
interweaving first person observations with testimony from novelists, historians,
and personal informants who survived Stalin's purges and gulags. Along
the way we meet Mikhail Volkov, a former secret police colonel from Karaganda
province whose bookcases feature Shakespeare, Russian classics and a portrait
of an underground poet-singer. There is Nikolai Fyodorich, a phlegmatic
history teacher with a black homburg, leafing through scrapbook pages and
reciting their damning facts. Hochschild's descriptions – of Moscow's
KGB archives, of the Central Asian steppe around Karaganda, or of Kolyma's
gold and uranium mines give The Unquiet Ghost a sense of place that
is both immediate and personal. There is an urgency to these portraits.
Although 100,000 executioners and victims of the gulag are still alive,
many are unwilling to talk. When they die, their testimony will be
lost. |
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Yet one suspects that Hochschild's real sense
of urgency comes from his belief that, like Pogo, he "has met the enemy
and he is us." Hochschild's Russians are archetypes for all people
who have suffered at the hands of their fellow citizens. In Russia
as elsewhere, Hochschild argues, we must draw a clear line between the utopia
dream and the arbitrary cruelty of its implementation. Lest we in the United
States "do the same", Hochschild makes his analogies explicit. "Those
who commit atrocities" thus include "Americans in Vietnam" as well as Nazis
and South African police. Even novice students should spot the overt comparisons
of a neo-Stalinist society, Unity, to the old John Birch Society. Though
he claims he found a Russia far more complex than his preconceived notions
about "evil executioners" and "heroic victims", this co-founder of Mother
Jones Magazine has nonetheless brought some of the same baggage out
of Russia as he brought in with him. |
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Hochschild's meditation on the Great
Purge and Great Silence breaks no new ground, but will serve world history
students well. His introductory overview of Stalinist purges and camps,
accompanied by a timeline and map, ably situates students in the era. Hochschild's
bibliographic essay provides an excellent introduction both to recent scholarship
and to published testimonies. The Unquiet Ghost also provides
students a ready-made case study in rhetorical method. Students will
learn much by analyzing the way Hochschild crafts his prose, organizes his
evidence, and structures his argument. Students will also gain from
more critical engagement, gauging the relative validity of Hochschild's
analogies and assessing the impact of his political positions on his historical
arguments. |
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Mary Beth Immediata
Ravenscroft School |
