O Amor ao Próximo e o Socialismo Como Ele É

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. Except in Bulgaria, which has cultural ties to Russia, Soviet soldiers not only looted but raped, almost systematically, in the countries they passed through. In eastern Germany alone, up to two million women are believed to have been raped by Soviet soldiers 

(...)This grant of immunity gave the Soviet Union a free hand to carry out one of the most radical experiments in social engineering in history. Between 1945 and 1953, the year that Stalin died, the societies of Eastern Europe were remade from top to bottom. The goal was not to force people to serve a new political system. The goal was to produce a new kind of human being, a human being who would not need to be forced to serve the system. The creation of that new human being was the end that justified every means, and those means are the subject of Applebaum’s book: how the Soviets and their local apparatchiks attempted to build the perfect socialist world. 
Applebaum’s previous book was “Gulag: A History,” published in 2003. It gave names and faces to a numbing statistic. Between 1929, when Stalin had firmly consolidated his position as Lenin’s heir, and 1953, eighteen million people were sent to labor camps in the Soviet Union. More than two million died there. Applebaum used memoirs and oral testimony to give a picture of how the Gulag worked—what it was like to be caught in the insatiable maw of Stalinist purgation, to be arrested, transported, incarcerated, abused, and, for the lucky, after many years, released. She helped to humanize an inhumanity. The new book is a re-creation of life on the streets and in the prisons of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and East Germany in the years of Stalinization. 
“Iron Curtain” gives us some idea of what it was like to be trapped in the Soviet experiment, to be a witness to the demolition and reconstruction of one’s environment. 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. People were jailed or deported or executed in totalitarian states not for being threats to the regime but for being threats to the future, a much broader jurisdiction. Applebaum tells of a Polish man who was executed for possession of an unlicensed radio, of a printer who was sentenced to five years for a typographical error in an obituary of Stalin, of teen-agers who were sent to camps or prison for making faces during a lecture on Stalin. By 1954, six million people in Poland were registered as criminal or suspicious elements. That was almost a quarter of the population. But the main target of totalitarian remaking was not the individual dissident or nonconformist. It was civil society itself. Any organization that operated outside the purview of the Party was eliminated or nationalized. In East Germany, all hiking clubs and chess clubs were banned. Almost every restaurant in Budapest became a “people’s cafeteria” or a state-owned workers’ pub. In Poland, the Y.M.C.A. was denounced as a “tool of bourgeois-fascism.” All youth organizations were subsumed into a single Communist-run agency. Universities were purged. Psychoanalysis, “the product of decaying capitalism and anti-state ideology,” was banned..