Adam Hochschild.

• Author: Rocawich, Linda
• Position: Journalist - Interview

In May 1991, the telephone rang in Adam Hochschild's Moscow apartment. The caller was an American scholar, and her message was: "The KGB has some files about Americans in the Gulag. They're looking for an American journalist to give them to."

Hochschild, who was in Russia working on a book about the Gulag, became that journalist, the first foreigner allowed inside the KGB archives. He tells that story in his book The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, but it's a very small part of his story. The larger one is of Soviet citizens in the Gulag--the imprisoned, the exiled, and the executed, but also the guards and executioners, and even one unreconstructed Stalinist, a woman who maintains what can only be called a shrine to his memory in her home.

Then glasnost unfolded in the late 1980s. "Maybe, politically, I should have been more interested in the fact that people could vote for the first time." Hochschild told me. "But what really fascinated me was what I began to read about how the forbidden books were starting to be published, and there could be open meetings of people who had been in the Gulag. There could be exhibitions on the subject. People were starting to make films."

Kolyma fascinated him. In far northeastern Siberia, the heart of the Gulag, Kolyma is home to more skeletons in frozen mass graves than to living souls. "Today in the summer," he writes, "Kolyma children use human skulls to gather blueberries. What was it like to live and work daily amid such reminders of mass murder?"

The fifty-one-year-old journalist visited Madison, Wisconsin, in late April, just as the book was being published, and we spoke for a few hours over lunch and in The Progressive's office. Active in left-wing politics since the 1960s, Hochschild was one of the founders of Mother Jones magazine, was an editor there for many years, and remains on its board.

His earlier books deal with other parts of the world. Half the Way Home is, as its subtitle has it, A Memoir of Father and Son. And The Mirror at Midnight is the tale of a lengthy journey throughout South Africa undertaken in 1988, interwoven with that nation's history. When we met, he had just returned from a three-week sojourn there, coming back to the United States a month before the elections. So we talked about Russia, South Africa, and the prospects for the Left in the United States.

Q: For your new book, The Unquiet Ghost, you spent six months in Russia. What prompted the move?

Adam Hochschild: I've always been fascinated with the history of the Russian Revolution, this event which was greeted around the world so enthusiastically by enlightened people, progressive people. I'm sure I would have greeted it that way if I'd been alive at the time. So the fascination is: Why did it turn so quickly into one of the great self-inflicted genocides of history? I read the history books of that period, about the 1920s and 1930s, I read Solzhenitsyn and the memoirs of other people who went through the Gulag system--Eugenia Ginzburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Victor Serge.

I had been to Russia a number of times in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, mostly short trips to do magazine or newspaper articles, and I noticed, as everybody does, that when you talked to people there at that time, they would talk about what happened during the Stalin era but only over the family dinner table or in the kitchen, and only if those present were trusted friends, because all public discussion of this was forbidden. Stalin died in 1953, having dispatched some twenty million people to unnatural deaths of one sort or another. And that's apart from all the Soviets who died in World War II.

About three years after Stalin died, Khrushchev let seven or eight million people out of the Gulag. Then there was a little window of time when some discussion took place. One book by Solzhenitsyn was published and there was some stilted talk in the newspapers about how "Errors were committed during the period of the personality cult." But by the late 1950s, this window was shut. For almost thirty years, there was public silence about this self-inflicted holocaust, silence of a remarkable nature.

Look, for instance, at the great Soviet encyclopedia, this multi-volume work the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There's a page and a half on Stalin that just lists the posts he held at different times and the phrase, "Certain of his personality traits had negative repercussions." And that's all they say.

The standard history text used in every Soviet high school up until a few years ago had ten lines about Stalin--the man who was absolute ruler of the country for twenty-five years. It had absolutely nothing about the Great Purge, in which nineteen million people were arrested and seven million executed outright. It completely skipped over the famines caused by the collectivization of agriculture, in which another six, seven, eight million died. There was this vacuum, this silence, and the scale of the silence just awed me.

Then Gorbachev came into power, and glasnost began. I just really wanted to go there and see what it was like, hear what the dialogue was like when, for the first time, people could openly talk about these things.

Q: In the book you mention a group called Memorial. What is it?

Hochschild: It's a very loose-knit, but enduring, association of former Gulag inmates, people who lost members of their families to the Gulag or to the firing squads, reform-minded historians, researchers who are digging up mass graves, and other people who simply don't want it all to happen again.

Q: You say that "human beings have a longer memory for fear than they do for most other emotions." Could you tell the story of the man whose father disappeared during World War II?

Hochschild: Yes, it illustrates the point. It's a man whose entire life has been determined by what happened fifty years ago. It shows what happens when fear lasts for decades and is woven into a society's very framework.

A man named Nikolai Danilov called me up one day, and I invited him over for breakfast. He was in his late fifties, and I had been told to ask him about his father. And he began to tell this story. His father had been a lieutenant colonel in the Red Army who had been arrested just on the eve of World War II in the purge of Red Army officers, when 40,000 officers were arrested. Most of them were shot, but his father survived. After some months in prison, he was released and went back to the army.

He was called to the front when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941. During the war, he disappeared and was listed as "missing, presumed dead." And so Nikolai Danilov grew up with everybody thinking, including himself, that he was the son of an officer who'd been killed, which was an...