Red scare: fifty years after his death, Stalin's crimes are still morally shocking--and politically vexing.

• Author: Clark, Bruce
• Position: Book Review

GULAG: A History by Anne Applebaum Doubleday, $35.00

IN HER NEW BOOK, ANNE APPLEBAUM tells an instructive story about Vice President Henry Wallace's first visit to the Soviet Far East in May 1944. Determined to think the best of America's wartime ally, Wallace took an instant liking to his Russian host, a senior secret policeman called Ivan Nikishov. The visitor was struck by the similarities between America and Russia as pioneering nations with vast natural resources, and he listened sympathetically as Nikishov told him how the town of Magadan, with 40,000 residents, had sprung up over the last 12 years. What Wallace hardly seems to have realized is that he was visiting a giant prison: Magadan was the "capital" of an area several times the size of France, where hundreds of thousands of people were sent to incarceration or exile. Many did not even arrive, because the ships that ferried prisoners to Magadan were notorious death traps. And work in the nearby Kolyma gold fields was so backbreaking thai very few survived it for more than a couple of years. The town Wallace so admired had been built by penal labor; the singers and musicians who performed for him were captives (albeit under strict instructions not to reveal the fact); even the local embroidery which he politely praised was the work of prisoners.

What this story reminds us, of course, is that when a nation or coalition has focused all its attention on the defeat of a single enemy, it can easily become blinded to the faults, indeed the downright evil, of other forces in the world--especially if those other forces happen to be helping in the struggle against the main adversary. Winston Churchill, to his credit, was aware of this paradox: He once declared that if Hitler had invaded hell, Her Majesty's government would at least have sent a friendly diplomatic note to the Prince of Darkness. And most people would agree that when a nation is engaged in the heat of a life-and-death struggle with a clearly defined enemy, such as Nazi Germany, it is reasonable to accept help from almost any partner, however unsavory--as long as you do not deceive yourself, as Wallace appears to have done, about that partner's real nature. The wisdom of cultivating dubious allies--on the old "enemy of my enemy" principle--is much less self-evident when the war you are fighting is long, multi-fronted, and has an important moral and psychological dimension as well as a military one. That description applied to the Cold War, and it also applies to the current war against terrorism.

Since 1945, not many observers of the Soviet Union have been as naive as Wallace; but Anne Applebaum believes that Westerners--especially on the political left--have never ceased to underestimate the radically evil nature of the Soviet system, and the degree of suffering it inflicted on its own citizens. And she is undoubtedly right to say that the dimensions of Stalin's repression, even if we do our best to assess it honestly, are hard to take in. For those of us who live in relative comfort and liberty, the story of the Soviet prison camps, through which as many as 18 million people may have passed over a period of roughly four decades, is a bone-chilling reminder of humanity's almost infinite capacity for cruelty, on a scale that defies belief. It is also a phenomenon in which many observers, including some who had little excuse, consciously chose not to believe. This was partly because the Soviet...