The Camp Kitchen, Ivan Sukhanov

STEVE KOGAN writes: 

There are times when a political hit job in the news can consume me to distraction. Either I find a way to work it out of my system or live with it until it disappears, although some never truly go away. I know an academically accomplished woman whose insults and smears are so barbed that people who were on the receiving end years ago can still feel the sting when they think of her. 

 The other day I experienced a reawakening of two such smears that have stuck in my craw for the longest time, the first being Dick Durbin’s remark on the Senate floor on June 14, 2005, in which he likened “what Americans had done” at Guantanamo to totalitarian regimes. His reference to Nazis was bad enough, but “Soviets in their Gulags” hit me hard. 

The second sliming was Tina Fey’s ridicule of Sarah Palin on NBC’s Saturday Night Live (“I can see Russia from my house”), which was peddled by the left with such avidity that it not only became an emblem of Palin’s supposedly diminished mental faculties but also made people believe that the words were actually hers. In effect, Tina Fey became Sarah Palin, while Dick Durbin was allowed to remain himself after he performed an exercise in damage control that sounded like remorse but was nothing of the kind (“I am sorry if anything I said,” and a “heartfelt apology” to those who “may believe that my remarks crossed the line”). 

What brought these events simultaneously back to mind was a passage in Ian Frazier’s recent article “On the Prison Highway: The Gulag’s Silent Remains” (The New Yorker, August 30). The subtitle and the word “silent,” in particular, sum up every aspect of the piece. As Lev Razgon observes in True Stories, the Soviet lagerei were spread across two continental regions for over half a century, far greater in space and time than anything comparable in history, yet they have all but disappeared. I once thought that the Gulag also existed minimally in photographs, having seen nothing that could compare in sheer quantity with those of Hitler’s camps, many of whose structures, when not demolished or allowed to rot, still remain as memorial sites. It was therefore with great excitement that I read a long review in Le Monde of Tomasz Kizny’s Goulag seven years ago, which included one or two hellish photographs among the many that Kizny managed to track down. The next day I found a large bookstore near the Sorbonne, promptly bought the book, and, in the leisure of an apartment in the old-world neighborhood of Parc Monceau, pored over the photos, maps, and detailed accounts of a prison system, writes Razgon, over which “the stars glittered as always in winter, with a gloomy power and a remote indifference to all that is alive.” When I left Paris with my wife, I lugged the book in my knapsack, all ten pounds of it, back to New York. For several weeks after Durbin made his contemptible remark, I had the urge to send him copies of two of the photographs, one of a camp “infirmary” filled with prisoners every inch the equivalent of their counterparts under the Third Reich, the other of a camp in the midst of an Arctic desolation all its own. 

I could have sent Durbin the entire book, but the effort would have been pointless even if the work had reached his desk. Had I gone further and personally placed a photograph of “Club Gitmo” and the gulag under his nose, I am equally certain that he would have found a way to be evasive in a flash. My conviction is based on a precedent that I inherited. When my father came back from a month-long visit to the remnants of his family in Russia, he tried to tell his former “comrades in the struggle” all that he had learned. “They can’t see,” he said to me one day. “If they can’t believe what I just saw and heard, they will never do it on their own. I know these people. I used to be just as blind.”

Except for those who have had it in them to wake up, that’s the left all over, blind and deaf and liars to boot. I no sooner started cruising the Web under the heading “I can see Russia from my house” than I discovered a noxious website called tunc.biz, where I read the following from the publisher Athena Simonidou or one of her minions: “The line ‘I can see Russia from my house’ was uttered by Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live (SNL). It’s such a good line because it’s close to Palin’s actual words and thoughts. She could well have uttered those very words.”

As for Palin’s “very words,” which can be be found in ABC’s transcript of her interview with Charlie Gibson, what she said, in point of fact, was that Russians are “our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.” There is nothing in this statement that is remotely “close to Palin’s actual words and thoughts,” although there are three identical words on which Fey’s mockery depends, namely, “see Russia from.” The island to which Palin alluded is Little Diomede, two and a half miles from Russia’s Big Diomede, which is indeed visible across the water when the sky is clear.

Writing for Slate four days after the Gibson interview, Nina Shen Rastogi cites a long article on the Bering Strait that appeared in the New York Times in 1988, in which Peter Iseman vividly remarks that, “between the barren islands of Soviet Big Diomede and American Little Diomede . . . the two great continental powers reach out across the map and all but touch, like the outstretched figures in Michelangelo’s ”The Creation of Adam.'” Referencing other sources, Rastogi remarks that, if you go to the highest point on Little Diomede,”you can see for about 37 miles,” and that in the winter, “when the water between the two islands freezes, an intrepid explorer can just walk from one to the other.” Nevertheless, “It’s not as if Alaskans can see into the heart of the Kremlin,” the implication being that, despite the proximity of the islands, Palin was weak in her attempt to link this fact with Alaskan trade deals with Russia and, by extension, her qualification to deal with Moscow on a diplomatic level. On the other hand, Rastogi also implies that Palin got her geography right in more ways than one, because there are other high grounds in Alaska from which Russia is visible. More precisely, “The region you’d be seeing from these vantage points is the Chukotka autonomous district,” which sounds like a mere fact of Alaskan topography until one learns that Chukotka lies just above the administrative region of Magadan and the gold-mining fields of Kolyma, the Gulag’s “pole of ferocity,” in Solzhenitsyn’s chilling words.

Which brings me to Frazier’s geo-political lesson that triggered my memory of Durbin and Fey. From what he says, there is indeed a connection between the U. S. and the Gulag, not in the sense of Durbin’s disgusting equation but in the hidden and malevolent uses to which the Soviets put some of our wartime aid and earlier materiel. “During the 1930s,” writes Frazier, the regime’s mining and construction agency Dalstroi, “run by the secret police, used some of its gold to purchase machinery and gold-mining equipment from America.” In the following years, “some of the barbed wire . . . might have been of American manufacture; barbed wire was among the hundreds  of thousands of tons of Lend-Lease goods shipped from the West Coast to ports of the Soviet Far East.” It was Frazier’s following lines that riveted my attention. In his words, “many of the worst Gulag prisons were much closer to America than they were to Moscow,” and slaveships heading north to Kolyma, which “survivors described as something out of Dante,” passed through the Bering Strait, close enough to American shores so that, “Under the right conditions, a person standing on U. S. soil would have been able to see the ships as they passed by.” Had the observer been able to look inside, he would have seen “the heart of the Kremlin” up close.

                                                                     — Comments —

Kilroy M. writes:

• Number of Gulags in operation in Russia in 2010: five.
• Reason they are called Gulags: inmates die there, ie nobody returns. Ever.
• Names: White Swan, Black Delphine, Vologod Five, During the Day (I wonder whether this was a typo; doesn’t sound like a name for a camp), and another simply known as Number 18.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

In response to Steve Kogan, Mabel LeBeau writes: “To suggest that the proximity to Alaska borders by Siberia represents a ‘closeness’ with decision-makers in the Russian Federation is naive, dangerously so”; and “To make a big deal about ’seeing Russia from Alaska’ begs the question of Ms. Palin’s fitness in thinking outside her provincial notions of Alaska First and the Alaska Secessionist Movement.” 

Kogan has not argued that Alaskan politicians, now or in the past, have been politically “close” to Stalinism; he is merely invoking a geographical fact, often overlooked, that has a moral meaning in the context of twentieth century history. Since it is true that Alaska, lay closer to many outposts of the Gulag than did Moscow, it is also unclear to me why LeBeau would characterize stating this as naïve or dangerous, which she does. Neither is it the case that Kogan has offered any blanket endorsement of Palin. The main point is that the American Left’s sympathy for Marxism and its reflexive loathing for conservatives (especially robust female conservatives) animate – and in good part explain – the ferocity, tenacity, and shoddiness of the attacks on Palin since she emerged on the national scene. The two aspects of Kogan’s exposition go together, of course, in that Palin-hatred drives leftwing types to ignore facts of physical existence and the specificity of statements. Portions of the Soviet Union (now Russia) were and are visible from American territory in Alaska. Palin never said that she could see Russia from her house; she only ever averred what is true – namely what I have just stated in the previous sentence.

Steve Kogan writes:

I referenced the full transcript of Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson so that readers could see for themselves the context in which she made her remark on the proximity of Alaska to Russia. Her point concerned the state’s strategic location, and it was coupled with her remarks on Alaska’s enormous energy reserves in oil and natural gas, about which she has more knowledge than most, given that she once served as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. There is nothing “provincial” or “myopic” about her observations, which were expressed in their most inclusive form years ago by General Billy Mitchell, commonly known as the father of the United States Air Force, who said that “Alaska is the most important strategic place in the world . . . the most central place in the world of aircraft. . . . Whoever holds Alaska will hold the world.” 

I want to thank Kilroy M. for his update on existing death camps in Central and Eastern Europe. I did not mean to imply that no such terrible places exist any longer. I was only speaking of the Soviet Gulag, the acronym for “The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.” 

I also appreciated the accuracy of Thomas Bertonneau’s comments and was moved by Laura Wood’s heartfelt essay on Eugenia Ginzburg, which reminded me how rare it is to hear a contemporary voice speaking on behalf of the millions who were exterminated at the hands of the Soviet regime. Years ago, my wife and I saw an exhibit of Soviet poster art at the “Modern” in New York (now dubbed MOMA). When we came out, we noticed a street seller at a table that was covered with posters, T-shirts, watches, etc., all decorated with Soviet emblems of one kind or another. I turned to my wife and said that if those had been Nazi prints and T-shirts with swastikas, the man would have had his hands full with outraged passers-by. It’s an old, sad story. As early as 1923, the German philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler wrote, “Who today thinks of the millions who perish in Russia?”

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