## Metadata - Author: [[Adam Hochschild]] - Full Title: The Unquiet Ghost - Category: #books ## Highlights - There are so many bones still lying about, said one account I read, that today in the summer Kolyma children use human skulls to gather blueberries. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=412)) - "One evening all the occupants of the women's hut had to parade outside. A uniformed member [of the secret police] then read us out a list of sentences passed in Dolinka on various prisoners for offenses against the camp rules. There were two and three years extra for attempts to escape; two years for stealing skins; eighteen months for letting some sheep die; three years for the murder of a fellow prisoner; and seventy-five death sentences for repeated and willful refusal to work." ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=1349)) - Growing up, we take our clues from those around us; if our families, our teachers, our newspapers don't notice something, we are not likely to notice, either. Only when we suddenly see the familiar world from a new angle do we realize that something is amiss. ([Location 1520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=1520)) - Although he teaches philosophy, Glebov says his real academic love is Slavic history and culture; his specialty is nineteenth-century Serbia. Why? When he was a university student in Stalin's last years, the slightest departure from orthodoxy could be fatal. "Our shrewd professor told us an aphorism: Here in Russia, a self-respecting historian must study something not closer than a hundred years to the time of his birth, and not closer than a thousand kilometers to Moscow. Only then can you be an honest historian!" ([Location 1704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=1704)) - "My first exile was when I was four. I didn't know it at the time! When I was arrested in 1950, they told me that I was an old offender, and that now I was in for my third term. 'I know about one other,' I said, 'but what was the first?' "'Well,' they said, 'we have it recorded right here: 1933—37, exile.' "I said, 'I'm sorry, but I was four years old then!' ([Location 1712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=1712)) - There remained the question of exactly what Glebov was to be accused of, since his real crime was being the son of one of Stalin's long-dead rivals. "They kept me there for some nine months before they found what to charge me with." He was finally found guilty of being an "aesthete." Another burst of infectious laughter. "You know, I'm probably the only person in the world with a certificate, validated with an official stamp, that I'm an aesthete. Oscar Wilde didn't have it! Thoreau didn't have it! But I have this indictment which reads, 'Aesthetic approach to literature.' ([Location 1752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=1752)) - Stalin spent a great deal of time at his various dachas; visitors describe an atmosphere of forced joviality and drinking, during which the host repeated the same old stories and jokes and the guests were very, very certain to laugh long and hard. One visitor recalls a long evening of drinking games in the 1930s that ended with Marshal Tukhachevsky of the Red Army showing his strength by picking up the diminutive Stalin and holding him high overhead. Such an expression of fear, anger, and humiliation came over Stalin's face that the others in the room all sensed Tukhachevsky was not long for this world. Soon after, he was put on trial and shot. ([Location 2013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2013)) - "I think those people who considered themselves leaders of the Revolution, equals to Lenin, they were very naive. They underestimated Stalin. They never thought he would become dangerous. I think the important thing was rivalry among them. Lenin did not indicate his heir. He should have understood there would be a struggle." ([Location 2072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2072)) - Few emotions are stronger than the desire to belong. And particularly to be accepted back into an elite, closely knit group from which you feel you were unfairly expelled. Stalin and his lieutenants knew this better than anyone, and made good use of it. If there is to be a them, a class of enemies, there must be an us. It was that desperate desire to get back into the Party at any cost that made so many Purge victims confess to impossible crimes. Berezhkov never had to confess to anything to get readmitted to the fold; but seeing how much the readmission meant to him made it clearer to me why so many thousands of people did confess. Facing the certainty of his own execution, Rubashov, the imprisoned hero of Koestler'sDarkness at Noon,has looked deep into his own conscience and into the morass of destruction that the Revolution has become. Yet he, too, is uncontrollably stirred when his interrogator, having extracted the necessary confession, at last calls his prisoner "Comrade." From this desire for human solidarity was constructed the machine that destroyed it. ([Location 2111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2111)) - Of all the stages in coming to terms with oppression, the hardest is realizing how much we internalize our oppressors. A man treated cruelly as a child is far more likely to abuse his own children than to become a crusader for children's rights. Writ large, the same thing happens: victims begin to resemble executioners. ([Location 2124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2124)) - Why did Moses spend forty years taking the Jews through the desert, when he could have made the trip in a week? Because he was waiting for all those to die who remembered the habits of life under slavery. ([Location 2152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2152)) - In one of his short stories, Varlam Shalamov, the writer who survived Kolyma, provides a haunting symbol of the persistence of old habits. A prisoner saves himself from being worked to death in the gold mines by injuring his hand, so it has to be amputated. In the hospital, he can still feel the sensations of the hand that is no longer there. And what he feels are his fingers bent around the handle of a pick or shovel, the tokens of his enslavement. ([Location 2164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2164)) - Without popular support Stalin and his cannibals wouldn't have lasted for long. The executioner's genius expressed itself in his ability to feel and direct the evil forces slumbering in the people; he deftly manipulated the choice of courses, knew who should be the hors d'oeuvres, who the main course, and who should be left for dessert; he knew what honorific toasts to pronounce and what inebriating ideological cocktails to offer.... ([Location 2247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2247)) - Totalitarian states fascinate us because of the way they reflect buried parts of our fantasy life. The child imagines new canals on the globe; the adult travels to a distant dictatorship and comes home to praise its canal-building. We are attracted to Utopian visions because they suggest how we can remake the world—and because they suggest how we can remake the world. The essential wish to create a better, more just society uneasily shares space, in our hearts, with the wish to wield the power for such creation. ([Location 2312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2312)) - In Russia the historian's profession has never been an easy one. "God ... merely decrees the future," Prince Kozlovsky said in 1839, "the Tsar can remake the past." Or, as one Soviet historian commented more recently, "The trouble is, you never know what's going to happen yesterday." ([Location 2471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=2471)) - "Pity the country," wrote the Marquis de Custine, "where every foreigner appears as a saviour." ([Location 3324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=3324)) - As I think back over the deep wound in so many people's lives that the spring flood waters of the Ob reopened on that day in 1979, the person whose story haunts me most is Stepan Marton, the Budapest doctor who ended up as a secret police commander in Siberia. Although he won a medal for committing his quota of mass murder, was Marton an evil man to begin with? It would be easier if he was. Otherwise we are faced with the chilling possibility that history can force any of us into situations whereyou would have done the same.But that is, I fear, the case. Come back for a moment to the world in which the young Stepan Marton finds himself, as a newly released prisoner of war, in 1917 and 1918. All Europe is horrified by the unspeakable, needless carnage of World War I—which Marton, of course, has seen first hand. The old empires, Russia, Germany, his own Austria-Hungary, are crumbling. In deciding to support the Russian Revolution, Marton is not alone: thousands of other foreigners also fight on the Red side in the Civil War, the first battle in building the society that will end war and injustice forever. Time is short; the forces that will soon thrust Hitler and Mussolini to prominence are already on the horizon. It is a world in which it is easy to feel, There must be a better way. Many of these foreigners in the infant Soviet state join the Cheka, the first incarnation of the secret police. Its first chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, is a Polish nobleman who had spent many years in Tsarist prisons; a man who eventually becomes a top general is a Turkish Jew; the future chief of Stalin's bodyguard is, like Marton, a former POW from Budapest. The Cheka's ranks include many other Jews and Hungarians, plus Finns, Latvians, and Czechs. It is an elite force at the very forefront of the battle for the new society. Yes, yes, the Cheka's role is to quash dissent, but look, the threats to the Revolution are so huge, we're surrounded on all sides. Foreign troops—British, French, American, Japanese—are on our very soil, shoring up the remnants of the White armies that are trying to overthrow the new state, the first in all history controlled by workers and peasants. Churchill has called on the West to "strangle the babe of Bolshevism in its cradle." Spies—real ones—are everywhere; the whole world is trying to crush us. Who can now afford petty peacetime luxuries like free speech, jury trials, opposition parties, carping critics? Maybe later... ([Location 3815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=3815)) - Omsukchan's only hotel was a little inn with a dozen or so rooms, called the Dawn. Electric wires stood out in long ribs beneath the wallpaper. The hot water was shut off for repairs. This was now the third city on this trip where I had encountered the Great Annual Hot Water Shut-Off; like the sun traveling the wrong direction, it had followed me across the country from west to east. ([Location 4089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=4089)) - Written Russian differs somewhat from the spoken language. Not for MM, however. His other linguistic peculiarity was a fondness for a whole class of words, participles, which are normally used almost only in writing. These are complex, thorny words, bristling nastily with prefixes, suffixes, and infixes, which, if you translated them literally, would read something like, "The having-stood-up Prince Andrei gazed upon the having-turned-toward-him Natasha ..." Grammar books reassure the innocent newcomer that participles are generally not used in everyday speech. But MM was unaware of these promises. He spoke in participles. It gave him the sound of someone perpetually delivering a speech or reading a newspaper article aloud. And so he plowed through Omsukchan as he had through Magadan, emitting smoke and participles in all directions. ([Location 4109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=4109)) - The NKVD was far better at inspiring terror than at ordinary detective work, and those who tried to avoid arrest by lying low and moving from place to place had a good chance of success. However, people rarely tried; despite the mass arrests, almost everybody believed, It won't happen to me. People deny bad news because it implies worse news: If I'm about to be arrested, that would mean the whole system has gone mad. And today? If there is a greenhouse effect, a depletion of the ozone, a shrinking of ocean fish stocks and an expansion of deserts, a steadily widening gap between the world's rich and poor, then that, too, means that the whole system has gone mad. But the analogy is imperfect. For we are free to read and write and talk endlessly about the greenhouse effect or the ozone layer or all the other problems, hence we do not feel the intense fear produced by the NKVD's knock on the door. That very lack of urgency is our form of denial, as foolhardy as the denials of the fellow travellers. For the knock, from all these things, will come. ([Location 4495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=4495)) - In his "madness," this tall, intense man is a representative of a whole generation of people trying to find out whether their parents were victims or executioners—or both. Like a magnet, the greatest of the Soviet killing grounds has drawn Biryukov back. In fact, if any one spot could be called the center of that inferno, it is the spacious public square in the middle of Magadan where, on a park bench, he is telling his story. The buildings on several sides of this square once housed the Kolyma camps administration, other NKVD offices, courts, a prison, and an interrogation center. Guards could herd groups of prisoners through an underground tunnel linking several of the buildings. In this century, more human misery was directly administered from this square than from anywhere else on earth, ([Location 4540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=4540)) - "And you," he asks, turning toward me on the bench. "Why are you so interested in all this?" For the last time in Russia, I try to answer this question. One answer, I tell him, has to do with how a whole society, like an individual human being, must look deep into the past and face the very worst, in order to become healed. It is this that gives Russia's long, slow recovery a moral echo that goes beyond the experience of Stalinism. Another answer has to do with the line between victims and executioners, far less distinct than I had first imagined.You would have done the same.It was this uneasy feeling that Eugenia Ginzburg took from her seventeen years of prison, labor camp, and exile: "After all, I was the anvil, not the hammer. But might I too have become a hammer?" And then there is the equally indistinct line between that necessary Utopian wish to improve and remake the world and the wish for total power. The finger on the map: I want a railway—there.The impulses that can lead a person, or a whole society, to good or to evil, are not so distant from each other. To Biryukov I cite Milan Kundera, an anti-Communist writer if there ever was one, observing just this paradox in his native Czechoslovakia: "... the Communists took power not in bloodshed and violence, but to the cheers of about half the population. And please note: the half that cheered was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half." ([Location 4549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004NSV946&location=4549))