THE UNQUIET GHOST: Russians Remember Stalin ...

THE UNQUIET GHOST: Russians Remember Stalin by Adam Hochschild (Penguin: $12.95; 304 pp., illustrated). With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ruins of the prisons and labor camps that made up the islands of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago have begun to emerge from the fog of official secrecy. American journalist Adam Hochschild interviewed former political prisoners (and former guards and executioners) in his effort to understand the purges of Stalin’s bloody reign. The numbers stagger the imagination. Between his consolidation of power in 1929 and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin may have caused the deaths of 20 million Soviet citizens; excavations and seasonal floods in Russia often uncover unmarked mass graves. Hochschild emphasizes that these purges were not an isolated phenomenon, but a part of the ongoing series of atrocities that have marked the 20th Century. The key, he concludes, lies in convincing people that the victims are subhuman: “This habit of thinking gradually spreads from executioner to bystander. It must, for without separating those before you into us and them, you cannot remain peaceful and untroubled in a society where imaginary enemies are shipped off to the gulag or Jews are sent to the gas chambers, or the poor starve, or the homeless lie on sidewalks.”