Dartmouth College anthropology professor Sergei Kan was born in the Soviet Union just a few months after the death of Stalin. He came to the United States in 1974 at the age of 21 and received his undergraduate degree from Boston University and his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He teaches courses at Dartmouth on the native peoples of Alaska, on the Jewish diaspora, and on Russia.
Next year—the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Gulag Archipelago—Dr. Kan will teach a course titled "Red Terror: The History and Culture of the Stalin Labor Camps." Dr. Kan has been kind enough to offer our viewers a preview of the seminar in advance.
Recorded on April 15, 2022, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.
To view the full transcript of this episode, read below:
Peter Robinson: Half a century ago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published "The Gulag Archipelago," bringing the world's attention to the Soviet Union's internment camps. Now that the camps are gone, now that the Soviet Union is gone, how bad was the Gulag really? Professor Sergei Kan of Dartmouth College addresses that question. "Uncommon Knowledge" now. Welcome to "Uncommon Knowledge," I'm Peter Robinson. Born in the Soviet Union just a few months after the death of Stalin, Sergei Kan came to the United States in 1974 at the age of 21. He received his undergraduate degree from Boston University and his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Noted for his field work with the Tlingit people. Did I pronounce that correctly?
Sergei Kan: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Got it. The Tlingit people of Alaska, Dr. Kan is a member of the faculty here at Dartmouth College, where we're shooting today, where he teaches courses on the native peoples of Alaska, on the Jewish diaspora, and on Russia. Next year, the 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago," Dr. Kan will teach a course titled "Red Terror: The History and Culture of the Stalin Labor Camps." Dr. Kan has been kind enough to give me an advanced copy of his syllabus. So what you're about to witness is a seminar between a masterful professor and a very slow student. Sergei Kan, welcome.
Sergei Kan: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
Peter Robinson: All right, I'm quoting from bits and pieces of the works that you cite in your syllabus. So this is, I've done my reading and I'm coming to office hours with you, Sergei.
Sergei Kan: Okay.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Sergei Kan: Well, I hope you pass the test.
Peter Robinson: All right. This is from "Gulag," one of the basic books that you place in your syllabus, by Anne Applebaum. "The word Gulag is an acronym for the Russian for Main Camp Administration, but over time, the word Gulag also has come to signify the system of Soviet slave labor itself, a vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the Soviet Union. From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion, until 1953, when Stalin died, some 18 million people passed through the system. Another 6 million were sent into exile, deported to the Kazakh deserts or the Siberian forests and they too were forced laborers." Why does it still matter?
Sergei Kan: It matters first of all because, it's a cliche, but those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. We need to know what happened. Besides the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and some other groups of people, it's the worst crime of the 20th century, horrendous destruction of human life, and yet, as I point out in the syllabus, my feeling is that while the Gulag, certain aspects of the Gulag, is addressed in courses in Russian literature, Russian history, we don't have a standalone course. I couldn't find one, yet we've had over my 30 some years at Dartmouth teaching here, we've had dozen courses on the Nazi Holocaust. There is a kind of almost a preoccupation, and for good reasons, we don't wanna forget that Holocaust with that event, but there seems to be less interest in the Stalin's crimes. So that's the first answer. The second answer is I did not anticipate when I developed a course last summer that Putin is gonna invade Ukraine.
Peter Robinson: I see your flag on the top.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, I'm a big supporter of Ukrainian people. My wife was born Ukraine. We're both Jewish, but we have roots there and ties. I'm from Moscow, but nonetheless. Not only has this war presented to us a very dark picture of Russian government and particularly its leader, there's also... And there's tremendous violence and we can talk about it briefly maybe, but there are aspects of this war that strongly remind me of the Nazi war against the allies in World War II. But there's also, as I'm sure you know, this war has been preceded by gradual elimination of those few freedoms that Russia still enjoyed under Mr. Putin. And then of course, with the declaration of war, the country has gone completely radical as far as persecution of war, opponents of the war. We haven't seen yet any sentences based on this new law, but it's on the books. By simply calling this a war rather than a special operation, you could go to jail for 15 years. This is unprecedented. So I would argue, and I don't think I'm alone, that the country which in 1991 rejected communis when we were all celebrating it, which tore down the statue of Zelensky, the founder of the KGB, we were ecstatic when we saw that on TV. The country has gone almost completely full circle and in some ways there's certain things that is government doing today that are even more vicious than late Soviet.
Peter Robinson: All right, we'll come back to-
Sergei Kan: But what I'm saying is there's a de-Stalinization going on.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Sergei Kan: And I just had one more thing I wanted to say. When you say that the Gulag is done, in fact there are new gulags or some old gulags that are still running.
Peter Robinson: In Russia?
Sergei Kan: Yeah, the number of prisoners is smaller, much smaller than under Stalin or even Brezhnev, but people have been sent to the camps for political reasons, Navalny, the-
Peter Robinson: Clinton's opponent.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, he's there on trumped-up charges. So in some ways-
Peter Robinson: It's still going on.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, not of course on that massive scale, but it's there.
Peter Robinson: All right, Sergei, let's go... I want to come back to contemporary Russia and what it means for us, but let's just establish what the Gulag was. Again, from Anne Applebaum's book, "Gulag," "Lenin reckoned," Bolshevik Revolution takes place in 1917. Lenin stage is a coup in effect and takes power. "Lenin reckoned that the creation of the Soviet state would give rise to a new kind of criminal, the class enemy. From the earliest days in other words, people were sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were. By 1921, there were already 84 camps in 43 provinces." The Gulag did not arise because communism somehow went wrong. It was there from the very beginning. Is that correct?
Sergei Kan: Absolutely.
Peter Robinson: Vladimir Lenin dies in '24. By 1929, Joseph Stalin, his successor, has consolidated power. He becomes dictator and he puts the Gulag prisoners to work. And you have a note in your syllabus about the importance of the White Sea Canal. I've looked this up, it's 140 miles. Construction begins in 1931. The canal opens in 1933. It connects the White Sea in the Arctic Ocean with the Baltic, labor force of 125,000 prisoners, and at least 25,000 died during the project. What does Stalin think he's doing? What do ordinary Russians hear about this? How can this happen?
Sergei Kan: I think that there are two sides to this story or to my answer. I think initially, and you're absolutely right, the arrests and persecution of people after the Bolshevik Coup centered on not so much on what they did against the government, although there were people who fought the government, the White Army officers.
Peter Robinson: There's a civil war in '21. So forth.
Sergei Kan: Yeah. But selecting the enemies by social, economic, or sometimes even ethnic categories. So even if a person himself or herself didn't do anything illegal or anti-Soviet, the fact that they were from the family of merchants or nobility, they were already a suspect. And so that made it possible to be sent there. However, in the early years of Gulag, particularly Solovki, which I mention in my syllabus and-
Peter Robinson: Solovki is the name of a camp?
Sergei Kan: Yeah, it's actually an old Russian Orthodox monastery in Northern Russia. It's a beautiful place. But since they shut down the monastery, they already had a building or actually a large compound with a wall, and they used that to house prisoners. And the initial idea was that criminals, anti-Soviet elements as they were called, would be rehabilitated. And in fact, they were called labor-correctional camps. We use it at correctional institutions as well in the west. And so there were some elements of trying to rehabilitate them. Solovki compared to later camps did have some venues for cultural activities and it published its own newspaper. Anyway, the idea was that there's also a lot of cruelty, wasn't it?
Peter Robinson: By rehabilitate, are we talking about a reeducation?
Sergei Kan: Reeducation, change in ideology, rejection of previous views. And the idea was at least for propaganda purposes, and I think initially, even for some practical purposes that these people could be redeemed. Now, Solovki also, they had their own theater, but they also had horrible places for torturing people. And I mean, they already had, just to give you one example, if you were a difficult inmate and they just couldn't deal with you, they could take you to the forest, tied you to a tree naked and then have the mosquitoes, which are in abundance-
Peter Robinson: This is above the Arctic Circle, or close to it.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, yeah, close, but awful. Or they would put women stripped naked and force them to sit on an ant hill and the ant would crawl into their bodies. You can imagine how, and it was awful. But there was still this element that maybe some of these people could be redeemed. And when delegations of Soviet writers come to the camp, they're presented with this Potemkin villages we call 'em where they have theater, they are making a movie, there are athletic competitions. And these either naive or simply people who are writing what they're told to write, but they write these descriptions of highly enthusiastic accounts of this wonderful camp.
Peter Robinson: Including Maxim Gorky.
Sergei Kan: Yes.
Peter Robinson: A major.
Sergei Kan: Of Belomoro Canal as well. And they make a point that unlike Bolshevik capitalist prisons and camps, ours are different 'cause we will rehabilitate people. But I think eventually, they kind of dropped the rehabilitation part or at least lowered the importance of that, whereas they realized that they have free labor. This canal it's huge. As you said, it's huge.
Peter Robinson: 140 Miles.
Sergei Kan: Yeah. They actually had... As far as my reading of the story of the canal, they didn't have a lot of machinery. A lot of the digging of the earth was then just by bare hands. And so these poor people had to work under incredibly difficult conditions. And the irony of course, is that eventually the canal turned out to be too shallow. So today very few ships can go through it. But at the time it was hailed as an achievement of the Soviet system. It wasn't just Stalin. There were some very clever administrators of these camps, some of them former inmates who were promoted because they were so smart and were good with numbers and so forth or organizers. They figured out that you can get a lot of things done. You can mine gold, you can mine uranium, which of course is a dangerous contagious substance.
Peter Robinson: Radioactive.
Sergei Kan: You can mine coal, you can build roads. The Gulag system at its height, which I think would be 1940s, was a major part of Soviet economy. And if you take Siberia in the north, probably the major part of the economy.
Peter Robinson: To continue here with the-
Sergei Kan: Although there are other reasons why they existed, I think, besides free labor, like terrorizing the population for example.
Peter Robinson: So again, to go back to your syllabus, you've got the collectivization, Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" again. "At the heart of Stalin's revolution was a new program of hysterically, rapid industrialization, and also collectivization where millions of peasants are forced to give up their land holdings and forced onto collective farms." And a lot of people resist both of these off the go into the Gulag. We get the Great Purge or the Great Terror in the '30s where Stalin is purging the party. The west is aware of show trials, but as these show trials, which involve a small number of prominent people take place, there are huge numbers of people being purged and a lot of them end up in the Gulag. Here's a question. During the 1930s when this is taking place, Stalin has now consolidated power. The agricultural collectivization is accompanied by a famine. There's some debate about the extent to which the famine is engineered or the extent to which the government simply permits it to happen, but one way or the other, the government is clearly complicit. And then we have Western journalists, including Walter Duranty of The New York Times, Sidney and Beatrice Webb in England, the great socialist figures, and they write about the Soviet Union as this gleaming new future on the one hand. Then we have a few figures. George Orwell as far as I'm aware, never visits the Soviet Union, but he understands, somehow he understands what's going on.
Sergei Kan: He met the Soviets in Spain during the Civil War.
Peter Robinson: Yes, of course he encountered the communists in Spain. And Malcolm Muggeridge, British journalist, visits Moscow and writes the truth. How is it that Westerners have this kind of double perception and one is a total fantasy, or maybe not a total fantasy. There is industrialization. They do dig a canal. They do use this forced labor to dig mines. There is some kind of economic output, but it's forced labor. It's inhuman. And a very small number of people see it and a very large number of people don't see it, refuse to see it. How do you account for this double perception?
Sergei Kan: Complicated question. Based on what I've read or stories I've heard, it's probably a combination of things. For some Westerners, particularly of the more liberal left, persuasion. I think they wanted to believe. Of course-
Peter Robinson: They saw what they wanted to see.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, the west was going through the depression and there were problems, economic, social, and others. And so Soviet Russia for many of these people was a kind of beacon of light and justice and an alternative model. There was some fascination with this socialist project. So that's-
Peter Robinson: Which to a certain extent is sort of honest understandably. You can understand the impulse.
Sergei Kan: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: Is that-
Sergei Kan: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: All right. But I also think that some are gullible. I think Duranty spent most his time in Moscow with a lot of partying and having good time drinking. And I dunno if he made an effort to see the- To do reporting.
Sergei Kan: And the earlier version of the KGB, the NKGB, they probably made it difficult to travel, but as you point out correctly, a few brave souls and smart people did see the deception, the truth behind the facade of that enthusiasm. So I think combination of wanting to believe, believing, being cynical, being lazy and not doing the homework or being afraid that if I really do investigative journalism, I could get in trouble. And of course, the media itself, for example, the two leading journals for American intellectuals, The Nation and The New Republic, they were pro-Soviet. They eventually began to criticize the trials, but they were pretty soft on Stalin. And what I've read, they would say things like, yeah, maybe the big show trials are too much. Maybe some of it is fabricated, but there must be something wrong. It can't be that it's all invented. That's not possible. So if your employer... And probably New York Times as well was at least mildly pro-Soviet. And so when your own employer back home wants to have that kind of reporting, you probably comply unless you are a rebel or a brave person.
Peter Robinson: The Second World War. Hitler invades the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941. The very same day, the prisoners convicted of "betrayal of the motherland" are forbidden from leaving the Gulag. In other words, their sentences, the very same day, Moscow decides that the sentences become indefinite. Nobody's getting out. And Applebaum again in "Gulag," "The result of these extended sentences, coupled with massive food shortages were dramatic." In 1942, one in four prisoners in the Gulag died. 24% of a population of about 2 million died in one year. The following year, 1943, another one in five dies. It's just a catastrophe deathwards scattered across the country. All right. After the Russians invaded Ukraine, one of President Zelensky's first moves in Ukraine, which he made reluctantly, but he gave a speech saying, we have no choice, was to open the prisons, because whatever these criminals had done, he trusted that more rather than fewer were going to fight for the country.
Sergei Kan: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Why didn't Stalin do the same with the Gulag?
Sergei Kan: Now, I must say eventually some prisoners were allowed to enlist. First of all, you probably know that in the late 30s during the higher Stalin's trials and the mass terror, the entire top layer of the Soviet Red Army, Marshalls, generals, colonels-
Peter Robinson: Wiped out.
Sergei Kan: Wiped out, arrested accused of spying. Many of them killed. Some survived and were sitting in Gulag. And so when the initial months of World War of German invasion were disaster for the Soviets. They were running. They were losing people and so forth. Surrendering. Some of these top people were released. A few. We have example, including some that eventually became the heroes of World War II. That's a small group. And then, and I don't know all the details. I'm still doing some reading. I think there were some opportunities to enlist. There was this phenomenon in the Soviet Army, which was called the Penalty Battalions, it's a military detachment of people who were former prisoners, or people who cannot be fully trust. And they were basically destined to die first. You send them to the most dangerous engagements with the enemy. They're like the stormtroopers, except their arms are not as good. Nobody cares if they die.
Peter Robinson: There's a famous anecdote after the war where Eisenhower is talking to Zhukov and they're comparing techniques, and Eisenhower says, "How do you handle mine fields?" And Zhukov says, "Oh, we just merge soldiers straight across them."
Sergei Kan: Right.
Peter Robinson: Unthinkable to Eisenhower.
Sergei Kan: So some Gulag prisoners as I understand were enlisted into these battalions. But nonetheless, it's ironic and it's not logical that the country that was really not doing well for the first year and a half and stretch to the limits as far as its human power, its finances, right, its industry, and where citizens were strongly encouraged, even pressured to donate gold and money to the war effort. Every single thing you had, you could donate or should donate. And yet the government was spending a lot of the resources on keeping these people
Peter Robinson: Locked up.
Sergei Kan: Locked. And I wanna go back to something I said when we say that Gulag was favored by the regime because of free labor. But it's debated and literature I've read is divided on this, but while you're getting free labor, you're also, first of all, you're treating these inmates very poorly. So they're hungry. They're barely moving. They're not robust builders of new factories and stuff. So you're not getting a lot of bang for your buck, if you wish. And secondly, there's some new work that I find really fascinating that claims that in fact while the Soviet Gulag camps were not the equivalent of Hitler's death camps, a lot of deaths did occur. Some physicians were complicit because they were not supposed to write in the death certificate that the person died of starvation or abuse. They invented some diseases. Also, there was a method that one of American historians points out that I just learned about where prisoners who were really, really sick, malnourished, very close to dying, they were released. So that-
Peter Robinson: To keep them off the books.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, that way, the numbers for people who died were much lower than the reality.
Peter Robinson: So you're describing a system that is mad?
Sergei Kan: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: That is insane.
Sergei Kan: Yes.
Peter Robinson: That even if you... Stalin... You say, all right, he was brutal, but at least he built canals.
Sergei Kan: Right.
Peter Robinson: At least he... But actually it doesn't even make economic sense.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, I'm not saying they didn't contribute to the... They built some new cities in Siberia and roads and stuff. But I think if these were well paid free volunteer laborers, they would've done much better.
Peter Robinson: All right. The apex, which takes place, again, I'm quoting Anne Applebaum, you have a number of sources for some reason.
Sergei Kan: Well, she's. very good.
Peter Robinson: She's very good. There's no doubt. "Contrary to popular assumption, the Gulag did not cease growing in the 1930s, but rather continued to expand throughout the Second World War and the 1940s, reaching its apex in the early 1950s." Reaching its apex in the early 1950s. What do we know about the early 1950s? Stalin has consolidated power totally. He's crushed all his enemies at home, killed a lot of them in the purges. With the United States and the United Kingdom, he's crushed Hitler. He is unchallenged in the Soviet Union. And he still keeps throwing people into the Gulag. What, I guess the question here, Sergei, is, are we studying something we would abor, but that's rational, that's an instrument of control? Or do we see Stalin in the final few years of his life, someone who is really simply gone mad?
Sergei Kan: I think a little bit of both. First of all, I think once the system is in place, it's like a machine, it's running, and you have to feed it fuel. In this case, you have to provide people because you have a giant-
Peter Robinson: You have an investment to protect.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, it's an archipelago as said. It's a giant, it's a country within a country. And there are hundreds of thousands of people employed to run it, guards, supervisors, soldiers, cooks, bureaucrat. There's so many people that are actually benefiting. They're getting good. They were fed well, they had good warm clothing. They had decent salaries, particularly as you go up in the hierarchy. People at the top I'm sure who were running the Gulag were interested in having more bodies brought in. So that's part of it.
Peter Robinson: It's a self-perpetuating bureaucracy like the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Sergei Kan: Yes. But secondly, keep in mind that what happened right before the World War II and after. In 1939, Hitler sound sign a treaty.
Peter Robinson: Molotov-Ribbertrop, right?
Sergei Kan: Yeah. Hitler occupies most Poland. Stalin occupies Eastern Poland, which becomes Western Ukraine, Western Belarus. He occupies a three Baltic republics, Moldova. And all the suspect people, again, those who belong to the social classes that are not kosher, if you wish, intelligence, businessmen, clergy, former military.
Peter Robinson: From those countries.
Sergei Kan: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: So the high ranking polls.
Sergei Kan: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: The Estonia, the Lithuanians
Sergei Kan: Absolutely
Peter Robinson: Into the camps with them.
Sergei Kan: Some go to exile and they live... There are two systems. There's the camp and then there's living in exile.
Peter Robinson: Internal exile.
Sergei Kan: Internal exile in very difficult conditions, but they're not in the camp. But a lot of these people are sent there. Then of course, you have German prisoners of war. We're talking millions of people. Japanese prisoners of war who very few people know about who I think were treated even worse than German prisoners of war. And then you have resistors. There were real resistors, such as Ukrainian Forest Brothers and Estonian Forest Brothers who actually fought the KGB during the war, but also after the war. The Ukrainian Partisan Army finally was crushed only in mid 50s. So for 10 years-
Peter Robinson: So they're still at it. They're still at it.
Sergei Kan: The Red Army and the KGB are hunting for these guys in the mountains of Western Ukraine. So it's an interesting development because it's a different kind of population. And actually what we have in memoir literature is that these, especially national, Polish, Ukrainian, Estonian inmates, they were better organized. They knew that they were there for a reason and they hated the system unlike former Bolshevik who ended up in Gulag and said, "Why am I here? I'm innocent. Comrade Stalin doesn't know about me. I'm sure I'm innocent." These guys knew why they were there. So they're an interesting.
Peter Robinson: Do we know that were they able to... Was there a survival rate higher?
Sergei Kan: I think they were organized. They helped each other.
Peter Robinson: I see.
Sergei Kan: And then also, we think of the 30s of the worst, but the 40s and early 50s, there were still a lot of people being arrested who were innocent. Just ordinary. Or if they were guilty, there were things like, after the war, there was this sense that we won the war. We beat Hitler. Maybe there'll be more freedom in our country. And you have this really interesting development of underground youth organizations often very small, but they're true communists. They want a country that is really based on Lenin and not on Stalin. And these high school kids, they gather and they talk about how unjust the Soviet system is.
Peter Robinson: So Stalin had his hands full is what you're saying, even when he appears to be at the peak of his power?
Sergei Kan: Oh, and the collaborators, the people who collaborated with the Nazis.
Peter Robinson: Okay.
Sergei Kan: Which often become guards in the camp.
Peter Robinson: Is that so?
Sergei Kan: He uses them. Yeah. 'Cause these are often people who they don't really have strong values. They weren't collaborators 'cause they believe in fascism. They wanted to survive.
Peter Robinson: They wanted to be on the winning side.
Sergei Kan: Yeah, yeah.
Peter Robinson: All right, the end, Stalin dies March 5th, 1953, few months later you were born. He dies in 1953. And then this is totally shocking, the person who takes power first is Lavrentiy Beria.
Sergei Kan: Beria.
Peter Robinson: And Beria is a very, very nasty figure. He rises through the secret police.
Sergei Kan: Also smart.
Peter Robinson: But he's a killer. And he's the one who very quickly ends most of the big forced labor projects that are then taking place. He grants wide amnesty, all pregnant women, all women with young children, all prisoners under the age of 18, all prisoners with sentences of five years or less, and forbids the police from using physical force. So he grants a wide amnesty. He effectively abolishes torture. Nikita Khruschev and the rest of the Pollit Bureau think he's getting uppity. They have him arrested. Beria eventually executed, and Nikita Khruschev comes out on top, but he doesn't repeal any of Beria's reforms. The Gulag is over. Not completely over, but the number of prisoners drops to the tens of thousands from the low millions.
Sergei Kan: Correct.
Peter Robinson: What on earth is going on there? Do we know why Beria, this very nasty figure, is the one who... If Beria grants the amnesty and Khruschev in effect ratifies it, it looks as though all of Stalin's henchman know that the system is crazy and they can't wait for him to die to end it. Is that correct? Is that a fair interpretation?
Sergei Kan: Beria is a mysterious character while he was definitely nasty and ambitious. And also there are all these stories about him abducting young women on the streets of Moscow and raping them and then sending them home. But he's also very smart and there seems to be new research and archival work that suggests that he actually wanted to tone down the viciousness of the regime that I think he was beginning to see as did cruise ship, that the system is self-destructive that if we don't stop it, first of all, it will destroy us the, the leadership, and that it's just not working anymore. And maybe even he realized that the cost of running it outweighs the results, what they produce. So maybe he saw that that it was a a dead end thing and he wanted to.
Peter Robinson: So where Stalin is beginning to become just crazy where there's a madness in the system, Beria is at least rational. Is that fair?
Sergei Kan: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: All right. A couple of last questions. After the war, Germany undergoes denazification. People who had served the Nazis up at a certain level are forbidden from participating in public life. You can't hold office if you were a Nazi of a certain rank or higher.
Sergei Kan: Right.
Peter Robinson: And we know that Germany has spent all these decades putting distance between itself and that passed, payments to Israel. In all kinds of ways Germany to this day just despises its own Nazi past. Russia never undergoes any kind of decommunization. If it had, Vladimir Putin who's a former KGB, this is known, he was a Colonel in the KGB. He was a KGB officer. He's now running the country. Poll after poll indicates that Stalin is still revered in Russia. So to what extent, I just... Who am I to write off a whole country? But it feels as though, unless there's some sort of formal repudiation of this decades long crime of the Gulag against over 20 million people, there's a sickness in Russia. Is that fair?
Sergei Kan: I completely agree. When we were watching from this country, how they were getting rid of Soviet symbols, they were now Russia as opposed to the Soviet Union, we were hoping that... And then Yeltsin briefly actually outlawed the Communist party.
Peter Robinson: Yes.
Sergei Kan: And we thought that was a good idea 'cause it was a nasty institution. He even organized the trial of the Communist party, but that petered out and nothing happened. And they were very reluctant to admit complicity. There were attempts to shame people, for example, some writers who voted against the other writers and were responsible for the persecution of those writers. They were exposed, but they said it's not my fault. It was dangerous. I was protecting myself. None of the people worked in the KGB unless they were vicious murderers. Some of them probably were arrested, but the majority either retired quietly or went on to work. So yeah, the denazification, decommunization that did occur as I understand in the Czech Republic, in the Baltics, in Poland, Russia never had. And in fact, in the last decade, there's a partial-
Peter Robinson: Reverse.
Sergei Kan: Reverse. It's complicated that Putin authorized the building of a monument to the victims of Stalin, but at the same time, Stalin won the war. He was great manager.
Peter Robinson: Lenin's and corpses is still right there on Red Square in a place of...
Sergei Kan: And periodically we get these glimpses of decentralization. For example, they were celebrating the anniversary of the atomic project or some major scientific project that Russian scientists created in the 50s or 40s. Most of them were prisoners. So that's another interesting. A lot of top level physicists were prisoners. But Beria was the supervisor of that giant project. So like the Manhattan Project.
Peter Robinson: Right. Right.
Sergei Kan: And they wanted to honor him, build a statue for him in that capacity. And I saw letters from children and grandchildren of these great scientists who many of them later became Nobel prize winners, academics. And they're begging the government not to do it, that it would be a sacral age, but the government does. Or there are now celebrations in some Northern Russian cities that were built by Gulag inmates. There's celebrations of the Gulag administration who helped create a particular town.
Peter Robinson: On forced labor.
Sergei Kan: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: So last question, here's you in an interview in The Dartmouth Review, quote, "I look at the free speech movement in this country in the 60s. Those people were fighting for the right to say anything they wanted. Now a significant segment of the left in this country is fighting for restricting those freedoms. What really frightens me is when you hear students and some faculty say that they don't want freedom of speech in this country, that they don't need it anymore. That really frightens me." You don't mean to suggest that anything like what took place in the Soviet Union could happen here?
Sergei Kan: I don't, although there are Russian immigrants, including some very close to me who think that we are going that direction. I personally-
Peter Robinson: Have you seen anything in this country where you say, "This reminds me of something I'd rather not."
Sergei Kan: Political correctness. Students are afraid to speak their mind because they'll be branded conservative, or right wing or racist or whatever. A kind of hounding people on campus before they've even been tried in the court of law. Presumption of innocence doesn't seem to be present. But I must say, I believe in America. I love the country. I think there's a healthy core that will still carry us through. But I think we are hitting some rough bumps and it is disappointing. It is scary. Yeah.
Peter Robinson: Professor Sergei Kan who next year will be teaching some very fortunate Dartmouth students about the Gulag, thank you.
Sergei Kan: Thank you.
Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and filming today on the campus of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Peter Robinson.
