By Ryan Fazio
Thursday, November 09, 2017
On February 9, 1940, seven-year-old Witold Rybicki and
his family awoke in the middle of the night to banging on the door of their
home in Lida, Poland (modern Belarus). Outside was an officer of the Soviet secret
police, then called the NKVD, who gave his father orders: “Do not run away.
Your house is surrounded by soldiers. You have an hour to pack your personal
belongings. Do not worry about bringing much. Everything you need will be at
your destination.”
The Rybickis were never informed of charges against them,
evidence of wrongdoing, a sentence, or their destination. Witold, his parents,
and four of his siblings were taken from their home to a train station, where
they were loaded into a cattle car about 15 meters long by five meters wide
along with about 40 other people. The car was completely bare otherwise, with
just a hole in the middle of the floor for a toilet.
For nearly a month, the train traversed Eastern Europe
and Russia toward Siberia, not allowing anyone outside of the cramped, filthy
cars except for a short period on Saturdays. Every morning, soldiers delivered
four gallons of water and one of soup for the entire car of 40 people.
The prisoners finally disembarked in a city called Tomsk.
From there, they walked two days through the Siberian taiga (forest) in the dead of winter to a set of barracks with
small, barren rooms built specifically for Poles. This was part of the Soviet
gulag system, a chain of forced-labor camps and settlements where tens of
millions of prisoners were punished and “reeducated” by the state through
grueling physical labor in harsh conditions.
This account of life under Soviet rule is not an extreme
outlier, but indicative of how the communist regime treated its own people.
This week marks 100 years since the revolution that gave rise to communism in
Russia and, subsequently, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Avowedly Marxist regimes killed anywhere from 65 to 100 million people, a total
so high that it is impossible for the human mind to conceptualize.
So goes the apocryphal Joseph Stalin quote, “One death is
a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” A good way to grasp the breadth of
communism’s evils is to understand the depth of the suffering in the lives of
its individual victims. That’s why the stories of the Rybickis and others are
apropos.
The Rybickis Are
Just a Few Out of Millions
The Rybickis’ plight is eerily similar to the famed
accounts catalogued by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago.” From
the psychologically poignant nighttime arrest without explanation, to the
inhumane transport by cattle car, to hard labor under-clothed in the bitter
cold, to the starvation, to the omnipresent stench of death, to the totalizing
oppression even outside of the gulags, the parallels between Witold’s story and
other victims’ are striking.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Nazi
Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and partitioned the country in two.
The USSR deported to Siberia about one and a half million of the 13 to 14
million Poles in the eastern half of the country. Hundreds of thousands of them
died or were executed in the process. Over decades, millions of kulaks,
Cossacks, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Soviet veterans, and Orthodox Christians, among
others, suffered similar fates. The USSR killed 20 to 30 million of its own
people in total.
Those who were considered educated, middle class, overtly
religious, or had served in the military were the primary targets, according to
Witold, because they were broadly viewed as threats to the communist regime.
His father, Stanislaw, was a Polish veteran who owned a small farm, so off to
the gulag system he and his family went.
A few months later, the Rybickis were moved even farther
east, by train to the last city on the tracks, then by foot to another
nondescript set of barracks in the middle of the Siberian taiga. It was a new labor settlement, where they would stay for
three years.
In the Rybickis’ settlement, able-bodied prisoners above
the age of 12 worked felling trees, preparing lumber, and collecting sap in
weather that would sometimes fall to 50 below zero degrees Celsius. The
laboring prisoners were given a ration of 400g of bread daily, roughly 1,200
calories, while non-working prisoners were given 200g, a measly 600 calories.
Sometimes food shipments would get delayed to the camps, and prisoners like the
Rybickis would go days without eating.
“We were practically starving to death,” Witold recalls.
Some prisoners had “swollen, huge bellies” from hunger. Prisoners were “dying
like flies all around” from hunger, disease, or being worked to death. There
was a makeshift cemetery by the settlement where “hundreds and hundreds were
buried.”
Your Choice: Death
By Enlistment Or In Prison
Witold’s sister, Irena, who was 14 when the Soviets
deported their family, eventually refused to work because she didn’t even have
shoes to wear. She was sentenced to three months in a prison in Novosibirsk
where she survived by the graces of a better-situated, older male prisoner.
Upon Irena’s return, she was badly shaken, exclaiming she
“had enough of Russia, communism, and Siberia, and was running away,” which she
did. A year later, her father discovered that authorities had captured her
trying to cross into Iran and sentenced her to seven years in prison. Because
the USSR was in the throes of a brutal war with Nazi Germany, it gave prisoners
like her a choice to risk likely death on the front lines of the eastern front
or in a harsh, small, cold prison cell. By great fortune, she survived the war,
fled to the West at the end, and got documentation to emigrate to the United
States.
Later, Witold’s father also went to war in service of the
Soviet Union under a program that got his family moved to a collective farm
with slightly better living standards than the settlement, in addition to a
promise of repatriation to Poland after the war.
Witold said it was the only promise Stalin ever kept. In
April 1946, almost a year after the war in Europe ended, the Rybickis were
permitted to move back to Poland because of their father’s service. By some act
of God, every member of their family survived the war and the Gulag system. For
millions of other Soviet citizens fighting the war and millions more repressed
by their own government, such was not the case.
You Must Never
Forget Our Stories
In 1966, Witold was able to escape communism to the
United States, by another stroke of luck, and reconnected with his sister. My
step-grandfather is 85 now and lives with his wife in Illinois, where he is
still a practicing anesthesiologist. He recalls the details of his family’s
repression nearly 80 years ago better than I can recall what I did eight days
ago. It would behoove our society, and the entire world, to better remember the
evils of communism 100 years since.
Stories like the Rybickis’ sometimes don’t resonate with
Western audiences because the material depravation foisted upon them is unimaginable
to us. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, “[It’s impossible] for Western authors…to
describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled to twenty
times its capacity and with no latrine bucket, where prisoners are taken out to
the toilet only once a day.”
Solzhenitsyn’s stories about NVKD officers coercing
confessions from innocent prisoners by crushing their testicles underneath the
officer’s jackboot are ghastly to even try imagining. So too the mass
executions carried out by binding, gagging, and burying prisoners alive,
because it was more efficient than shooting them first. However, it is
difficult to fully comprehend for Westerners who have not experienced immense
and continuous physical pain. Thus, it is also worth considering the damage done
to the human soul beyond the gulags.
“The USSR was one big camp,” cites Solzhenitsyn of one of
its victims. Totalitarian repression in the USSR was not consigned to the war
years or the gulags or the Stalin years. It lasted straight through from 1917
to 1991. Back in Poland in the early 1950s, a classmate of Witold’s who started
a quasi-patriotic club at their high school was accused of spying against the
government and sentenced to five years in prison. He was never the same after
his release and scared of every conversation thereafter.
“Whatever was spoken,” Witold recalls, “was spoken in
secret, because there were even situations when so-called friends would report
you to police and…even if you didn’t say it…you were arrested.” Solzhenitsyn
wrote that “in conflicts between people in freedom, denunciations [to the
authorities] were the superweapon….and it always worked.” They were used for
romantic gain, material gain, and anything else you can imagine.
When Government Is
Supreme Above All
Try to imagine how badly this repression decimates civil
society. Under communism, nothing was private, so one family member could be
turned against another because no loyalty mattered except that to the
proletarian class represented by the state. In East Germany, a full third of
the population were informants to their secret police, the Stasi. Trust no one.
Marxism considers economic relationships to be the “base”
of society, upon which all other institutions are based for the sake of
reinforcement. That includes family, religion, culture, and art, among others.
Thus, communists viewed loyalty to civil society institutions associated with
the old capitalist order with great distrust and sought to break them. They
tried to turn families against each other, “sought the root destruction of
religion in the country,” turned the truth on its head, and attempted to stamp
out any sense of individuality in its citizens.
One hundred years later, there are still some efforts to
whitewash the terrible legacy of communism, and reflexive repulsion toward
communism has not been engrained in Western culture like that toward fascism. The New York Times published 39 articles
on the “Red Century” this year, anesthetizing its readers towards communism. It
mentions the gulag system in only two of those articles, and simply as asides.
One in five social science professors identify as Marxists, and they have foot
soldiers in the violent “Antifa” movement. Socialism has become more popular
than capitalism among Democrats and young Americans.
The far-left insists it is a pointless exercise to
remember historical aberrations perpetrated by Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol
Pot, the Kims, the Castros, and so on. None of it was “true communism,” anyway.
But all the crimes perpetrated by dozens of communist regimes in dozens of
countries over 100 years that touched more than a billion people suggest a
pattern. Karl Marx was a false prophet, and the proof is in the tens of
millions killed by those who espoused his ideology. Communism was murderous in
practice because it was murderous in theory.
Murderous Outcomes
from a Murderous Theory
Marxism was predicated on the idea that “the history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” It views
society as a zero-sum war between different groups where the individual plays
little or no part. Under capitalism, all property was theft with profits
derived from the “surplus value” of the worker. All other institutions of
society, the “superstructure,” simply existed to trick the proletariat into
accepting their subjugated status.
The solution Marx proposed was a violent revolution
leading to a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would abolish private
property and the ancillary institutions of the bourgeois order and, eventually,
gracefully fade into a stateless, classless utopia. This entire progression of
things was not just considered an ideal, but an inevitable fact, according to
scientific socialism.
But it turned out that people do not relinquish their
hard-earned property, nation, culture, beliefs, family, and God easily. By
clinging to these things, people revealed themselves as class enemies of the
proletariat and had to be eliminated.
Martin Latsis, the head of the Ukrainian secret police,
wrote in a communist newspaper in 1918, “We are not fighting against single individuals.
We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.” Communism is truly the
ultimate collectivist ideology. Your membership and devotion to class, so to
speak, determines your worth. In this way, communist ideology sets the
predicate to discard individuals en masse
for the sake of the collective.
Anti-Communism Is
a Moral Imperative
Solzhenitsyn deservedly won the Nobel Prize in literature
for his contribution to humanity and helped delegitimize communism in the eyes
of many who had also previously embraced or condoned it. In its place, he
rightfully endorsed what the West had been built upon over millennia: A
morality that recognizes the fallen nature of each individual, guards against
his or her worst elements, and grants the ability of that individual to seek
his or her own salvation.
A system that guards the sovereignty of individuals can
also foster the best within them. Unprompted, Withold expresses a similar
lesson from his time under Soviet oppression: “I am so happy being here in the
United States. People do not realize what they have here. It’s freedom. How
many other countries have this freedom? You can count them on a few
hands…Hopefully we can stay that way, [because] we have irresponsible people,
even amongst ourselves.”
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