In Europe

a 180-degree turn.
    The booklet, thin and yellow, looks like a pamphlet, and in it Gide's tone is at first flattering. He loves the Russians, he expounds time and again, and everywhere he goes he experiences ‘moments of deep happiness’. The children he sees at a holiday camp are handsome, healthy, cheerful and well dressed. ‘Their gaze is clear, full of confidence; their smile is naïve, innocent.’ On a train he meets a group of young Komsomol members, on their way to a holiday resort in the Caucasus. They spend a hilarious evening in the luxurious compartment reserved for the writers, laughing, singing and dancing.
    Despite all the wining and dining, however, Gide gradually begins to sense that all is not as it appears. In Moscow he is struck by the long lines in front of the shops, the ugly and tasteless products, the sluggish masses of humanity, the bare living rooms in the kolkhoz buildings from which all personality has been erased. In Sebastopol he remarks upon great troops of street urchins, abandoned children whose parents have disappeared or been killed during the forced collectivisations, and who now wander the country by the thousands, hungry and lonely.
    After a while,
Pravda
begins to irritate him as well: every morning the paper dictates precisely what everyone should know, think and believe. ‘If you wish to be happy, conform.’ Gide says that ‘every time you talk to a Russian, you get the feeling that you are talking to all Russians.’ It's not that people speak only in slogans, but everything has its own iron logic. The cult around Stalin does not please him, either: the leader's name is on everyone's lips, and his portrait hangs even in the plainest of farm huts. ‘Adoration, love or fear, I do not know; he is present, everywhere and always.’
    He is struck by the Russians’ complete ignorance of the rest of the world: in this way Gide's enthusiasm made way in the space of a few weeks for doubt and finally abhorrence. ‘I doubt whether there is any other country at this moment, including Hitler's Germany, where the mind is less free, more bowed by coercion, more fearful and more dependent.’
    A Russian joke from the 1930s.
    A group of rabbits turns up at the Polish border asking for political asylum. ‘Why do you want to emigrate?’ the border guard asks. ‘The NKVD has ordered the arrest of every camel in the Soviet Union,’ thesenior rabbit says. ‘But you're not camels, are you?’ ‘No, but try telling that to the NKVD!’
    The word ‘Gulag’ is an acronym of ‘
Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh lagerei
’, the Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps. In summer 1937, Stalin, just like Hitler, started on a ‘campaign of social purification’, in which ‘criminals’, ‘riot mongers’ and ‘socially dangerous elements’ were to be rounded up en masse. In accordance with the tradition of the planned economy, quotas were established even here: each region had to achieve a given ‘production’. The objective for the entire Soviet Union, according to the resolution of 2 July, 1937, was fixed at 70,000 executions and 200,000 people sent to the Gulag. Moscow's Communist Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, had already been presented with a quota of 35,000 ‘enemies’ to arrest, 5,000 of whom were to be shot. Khrushchev asked whether he could also liquidate 2,000 ‘former kulaks’ as part of this quota. By 10 July he was able to report to Stalin that he had arrested no fewer than 41,305 ‘kulaks and hostile elements’, including some 8,500 ‘first-category enemies’ absolutely deserving of death.
    The ‘production’ of prisoners had to do with one of the Gulag's remarkable features: until 1937, the camps served primarily as pools of cheap labour, not as penal institutions or, as with the Nazis, extermination factories. For a large part, the prisoners served as forced colonists. As Genrich Jagoda, chief of the secret police, put it: ‘We encounter a great many problems in attracting workers to the far north. If we send many thousands of prisoners there, however, we can exploit their riches.’ With the help of tens of thousands of slave labourers, the Politburo said, the Soviet Union would be able to extract huge quantities of coal, gas and oil from Siberia. The construction of the 225-kilometre canal linking the Baltic Sea and the White Sea in 1932–3 – which was built by 170,000 prisoners with the most primitive equipment, and which cost 25,000