Anne Applebaum: historiadora do totalitarismo soviético

Foi publicado recentemente no Brasil mais um livro da historiadora Anne Applebaum, sobre o terrível Holodomor, traduzido de Red Famine, que retraça o programa stalinista de coletivização agrícola na União Soviética e sua aplicação especialmente brutal na Ucrânia, quando o saque violento de grãos dos camponeses provocou uma fome devastadora, que foi responsável pela morte de milhões de ucranianos (5 ou 6 milhões segundo os cálculos de historiadores).
Já li muitas resenhas, ainda não o livro, mas já recomendo, pois li outros livros dessa historiadora, entre eles o Gulag, dedicado ao maior empreendimento escravista da modernidade, que também causou a morte de milhões de pessoas.
Fiz uma resenha desse primeiro livro dela traduzido no Brasil, que transcrevo a seguir.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Gulag: anatomia da tragédia

Resenha de:

Anne Applebaum:

Gulag: uma história dos campos de prisioneiros soviéticos

(Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 2004, 744 p.; tradução de Mário Vilela e Ibraíma Dafonte; ISBN: 8500015403)

            O terror moderno, isto é, o recurso à intimidação aberta e indiscriminada para alcançar fins especificamente políticos, não está ligado apenas aos exemplos cruéis do fundamentalismo de base islâmica. Ele nasceu na Revolução francesa e seu mais conhecido "teórico", Robespierre, o defendeu sem hesitação: "O atributo do governo popular na revolução é ao mesmo tempo virtude e terror, virtude sem a qual o terror é fatal, terror sem o qual a virtude é impotente. O terror nada mais é do que justiça imediata, severa, inflexível...". 

            Lênin, o inventor do terror moderno, apreciava Robespierre e sua "justiça expedita": desde os primeiros dias da revolução de 1917 ele ordenou à Cheka, a polícia política imediatamente criada para esmagar a ameaça "contra-revolucionária", que fuzilasse sem hesitação não só os opositores declarados do novo regime, mas também representantes da classe proprietária em geral, capitalistas, grandes comerciantes e latifundiários, religiosos, enfim, os potenciais "inimigos de classe". Criador do Gulag, em sua primeira emanação, ele justificava assim o trabalho da Cheka:

            "A Cheka não é uma comissão de investigação nem um tribunal. É um órgão de luta atuando na frente de batalha de uma guerra civil. Não julga o inimigo: abate-o... Nós não estamos lutando contra indivíduos. Estamos exterminando a burguesia como uma classe. A nossa primeira pergunta é: a que classe o indivíduo pertence, quais são suas origens, criação, educação ou profissão? Estas perguntas definem o destino do acusado. Esta é a essência do Terror Vermelho" (citado por Paul Johnson em Tempos Modernos).

            Stalin se encarregou de aplicar sistematicamente as recomendações de Lênin, e o fez de uma forma completa, terminando por incorporar como "clientes" da máquina de terror administrada por ele os seus próprios colegas de partido. A amplitude do Gulag, ampliado e desenvolvido no seu mais alto grau por Stalin, justifica que apliquemos a ele a categoria de genocídio, noção que costuma estar associada apenas aos terríveis experimentos raciais nazistas, antes e durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

            O livro de Anne Applebaum não é, apenas, como seu subtítulo indica, "uma história" dos campos soviéticos, mas a mais completa e sinistra história de um fenômeno único na história da humanidade: uma instituição oficial (ainda que em muitos aspectos "clandestina"), montada e sustentada pelo poder central do Estado, para administrar pelo terror, por um tempo indefinido, uma população inteira de um dos países mais importantes do planeta. A historiadora americana, editorialista do Washington Post e colaboradora do Wall Street Journal, realizou uma pesquisa monumental, indo muito além dos primeiros levantamentos de Alexander Solzenitsyn em torno dos depoimentos dos sobreviventes do nefando sistema de escravização em massa criado pelo totalitarismo soviético.

            Organizado em três partes, o livro documenta amplamente o que até aqui tinha sido divulgado de maneira dispersa em trabalhos de pesquisa histórica que não tinham ainda tido acesso aos principais arquivos soviéticos liberados no período recente. A primeira parte, "As origens do Gulag, 1917-1939", faz a reconstituição histórica dessa instituição singular, que unia a mais transparente crueldade no trato dos prisioneiros ao burocratismo metódico de uma moderna administração voltada para a exploração sistemática do trabalho escravo. Sim, não devemos esquecer que, independentemente de suas funções "didáticas", de intimidação direta e aberta contra a própria população da União Soviética, o Gulag teve um importante papel econômico na história do socialismo naquele país, chegando a representar, a produção de um terço do seu ouro, muito do carvão e da madeira e grandes quantidades de outras matérias-primas. Os prisioneiros passaram a trabalhar em todo e qualquer tipo de indústria, vivendo num país dentro de um outro país.

            A segunda parte, "Vida e trabalho nos campos", mostra também como o sistema do Gulag, que chegou a reunir 476 campos no mais diferentes cantos da URSS, constituía um Estado dentro do Estado, regulando os mais diferentes aspectos de um universo concentracionário que não teve precedentes, teve poucos imitadores efetivos (a despeito da terrível eficácia mortífera dos campos de concentração nazistas) e um número ainda mais reduzido de seguidores (sendo os mais efetivos os sistemas "correcionais" da Coréia do Norte e de Cuba, já que o exemplo do Camboja foi o de uma simples máquina de matar, como de certo modo tinha sido o caso dos experimentos nazistas). 

            A terceira parte, "Ascensão e queda do complexo industrial dos campos, 1940-1986", segue o sistema no seu ápice, durante e imediatamente após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, até o seu desmantelamento gradual após a morte de Stalin (1953) e a disseminação do fenômeno dos "dissidentes": ele foi sendo erodido progressivamente em seu papel político (ainda que não o econômico), mas só teve seu final decretado depois do próprio fim do socialismo.

            Um apêndice tenta quantificar a extensão do terror: de acordo com os próprios dados do sistema (estatísticas da NKVD, sucessora da Cheka e antecessora do KGB), o número de prisioneiros passou de cerca de 200 mil no início dos anos 1930 para 2,5 milhões no momento da morte de Stalin. O "turnover", obviamente, foi muito maior: muitos prisioneiros morreram, alguns escaparam (poucos), vários eram incorporados ao Exército Vermelho ou à própria administração dos campos (cruel ironia). As "taxas de desaparecimentos" refletiram também as terríveis condições de vida na URSS: passou-se de 4,8% de mortos em 1932 para 15,3% no ano seguinte, o que indica o impacto da epidemia de fome induzida pela coletivização stalinista da agricultura, que matou 6 ou 7 milhões de cidadãos "livres" igualmente. A "taxa" de mortos sobe para seu máximo de 25% em 1942, para declinar para menos de 1% nos anos 1950, quando o sistema "industrial" já tinha sido instalado em sua plenitude. No total, 2,7 milhões de cidadãos soviéticos podem ter morrido no sistema do Gulag, o que de todo modo representa apenas uma pequena parte dos desaparecidos durante todo o regime stalinista e uma parte ainda menor dos sacrificados pelo sistema soviético. Os autores franceses do Livre Noir du Communisme, por exemplo, estimam em 20 milhões as vítimas do regime soviético, o que pode ser uma indicação plausível (outros colocam entre 12 e 15 milhões de mortos). Vários historiadores se aproximam da cifra de 28 milhões de cidadãos soviéticos para o número total de “clientes” de todo o sistema concentracionário soviético em sua história de “terror vermelho”.

            O Gulag foi a face mais visível da tragédia soviética, mas certamente não a única ou exclusiva. Este livro conta a história desse terrível legado do socialismo do século XX: esperemos que a história não se repita, sequer como farsa.

            

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 12 de dezembro de 2004

Russia: o novo despotismo em construcao (NYT)

Estes são os nossos aliados nos Brics: os que promovem censura, repressão nos meios de comunicação, ataques a blogueiros independentes ou de oposição, enfim, monopolização do poder político, tudo o que gostariam de fazer no Brasil os companheiros do partido neobolchevique, os leninistas tropicais, frustrados porque até agora não conseguiram fazer o mesmo que seus aliados russos, chineses, bolivarianos, ou seja, totalitários de várias espécies 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Russia Quietly Tightens Reins on Web With ‘Bloggers Law’

President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday. A new law he signed requires popular online voices to register with the government.

POOL PHOTO BY MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV

• 
  

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

The New York Times, May 6, 2014

MOSCOW — Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online.

Mr. Putin’s action on Monday, just weeks after he disparaged the Internet as “a special C.I.A. project,” borrowed a page from the restrictive Internet playbooks of many governments around the world that have been steadily smothering online freedoms they once tolerated.

The idea that the Internet was at best controlled anarchy and beyond any one nation’s control is fading globally amid determined attempts by more and more governments to tame the web. If innovations like Twitter were hailed as recently as the Arab uprisings as the new public square, governments like those in China, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and now Russia are making it clear that they can deploy their tanks on virtual squares, too.

China, long a pioneer in using sophisticated technology to filter the Internet, has continually tightened censorship. It has banned all major Western online social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google, though it seems not to be bothered by Alibaba, its homegrown e-commerce site, which has filed the paperwork for what could be the biggest public stock offering ever.

Nevertheless, even Beijing’s own social media champion, Weibo, valued at $3.6 billion in a public stock offering this year, has come under mounting censorship pressure as the government fine-tunes its policing of expression.

Under the pressure of a corruption scandal, Turkey recently imposed bans on Twitter and YouTube over tapes alleging corruption by the country’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Although the YouTube ban remains, Twitter service was restored in April only after the Constitutional Court overturned the ban.

During protests against the government in Venezuela in February, there were reports that the government there was blocking online images from users. In recent years, Pakistan has banned 20,000 to 40,000 websites, including YouTube, saying they offend Muslims. Facebook was blocked for a while in 2010, but is now accessible.

The level of challenge is rising, but “we also see the amount of resources going into censorship increasing greatly,” Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in Internet law, said in a telephone interview.

Widely known as the “bloggers law,” the new Russian measure specifies that any site with more than 3,000 visitors daily will be considered a media outlet akin to a newspaper and be responsible for the accuracy of the information published.

Besides registering, bloggers can no longer remain anonymous online, and organizations that provide platforms for their work such as search engines, social networks and other forums must maintain computer records on Russian soil of everything posted over the previous six months.

“This law will cut the number of critical voices and opposition voices on the Internet,” said Galina Arapova, director of the Mass Media Defense Center and an expert on Russian media law. “The whole package seems quite restrictive and might affect harshly those who disseminate critical information about the state, about authorities, about public figures.”

Mr. Putin has already used the pliable Russian Parliament to pass laws that scattered the opposition, hobbled nongovernmental organizations and shut down public protests. Now, riding a wave of popular support after hosting the Winter Olympics and annexing Crimea, he has turned his attention to regulating the Internet, as well as burnishing his credentials as the worldwide champion of conservative values.

Aside from the Internet law signed Monday, the Russian leader signed a new profanity law that levies heavy fines for using four common vulgarities in the arts, including literature, movies, plays and television.

Speaking in St. Petersburg in late April, Mr. Putin voiced his suspicions about the Internet, even while noting that it had become a public market of huge proportions.

“You know that it all began initially, when the Internet first appeared, as a special C.I.A. project,” he said in remarks broadcast live nationally, before adding that “special services are still at the center of things.” He specifically thanked Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor granted asylum in Russia, for revealing to the world how efficient the N.S.A. was at collecting information.

Mr. Putin went on to say that someone writing online whose opinion affects thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people should be considered a media outlet. He said he was not talking about a ban, only acting “the way it is done all over the world.”

Russian Internet pioneers despaired that Mr. Putin was really talking about the Chinese model of curtailing any political discussion online.

“It is part of the general campaign to shut down the Internet in Russia,” said Anton Nossik, an early online media figure here. “They have not been able to control it until now, and they think they should implement the Chinese model. But they don’t understand how it works. The Chinese model also stimulates the development of local platforms, while the Russian laws are killing the local platform.”

Russia is among a growing list of countries that have sought to shut down Internet voices circumventing a subservient national news media. Many leaders see the Internet as the key tool behind antigovernment demonstrations and are determined to render it ineffective.

Yet polls conducted in 24 countries last spring by Pew Research found that most people are against government censorship of the Internet, including 63 percent in Russia and 58 percent in Turkey.

Another Russian Internet law, one that went into effect on Feb. 1, gave the government the power to block websites. It immediately used the law against its most vocal critics, like Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov, as well as online news sites that reported on demonstrations and other political activity.

In April, Pavel Durov, the 29-year-old founder of Vkontakte, Russia’s popular version of Facebook, said he had fled the country because he feared the consequences of refusing to turn over information the government requested about activists in Russia and Ukraine. Critics said he had fled after cashing out, and United Capital Partners, the owner of a 48 percent stake in the company, posted a lengthy statement online saying he was trying to divert attention from legal issues surrounding his running of the company.

Aleksandr Zharov, who runs Roskomnadzor, the government agency that supervises the Internet, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency last month that the law was necessary because people need to be held responsible for what they say on the web. “What he would never say face to face, he often allows himself online,” Mr. Zharov was quoted as saying.

The lack of transparency in Russia creates a kind of fog around countless issues, and the Internet is no different. Many critics and even some supporters of the new law said it was too vague to understand.

The Internet needs to be regulated by law just like publishing, said Robert A. Shlegel, among the youngest members of Parliament from United Russia, Mr. Putin’s party. But Internet savvy among legislators is weak, he added. “The law, as it is, is so raw,” he said. “It is clear that the person who wrote it just doesn’t understand.”

The law does not specify how the government will count the 3,000 daily visitors, for example. Even before Mr. Putin signed it, two of the largest blogging platforms, Yandex and LiveJournal, announced that henceforth their publicly visible counters would stop below 3,000.

Ms. Arapova said other murky issues included who would be considered a provider. For instance, will large international social media or search sites like Google, Twitter and Facebook have to keep their data in Russia or face fines and possible closing?

In California, both Twitter and Facebook said they were studying the law but would not comment further.

Ms. Arapova said the law would undoubtedly have a chilling effect in terms of who would go online. Whistle-blowers who work for corrupt government agencies, for example, would theoretically no longer be able to post anonymously.

The actual impact of the law will not be measurable until after it goes into effect on Aug. 1, Ms. Arapova said. Punishments start at fines that can reach up to $142,000 or the temporary closing of the blog, if the law is actively enforced.

Like the Internet law, the ban on four vulgar words was met with a combination of dismay and derision among artists. (The words, not mentioned in the law either, are crude terms for male and female genitalia, sex and a prostitute.) Many people thought it would be widely ignored, but the very idea that the Kremlin was trying to censor the arts rankled.

“We feel like we are back in kindergarten again when they said, ‘Don’t pee in your bed and don’t eat with your hands and don’t use that word,’ ” said Viktor V. Yerofeyev, a popular writer. “On the one hand, the Russian government says the Russian people are the best. On the other hand, it doesn’t trust the people.”

Reporting was contributed by Andrew Roth and Alexandra Odynova from Moscow; Tim Arango from Baghdad; Declan Walsh from London; Marjorie Connelly, Noam Cohen and Peter Lattmann from New York; and Vindu Goel from San Francisco.

A "Cortina de Ferro" dos companheiros dos cumpanheiro...

Ainda não aconteceu por aqui, mas isto é o que certos "cumpanheiro" gostariam de fazer por aqui; afinal de contas, eles aprenderam com os companheiros.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Stalin’s Shadow

By MAX FRANKEL

The New York Times Review of Books, November 25, 2012

IRON CURTAIN

The Crushing of Eastern Europe,1944-1956

By Anne Applebaum

Illustrated. 566 pp. Doubleday. $35.

Having brilliantly documented the horror of Stalin’s Soviet terror machine in her Pulitzer Prize-­winning “Gulag,” Anne Applebaum now offers a bulky sequel, “Iron Curtain,” about the brutal effort of that same machine to crush and colonize Eastern Europe in the first decade after World War II. Her evidence, once again drawn from archival research and some survivor interviews, is overwhelming and convincing. But the heart of her story is hardly news.

That Soviet tanks carried Moscow-trained agents into Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany was known in the West at the time and has been well documented since. When those agents set out to produce not only a friendly sphere of Soviet influence but also a cordon of dictatorships reliably responsive to Russian orders, Winston Churchill was moved to warn, just days after the Nazis’ surrender in 1945, that an Iron Curtain was being drawn through the heart of Europe. (He coined the metaphor in a message to President Truman a full year before he used it in public in Fulton, Mo.) And Matyas Rakosi, the “little Stalin” of Hungary, was well known for another apt metaphor, describing how the region’s political, economic, cultural and social oppositions were to be destroyed by “cutting them off like slices of salami.”

Applebaum tracks the salami slicing as typically practiced in Poland, Hungary and Germany, and serves up not only the beef but also the fat, vinegar and garlic in exhausting detail. She shows how the knives were sharpened before the war’s end in Soviet training camps for East European Communists, so that trusted agents could create and control secret police forces in each of the “liberated” nations. She shows how reliable operatives then took charge of all radio broadcasting, the era’s most powerful mass medium. And she demonstrates how the Soviet stooges could then, with surprising speed, harass, persecute and finally ban all independent institutions, from youth groups and welfare agencies to schools, churches and rival political parties.

Along the way, millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and Hungarians were ruthlessly driven from their historic homes to satisfy Soviet territorial ambitions. Millions more were deemed opponents and beaten, imprisoned or hauled off to hard labor in Siberia. In Stalin’s paranoid sphere, not even total control of economic and cultural life was sufficient. To complete the terror, he purged even the Communist leaders of each satellite regime, accusing them of treason and parading them as they made humiliating confessions.

It is good to be reminded of these sordid events, now that more archives are accessible and some witnesses remain alive to recall the horror. Still, why should we be consuming such a mass of detail more than half a century later?

In her introduction Applebaum says it is important to remember that “historically, there were regimes that aspired to total control,” not only of the organs of state but also of human nature itself. We should be studying how totalitarianism worked, she maintains, because “we can’t be certain that mobile phones, the Internet and satellite photographs won’t eventually become tools of control” in other places. Well, Vladimir Putin may yet make her a prophet, but so far this century, technology has become a welcome defense against tyranny.

More relevant to contemporary discussion are some themes Applebaum evokes along the way but never develops. She begins her tale by insisting that the United States and Britain, having promised the East Europeans a democratic future, quickly abandoned them to Soviet domination. True enough. Yet what were the West’s alternatives? The door to Europe was left open for Stalin in 1945 because the Americans were rapidly redeploying to fight Japan and eager to enlist Stalin in the Pacific war. Applebaum does not speculate about how Soviet colonization might have been forestalled or what methods of intervention for freedom we should be applying now in Cuba or North Korea, Syria or China.

Similarly, she barely touches on the contrary claims of some historians that it was not the West’s appeasement but rather hostility against the Soviet Union that provoked Stalin’s aggressive responses. These scholars accuse the United States of having triggered the cold war, thus baiting Stalin into taking crude defensive countermeasures. Applebaum’s evidence provides a telling rebuttal to those “revisionist” theories, but she never really engages them.

Most conspicuously missing is any sustained examination of Soviet motives for the rape of Eastern Europe. What did the Russians want? Revenge against Germany and its allies? Compensation for their enormous loss of life and suffering in the war and the spoils due a victor? Was the domination of neighboring states a wildly arrogant policy of defense so that no conqueror could ever again follow Napoleon and Hitler to Moscow? Or was it a revival of Russia’s imperial desire to annex at least half of Poland, to secure a rebellious Ukraine and to incorporate the Baltic States and various adjacent Balkan lands?

Applebaum’s overriding interest is in Stalin’s deranged tyranny, which aggravated the postwar horror inside the Soviet Union at the same time that it was being slavishly imitated by his East European henchmen until his death in 1953. Yet Stalin’s successors were just as intent on preserving their dominion. Why? Applebaum contends that Stalin, having once postponed the Soviet dream of igniting an international Communist revolution, “was preparing to relaunch it” in 1944 as the Red Army rolled westward. But that passing comment — and debatable premise — is all she offers to explain Soviet policy.

While her documentation of the Soviet takeover is impressive, at this late date fewer facts and more analysis would have been welcome. The seeds of the Communists’ ultimate failure in East Europe are strewed throughout her book, but with little explanation. She shows how poorly the Communist regimes provided for their consumers and how they alienated the workers in whose name they governed. Why? And does not this subject require lengthy discussion of how Communism collided with the deeply rooted nationalisms of the region? Applebaum incisively demonstrates the moral confusion that haunted Roman Catholic leaders and other opponents of the Communist regimes, some openly hostile, some reluctantly cooperative, many simply passive. But how should we evaluate their choices?

“Iron Curtain” is not a full history of the Iron Curtain because of Applebaum’s decision to end her history in 1956, just as Poles and Hungarians openly rebelled against Soviet control. There then followed a 30-year effort in the Kremlin to stabilize and reform all Communist societies, but the East Europeans remained restive, held captive only by Soviet armed might. The colonization became a huge burden on the Soviet economy, and the lures of Western democracy and economic achievement produced corrosive holes in that curtain. Finally, when Mikhail Gorbachev refused to shoot to preserve his costly empire, the curtain collapsed altogether and dragged down the Soviet center as well.

Applebaum rightly concludes, long before that climax, that the totalitarian spell could never be sustained for long. But she declines to generalize about the reasons or the defenses we all may need against other totalitarian threats. Instead, what she has given us is a concrete and sad record that honors the memory of the millions who were slaughtered, tortured and suppressed in the mad pursuit of totality.