Brutalized by an 'Aberration'

...Seven Thousand Days in Siberia was brought out in West Germany in 1975, and in France eight years later...

...Stajner asks this "kind and generous person" how he could have joined "a band of murderers like the SS...

...In his view, one shared by many of the Yugoslav (and other) faithful, Stalin's system was an aberration, not the final product of the ideology he was committed to...

...While Stajner was enduring the Siberian purga, and while the Western anti-Stalinists were praising Tito for his humane Marxism, thousands upon thousands of Yugoslav "Cominformists" were being tortured, re-educated, or liquidated in these camps, the largest of which was on Goti Otok ["Naked Island"] in the Adriatic...

...managing editor, "Chronicles" When Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski's Conspiracy of Silence appeared in post-Cominform Yugoslavia, few Westerners of conscience took note of it...

...Unlike some other survivors of the gulag, though, Stajner never underplays the ploys, stratagems and humiliating, deceits that enabled him to bear up under the katorga (punitive labor...

...Then in 1956, following Nikita S. Khrushchev's reconciliation with Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Stajner was released to Yugoslavia...

...The Procrustean bed of contemporary totalitarianism is no different from its prototype: Shortened, the victims can crawl or totter...

...In a world of slaves, he lied, stole and did anything else he deemed necessary in order to live to see his loyal wife again...

...That Muscovites don't dress in the latest fashion, that the stores aren't well stocked, that hotels aren' t as good as they might be...

...The Soviet, Yugoslav, Chinese, Cuban, Sandinista and other such systems prove to us, unhappily, that upright men like Stajner can be brutalized...

...In this era oiglasnost, what Stajner said to his fellow zek still rings true...

...From 1919 on he belonged, at various times, to the Austrian, the Yugoslav and the Soviet Communist parties...

...Karlo Stajner is an expert on the USSR —at least on the one that, we are told, disappeared with the advent of glasnost...

...Once again Tito distanced himself from Moscow...

...Nor did Loncar, notwithstanding a certain youthful humanism, have much sympathy for me, as a member of one of the "historically condemned" classes...

...Despite all his suffering, Stajner— who still lives in Yugoslavia— remains a Communist...

...stretched, they can lie still, or die...

...Toreallyknowwhat'sgoingonin this country, you have to be in a situation like ours...

...Karl, I would like to ask you a question, too," replies Hans...

...Some are full of praise...

...Slavomir Rawicz' The Long Walk, published in London in 1956) were virtually ignored in Europe and America until the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in 1974...

...Anything short of killing...

...Consider, however, Stajner's description of the delivery of Western aid to the Soviet Union in 1947: "More and more American and British ships came into the port of Dudinka...

...Only free workers were used to unload those ships...

...That was left to the many criminal inmates who, in Soviet prisons as well as in Yugoslav, do much of the administration's dirty work...

...Where is your compassion for the underdog...

...Upon serving this stint he was resentenced to another 10 years for not admitting his guilt...

...Karlo Stajner, himself a resident of the gulag at that time, recalls commenting on the West's credulousness to a fellow inmate: "That's what's so awful about it—most people don't have any idea what's going on here...

...my re-educator, a man called Loncar, asked me...

...But the reader of his memoir cannot escape the irony of Stajner's exchange with a former SS officer, Hans Baltes, who saved his life in Siberia...

...They docked at special piers far from where the prisoners worked...

...Though he was pleased by his new job as director of the publishing house of the Communist International, he forgot that he was not supposed to grumble about minor shortcomings of the Soviet system...

...others are critical—but what does the criticism amount to...

...Only after the arrest and deportation of that Nobel Prize-winning Russian dissident did the tragic story he and innumerable others were telling sink into the Western mind...

...Western TV crews make the rounds of Potemkin villages (or cities) and broadcast their on-the-spot reports...

...And Karlo Stajner's Seven Thousand Days in Siberia began appearing as a serial in NIN, a Belgrade weekly newsmagazine...

...Infinitely more influential were the pleas of such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, JeanPaul Sartre, the Dean of Canterbury, Bertrand Russell, Lillian Hellman, and Eleanor Roosevelt for understanding and friendship with America's great wartime ally...

...In 1932, after working to set up illicit Communist printing presses in King Alexander's Yugoslavia, he was transferred to Comintern headquarters in Moscow...

...The Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis (who contributed the Introduction to the present English translation of the book from the German) has in his short stories fictionalized some of the people Stajner encountered in the gulag (among them an Irish Communist who had been kidnapped by the Cheka while fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War...

...There are some foreign journalists who hang around Moscow or tour some Soviet cities for a few days, and they're the ones that inform the rest of the world about life in the Soviet Union...

...But in 1968, Russian troops invaded Czechoslovakia...

...Tito's willingness to allow the horrors of the Soviet gulag to be aired should not obscure the fact that he maintained a gulag of his own in Yugoslavia...

...In the early 1950s Weissberg-Cybulski was considered a renegade by the international Left, as was the whole Yugoslav Communist Party, and his personal account of the Soviet gulag was dismissed as anti-Communist propaganda...

...Although Stajner's account does not exactly come as news to us now, its appearance is nonetheless welcome considering the recurring amnesia of many opinion-makers this side of Prague, East Berlin and Belgrade...

...For this purpose, they were given special shoes and clothes, which had to be returned to the harbor authorities after work.' Are we bey ond being gulled by such ruses...

...DidyouCommunists join your party with the idea of creating all this...

...Reviewed by Momcilo Selic Former Yugoslav dissident...

...When I was confined in the Zabela prison camp from 1980 to 1982 for "anti-Yugoslav propaganda," I saw common criminals rewarded with benefits, privileges and good jobs for their sometimes fatal "work" on the politicals...

...In truth I, like Stajner, had no compassion for the thugs and cutthroats who preyed upon me and upon each other...

...The Russians we see smiling into the camera are neither hirsute nor fanged, and we rest assured...

...In 1936 he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in Siberia for being a Gestapo spy, a Trotskyite, a Western degenerate, a foreigner, and much else besides...

...Not until Tito's death was the taboo against mentioning this terror broken...

...Khrushchev's ascendancy put an end to the days of Yugoslav anti-Stalinism that had made it possible for books like Weissberg-Cybulski's to be published...

...An era of "socialist friendship" between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was at hand...

...Stajner's memoir and other literature about the Soviet prison-camp system by former inmates (e.g...

...Of the 113 Yugoslav Communists in the Soviet gulag whose names were on the list Tito gave Khrushchev, only he and 12 others had survived...

...They look at Russia from the foreign point of view...