I have read tons of books about the history of the 20th century. It’s the century of world wars, the century of brutal and murderous regimes, the century of the Cold War, the century of freedom fight, and the century of victories. It’s the century that interests me the most in the entire history.

It’s very unfortunate to tens of millions of people that the 20th century was the century of brutal and murderous regimes. Stalin’s repressions killed at least 20 million people, Hitler’s ethnic cleansing another more than six million. All those people really did was being born in the wrong place and time.

Ludwik Kowalski's "Hell on Earth" is one of the best books I've read in a while.

The memory of all those people must be perpetuated. To remember the innocent victims of the ruthless tyrants, and to make sure that events like this would never happen again. Professor Emeritus Ludwik Kowalski contributed to this end by writing a book called “Hell on Earth: Brutality and Violence Under The Stalinist Regime”.

When Professor Kowalski contacted me (he found me through my blog) and asked if he could send me his book, I was very glad to accept. When I finally received the book and started reading it, I simply couldn’t put it down.

“Hell on Earth” is a collection of essays by Professor Kowalski, which he started writing by accident. He was travelling in Alaska, where he encountered a plaque with the name of the Russian town of Magadan, and that brought up his memories from 1939, when he was eight years old and living in Russia. “The address: “Kolyma, Magadan, Buchta Nagayevo” was where my father, arrested one year earlier, had died in a concentration camp at the age of 36,” he wrote in the introduction.

Kowalski’s Polish father was an idealistic communist and he believed it was his duty to emigrate from Poland to Soviet Union, to contribute to the building of a new society. His wife and son followed soon after. Unfortunately, in 1938 he was arrested and sent to a GULAG camp in Kolyma, Russia’s far east, where he became a slave in Stalin’s dictatorship. He died two years later from exhaustion working in a gold mine.

“I did not write this book for money; it was a moral obligation,” Kowalski, Professor Emeritus at Montclair State University, New Jersey, told me. It’s very honourable, I think. We’re all sons of our fathers and we’re obliged to keep our fathers’ memory alive. But most of us don’t bother to take up such a chore in order to do that. Professor Kowalski deserves every bit of respect for that.

He was educated in a Soviet Union’s elementary school and graduated from high school and obtained a master’s degree in Poland. He received his PhD in nuclear physics in France, and in 1964 he went to the United States. He deliberately avoided talking about Stalinism and concentrated on teaching and research, but approaching retirement he wrote an essay on Stalinism entitled “Alaska Notes”, which focuses on the Kolyma concentration camp, and Stalin’s inner circle. Later, he wrote more essays on the subject and “Hell on Earth” was born as a book.

The book consists of essays about what Professor Kowalski knows and thinks of the Stalinist regime. The gruesome descriptions of people being persecuted, jailed, sent to concentration camps to die, or just brutally murdered may bring a tear to an eye. But people have to know those details, as it was the reality so many naive people fought for, and later died for in the hands of those they fought with.

According to Lenin and Stalin, morality should be subordinated to the ideology of proletarian revolution. Denying the validity of religion-based morality, they wrote: what is useful to us is moral, what is harmful to us is immoral.
[...]
The justification was simple. The world is full of injustice and immorality. We want to replace it by a much better “scientifically designed” social structure – communism. That is what we do is right, by definition. Here is a good illustration. An act of torture committed by our enemy should be exposed as unspeakable barbarism. We do this to gain sympathy and support of naive people believing in “bourgeois morality”. But an act of torture committed by us to punish an enemy of revolution is not immoral. It is a historical necessity.

Unfortunately, we do see the same kind of ideology even today. And not only with communists or marxists, but also with many others, at least according to their own claims. “What we do is right and what they do is wrong” is a common principle among humans. And it wasn’t a long ago when a President of a large western country proclaimed that “who’re not with us, are against us”. It’s not necessarily always that black and white, now is it?

The book also portrays the feelings of those true communists who were jailed and persecuted by the Stalinist regime. Those people sincerely believed they were jailed by a mistake, because they in their hearts knew that they’re “good” communists and fighters for the revolution. Apparently, someone else thought they weren’t that good, but forgot to tell them. The Stalinist regime didn’t jail people “by mistake”, they jailed people for being on Stalin’s way. Even being a Soviet soldier who had landed in the hands Germans as a prisoner of war was reason enough to send one to the GULAG.

The estimated number of victims of communism is about 100 million people. 20 million of them perished in the Soviet Union during the existence of this evil empire. Mao, of course, was even more brutal than Stalin – as he killed about 65 million people. But the fact that someone kills more or less than one doesn’t lessen the intolerable crime one’s committed, in my opinion. And as for Stalin, the millions of people he killed in Russia and occupied territories apparently was not yet enough.

One of the last statements made by Stalin was, “We are afraid of no one, and if the imperialist gentlemen like going to war there is no more favourable moment for us than the present.” The nuclear arsenal was ready, defences were ready and the most powerful army in the world was ready. The catastrophe was prevented by Stalin’s death. The world would be very different today if the criminal dictator had lived another month or year.

Thank God he died in 1953. Well, he could have died earlier, or even better, he shouldn’t have existed. But can you imagine how many more people would have died if he hadn’t kicked the bucket? If it was Lavrenti Beria who poisoned him, as some conspiracy theorists claim, then despite of all Beria’s crimes, he deserves recognition for that final act. After all, Beria was shot shortly afterwards, too.

But despite all the facts of the gruesome reality of Stalinist days and the Soviet Union entirely, there have always been people who are sympathetic to the regime and still want to fight for both the communist utopia and for Stalin. People either forget his enormous crimes, lessen them or much worse – justify them, by, for example, claiming they were “necessary”. Russians voted only recently Stalin the greatest Russian that has ever lived – despite him being Georgian and despite him being the biggest slaughterer of the Russian people ever.

Who should be eager to make attempts to understand Stalinism? Those who still believe in Marxism-Leninism. Why? To be sure their ideology is worth believing. How can they advocate Marxism without an analysis of objective data from the Soviet Union and several other countries? They probably prefer not to talk about this in public because nobody wants to be called a promoter of mass murder. Do they discuss the evil empire among themselves? I doubt it. They prefer to forget about Stalin and move forward. As a result Stalinism is mostly investigated by those who disagree with it. The refusal to openly discuss Stalinism, by those who advocate it, does not help the ideology.

After finishing “Alaska Notes”, Professor Kowalski published them on a web page in Montclair State University. That provoked a discussion thread on Stalinism where several professors took part in and expressed their views. One professor, named “Professor 1” in the book, said: “Your web pages on Soviet labor camps and the number of deaths in them and in the USSR during the ‘30s generally are a gross distortion of reality. [...] According to the NKVD archives, in every year between 1934 and 1953 more inmates were released from the hard regime camps than died there, usually 2-5 times as many… It’s revealing that you lump together Hitler, Stalin and Mao. This is a relic of Cold War disinformation. Stalin did not ‘kill tens of millions’, neither did Mao.”

The same professor also wrote: “The USSR, with all its great weaknesses at the time, was the most progressive state in the world. The communist parties in all countries, including the USA, led in organizing unions, fighting for the rights of working people, and opposing racism. The communist movement worldwide was the single greatest force fighting against imperialism in the colonies, too.”

People are entitled to their opinions and are free to think whatever they please. But what makes me very, incredibly sad is that this “Professor 1” works or has worked in a university, teaching youngsters who will be forming the future. How can they be guided in their studies by a person who defends a proven mass murder? How can they be led to the future by a person who’s a fierce communist, idealizing the Stalinist utopia which murdered at least 20 million people? That is beyond me.

I’m glad that Professor Kowalski published the thread of by his fellow professors. Now everyone sees what kind of people teach today’s youth, and can decide themselves, do they really want such people be teaching their children.

I don’t think that people who haven’t been through the communist terror themselves could understand it fully without reading such books. You just cannot believe the unbelievable. And pretty unbelievable the Soviet terror was. So, in order to understand the communist terror fully, in order to understand the extensive scope of it, and to realize that it’s impossible to build such an utopia Marx, Engels and Lenin preached about, without killing millions of innocent people (no matter what convinced communists like “Professor 1” tell you), one must read Professor Kowalski’s “Hell on Earth”.

Ludwik Kowalski
“Hell on Earth: Brutality and Violence Under The Stalinist Regime”
Wasteland Press, 2008
Paperback
Buy from Amazon.co.uk! £12.00
Buy from Amazon.com! $14.95
All royalties will be donated to a Montclair State University scholarship fund.

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