How Does Bureaucracy Shape the Soul?

Years after many of the Zeks––prisoners in the Soviet Union’s gulag system––had been released from their long captivity another round of arrests began. The standard sentence in Stalin’s purge of 1937 was 10 years for presumed political activity. Yet the system demanded so much more than that miserable internment. In 1949 the freed convicts, barely eking out existence as exiles in Siberia, were being absorbed into the Soviet bureaucratic machine once again.

The number of arrests was relatively small. It was concerning, but not surprising. After all, despite all the rhetoric, those accused and convicted of political activity against the Communist Party were unlikely to be trusted again. But every month a new batch of prisoners was taken to the local MGB headquarters and detained. The logic behind who was chosen was mysterious. It wasn’t the most violent, or the most vocal, or the youngest, or the most serious offenders. The cause was mysterious, though rumors abounded.

After several months of this slow reabsorption of prisoners, Eugenia Ginzburg and her neighbors finally figured out what was happening. Freed convicts were being arrested in alphabetical order by their last name. It had nothing to do with the people or their behavior, simply that they had once been convicted of political activity and had been born with a particular surname.

This scene, about two-thirds of the way through Eugenia Ginzburg’s autobiographical, Within the Whirlwind, is a perfect illustration of the horrors of communism. It is, more significantly, a clear example of the destruction that a purely bureaucratic government entails. A soulless destruction without malice, which, as Hannah Arendt describes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, puts the “banality of evil” on full display.

Rising Tide of Communism

I’ve been amazed to see a rise in unironic celebration of communism among a younger generation of Americans. The attraction of this foreign economic and political system is not hard to understand. Communism is a romantic, idealistic vision for humanity. It embodies the most hopeful elements of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Overt materialism that rejects the inherent conflicts between religions. The otherworldly human perfectionism that expects the lack of possessions and property rights to end well.

This idyllic vision is attractive at some level. Imagining it, as the songwriter says, is easy. In reality, however, it consistently creates a sort of hell on earth.

The most famous record of the misery of communism is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which was published in three hefty volumes. He details the abuses, absurdity, and outrages of the Soviet communist system in great detail from his own perspective and through the eyes of many other prisoners.

Solzhenitsyn’s account remains obscure because of its length and the fact that he was not a card-carrying communist. Though he was not a dissident, he wasn’t inside the system, and thus was not fully bought in. On top of that, current proponents of communism can safely ignore him because of how popular his work is among opponents of communism. That’s confirmation bias at work, but par for the course in our epistemologically disrupted day.

But Ginzburg’s account, detailed in two volumes, Journey Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, tells the story of an actually communist party member who was denounced based on a very loose connection and sucked into the horrific bureaucratic machine that was the Soviet system. She lost a husband, a child, and more than a decade of her life for not sufficiently denouncing someone who had merely fallen out of favor with party leadership. Imagine.

Soul Shaping Bureaucracy

The first of Ginzburg’s volumes, Journey Into the Whirlwind, is still in print and is a gripping story of survival in the camp. The second volume, Within the Whirlwind, extends the account of her imprisonment for half the volume, then shifts to post prison life and eventual rehabilitation as a Soviet citizen after Stalin’s death. The first volume is more engaging. Ginzburg knows how to tell a story. The insights into human nature, especially with regard to her time in solitary confinement, are powerful. The second volume is a little tedious at points, but the last half of the volume offers insight into nature of communism in particular and bureaucracy in general.

Stalin’s death lifted a huge weight of fear from the Soviet Union. His tyrannical fear of being betrayed had contributed to the purges and the ongoing persecution of those accused of political activity. As Ginzburg was being rehabilitated, she struggled with bitterness. An understandable struggle for someone who lost so much for so little cause.

It’s in this struggle that Ginzburg’s offers profound insights about the effects of impersonal bureaucracy:

Ours was an age in which events affected such huge numbers of people, and the dividing lines between butchers and their victims were so blurred (think of all the people who had been only too ready to put others through Stalin’s mincing machine, before slipping into it themselves!), that the barricades such as that which in 1905, for example, divided them from us no longer existed. The systematic corruption of people’s souls by means of the Great Lie, which resembled nothing ever known before, had resulted in thousands and thousands of ordinary people being caught up in the charade. (381)

This corruption of souls and the propagation of the Great Lie was made possible by the depersonalization of bureaucracy. Something to keep in mind as we imagine our political ideals.

Journey into the Whirlwind: The Critically Acclaimed Memoir of Stalin's Reign of Terror

By Ginzburg, Eugenia Semenovna

Buy on Amazon