This book is a history of the Soviet Union and the manifestations of its Communist ideology. Our author walks us through the rise and fall of the empire starting with Vladimir Lenin assuming power via the Bolshevik victory in the 1917 Russian civil war and ending with the Belovezha Accords of 1991 dissolving the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev resigning as it’s President.
While the narrative of this book is messy (some chapters follow individuals, some follow ideas, some follow periods of history) it does a good job of providing information about the Soviet Union from a variety of perspectives. How did Americans and other Europeans view Russia and the Soviet Union throughout the 1900s? How were these perspectives shaped by the communication technology of the time? Why were some people duped while others were not, while still others felt compelled to turn the other cheek? These questions and many more are explored in the pages of this book.
The major point that Malice gets across in his writing is the destructive nature of Communism: it is an ideology built upon lies and secrecy. Centralization of control is synonymous with the centralization of information, which is how totalitarian regimes operate. It is democracy that thrives on the dissemination of information. In order to squash this dissemination of information and keep all things centralized, Stalin and his chief advisors founded the Stasi, the Soviet secret police in charge of spying on its citizens. At one point in East Germany, the Stasi employed 102,000 members to control a population of 17 million, a heavy-handed move when compared with the Italian Gestapo, who at its height had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million. This statistic goes to show that surveillance was universal and obedience strictly enforced.
The secret police went by different names at different times in the empire, but their destructive techniques remained the same: arrests without evidence, torture without cause, imprisonment without verdicts, and execution without mercy. They rounded up everybody: the elites, the intellectuals, the foreign-born, the soldiers returning from war in Europe, and, most importantly, anybody suspected of political crimes against the regime. Tens of millions perished, and what comes across in these pages is the true inhumanity. The starvation of the Ukrainian people is one particularly brutal example because there was no way to hide the evidence of food: if there was too much color in a peasant’s cheeks, the Soviet authorities would know they were hiding food and would beat them until it was handed over. While many horrors of the Gulag archipelago are revealed, this dark turn of human nature is most famously recorded by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his autobiographical books The Gulag Archipelago.
I was particularly amazed at the Soviet’s ability to deceive the rest of the world. During the Second World War, Stalin fought on the side of the Allies and was viewed by many in Britain and America as a good guy. Despite the Soviet’s victory over Hitler’s regime, their own regime back home was arguably worse. Hitler came to power and was defeated within a decade; the Soviet Union abused its citizens for over 70 years (with Stalin personally in charge for 30 of them). Perhaps the West’s inability to discern the truth was due to the technology of the time: back then, messages had to travel with a person or over a cable, something easily stopped or damaged, whereas these days satellites can bounce giant quantities of information across the globe in seconds.
Having a monopoly on the media and information is what gave the regime its power and legitimacy in the eyes of the world and also how the cracks began to form as the truth eventually got out. (This is also how Nelson Mandela was eventually released from prison in South Africa—international news media broadcasting his story to the world and the world responding with pressure on the South African government.) Malice titles his book The White Pill, because ultimately this book is a message of hope and optimism. The people of the Soviet Union persevered against the greatest of odds, and while many lost their lives in tragic ways, eventually the system collapsed upon itself. Lies can only fester in the shade for so long before the antiseptic sunlight of truth reveals them. This is a pertinent message for us all to comprehend as we find ourselves in a world with totalitarian regimes on the rise again.
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