The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements.

Graeme S. Mount is a history professor at Laurentian University and
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom.

Now that the archives of the former Soviet Union are partially open, Viola has been able to reconstruct one of Stalin’s horrors—the forced removals of some two million agricultural workers in the early 1930s and their relocation to frigid, food-deprived destinations. Robert Mugabe’s land reform program in 21st century Zimbabwe had the same effect upon the general population—creation of a self-inflicted famine. Unlike Zimbabwe’s white farmers, however, the dislocated peasants could not flee to other countries but had to go to one of the least desirable parts of their own. Unlike Zimbabwe’s former agricultural workers, the Soviet victims could not even starve in their own environment. The cover flap says that Viola’s is the first book to report these tragic events in English. For the non-expert, Viola has provided a superb map, a chronological chart of events from the outbreak of the First World War to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, and a glossary of terms and abbreviations.

Agricultural workers (kulaks) knew that they were living on borrowed time. Soviet authorities, says Viola, would often arrive in the middle of the night and make a noise that would awaken the frightened family. “They often began by rounding up the men and herding them into a makeshift prison in an attempt to prevent resistance, while the families watched helplessly as the cadres rummaged through their possessions, inventorying property for expropriation.” There are testimonials from children who survived the experience.

Viola brings her characters to life. They were real people, two million of them, who endured unspeakable experiences. The book, unfortunately, remains all too relevant. As the Mugabe regime demonstrates, some governments remain willing, even eager, to dispossess political opponents they describe as enemies but who know how to work the land. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge government (1975–1979), like Stalin’s, attempted to create a new and “pure” society through the elimination of beneficiaries of the old order. Also, now that Western fears of the Soviet Union often appear exaggerated, it is helpful to know why Western leaders thought as they did. Stalin really was a monster.