Karl Schlögel. Moscow, 1937

It is difficult to understand the history of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin without resorting to metaphor. How else can one make sense of the fantastic juxtapositions that make up the twentieth-century experience in Eurasia: progress and modernization alongside mass starvation, emancipation alongside mass repression, hope for the future of mankind alongside bewildered despair? Alexander Solzhenitsyn provided the most influential such metaphor in the immediate post-Stalin period with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which portrays the Soviet system as one giant labor camp that perverts all norms of humanity: trust becomes weakness, self-respect a death sentence, morality a sign that one has not yet become a “new Soviet person.” Yet since the collapse of the Soviet Union a new metaphor has gained currency in the field, taken from the repressed novel of the Soviet writer Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit (1930), which was written during the opening salvos of collectivization and anticipated the descent into the state-sponsored mass murder that followed. Platonov's hero, dismissed from his factory job for thinking too much, stumbled on new work digging the foundation of a huge apartment building in which all the workers of his town would live, a construction site for the socialist dream of communal life and material progress in the new Soviet Union. The apartment, however, was never built; the pit, ever larger to accommodate the expanding number of people forced to “build socialism,” in the end became a mass grave, a dumping ground for the utopian hopes that were shattered by the murderous policies of Stalin, not to mention the bodies of the millions of human “parasites” whose lives were ruined or cut short along the way.

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