Rewriting history

It is tempting to dismiss the pratings of a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, about the Soviet gulags as the ignorant outpourings of a juvenile mind. This particular individual took to Twitter to “debunk the myths” surrounding the forced labour camps set up by Stalin and maintained after his death to hold dissidents, opponents of the regime or anyone else unfortunate enough to cross the system.

Anne Applebaum, in her 2003 study Gulag, estimated that 18 million people passed through the system and countless numbers died. These were not extermination camps like those run by the Nazis, but the idea that they were supposed to rehabilitate offenders, as the anonymous tweeter maintained, was belied by the indifference of the authorities to the fate of prisoners exposed to severe cold and hunger. Has he, or she, never read Solzhenitsyn?

None of this would matter were it not the case that it reflects a trend among the hard Left in British politics to play down the excesses of regimes like the Soviet Union. If they got things wrong, their hearts were in the right place and the ends, after all, justify the means.

It is disappointing, but no great surprise, for such views to be held by a student. After all, there have been many academic apologists down the years willing to explain away the atrocities of the Soviet era. Socialism may have failed everywhere it has been tried and is almost always accompanied by tyranny and repression. But the problem, they say, is not with the creed but its implementation, because it has been stymied by an American plot, as in Venezuela. It is when these opinions are shared and given credence by the leadership of the main opposition party that we need to pay heed.