We all know the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and Dachau. But what about Pechora, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Norilsk? Why are the camps to which Nazism’s victims were deported household words, while the Gulag archipelago – the far flung network of Soviet labour camps and penal colonies where the victims of Stalin and Communism suffered and died – remains terra incognito to most of us.
Despite the vast disparity in the death toll – (Communist regimes killed, according to the respected ‘Black Book of Communism’ an estimated 100 million in the 20th century, ranging from the major monsters Lenin, Mao and Stalin to more minor Marxist killers such as Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Fidel Castro) – it is Hitler who always takes the Gold Star when we want to award an embodiment of pure evil. For, as journalist Nick Cohen recently noted: ‘Few can bring themselves to see fascism and Communism as moral equivalents’.
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