Status of Gulag research in the United States, with specific attention to the Hungarians

Várdy, Steven (2013) Status of Gulag research in the United States, with specific attention to the Hungarians. Hungarian Studies, 27 (1). pp. 147-165. ISSN 0236-6568

Preview

Text hstud.27.2013.1.10.pdf Download (99kB) | Preview

Abstract

The twentieth century was undoubtedly the bloodiest hundred years in the history of humanity. In this final century of the second millennium more humans suffered from various state-sponsored programs and institutions of mass murder than during the whole stretch of written century. In the twentieth century tens of millions of humans fell victim to these so-called “redeeming” religious and political ideologies. The bloodiest of these ideologies included: (1) an extreme form of nationalism that culminated in racism; (2) applied Marxism that hid under the mantle of Bolshevism and Stalinism; (3) national socialism that manifested itself in Fascism and Nazism; and finally (4) the recently emerging Fundamentalist Islam that attempted to tear down the structure and achievements of Western Christian Civilization. These “redeeming ideologies” competed against each other in their efforts to torture, torment, and annihilate tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of human beings. The best known among these mass exterminations is undoubtedly the Holocaust, which resulted in the torturous death of six million Jews or alleged Jews, among them several hundred-thousand Hungarians. This centrally planned and meticulously executed extermination process is so well known that nowadays it is part of general human consciousness everywhere in the world. Sadly, this does not apply to the other 20th-century mass extermination known as the Gulag, which is not part of that consciousness. In point of fact, one still encounters scholars who don’t even believe that the Gulag had ever existed. While Holocaust-research is pursued in the United States at several dozen universities, museums, libraries and various other research centers, this does not apply to the Gulag, which is hardly known to the general public. This is also true for American university students, of whom — based on my own experiences — less than five percent is aware of this modern form of slavery and mass extermination. The goal of this paper is to summarize briefly the type of Gulag-research pursued in the United States, which — in absence of specialized research institutes — is pursued mostly by individual scholars. Toward the end of this study, reference is also made to the “Gulag-consciousness” and “Gulag-research” in Hungary — which also leaves much to be desired.

Actions (login required)

Edit Item