Posts Tagged ‘Paul Gregory’

Paul R. Gregory, an economist and Slavic scholar, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also Cullen Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston. He is the author are Women of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives (Hoover Institution Press, 2013), Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Institution Press, 2010), Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (Hoover Institution Press, 2008). Now he is the author of The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee, out on Nov. 15 with Diversion Books.

Book Haven readers will remember his earlier account of the events of 1963 in The New York Times Sunday Magazine here. We’ve also written about his account of Lenin’s brain here. And his account of Women of the Gulag here and here. And Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin here.

He recalls, “remarkably, Lee’s actions on November 22, 1963, did not surprise me. Rather, it was as if the pieces of a puzzle were falling in place as I saw him brought handcuffed and bruised into the Dallas police station.”

This is his first book-length discussion of his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina. He has offered the Book Haven an introduction to the book and some short excerpts:

As a 21-year-old college student, I returned to my hometown of Ft. Worth for the summer of 1962. At the same time, an ex-marine defector to the USSR returned the Ft. Worth with his wife and infant daughter. I was thus thrown into the life and troubled marriage of Lee and Marina Oswald, as Lee struggled to fulfill his dreams of fame and Marina was introduced to a new life in the United States. Through the pretext of Russian language practice, I became a frequent visitor as they settled into their run-down Mercedes Street duplex. As their only visitor besides Lee’s brother, I got hints of Lee’s visions of grandeur, abuse of Marina, and her scornful dismissal of her “loser” husband. It was through my initiative that we introduced the couple to the “Dallas Russians,’ who took an immediate dislike to Lee, as they became determined to free Marina from her unfortunate husband.

I returned to college, and the Oswalds moved to Dallas. Other than reports from Dallas of Lee’s outrageous behavior, I did not hear or see them until shortly before Thanksgiving, as Lee used me as a pawn to get Marina to move back in with him. My last image of Lee and Marina was them running to the Dallas bus at the Ft. Worth bus station on Thanksgiving Day 1962. My next image was November 22, 1963, as a bruised Lee was dragged into Dallas police headquarters to my shock and horror. Sitting in front of a TV screen at Norman, Oklahoma, I immediately understood that Lee had done it, and why, and that he had done it alone. I had ample opportunity to express my reasons before the US Secret Service and the Warren Commission. I was picked up early morning the day after the assassination as a ”known associate” of one Lee Harvey Oswald.

This book combines my experiences with Lee and Marina with the testimonies found in the tens of thousands of pages of the Warren Commission report, a reading to Lee’s largely unknown writing on socialism and communism, and Oswald’s KGB file. Some of the most important insights come from my father’s account of translating for Marina at a hideout arranged by the Secret Service in the week following the assassination as the FBI and Secret Service clashed and Lee’s mother went off the rails.

I largely refrained from writing on my experiences with the Oswalds because my parents both considered our association with a Marine deserter and communist to be shameful and best not talked about. Virtually everyone I write about is now gone; so it is time to tell the story.

***

That the Warren Commission’s lone assassin—Lee Harvey Oswald—was an unaccomplished, poorly educated misfit continues to feed the public’s skepticism. Nonentities do not change history. By this line of reasoning, we should be leery of the lone gunman conclusion unless we can explain with firsthand detail and confidence how Oswald could gun down the world’s most heavily guarded figure using only his own meager devices. And that’s what this book is about. It asks whether our “intimate” portrait of Oswald conveys in him the motive, resources, cunning, and killer instinct to have indeed changed our history as he fired on the president’s motorcade passing below him.

I would not be writing this book had I not known Lee Harvey Oswald personally. From June through mid-September of 1962, I was the sole companion of Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald outside of Lee’s immediate family. I visited this young married couple often in the duplex where they settled after Lee’s return from his defection to the USSR.

***

At 2:01 p.m., an excited reporter, located at Dallas police headquarters, shouted out on camera: “They are bringing in a suspect!” The TV showed a short man, disheveled in a white, V-neck tee shirt and dark trousers. He was surrounded by police officers. His face was bruised, and one eye was black. I stared in utter and stunned disbelief. It was clearly Lee Harvey Oswald! I muttered mainly to myself in shock: “I know that man.”

***

MR. JENNER (Warren Commission Deputy Counsel): Now, you were seeking to report to us the friends and acquaintances of your brother and your sister-in-law subsequent to their return to the United States in June of 1962. Now, who next in addition to Paul and [his father] Peter Gregory?

MR. OSWALD: None, sir.

MR. JENNER: None?

MR. OSWALD: None.

***
The army of assassination buffs are wasting their time on missing bullets, Oswald doppelgangers, and Soviet, Cuban, or Mafia assassinations. We need to look no further than Oswald himself. We must ask how this “little man” with megalomaniacal ambitions mustered the wherewithal to kill the ideal target for someone who wanted to go down in history books.

***

As someone who has worked professionally with Soviet state and party documents for over a decade, the Yeltsin documents appear authentic to me. We learn that Oswald’s case was dealt with at the highest levels of the Politburo and KGB—not by the local passport office as I had previously thought. The original USSR counterattack eventually implicated the Gregorys in a “White Russian Conspiracy.”

This Soviet version remains an active thread in the JFK conspiracy portfolio. I guess Pete and Paul Gregory are still under suspicion of some kind in some quarters.

Agent Nielson bored in on whether Lee could have been part of an organized conspiracy. I answered that I had no evidence pro or con, but I volunteered that if I were to organize such a heinous crime, the last person on earth I would include in the conspiracy would be Lee Harvey Oswald. I stated that Oswald marched to his own drummer. He could not be relied upon, and he would not take kindly to orders from others. This personal opinion somehow did not make it into the official transcript of my remarks, but I am sure I said it.

***

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It premiered in Hollywood and New York – but on June 11, Women of the Gulag, a documentary film based on Paul Gregory‘s book of the same name, came home to Stanford. It got a big audience at Hoover’s Hauck Auditorium, in the new David & Joan Traitel Building, with a splendid reception afterwards. (We’ve written about the film here and here and here and here.)

The film, directed by Marianna Yarovskaya of MayFilms and produced by Yarovskaya and Gregory, was also shortlisted in the best documentary category in the 2019 Academy Awards competition. It has been named the Best Non-European Independent Documentary in the 2019 European Independent Documentary Film Festival held in Paris. It was also shown at Moscow’s Film Festival. It couldn’t be more timely, as Russia sinks into denial, historical lies, and Stalin-fandom.

The film tells the compelling stories of six remarkable women – among the last survivors of the Gulag, the brutal system of repression that devastated the Soviet population during the Stalin years. Most stories of the gulag have told of men’s experience. Women of the Gulag is the first account of women in the camps and special settlements.

Women of the Gulag, filmed entirely on location in Russia, turned out to be the last chance to tell the story of women in camps and special settlements. Several of the women featured in the film have died since their interviews.

You can listen to the podcast of the Q&A session from the June 11 screening below – it’s a Book Haven exclusive. Eric Wakin, director of Hoover Library & Aerchives, introduces filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya and author Paul Gregory, who have a short discussion and answer audience questions.

There’s more to come: The film has been cleared for screening on Russian Channel 2 Russiya – with an okay from the highest government levels. The film will also get Russian screenings at Дом Русского Зарубежья (Solzhenitsyn’s house) and Gulag Museum, as well as Tver and other smaller cities. Other European universities have signed on for a screenings, and so has South Korea.

But the most exclusive showing to date is the one that took place the following morning for 98-year-old former State Secretary George Schultz, who had a private screening at the Hoover Tower. He called Women of the Gulag “an outstanding work,” and praised the strength of character of the women it profiled.

Photos by Igor Runov

Women of the Gulag was a last-chance attempt to record he memories of the women who had faced arrest, torture, incarceration, hard labor, and abuse during the Soviet years – an untold story kept by the octogenarian and nonagenarian survivors, some who died during the making of the film. So I was  pleased it was shortlisted for the Academy Awards “documentary shorts” category. I wrote about it here and here and here. And film clip above.)

Filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya was the first Russian woman to be shortlisted or nominated for an Oscar since the founding of the Russian Federation, and the second Russian female director to be shortlisted for an Academy Award in any category in 91 years.

According to Paul Gregory, the Hoover Russianist who was author of the book and producer of the film: “Requests for interviews flooded in from Russia’s scrappy liberal press, and from Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, Echo of Moscow, Moscow Times, and Kyiv Post. John Batchelor hosted Marianna and me on his syndicated radio show (watch it here). John was enthused but skeptical that Hollywood would give its highest award to a film about Stalin’s genocides. Marianna informed the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Culture and received back a formal statement that the film is not a ‘national film’ of the Russian Federation. There was a sudden awakening of interest on the part of film distributors.”

Then the bad news last week:  it didn’t make the nominations, despite golden predictions. So Stalin loses at the Academy – again. “We can agree to disagree, but it is true that filmmakers have largely ignored the mass executions, Gulag camps, and repressions for ‘political’ crimes that took place in the Stalin years. International awards for Stalin themes have been rare,” Gregory wrote in Defining Ideas, a Hoover Institution journal.

“As Jan. 22 approached, we were buoyed by some good news. All seven major prognosticators (including Variety, The Wrap, Indiewire, LA Times, and Hollywood Reporter’s Feinberg Forecasts) predicted we would make the final five. These were the professionals, we thought. Surely, they know what they are doing. Bookies placed our odds of winning the whole shebang at 6/1.”

But Stalin has not been as interesting as Hitler, the focus of many acclaimed and awarded films – despite Stalin’s record that makes him one of the greatest genocidaires of modern times. “Societies that do not come to terms with such genocides suffer, each in their own way,” said Gregory. And so it has been with post-Soviet Russia, lost to memory and drawn to Putin like a moth to the flame.

But 2019 was a surprising year for the Oscars: the most expensive campaign in its history. The small, independently funded was kneecapped against professional publicity campaigns.

The indefatigable Paul Gregory is still optimistic and looking forward: “There is still the Emmys, if we can find a suitable TV venue. We have a premiere in London on  April 23 at the Barbican Centre.  Universities and museums are requesting showings and panel discussions. Most interesting is going to be the reaction of Russian media. Will they allow a showing on a major network? We’ll wait and see.”

Read Paul Gregory’s article here.

Russian American filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya sent me a short note after she read the earlier Book Haven post on her new film Women of the Gulag, based on the research and book by Paul Gregory. The film is now up for an Oscar next month in the “short documentary” category. 

Her email included an endorsement from Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who spent a dozen years in the psychiatric hospitals, prisons and labor camps of the USSR. In December 1976 he was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zürich airport by the Soviet government for the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalán. Bukovsky now lives in the UK.

So he knows what he’s talking about. Here’s what he had to say about Women of the Gulag – consider it an endorsement from the depths of hell:

The film Women of the Gulag is an important document of the era.

The U.S.S.R. was a huge zone of human suffering.

Inside that zone there was also a hell that contained its powerless slaves—the GULAG.

But within that hell, there was an even more terrible hell.

Varlam Shalamov, the great writer who lived through the GULAG hell, said the women in the camps were slaves of the slaves.

Their experience was so horrific that eyewitnesses were afraid to describe it in detail.

I could not understand how you can make a film about “what a person should not know, should not see, and if he has, he is better off dead,” as Shalamov wrote.

Marianna Yarovskaya has managed to do it. Her heroines, who survived the GULAG, say almost nothing about their suffering. But I could hear their desperate screams during their silences.

To go through such suffering without going mad is a spiritual feat.

To make such a film is a moral feat.

I would compare the appearance of Women of the Gulag with the appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

The Gulag Archipelago was awarded the Nobel Prize. [Editor’s note: Solzhenitsyn was awarded, rather than his masterpiece.]

I am glad that there is the opportunity to award an Oscar to Women of the Gulag.

Everyone nowadays is terrified of Russia, talking about Russia, condemning Russia – but comparatively few make any attempt to find out what Russia is really about, culturally, socially, politically. Relatively few make an effort to know its history, other than the comic-book version. Author Paul Gregory, an economist and Russia expert, has gone some way towards alleviating our myopia with Women of the Gulag, teaming up with Russian-American filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya. We’ve written about the Women of the Gulag here and here and here. (We’ve written about Paul’s book on Nikolai Bukharin here, and his curious and complicated tale of Lenin‘s brain here.) Although he’s one of the movers-and-shakers at the Hoover Institution, he’s had to use public fundraising platforms to get the film made.

Now Women of the Gulag is up for an Academy Award, and we couldn’t be more pleased. Women of the Gulag is a story that’s still untold, even in Russia. 

According to Paul, the film “drives home the point that Russia has yet to come to terms with the Gulag and the Great Terror. Consider the striking images of a Stalin look-alike selling photos on Red Square and older men and women sobbing at Stalin’s burial place. There has never been a big event, like Nuremberg or the Truth Commission in South Africa, that wipes the slate clean.  The Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot deny that the Gulag happened, but he needs the Russian people to want a leader with a firm hand. The strategy of admitting Stalin’s ‘harshness’ while emphasizing his presumed contributions has paid off. The Russian people name Stalin as the most significant figure in history!”

The Academy Awards are notoriously whimsical in their choices, but if there’s any justice, I hope Women of the Gulag takes home the statuette in the “short documentary” category. (The Academy finalists are listed in Variety here.) He’s competing against shorts like My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes, which was featured in The New York Times here .

Women of the Gulag was first screened last September in Santa Monica. The John Batchelor radio show featured an episode on the film, and in 2013, Gregory talked about his research, which drew a lot from the phenomenal Hoover Library & Archives, on CSPAN BOOKTV.

Paul says in a Hoover interview here:

My first surprise was that I could gather enough information from the above sources to breathe life into the five remarkable women whose lives I was chronicling. I was also surprised (although I had encountered this in the statistics) by the fine line between executioner and condemned. The two women in my book who married executioners lost their husbands to execution and one was forced into suicide

My second surprise (and this led to the documentary film with Marianna Yarovskaya) was that three of my characters were still alive in their upper 80s and lower 90s. They readily agreed to be filmed. The others were long gone and had no adult children to tell their story first-hand. Therefore, Marianna and I used networking and the good services of Memorial Moscow to identify three additional Women of the Gulag, who told their remarkable stories on camera. We called our subjects “last witnesses” while making our documentary. Indeed, two of the main characters died shortly after their interviews.

My third surprise was that no one had written this book or made this documentary before us. Hollywood has been remarkably absent in the coverage of Stalinist crimes against humanity. Perhaps Women of the Gulag will be a turning point.

Let’s hope so.

You think I’m imagining the international ignorance? Paul writes on his blog earlier this week about a Gulag denier: “A writer viewed the film and concluded that the five female Gulag survivors, telling their story on camera were lying. Such things that they describe – the arbitrary sentences, the beatings, and arrest of innocent fathers and husbands – were made-up fantastic stories. … Surely viewers will not be taken in by such nonsense. Besides, director Yarovskaya is incompetent – a dupe of faux human-rights organizations, like Memorial. In the same edition, another Gulag-denier writes that the much-authenticated order 00447 that initiated the Great Terror is a fabrication of Russian human-rights organizations. So far, Russian mainstream media is waiting and watching, asking should Yarovskaya’s Women of the Gulag be treated as an accomplishment of Russian film makers or an attempt to sully the greatness of Russian history?”

According to Paul, “Stalin is purported to have said that one death is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. We believe that by giving the Gulag and the Great Terror human faces and human stories, we will cause viewers everywhere to think of the tragedy and not the statistic.”

Postscript on 1/14: Women of the Gulag gets a resounding endorsement from one of the former Soviet Union’s foremost dissidents, Vladimir Bukovsky. Read it here. 

Paul Gregory, author of Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Institution Press, 2010), is passing the hat. It’s for a good cause.

He and Muscovite documentary filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya are in the final stages of filming his 2013 book, Women of the Gulag. (Marcel Krüger has an interview with Yarovskaya here.) They’re nearly a quarter of the way to the $25,000 they need to complete final editing, sound mix, and music. Want to help? Go to Indiegogo here.

From the introduction to Women of the Gulag:

A remark often attributed to Stalin is, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

This is the story of five such tragedies. They are stories about women because, as in so many cases, it was the wives and daughters who survived to tell what happened.

These five women put a human face on the terror of Stalin’s purges and the Gulag in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.  They show how the impersonal orders emanating from the Kremlin office of “the Master” brought tragedy to their lives. They cover the gamut of victims. Two are wives and daughters in ordinary families unable to comprehend why such misfortune has overtaken them. A third is a young bride living in the household of a high party official. The last two are wives of the Master’s executioners. These stories are based on their memoirs—some written by themselves, others by close friends or by their children.

“Why film a bunch of old babushkas?” Marianna is asked.  According to Washington Post‘s Pulitzer-prizewinning Anne Applebaum, who appears in the film,  “What had happened since the year 2000 is that history has been gradually re-politicized. And the Russians started treating history that way. And that means that they’ve become more sensitive again about discussing this sort of crimes of their past. For the Russians, understanding the history of the gulag is absolutely crucial.”

She tells us that Russia still lacks “that defining moment, that big monument” that will help the Russian people come to terms with their past.

“I wish to express my support for Dr. Paul Gregory’s and Marianna Yarovskaya’s documentary project, Women of the Gulag. Although there have been a number of excellent Gulag documentaries, this film is intended to tell the personal stories of just a few former prisoners in greater detail. It will also focus on the stories of women, which differed in a number of ways from that of their male counterparts. Rape, pregnancy and motherhood were a part of the Gulag experience, too.”

The film below gives a preview of their work.  I hope you find it as riveting as I do – and please do pony up whatever you can over at Indiegogo here. Putin won’t thank you. That’s one reason to do it.