The Way Back

There was a man, an ordinary married man. He is hauled out of his life; his wife is tortured and accuses him of treason. He is convicted in a closed interrogation room by party member and sentenced to twenty years hard labor in a Siberian Gulag. His whole world was taken away and he was caste from his homeland of Poland to a hell-on-earth in frozen Siberia.
The Gulags were walled but really didn't need to be. The wall was Siberia itself; the endless frozen forests of the Soviet East were sufficient to kill any who left the camps.
With the meager rations, frozen environs, voracious diseases, dangerous work conditions, and random executions by bored guards, the average death rate per year was 20% during the period of 1938-1965.
Janusz's home was attacked and divided between Nazi and Soviet megalomaniacs. His life and liberty were taken away and he was condemned to death in the camps(there was only a 1.15% chance that he would survive the 20 year sentence).
This story is the story of millions.
This story is retold by Peter Weir in the film "The Way Back". There are dozens if not hundreds of movies about Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Sino-Imperialism. There are very few honest depictions of Soviet brutality. The anti-semitic genocide in Germany killed 9-12 million. The Soviet Communists murdered more. Socialism in Germany and Italy was bloody but nothing compared to Soviet Communism. As many as 60 million caste into the furnace of the USSR, turned to ash in the name of equality and proletariat exaltation.

Weir's story tells the true story of Slawomir Rawics. In 1941, this man escaped from the barbed wire camp into the Siberian wastes. He and five others headed South to escape the Communists. They walked through a Siberian Winter. They walked past Soviet patrols. They walked into Mongolia and entered the Gobi desert. They lost three men along the way, in the sand. Three made it to Tibet. They walked across the narrow mountain passes from Lhasa into North of India in Winter, arriving barely alive. Many would ask for proof of their 4,000 miles walk. There is none.

Captain Rupert Mayne was a British intelligence officer stationed in Calcutta who interviewed these three men. His report and Slawomir's personal testimony is the only proof that this actually happened.

What do you think? I would encourage you to give his story a hearing. Go see The Way Back, and ask what drives each of these men. They faced a slow death in the camps, but instead they decided to walk. They could have faced the wasting away of their life, but instead they chose to take their life back and run for it.

I can't help myself. As a rather conservative economic theorist (wow that is such an arrogant thing to say, what difference does my little degree really make?), I can only look at the Communist form as inherently denying reality. They assume first of all that a central planner (or team of mere thousands of planners) can coordinate markets better than the price system. This assumption (no it's a blind assertion) caused the famines in the USSR (5-10 million deaths all due to bureaucrats' arrogance). The second assumption in Soviet Communism is that people are inherently good so we can trust the ruling class (the Politburo). The only minor problem is that in a Communist system only the ambitious men are promoted to power not the best men. The result is that Lennin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and the like end up leading (45-50 million killed as political, social or racial undesirables). Basically, these two assumptions end in blood. Soviet communism has caused devastation and horror on a larger scale than any other philosophical system ever.