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"Since there are a lot of writers in the room today, I think I can also
confess that I was further inspired by an irritating New York Times review
of my first book, in 1994, which was about the Western borderlands of the
former Soviet Union. Although largely positive, of course, it contained the
following line:
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Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin
killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how
many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so--
so boring, and ostensibly undramatic."
"In the 1930s, however, as Americans became more interested in learning
how socialism could be applied here, the tone changed. Writers and
journalists went off to the USSR, trying to learn lessons they could use at
home. The New York Times employed a correspondent, Walter Duranty,
who lauded the five-year plan and argued, against all the evidence, that it
was a massive success--and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so."
By Anne Applebaum, Author, Columnist
Member of the Editorial Board of The Washington Post
Author of the book "Gulag: A History" (New York: Doubleday, 2003)
Heritage Lecture #800, The Heritage Foundation
Washington, D. C., October 16, 2003
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I am very delighted to be here--for a number of reasons, but mostly because
Heritage was one of the organizations that continued to say what was wrong
with Communism and continued to criticize it even before everybody else saw
the light and agreed that that was the right thing to do. So thank you very
much for having me here.
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I'd like to begin by pointing out that I am standing before you today in
2003, the year that marks the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death. In
commemoration of that event, I'd like to read a very short excerpt from the
memoirs of his daughter, Svetlana, who sat by his deathbed until the very
end. For the last twelve hours, she wrote:
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The lack of oxygen became acute . . . the death agony was
terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what
seemed to be the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast
a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance,
insane, or perhaps angry, and full of the fear of death.
Within days of Stalin's demise, his henchman Beria, and then Khrushchev,
began dismantling one of the dictator's proudest achievements, namely his
concentration camps. They did so for many reasons--some had wives and
relatives in the camps; some feared retribution from others who did. Most of
all, though, they did so because the camps were an economic disaster and had
distorted the society they were supposed to help build.
Yet although they knew this, none of Stalin's Soviet successors--not Nikita
Khrushchev and not his reformist successor, Mikhail Gorbachev--was
far-seeing enough, or politically powerful enough, to finish the job. As a
result, both the economic and the moral legacy of the camps continue to
distort Russian and East European society today. One might say that Stalin
is dead, but his last, terrible gaze still casts its shadow.
Although the legacy of the Gulag will be the ultimate subject of my talk
today, I do want to begin with a brief account of what we have learned about
the camps since the time of Stalin's death, and in particular what we know
now that we did not know 10 years ago. For I do not want to claim that, in
writing a narrative history of the Gulag,1 I have discovered a new topic
that has never been touched upon before: Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago,
the history of the camp system that he published in the West in the 1970s,
largely got it right. Although he had no access to archives, and based all
of his writing on letters and memoirs of other prisoners, he did, it now
appears, get the general outline of the history right, proving that
prisoners' gossip was not so wrong as many historians tried to claim.
MINING THE ARCHIVES
In the years I spent researching this book, however, I concluded that
archives can make a difference. I was able to work in archives in Moscow and
Karelia, and had access to many documents already copied out of archives in
St. Petersburg, Perm, Vorkuta, Kolyma, and Novosibirsk. At one point, I was
handed a part of the archive of a small camp called Kedrovy Shor, in the far
north, and politely asked if I wanted to buy it--which I did, of course.
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What was available to me was often quite ordinary--the day-to-day archive of
the Gulag administration, for example, with inspectors' reports, financial
accounts, letters from the camp directors to their supervisors in Moscow.
Yet when reading these documents, the full extent of the system, and its
importance to the Soviet economy, comes into focus.
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Thanks to archives, we now know that there were at least 476 camp systems,
each one made up of hundreds, even thousands of individual camps or
lagpunkts, sometimes spread out over thousands of square miles of otherwise
empty tundra. We know that the vast majority of prisoners in them were
peasants and workers, not the intellectuals who later wrote memoirs and
books. We know that, with a few exceptions, the camps were not constructed
in order to kill people--Stalin preferred to use firing squads to conduct
mass executions.
Nevertheless they were, at times, very lethal: Nearly one-quarter of the
Gulag's prisoners died during the war years. They were also very fluid:
Prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had
short sentences, because they were being released into the Red Army, or
because they had been promoted from prisoner to guard. There were also
frequent amnesties for the old, the ill, pregnant women, and anyone else no
longer useful to the forced labor system. These releases were invariably
followed by new waves of arrests.
As a result, between 1929, when they first became a mass phenomenon, and
1953, the year of Stalin's death, some 18 million people passed through
them. In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were deported, not to
camps but to exile villages. In total, that means the number of people with
some experience of imprisonment in Stalin's Soviet Union could have run as
high as 25 million, about 15 percent of the population.
We also know they were everywhere. Although we are all familiar with the
image of the prisoner in the snowstorm digging coal with a pickaxe, there
were also camps in central Moscow, where prisoners built apartment blocks or
designed airplanes; camps in Krasnoyarsk, where prisoners ran nuclear power
plants; fishing camps on the Pacific coast. The Gulag photo albums in the
Russian State Archive are chock-full of pictures of prisoners with their
camels.
From Aktyubinsk to Yakutsk, there was not a single major population center
that did not have its own local camp or camps, and not a single industry
that did not employ prisoners. Over the years, prisoners built roads and
railroads, power plants and chemical factories; manufactured weapons,
furniture, even children's toys. In the Soviet Union of the 1940s, the
decade the camps reached their zenith, it would have been difficult in many
places to go about your daily business and not run into prisoners.
THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN
We also understand better the chronology of the camps. We've long known that
Lenin built the first ones in 1918, at the time of the Bolshevik revolution,
as an ad hoc, emergency measure to contain "enemies of the people," prevent
counter-revolution, and re-educate the bourgeoisie.
Archives have also helped explain why Stalin chose to expand them in 1929.
In that year, Stalin launched the Five Year Plan, an extraordinarily costly
attempt, in human lives and natural resources, to force a 20 percent annual
increase in the Soviet Union's industrial output and to collectivize
agriculture. The plan led to millions of arrests as peasants were forced off
their land and imprisoned if they refused to leave. It also led to an
enormous labor shortage. Suddenly, the Soviet Union found itself in need of
coal, gas, and minerals, most of which could be found only in the far north
of the country.
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The decision was taken: The prisoners should be used to extract the
minerals. To the secret policeman charged with carrying out the construction
of the camps, it all made sense. Here is how Alexei Loginov, former deputy
commander of the Norilsk camps, north of the Arctic Circle, justified the
use of prisoner labor in a 1992 interview:
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If we had sent civilians, we would first have had to build
houses for them to live in. And how could civilians live there?
With prisoners it is easy--all you need is a barrack, a stove
with a chimney, and they survive.
None of which is to say that the camps were not also intended to terrorize
and subjugate the population. Certainly prison and camp regimes, which were
dictated in minute detail by Moscow, were openly designed to humiliate
prisoners. The prisoners' belts, buttons, garters, and items made of elastic
were taken away from them; they were described as "enemies" and forbidden to
use the word "comrade." Such measures contributed to the dehumanization of
prisoners in the eyes of camp guards and bureaucrats, who therefore found it
that much easier not to treat them as fellow citizens, or even as human
beings.
In fact, this was an extremely powerful ideological combination--the
disregarding of the humanity of prisoners, combined with the overwhelming
need to fulfill the Plan. Nowhere is this clearer than in the camp
inspection reports, submitted periodically by local prosecutors and now kept
neatly on file in the Moscow archives.
When I first began to read them, I was shocked both by their frankness and
by the peculiar kind of outrage they express. Describing conditions in
Volgolag, a railroad construction camp in Tatarstan, in July 1942, one
inspector complained, for example, that "the whole population of the camp,
including free workers, lives off flour. The only meal for prisoners is
so-called `bread' made from flour and water, without meats or fats." As a
result, the inspector went on indignantly, there were high rates of illness,
particularly scurvy, and, not surprisingly, the camp was failing to meet its
production norms.
The outrage ceased to seem surprising after I had read several dozen similar
reports, each of which used more or less the same sort of language and ended
with more or less the same ritual conclusion: Conditions needed to be
improved so that prisoners would work harder, and so that production norms
would be met. Yet very little was actually done.
The reports reminded me of the inspectors of Gogol's era: The forms were
observed, the reports were filed, and effects on actual human beings were
ignored. Camp commanders were routinely reprimanded for failing to improve
living conditions, living conditions continued to fail to improve, and the
discussion ended there.
The level of detail also, however, clears up any remaining doubt about who
was in control of the camp, the central government or the regional bosses.
Back in Moscow, they knew what the camps were like, and they knew in great
detail.
DISTORTION OF THE ECONOMY
Without question, the expansion of the camps distorted the Soviet economy.
With so much cheap labor available, the Soviet economy took far longer than
it should have to become mechanized. Problems were solved by calling for
more workers. With so many poorly trained people working under coercion,
construction was not of the highest quality either. By one account, labor
productivity among free workers in the forestry industry was nearly three
times that of the prisoners working in the forestry camps.
But the camps also distorted the way people in the lands of the former
Soviet Union think about economics, a point I would like to illustrate by
describing a trip I took a couple of years ago to the city of Vorkuta, on
the Arctic Circle.
Vorkuta's history begins in 1931, when a group of colonists first arrived in the region by boat, up the northern waterways. Although even the tsars had
known about the region's enormous coal reserves, no one had managed to work
out precisely how to get the coal out of the ground, given the sheer horror
of life in a place where temperatures regularly drop to -30 degrees or -40
degrees in the winter, where the sun does not shine for six months of the
year, and where--as I can testify--in the summertime flies and mosquitoes
travel in great dark clouds.
But Stalin found a way by making use of another sort of vast reserve.
Vorkuta's 23 original settlers were, of course, prisoners, and the leaders
of that founding expedition were, of course, secret policemen. Over the
subsequent two and a half decades, a million more prisoners passed through
Vorkuta, one of the two or three most notorious hubs of the Gulag.
With the help of prisoners, the Soviet authorities built a city with shops
and schools and later swimming pools. Yet the cost of heating shoddy Soviet
apartment blocks for 11 months of the year was astronomical, far more than
the value of the coal itself. The city's infrastructure, built on constantly
shifting permafrost, required huge efforts to maintain. Miners could,
instead, have been flown in and out on two-week shifts, as they are in
Canada or Alaska. Nevertheless, Vorkuta, now a city of 200,000 people, kept
going throughout the 1970s and 1980s and still exists today.
The truth, of course, is that Vorkuta was and still is completely
unnecessary. Why build kindergartens and university lecture halls in the
tundra? Why build puppet theatres? Vorkuta has three. Yet in Vorkuta, you
cannot ask such questions, even now.
You cannot ask them, for example, of Zhenya, a retired geologist with whom I
spent the better part of a day. Together, we walked around the city, around
the prisoners' cemeteries, around the ruined geological institute--a
once-solid structure, complete with a columned, Stalinist portico and a red
star on the pediment.
Although her Polish parents had been arrested and deported here in the
1940s, although she knows and willingly recounts the city's history, Zhenya
nevertheless spent a good part of the day railing against the
"thief-democrats" and "greedy bureaucrats" who had, rather sensibly, decided
to shut the institute down. If your whole life has been associated with a
place, it is hard to admit that the place need never have existed.
CONFUSED MEMORY OF THE PAST
But if Zhenya, herself the daughter of victims, was unable to understand why
her city now needs to be dismantled, then who can? And this question brings
me to the next part of my talk, in which I would like to ask why the Gulag,
about which historians now know so much, and whose economic impact we now
understand so much better, is so seldom debated and discussed by Russians.
One of the things that always strikes contemporary visitors to Russia is the
lack of monuments to the victims of Stalin's execution squads and
concentration camps. There are a few scattered memorials, but no national
monument or place of mourning. Worse, 15 years after glasnost, 10 years
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been no trials, no truth
and reconciliation commissions, no government inquiries into what happened
in the past, and no public debate.
This was not always the case. During the 1980s, when glasnost was just
beginning in Russia, Gulag survivors' memoirs sold millions of copies, and a
new revelation about the past could sell out a newspaper. But more recently,
history books containing similar "revelations" are badly reviewed or
ignored. The president of Russia is a former KGB agent who describes himself
as a "Chekist," the word for Stalin's political police.
The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Life is genuinely difficult in
Russia today, and most Russians, who spend all of their time trying to cope,
do not want to discuss the past. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and
a great deal has happened since it ended. Post-Soviet Russia is not the same
as post-Nazi Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities were still
in people's minds.
The memory of the camps is also confused in Russia by the presence of so
many other atrocities: war, famine, and collectivization. Why should camp
survivors get special treatment? It is further confused by the link made, in
some people's minds, between the discussion of the past that took place in
the 1980s and the total collapse of the economy in the 1990s. What was the
point of talking about all of that, many people said to me: It didn't get us
anywhere.
But there is also a question of pride. Like Zhenya, many experienced the
collapse of the Soviet Union as a personal blow. Perhaps the old system was
bad, they now feel, but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not
powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad.
Far and away, though, the most important explanation for the lack of debate
is not the fears and anxieties of the ordinary Russian, but the power and
prestige of those now ruling the country. In December 2001, on the 10th
anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 13 of the 15 former
Soviet republics were run by former communists, as were many of the
satellite states.
To put it bluntly, former communists have no interest in discussing the
past. It tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their image as "reformers."
Sometimes they end discussion subtly; sometimes they do so bluntly. Just a
few weeks ago, Hungary's new post-communist government cut the funding and
fired the board of directors of Budapest's new museum dedicated to the
history of communism and fascism, which the previous government had erected
at great cost.
And this matters: The failure to acknowledge or repent affects politics and
society across the region. Would the Russians truly be able to conduct a war
in Chechnya if they remembered what Stalin did to the Chechens? During the
Second World War, Stalin accused the Chechens of collaboration with the
Germans, but instead of punishing collaborators--if there were any--he
punished the whole nation. Every Chechen man, woman, and child was put on a
truck or a cattle car and sent to the deserts of Central Asia. Thousands
wound up in camps. Half of them died. To invade Chechnya again, at the end
of the 20th century, was the moral equivalent of Germany re-invading Poland,
yet very few Russians saw it that way.
Yet the failure to fully absorb the lessons of the past has consequences for
ordinary Russians too. It can be argued, for example, that the Russian
failure to delve properly into the past also explains the Russian
insensitivity to the slow growth of censorship, and to the continued, heavy
presence of the secret police.
It may also explain the stunning absence of judicial and police reform. In
1998, I visited a criminal prison in Arkhangelsk and emerged reeling from
what I'd seen. The women's cells, with their hot, heavy air and powerful
smells, made me feel as if I were walking back into the past. Next door, in
the juvenile cell, I met a sobbing, 15-year-old girl who had been accused of
stealing the ruble equivalent of $10. She had been in jail, without a
hearing, for a week.
Afterwards, I spoke to the prison boss. It all came down to money, he told
me. The prison warders were rude because they were badly paid. The
ventilation was bad because the building was old and needed repairs.
Electricity was expensive, so the corridors were dark. Trials were delayed
because there were not enough judges.
I was not convinced. Money is a problem, but it is not the whole story. If
Russia's prisons look like a scene from a Gulag memoir, and if Russia's
courts and criminal investigations are a sham, that is partly because the
Soviet legacy does not haunt Russia's criminal police, secret police,
judges, jailers, or even businessmen. But then, very few people in
contemporary Russia feel the past to be a burden or an obligation at all.
Like a great, unopened Pandora's box, the past lies in wait for the next
generation.
LESSONS FOR THE WEST
But do we, in the West, remember the Soviet past any better? One of the
reasons I wrote this book was because I really encountered this subject only
while living in Eastern Europe, and I started to wonder why.
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Since there are a lot of writers in the room today, I think I can also
confess that I was further inspired by an irritating New York Times review
of my first book, in 1994, which was about the Western borderlands of the
former Soviet Union. Although largely positive, of course, it contained the
following line:
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Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin
killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how
many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so--
so boring, and ostensibly undramatic.
Were Stalin's murders boring? Many people think so. Put differently, the
crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes
of Hitler.
Ken Livingstone, a former British member of Parliament, now Mayor of London,
once struggled to explain the difference to me. Yes, the Nazis were "evil,"
he said. But the Soviet Union was "deformed." That view echoes the feeling
that many people have, even people who are not old-fashioned members of the
British Labor Party: The Soviet Union simply went wrong somehow, but it was
not fundamentally wrong in the way that Hitler's Germany was wrong.
Until recently, it was possible to explain this absence of popular feeling
about the tragedy of European communism in the West as the logical result of
a particular set of circumstances. The passage of time is part of it:
Communist regimes really did grow less reprehensible as the years went by.
Nobody was very frightened of General Jaruzelski, or even of Brezhnev,
although both were responsible for a great deal of destruction. Besides,
archives were closed. Access to camp sites was forbidden. No television
cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they had done in
Germany at the end of the Second World War. No images, in turn, meant that
the subject, in our image-driven culture, didn't really exist either.
But ideology twisted the ways in which we understood Soviet and East
European history as well. In fact, in the 1920s, a great deal was known in
the West about the bloodiness of Lenin's revolution. Western socialists,
many of whose brethren had been jailed by the Bolsheviks, protested loudly
and strongly against the crimes being committed then.
In the 1930s, however, as Americans became more interested in learning how
socialism could be applied here, the tone changed. Writers and journalists
went off to the USSR, trying to learn lessons they could use at home. The
New York Times employed a correspondent, Walter Duranty, who lauded the
five-year plan and argued, against all the evidence, that it was a massive
success--and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a part of the Western Left struggled to
explain, and sometimes to excuse, the camps and the terror that created them
precisely because they wanted to try some aspects of the Soviet experiment
at home. In 1936, after millions of Soviet peasants had died of famine, the
British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb published a vast survey of the
Soviet Union, which explained, among other things, how the "downtrodden
Russian peasant is gradually acquiring a sense of political freedom."
These sentiments reached their peak during the Second World War, when Stalin
was our ally and we had other reasons to ignore the truth about his
repressive regime. In 1944, the American Vice President, Henry Wallace,
actually went to Kolyma, one of the most notorious camps, during a trip
across the USSR.
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Imagining he was visiting some kind of industrial complex, he told his hosts
that "Soviet Asia," as he called it, reminded him of the Wild West:
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The vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide
rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate--from tropical to
polar--her inexhaustible wealth, remind me of my homeland.
According to a report that the boss of Kolyma later wrote for Beria, then
the head of the security services, Wallace did ask to see prisoners, but was
kept away. He was not alone in refusing to see the truth about Stalin's
system: Roosevelt and Churchill had very cordial relations with Stalin too.
All of that contributed to our firm conviction that the Second World War was
a wholly just war, and even today few want that conviction shaken. We
remember D-Day, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the children
welcoming American GIs with cheers on the streets. We do not remember that
the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our
enemy, were liberated. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass
murderer with the help of another.
During the Cold War, it is true, our awareness of Soviet atrocities went
up--but in the 1960s, they receded again. Even in the 1980s, there were
still American academics that went on describing the advantages of East
German health care or Polish peace initiatives.
In the academic world, Soviet historians who wrote about the camps generally
divided up into two groups: those who wrote about the camps as criminal and
those who downplayed them, if not because they were actually pro-Soviet,
then because they were opposed to America's role in the Cold War, or perhaps
to Ronald Reagan. Right up to the very end, our views of the Soviet Union
and its repressive system always had more to do with American politics and
American ideological struggles than they did with the Soviet Union itself.
Together, all of these explanations once made a kind of sense. When I first
began to think seriously about this subject, as communism was collapsing in
1989, I even saw the logic of them myself: It seemed natural, obvious, that
I should know very little about Stalin's Soviet Union, whose secret history
made it all the more intriguing.
More than a decade later, I feel very differently. World War II now belongs
to a previous generation. The Cold War is over too, and the alliances and
international fault lines it produced have shifted for good. The Western
Left and the Western Right now compete over different issues. At the same
time, the emergence of new terrorist threats to Western civilization make
the study of the old communist threats to Western civilization all the more
relevant. It is time, it seems to me, to stop looking at the history of the
Soviet Union through the narrow lens of American politics and start seeing
it for what it really was.
I should say, of course, that our failure in the West to understand the
magnitude of what happened in Central Europe does not have the same profound
implications for our way of life as it does in Russia. But there will be
consequences.
For one, our understanding of what is happening now in the former Soviet
Union is distorted by our misunderstanding of its history. Again, if we
really felt--if we really, viscerally felt--that what Stalin did to the
Chechens amounted to genocide, it is not only Vladimir Putin who would be
unable to do the same things to them now, but we who would be unable to sit
back with any equanimity and watch them.
In the end, the foreign policy consequences are not the most important. For
if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will forget our own history too.
Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing
politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA,
invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans to go along
with it? Or was there something more important happening?
Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British
Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was "one of the most
unnecessary conflicts of all time." Gore Vidal has also described the
battles of the Cold War as "forty years of mindless wars which created
a debt of $5 trillion." Already, we are forgetting what it was that
mobilized
us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of "the West" together for
so
long.
And this is not only about the politics of the West. For if we do not study
the history of the Gulag, some of what we know about mankind itself will be
distorted. Every one of the 20th century's mass tragedies was unique: the
Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the
Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, the Rwandan
massacres. Every one of these events had different historical and
philosophical origins, and arose in circumstances that will never be
repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow
men has been--and will be--repeated again and again.
Yet the more we understand how different societies have transformed their
neighbors and fellow citizens into objects, the more we know of the specific
circumstances which led to each episode of mass murder, the better we will
understand the darker side of our own human nature. I wrote my book about
the Gulag not "so that it will not happen again," as the cliche has it, but
because it probably will happen again. We need to know why--and each story,
each memoir, each document is a piece of the puzzle. Without them, we will
wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of The
Washington Post. She is the author of the book "Gulag: A History" (New
York: Doubleday, 2003).
The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/RussiaandEurasia/HL-800.cfm
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