Into The Whirlwind
October 5, 2010
Journey into the Whirlwind
Within the Whirlwind
By Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg
The Thinking Housewife Book Club
Years ago, I picked up the books of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg and was so astonished by the clarity of her memories and by both the Stoicism and feeling with which she described unimaginable suffering, cruelty and bureaucratic absurdity, that I vowed to actively remember her forever, as if she was a relative or a good friend lost in a plane crash. That’s why I return, and I imagine others return, to these books every so often and remember her remembering, vicariously reliving that time when Ginzburg was in solitary confinement in the Yaroslavl prison, the days when she traveled the Sea of Okhotsk in the stench-filled hold of a slave ship and that moment when she encountered berries in the snow while felling trees in the subarctic Siberian taiga:
It was already May when, as I was crouching close to the ground in order to cut the branches off a felled larch tree, I noticed in the thawed patch near the stump that miracle of nature – a sprig with five or six berries on it, of a red so deep that they looked almost black, and so tender that it broke one’s heart to look at them. As with all over-ripe beauties, they could be destroyed by the slightest touch, however careful. If you tried to pick them., they burst in your fingers; but you could lie on the ground and suck them off the branch with your dried, chapped lips, crushing each ojne separately against your palate and savoring its flavor. The taste was indescribable, like that of an old wine – and not to be compared with ordinary cranberries: its sweetness and heady flavor were those of victory over suffering and winter. (Journey into the Whirlwind, Transl. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward)
Soviet Communism lies in the dustbin of history, but for all that has been said and written, its full reality has not permeated the consciousness of many Westerners. The extremity of their suffering calls us to know at least some of the victims of Soviet Communism up close. Yet the inhabitants of the dark underworld of Soviet concentration camps, the zeks and deportees, the exiles and prisoners, still have not gained the attention they are due. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is world famous, but other accomplished memoirists have never achieved the ranks of Anne Frank, Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel. The warmth once extended to Stalin and, to Communism in general, perhaps lives on in the muted horror over their legacy. Lingering bad conscience, the close affinity of Communist ideals of equality and social justice to the objectives of modern liberalism, must explain why someone like Ginzburg is rarely read in American high schools or universities. Here is an author meant for the student pondering the lessons of the twentieth century. And, regardless of its lessons, here is a story as gripping as the best works of the imagination.
The day in 1937 when Ginzburg, then a happily married university instructor, Communist Party member and mother of three children, left her family apartment in the city of Kazan to report to secret police headquarters was the day she embarked on a surreal journey into hell and beyond, an odyssey through the famous archipelago of depravity and despair. She never committed any crimes or the slightest acts of political treason, and yet Ginzburg would spend 18 years in prison, concentration camps and Siberian exile. Her story includes all the dread elements of the Stalinist era: the Black Maria vans that carted detainees through the streets of major cities; the non-stop interrogations for days without sleep or food; trial without lawyer or witnesses before a military tribunal; years of confinement in an ancient, mildewed prison cell; near starvation in the Siberian wastes, and back-breaking labor in a vast system of industrial-scale slavery. Through all this, Ginzburg never ceased to proclaim her innocence, never signed any phony confessions or pointed to make-believe crimes by others.
Hers is not a philosophical account of the Gulag, especially not in comparison to Solzhenitsyn’s works. “To be able to encompass the whole truth I had neither the range of information, nor the skill, nor the depth of understanding,” she said. “All I could do was to resist subordinating my story to nimble sophisms about what was and what was not expedient, to calculations about what was called for by the needs of the moment. I took as my point of departure the simple idea that truth does not need to be justified by expediency. It is simply the truth. Expediency should take its cue from truth, not the other way around.”
From this point of departure she gives a narrative of all she saw and a story of “spiritual evolution.” She had been a Communist, a supporter of the regime that made this possible. Censorship made it difficult to say all she wanted, but she is unsparing in her remorse. Having committed everything to memory and put it in print, she repents. Ginzburg leaves us with the truth of what Solzhenitsyn called “the soul and barbed wire” and with portraits of good and evil that seem the human counterparts of the Siberian extremes of frozen forests and jewel-like berries in the snow.
Ginzburg, who died in 1977, was born in Moscow in 1904, the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist who later moved the family to Kazan, the capital of what is now Tatarstan. In childhood, while she attended school, she became a passionate and idealistic follower of Communism, so much so that her ideological fervor caused tension with her father when she was under ten. She was educated at Kazan State University, an avid student of Communist “history.” She spoke several languages and studied Russian literature. She worked as a “liquidator of illiteracy” and later as a history instructor at the Tartar Communist University. In 1934, when she was 30, married to the chairman of the Kazan City Soviet, the mother of two sons and a stepdaughter, she lived and vacationed among the city’s political elite.
On Dec. 1, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was assassinated in Leningrad. At the time of Kirov’s death, she wrote,
“I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I must say in all honesty that, had I been ordered to die for the Party – not once but three times- that very night. in that snowy winter dawn, I would have obeyed without the slightest hesitation. I had not the shadow of a doubt of the rightness of the Party line. Only Stalin himself – I suppose instinctively – I could not bring myself to idolize, as it was already becoming the fashion to do. But if I felt this vague disquiet about him, I carefully concealed it even from myself.” (Journey into the Whirlwind)
Stalin ordered mass arrests after the assassination, many among his most loyal supporters. The practice of arresting and confining “unreliable elements” began as early as 1918, right after the Russian Revolution. Though political enemies were exiled in Czarost Russia, the conditions of their exile were entirely different and their numbers were a mere fraction of those deported or imprisoned for political offenses in Soviet times. In Ginzburg’s case, a Kazan professor had written a history of the early Communist years that contained a passage that offended Stalin. Ginzburg , who was on the staff of an academic journal, did not denounce the offending passage. She was interrogated and let go; then her Party membership was revoked. One friend of Ginzburg’s, a woman identified as Pitkovskaya, was so loyal to the Party that she welcomed the secret police when they showed up at her apartment to arrest her husband. Pitkovskaya was then expelled from the Party and lost her job:
Then suddenly she stopped coming to see us. For two or three days we had no news and on the fourth we heard that, after writing a letter full of love and devotion to Stalin, Pitkovskaya had drunk a glass of acetic acid. In her suicide note, she blamed nobody, treated the whole thing as a misunderstanding, and begged to be remembered as a Communist. (Journey)
The NKVD headquarters in Kazan were located on Black Lake Street, named for a municipal park. On the day of her arrest, Ginzburg’s husband walked her there:
“Well, Genia, we’ll expect you home for lunch.”
How pathetic he [her husband] looked, all of a sudden, how his lips tembled! I thought of his assured, masterful tone in the old days, the tone of an old Communist, an experienced Party worker.
“Goodbye, Paul dear. We’ve had a good life together.”
[…] I walked quickly toward the reception room, and suddenly heard his broken cry: “Genia!”
He had the hunted look of a baited animal, of a harried and exhausted human being – it was a look I was to see again and again – there. (Journey)
She was interrogated by Vevers, the head of the local NKVD:
“Well, how do you stand with the Party?”
“Surely, you know. I’ve been expelled from it.”
“So I should hope! You don’t expect us to keep traitors in, do you?”
“Why do you insult me?”
“Insult you! Why death would be too good for you! You turncoat! You agent of international imperialism!” (Journey)
There were more interrogations, including seven days in a row without food or sleep. Ginzburg was transferred to Moscow, placed in prison with hundreds of other newly-arrested women and tried without a jury, witnesses or a lawyer. On August 1, 1937, she was found guilty of counter-revolutionary terrorism and sentenced to ten years of solitary confinement in prison. Many others were shot. Due to prison overcrowding, she shared her cell in the Yaroslavl prison with another woman, the only person other than the guards whom she saw for two years. “There were no more fervent friendships than those made in prison,” she said. The prisoners in Yaroslavl would tap messages on the walls and they were allowed some books from the library. Ginzburg recited poetry from memory to her cellmate. She said repeatedly that literature saved her life, particularly Russian poetry. She had a mysterious ability to recall the poems she had read, the works of Akhmatova, Pushkin, Mandelshtam, Blok and Nekrasov.
She wrote of this time:
Our prison experience illustrated the fact that any human being in the position of Robinson Crusoe will, as it were, retrace the development of the species, passing through the various stages of technical progress. We made a needle out of fishbone, and thread out of our own hair. We invented a system of shorthand for writing verses (I have comoketely forgotten it now) and brought to exquisite perfection the technique of wall tapping, which in the awful stillness of this place was far more dangerous than in the cellars of Kazan.
[…]
Our neighbor to the right passed incessantly up and down, the creaking of her heavy prison boots being audible even through the three-foot wall. When we asked her name and how long she was in for, she countered by asking which party we belonged to. When we replied that we were Communists, she retorted, “No member of that Party is a friend of mine,” and banged the wall with her fist, after which she ignored us for fully two years. (Journey)
After two years, she and hundreds of other women were transported in packed freight cars to Vladivostock and then by steamer on the Sea of Okhotsk to the city of Magadan and the camps of Kolyma in the Far North. When she arrives, she is so ill from the journey that her body is left on the cobblestones of the street. From 1929 to 1953, some 18 million people passed through the Soviet system of labor camps and penal colonies, according to estimates in Anne Appelbaum’s excellent book, Gulag: A History. (GULAG is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration.) Another six million were exiled to Siberia or other remote regions. Roughly three million died in Siberia; more perished in transit, in mass executions and in prisons. Anywhere from ten to twenty million are believed to have died due to collectivization, arrests and deportations. At the height of female confinement, in 1948, the female prison population was 30 percent of the total in the camps. It dropped to about 17 percent in the early 1950s, when the system was at its peak population. Sozhenitsyn said the women were hardier in many ways than men and could tolerate starvation better. The women often entered into some form of prostitution among guards or inmates or they were raped. Children born in the camps were kept in communal nurseries, where they were fed by their mothers for a time and then were typically sent to orphanages.
Despite the general brutality of male and female relations in the camps, there are sweet encounters, moments of tender solicitude and Platonic love affairs across barbed wire barriers. Ginzburg describes the arrival of a group of men to the transit camp in Vladivostock:
Unhindered by the guards, we stood by the barbed-wire fence which separated our compound from the men’s, and gazed spellbound at the long line of men who passed before us – silent, with bowed heads, plodding wearily in prison boots similar to ours. Their uniforms were also similar, but their trousers with the brown stripe were even more like convict garb than our skirts. Although one might have thought the men were stronger than we were, they seemed somehow more defenseless and we all felt a maternal pity for them. They stood up to pain so badly – this was every woman’s opinion – and they would not know how to mend anything or be able to wash their clothes on the sly as we could with our light things … Above all, they were our husbands and brothers, deprived of our care in this terrible place.
[..]
Each face seemed to me to resemble my husband’s; I was so tense my head ached. All of us were straining to try to find out loved one. Suddenly one of the men at last noticed us and cried out:
“Look, the women! Our women!”
What happened next was indescribable. It was as if some strong electric current had flashed across the barbed wire. It was clear at that moment how alike, deep down, all human beings are. All the feelings that had been suppressed during two years of prison, all that each one of us had borne solitarily in himself or herself, gushed to the surface and mingled in a flood that seemed to be both within us and around us. The men and women were shouting and reaching out to each other. Almost all were sobbing aloud.
“You poor loves, you poor darlings! Cheer up, be brave, be strong!” Such were the words that were shouted both ways across the wire. (Journey)
The Gulag served both political and economic purposes, eventually playing an important role in the Soviet economy. Camp deportees and exiles mined gold, quarried stone, culled timber, built railways, farmed, produced factory goods, and constructed major projects in cities. These slave laborers included common criminals, peasants who had run afoul of the collectivization of farms, German prisoners of war, munitions workers who had not been productive enough, and politicals. Ginzburg worked first at “land reclamation” and felling trees in the taiga in temperatures of minus 40 Celsius. Workers were not excused from labor outside unless the temperature dipped below minus 50. These tasks were accomplished with ludicrous inefficiency, with prisoners who were barely fed and clothed. Many died of malnutrition or exposure. Ginzburg later managed to win assignments in various indoor jobs, in the camp hospitals and a children’s home.
While Ginzburg was “detained,” her older son died of starvation in Leningrad and her husband spent time in prison. She is reunited with her younger son, then a teenager, later when she is released from the camps but still forced to remain in exile in the North. The story of her friendship and then marriage to Anton Walter, a Catholic German and doctor confined in the camps, is part of her second book, Within the Whirlwind. Outside the camps, there was a world of suffering too, with World War II, the collectivization of farms, and famine. Ginzburg would never see her mother again after her arrest:
She was a quite ordinary, uncelebrated mother. The mother of a prisoner. [At her death,] she had accomplished her silent, unconscious feat of endurance in the years when she was an aged widow without a home of her own. [Ginsburg’s father died after the couple had been arrested and released.] But she was not daunted by illness, by age, or by chronic undernourishment. For her there was no such thing as the lost land beyond the horizon in our grotesque kingdom of the Georgian Serpent. All those long, thirteen years, day in, day out, she had never given up searching for me wherever I might have been put away. If her letters of those thirteen years were published they would make a human document of compelling force. (Within the Whirlwind)
Journey was first published in the early 60s in Italy, having gained almost instant acclaim in the underground samizdat press in Soviet Russia. It was published in the United States in 1967 and a new English editionwas published in 2002. Neither book was published in the Soviet Union while the author was alive; not until 1990 were her books official published there. The account of what she called “the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who had tasted unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” was made into a movie starring the actress Emily Watson in 2009, but was apparently never released in mainstream theaters here. (Judging from the trailers, it is just as well.) Within the Whirlwind is read less often though it is a better book in some ways.
“The stones rustle beneath our feet … we are ascending,” Solzhenitsyn said in Gulag Archipelago. He referred to the moral effort, the choice to be degraded or improved by life in the camps. The line dividing good and evil, he said, passes not through states or political parties, “but right through every human heart.” Ginzburg struggled with her own complicity:
When you can’t sleep, the knowledge that you did not directly take part in the murders and betrayals is no consolation. After all, the assassin is not only he who struck the blow, but whoever supported evil, no matter how: by thoughtless repetition of dangerous political theories, by silently raising his right hand;by faint-heartedly writing half-truths.Mea culpa … and it occurs to me more and more frequently that even eighteen years of hell on earth is insufficient expiation for the guilt. (Within the Whirlwind)
— Comments —
Howard Sutherland writes:
I also read with interest your post about Mrs. Ginzburg and her books. I have read much of the Gulag literature (Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Conquest, Applebaum), but not Mrs. Ginzburg’s contributions. They sound fascinating, in that horrible Soviet-memoir way. Like you, I have wondered why the victims of Communism, and of the Soviets in particular, have received so little attention, certainly in comparison to those murdered and abused by the Nazis. In the same way, I have wondered why none of Communism’s willing executioners has ever been tried – at least, as far as I know.
With respect to the latter, an observation I heard at a charity event for the Paul Klebnikov Foundation (Klebnikov was a Russian-American jounalist murdered in Moscow in 2004, almost certainly for learning a little too much about certain Chechen mobsters) may shed some light. Our host was a White Russian businessman, born and raised in New York State but still entirely Russian, who has obviously made a killing doing business in Russia since the Soviet Union fell apart. He was talking about a meeting he had with Vladimir Putin a few years ago, while Putin was still president; he gave the impression – as no doubt he wanted to do – of knowing Putin pretty well. He asked Putin why the Russian government would not pull Lenin’s pickled cadaver out of the Kremlin wall and bury it somewhere suitably obscure. As one can imagine, Lenin’s continued prominence at the Kremlin is a sore point with the White Russians. Putin’s reply was to the effect that Russia is still in bad shape; older Russians can’t have everything they once believed in uprooted all at once – and in any event those old people, especially the wartime generation, who cherish what they imagine to be the Soviet Union’s accomplishment are dying off. So be patient! Once they are less than 10% of the population, rather than still more than 25%, Lenin will go where he belongs. And, of course, the Soviet regime was not destroyed by war, as was the Nazi government, so there were no victors to bring Communism’s perpetrators to Nuremberg-style trials.
As for the former, I think you have part of the answer: Western academia and media are generally leftist, and so won’t be too hard on a regime whose stated goals they largely agree with. But I think there is more to it than just that. (Warning: what follows may strike some as very politically incorrect. From personal experience, I think it is simply factual.)
As you may have seen, Joseph Sobran died last week. I agreed with much of what Sobran wrote during his National Review years, and I always enjoyed his writing style. I emphatically disagree with Sobran’s views of Israel, as I disagree with those of Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell and other conservatives who channel what I think is really frustration with Jewish American liberals into an irrational animus against Israel, as a sort of acceptable Jewish proxy for their animosities. That is foolish in that it misses the mark (Israelis and liberal Jewish Americans are plainly not one-and-the-same), and anti-Semitic in the urge to find some Jewish whipping boy one is allowed to beat on. At the extreme, this anti-Israelism leads to the idiocy of imagining that the Moslems, those unfortunate victims of the Israelis(!), are somehow our natural allies. Nevertheless, much of what Sobran had to say about Jewish influence in the United States is accurate. Having lived in New York City growing up and having worked on Wall Street since the end of my fighter pilot days, I have seen enough to know that for myself.
American media are largely Jewish owned and dominated. I’m not offering a value judgment on that basis, just stating a fact. The Jewish presence and influence in elite American academia is also enormously disproportionate to the Jewish share of our population. The leading victims, certainly the most publicized, of the Holocaust were Jewish. I don’t think it is entirely coincidental that the American entertainment, publishing and media businesses constantly keep the Holocaust before our eyes. It can be very convenient in America today to be perceived as a victim. The continual commemoration of the Holocaust is a celebration of perpetual victimhood status, with all the possibilities for moral one-upmanship that offers. I think that largely explains why, over 65 years after it ended, the Holocaust is such a big part of American public life. I think it is indicative of a certain power that every major American city, and many a minor one, has a prominent museum or monument – starting with the one on the national Mall – to crimes that did not take place in the United States, were not committed by Americans and did not happen to Americans.
Part of the power of the Holocaust in memory, and its power to confer moral status on the victim people, is that it is presented as an event utterly unique in history and unique in its evil. Abraham Foxman of the ADL has said openly many times that it is evil to compare the Holocaust to anything. Another problem standing in the way of presenting the Gulag as a horror comparable to the Holocaust is that a great many of the villains of Gulag history were themselves Jewish. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s last two books, which have found no publisher willing to offer them in English (I have read them in French), are about the troubled history of Russian-Jewish relations in the 200 years from the partition of Poland to the Brezhnev years. Solzhenitsyn is scrupulously fair and even-handed, I think, but also very frank about the collective moral failings of both Russians and Jews. His portrayal of the extent of the Jewish role in founding and establishing Soviet Communism, and in running the machinery of the KGB and the Gulag is riveting, and the scale of Jewish involvement is far larger than most in the West realize. In its way it is a counter-narrative to the Holocaust narrative of Jews as victims, and thus something of a forbidden story for us to hear. For myself, I think both stories are true. There was plenty of room in Europe and the USSR for millions of Jews to be suffering Nazi persecution while thousands of other Jews were among the oppressors in the name of Soviet Communism. I suspect, though, that men such as Abraham Foxman are very concerned that the power of the Holocaust narrative not be diluted by another narrative that features Jews among the bad guys. All truths are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Barring a change in the zeitgeist, I do not think we will see the crimes and victims of Communism accorded anything like the coverage of the crimes and victims of the Nazis.
Laura writes:
It is important to note when talking about the greater attention accorded to the Nazi victims that there is room for adequately commemorating both events, which were similar in their use of industrial-scale containment while at the same time very different, the main intention of the Nazi camps being to kill, not to exploit prisoners for economic gain or punish them for political reasons. In other words, it’s not a question of adequately memorializing one or the other.
The West is negligent in its recognition of the victims of the Soviet holocaust and yet the impetus for coming to terms with it obviously belongs to Russia and the former Soviet nations first. Ian Frazier recently wrote about his travels in Siberia in The New Yorker, noting how so many of the sites of former camps contain no memorials at all. There has been more awareness and commemoration in Russia as the years go by, but Russians, he said, continue to rank Stalin high among past leaders in opinion polls, which is a mind-blowing fact if it is true.
Another factor in the West, according to Appelbaum, is that the Soviet Gulag complicates our understanding of World War II. The friendship extended to Stalin by the Allies makes the story less a clear-cut case of good overcoming and vanquishing evil.
Fred writes:
“Another factor in the West, according to Appelbaum, is that the Soviet Gulag complicates our understanding of World War II. The friendship extended to Stalin by the Allies makes the story less a clear-cut case of good overcoming and vanquishing the evil.”
We chose to ally ourselves with Stalin, in order to defeat Hitler. We made the right choice.
Diana writes:
I am tired of reading words such as this:
“I don’t think it is entirely coincidental that the American entertainment, publishing and media businesses constantly keep the Holocaust before our eyes.”
I don’t think it’s true. There was a vogue for it from the 80s to the 90s, reaching a peak with SCHINDLER’S LIST, but it’s died down. In fact, by 1994, Seinfeld could make fun of the whole thing. Remember the episode where Jerry and a girlfriend make out during the movie?
It didn’t even raise many eyebrows.
