Over the New Year’s holiday weekend, I watched with my boys a movie starring Emily Watson, namely Within the Whirlwind. It is a film adaptation of the memoirs of Yevgenia Ginzburg, available in English translation in two volumes as Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind. [For Gentle Reader’s help, the first volume cuts off about part-way through the period covered by the film.]

Ginzburg was writing her memoirs at roughly the same time that Solzhenitsyn was writing The GuLAG Archipelago. Both Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn had mostly finished their writing in the early 1960s but for both publication had to wait, and in both instances through foreign publication of smuggled manuscripts. Ginzburg appears to have been known to Solzhenitsyn and supplied him with generous access to her manuscript; certainly there are multiple citations to her (at that time as-yet unpublished) memoirs in his larger work.

Yevgenia was born in 1904, making her fourteen years older than Alexandr; he describes himself as being a child of the Revolution, and of course had no personal memory of pre-Revolutionary Russia (about which he wrote in so many settings so feelingly). Yevgenia would have been a fully-aware young woman when All Hell Broke Loose. True, she would have had likely only a child’s understanding and recollection of pre-War Russia, and that would have made a difference. Unless extraordinarily precocious her intellectual quickening would have played out against the backdrop of unspooling disaster for her country and her society. And then of course would have come four years of civil war, Red Terror, and the bait-and-switch of the New Economic Policy.

Still: no matter how calamitous the break with the past, Yevgenia would have been a bright teenager by the time the Bolsheviks seized power. Which is to say that she had not the excuse that children of the Revolution had, namely “we never knew anything different”.

At some point Yevgenia joined the Communist Party, and became a teacher at Kazan University, apparently with a specialty in teaching the history of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Apparently she had was unaware that in the Soviet Union, it was the future that was known, with the past being subject to on-going revision. This was to be the barb in the hook that got her in the throat.

Her (second) husband, Pavel Aksyonov, with whom she had a son (Yevgenia had an older son by her first marriage, and Pavel had a daughter of his own), was a member of the Central Committee of the USSR, which is to say a Pretty Damned Big Fish by any means.

In addition to her day job, so to speak, teaching Party history at the university, and her obligatory agitation on various occasion (among the book’s earliest scenes is her standing on a pile of empty sacks at a factory, reading aloud to a bunch of no-doubt tired, hungry, and profoundly uninterested workers a canned Party announcement of Kirov’s murder on December 1, 1934), she had a more formal side-hustle in the form of working on the editorial staff of a magazine, Red Tartary.

As Gentle Reader will recall, Kirov’s murder, whether taxable to Stalin or not, was used by Stalin as the pretext for the beginnings of what became the Great Purge. And as Gentle Reader will also recall, the Great Purge — or as Robert Conquest styled it in his ground-breaking book, The Great Terror — began as Stalin’s annihilation of the middle and upper reaches of the Party and other major Soviet institutions (such as the Central Committee, the Red Army, and eventually the NKVD itself). True, the killing circle kept expanding its radius and sweeping in people who little or nothing to do with politics, but they were just collateral damage.

The Purge came to Red Tartary.

Apparently an editor with whom Yevgenia worked had written an article touching on, among other things, the theory of “permanent revolution”. It had been published and even included in a major compendium of such tripe published by (and here Gentle Reader must excuse a failure of memory: I cannot remember which central Party organ was the publisher), but the publishing authority was it seems quite a bit more authoritative than Red Tartary . . . a bit like having a Southern Living article re-published in the Kenyon Review or New York Magazine or Smithsonian. There was a problem, however. At some point after the article’s publication, an article was published over Stalin’s by-line, in which was also treated the theory of “permanent revolution”. Gentle Reader must not, by the way, suppose that ol’ Soso, the Georgian seminary drop-out, actually wrote this sort of nonsense himself; rather he had it ghost-written, as with the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Short Course) [N.b. Not having read the book I don’t link to it; it may be obtained through the kind offices of Amazon.com, however.], and then, as often as not, had his ghost-writer(s) shot (as also with one of the principal authors of the Short Course).

“Stalin’s” treatment of the theory of “permanent revolution” was inconsistent with the treatment by Yevgenia’s colleague. In 1935, that was enough to get you fired, expelled, arrested, and shot.

The meat of Yevgenia’s memoir begins to pick up pace upon the denunciation and eventual dismissal of her editorial colleague. Alone among those in his circle of acquaintance and/or colleagues, Yevgenia refused to confess to any sort of doctrinal lapse or Trotskyite wrong-think etc. etc. etc. She lost her license to teach and embarked upon a downward-spiralling cycle of Party accusation, confrontation, discipline, and general squeezing. The accusations against her crept upward from a simple failure to exercise proper political diligence to active collaboration with Trotskyite elements to active participation in a terrorist organization, centered upon her unfortunate colleague, the objective of which was the assassination of senior Soviet officialdom. Naïvely, Yevgenia attempted to fight the accusations, never confessing to the slightest lapse. She filed and prosecuted appeals to Moscow and at one point spent several months there trying to clear her name through the Approved Party Channels. The only thing she accomplished, of course, was that progressive ramping up of the severity of her formal charges.

Eventually of course she was asked to leave her Party card at the desk of whichever functionary she was seeing. From that moment she knew what awaited her.

On April 1, 1937, the expected call came to the apartment where the family lived. Could she please report to the Party office downtown? That day as she left, she saw for the last time her mother, her husband, and her older son. Her husband as a senior Party official was eventually arrested but died before sentencing. Her older son ended up starving to death during the Siege of Leningrad during the war. And her mother died (of causes unspecified at least in the first volume).

Yevgnia was arrested that day and stuck down in the cellars, and her interrogation began. As she notes herself, she was fortunate in that, as of the time of her arrest physical torture had not yet been authorized for those undergoing interrogation. All that her interrogators could manage was screaming and threats.

[Fast forward: Yevgenia’s principal interrogator ended up arrested himself (remember the NKVD went through its own blood-letting), and Yevgenia, then working in the kitchen in a camp, is asked to give an extra crust of bread for a dying man from Kazan, he (the dying man) having heard that a woman from his city is working in the kitchen. Yevgenia asks for his name, and upon being told, gives her own name to the go-between and instructs him to tell the major that it’s from her; it’s her only confessed moment of vindictiveness in the entire book.]

Eventually Yevgenia’s interrogation was finished and her case referred for disposition to a military tribunal in Moscow, where she was incarcerated in Butyrki prison. This apparently was an indication of the seriousness of her case. Most arrestees’ cases were disposed of at much lower levels and locally, some even administratively (it was such an administrative panel in 1945 that sentenced Solzhenitsyn to eight years in the camps). The military tribunals also doled out many more death penalties, I understand, than the other sentencing authorities. Certainly Yevgenia was convinced that she would receive the “Supreme Measure,” as they called it. The trial itself was held in Lefortovo prison, and according to the clock on the wall, visible to Yevgenia, took all of seven minutes from opening to the finishing of reading of her sentence. Ten years of solitary confinement, followed by five years’ deprivation of rights. The predictability with which these tribunals handed out death sentences can be inferred Yevgenia’s observation that the two guards standing behind her, on either side, had joined hands behind her back to catch her as she fainted. After her trial they took her back to Butryki, where by then (August, 1937) torture was routinely used during night-time interrogations. Every night, from 2300 to 0300, the screaming went on uninterrupted.

It’s in the cell at Butryki that Yevgenia begins to be exposed to a wider swathe of what Solzhenitsyn described as the 1937 “wave” of “sewage” flooding into the Soviet Union’s sewer of a penal system. There are the usual Party stalwarts (it’s all a great mistake, my case is) to the denialists (Stalin can’t know what’s going on) to the retreads (the Socialist-Revolutionary who’s an inveterate chain smoker but who, when Yevgenia offers her a pack of smokes, first has to check — via taps on the cell wall in the Tsarist-era prison Morse code — with her S.R. party superior in the next cell over before she can accept . . . and is then instructed to refuse).

It’s at this point that the book begins to become interesting, in that cell in Butryki while she’s waiting for “trial” and afterwards, as she’s waiting to be shipped off to prison. As I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this Humble Blog, what makes for me Solzhenitsyn’s GuLAG so intriguing is its study in human character, both inside prison, in the camps, and in the surrounding society (both in the camps’ immediate vicinity and in the country as a whole). More to the point, Solzhenitsyn examines in very unsparing particularity what happens to people when they are exposed to the rack and pressure of a socialist society. Very broadly stated, he concludes that the abuses were not merely an aberration of the Stalinist years; rather they began almost immediately after the October Revolution and continued, nearly unabated, until well after the Twentieth Party Congress “Secret” Speech of 1956. They inhered in the very fabric of the Soviet Union, which Solzhenitsyn viewed as a monstrous assault upon the soul of Holy Mother Russia.

From Moscow she was taken to Yaroslavl, where she spent two years in prison. Frequently described as “solitary confinement,” in point of fact she spent very little time at all in genuine solitary confinement. By reason of over-crowding a second prisoner was housed with her, and so she did have company; mercifully they got on extremely well. Yevgenia was not fated to spend her entire sentence in that cell, though. As she points out, by 1939 even the Leadership had tumbled to the idea that keeping prisoners in prisons was grotesquely inefficient, especially if they were to be kept in any kind of isolation. By way of example, we see that it took no fewer than five individual prison guards to complete an operation so simple as taking Yevgenia from her cell to her walled-in but still outdoor prison walk for her fifteen minutes of fresh air each day, and of course the same five to return her to her cell.

So the sentences of the incarcerated prisoners in Yaroslavl were amended wholesale to forced labor in the camps. Yevgenia and her fellow inmates were herded aboard a train the cars of which were marked on the outside, “Special Equipment”. There then began a month-long hell ride across Siberia, all the way to Vladivostok. In addition to inadequate rations, they were systematically deprived of water. The chapters on the train transport are a bit confusing (at least they were for someone of my limitations) because there are a passel of women with each of a very limited number of names. There are a bunch of Tanyas, several Nadyas, and a few other repeats; it’s difficult in places to figure out which one is being talked about, or is talking. Yevgenia also has a habit of referring to people by (usually diminutive) nicknames, which is endearing in a way, but also confusing if you don’t have background in colloquial Russian (as I do not).

From Vladivostok the principal destination was Magadan, gateway city to Hell on Earth in the shape of the camps of the Kolyma. The route was sea-borne, in ships which for misery, danger, and mortality per day at sea don’t seem to have lagged much behind the ships of the Middle Passage, with the added trauma of systematic terror at the hands of the criminals (“socially friendly elements” in Marxist dogma; cf. the announcement of the Soros-funded district attorney general in San Francisco that “ordinary” crimes of violence against the person and against property will simply not be prosecuted . . . the Bolsheviks are nothing if not consistent and predictable). Yevgenia nearly didn’t survive the voyage; in fact she spent the last few days unconscious and was carried ashore on a stretcher, thence into a receiving hospital where a doctor took mercy on her and nursed her back to something like passable health. [“Passable health” is an expression that should be taken with a shipping container or so of salt; after the prisoner transport across Siberia, one of Yevgenia’s fellow prisoners was “certified” by the camp “doctor” to be eligible for general work . . . four hours before she died of scurvy.] Upon her return from the hospital to the hut where the rest of her fellow prisoners are housed, they tell her that the doctor’s efforts will turn out to be wasted, and Yevgenia will soon enough be right back where she was.

And so it comes to pass.

Yevgenia ends up at a logging sub-camp at Kilometer 7 on the Kolyma Road, where her condition begins to deteriorate even further. It’s spring of 1940 by now, and in the melting snow she discovers a species of cranberry that has lasted through the winter. So fragile they burst if picked, she and her teammate eat them by lying on the ground and sucking them off the stems with their mouths. Yevgenia credits the berries with providing just enough nutrients to keep them going. Eventually a medical inspection team arrives at Kilometer 7. As Yevgenia points out, these sorts of inspections didn’t “just happen”; rather they were a response to mortality unacceptably high even by Kolyma standards.

It’s during this medical inspection that a Gulag Miracle happens. The inspection team consists of a feldscher, a term the Russians took over from the Germans (think a medic or corpsman in the U.S. military) and an actual doctor. The feldscher is fairly typical of the Gulag run of medical care — like the one who certified Yevgenia’s nearly-dead fellow prisoner as eligible for “general work” four hours before she died — but: the doctor knows the uncle with whom Yevgenia’s older son is staying in Leningrad (this is before the siege, of course), and he hooks her up with a three-day medical exemption from work. He also arranges to have her re-assigned as a nurse in his hospital.

The book ends during Yevgenia’s trip southward towards the hospital and salvation.

[By way of plot spoiler: Yevgenia spent a total of 18 years either in prison or in camp. She ended up marrying one of the doctors she worked with in Kolyma. After her release she stayed on in exile in Kolyma, never ceasing to appeal her case. She was completely rehabilitated in 1955.]

It is as well to note that almost all Survivor Literature to have emerged from the Gulag was written by people who spent some portion, or the major portion, of their terms working in hospitals, or in the camp shops, or (in Solzhenitsyn’s case), a sharashka, an “island of paradise” as he calls it, where he worked (fraudulently) as a physicist. In addition to Ginzburg and Solzhenitsyn, I’ve also read the memoirs of Alexander Dolgun and Janusz Bardach and some of the short stories of Varlam Shalamov, and every one of them spent large portions of their respective terms working inside the camp (Bardach in fact became after his liberation a surgeon and ended his days teaching at the University of Iowa; he developed what is apparently the standard surgical correction for cleft palate).

The above pattern is no coincidence. Early in his incarceration Solzhenitsyn was specifically warned to do whatever it took not to be assigned to general work. “General work” for any particular camp was the basic industrial activity for which the camp had been established, whether that was coal, copper, gold, uranium, or other mining, the manufacture of brick, logging, digging canals, or whatever. Assignment to general work was by and large a death sentence. Between the labor brigade, the common pot, and the differentiated ration, a prisoner on “general work” could be expected to last a few months at most. Naftaly Frenkel, whom Solzhenitsyn characterizes as the spiritual father of Gulag’s slave labor system, is quoted as opining that a prisoner on general work was expected to last three to four months, after which time no further use for him could be looked for.

So much for the narrative of Journey into the Whirlwind. What does it tell us about Yevgenia Ginzburg?

I think that the important thing to remember about Yevgenia is that she was a Party member. And that leads to the first noteworthy thing about at least the first volume of her memoirs [sidebar: I am very much aware that my comments that follow here are made without having read the second volume. On the other hand her memoirs were originally written as a single book, and it strikes me at least as highly odd for a general examination of herself and her premises, of the sort Solzhenitsyn lays out, not even to be hinted at in the first part of her story.]: There is not a single passage in this book in which she questions in the least the very moral premise and structure either of communism as such, or the Party as an institution. Oh sure; she relates the slavishness with which her fellow Party members (and co-workers, some of whom would have been fellow Party members and some who weren’t) rushed to prostrate themselves and “confess” to all manner of doctrinal and political impurities. Nowhere does she pose the question: To what extent does this transparently fraudulent, farcical, yet blood-soaked witches’ circus arise from the moral propositions on which communism, or the Communist Party, or the Soviet Union are based? On the contrary: Remember that Yevgenia refuses to admit her “guilt,” refuses to acknowledge that she has done anything for which she deserved Party discipline (even to the extent of a censure).

Throughout it all Yevgenia claims the mantle of unsullied Party doctrine. Even having witnessed her fellow toads beneath the harrow get swept up, swept away, she is crushed by the experience of having to surrender her Party card. [I am interested to read whether the second volume covers her rehabilitation and whether she eagerly grasped her Party card on rehabilitation.] This experience matches, by the way, with Solzhenitsyn’s description of the True Believers in camp. They are outraged by the physical miseries and indignities visited upon them, but what really cuts them to the bottom of what they are pleased to think of as their moral beings is the loss of that damned Party card. It’s all they want back.

Yevgenia notes with a mixture of sadness and pity the Socialist-Revolutionary cellmate who feels she must ask her comrade in the next cell over before she can accept something so basically human as the offer of cigarettes. And who when she is instructed to reject them meekly submits. To the sight-unseen dictate of someone who is likely headed for a death chamber at some point (Stalin was merciless in his liquidation of all rival leftist parties and factions, from the Old Bolsheviks to the Trotskyites to the S.R.s to the Mensheviks, Stalin had them pretty much all shot) this woman cannot muster the human dignity to assert her own separate existence as a moral agent. Gentle Reader must remember that in those circumstances a proffered smoke, or lump of sugar, or tea, or crust of bread is much, much more than a simple physical object; it is, rather, an extended human bond, a recognition of common humanity. It can be a gesture of self-sacrifice of life itself. But none of this is enough to trump party discipline for this S.R. woman.

There are several passages in Ginzburg’s book where other Party members in her cell or on that prisoner transport take her aside and whisper to her of the need to maintain Party discipline and purity, and not to mix with the political riff-raff and counter-revolutionaries among whom they find themselves. To her credit Ginzburg does not go down that route, the same moral dead-end of her Socialist-Revolutionary cellmate. To her credit. But she does not examine in the slightest the moral foundations of a Party that expects her to behave exactly that way. What kind of claim to any sort of moral pre-eminence does any political party have which demands and expects that its members so divest themselves of ordinary humanity down to that level?

As with the Party, so also with the state and society that the Party has created. In her interrogation Yevgenia is “confronted” by “witnesses” who solemnly attest to her terrorist activities, knowing as they must that it’s all a lie. What kind of a society produces that behavior? What kind of state is produced by that society? Or vice-versa? The whole examination of human character and its assertion of an underlying morality that makes The GuLAG Archipelago so fascinating a read is utterly absent from Journey into the Whirlwind. It’s just not there. One of Yevgenia’s cellmates to whom she became especially close was a young girl who was a Harbinist. Her father had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railroad that branched off the Siberian railroad and ran to Harbin on the coast. The Soviets sold the road to Japan (after its invasion of Manchuria) and called their nationals home, where, Solzhenitsyn reports, those that returned were almost without exception imprisoned and exterminated. This subsequent history would have been known to Ginzburg at the time she wrote, but not a word of it makes it into her narrative, notwithstanding her loving recollections.

I think Gentle Reader is entitled to question: Why this omission? Why does someone who survives eighteen years in this death spasm, the majority of it in the most notorious killing industries in the entire country, not include the slightest comment upon the legitimacy of the entire structure?

I’m going to order and read that second volume. I hope that what Yevgenia has to say in it will render all of my above comments nugatory, in which event I’ll happily update this post to admit my error. But I’m afraid that Yevgenia, simon-pure Party member that she claimed to be no matter what comes her way, will turn out to be little more than one of those True Believers described by Solzhenitsyn. She will be, at bottom, one of those who convinced themselves that in their particular case it was just a big mistake, or was necessary to maintain the Party, or even that it might be attributable to a rogue General Secretary . . . but as to all those other millions? They deserved what they got.

Truth is what the Party requires it to be, Comrade.