The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III/The Arctic Death Camps
Kolyma & Conquest, Robert & Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
BOOK REVIEW The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn / Harper & Row I $16.95 Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps Robert Conquest /IThe Viking Press / $10.95 Terry Quist The...
...Things flow logically in their own proper sequence...
...Conquest performs rough calculations based on camp populations and prisoner transport and estimates a minimum death toll of three million-an average annual death rate of 20-35 percent...
...Of course redress and inquiry never come, and the rebel leaders and relatives of the slain are arrested...
...And the strapping soldiers pouring into camp who had just fought on somebody's side in the late war were not disposed to "bend over and take it...
...The removal of the thieves stoked morale...
...Prisoners were killed by thieves, disease, and cold in the jammed transport ships which crossed the sea of Okhotsk to Kolyma from the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway...
...Prisoners died in droves establishing new mines and camps in the taiga...
...But the liberalization campaign was only cosmetic, a cynical tool in Khrushchev's power struggles within the Kremlin...
...It was frequently impossible for exiles to find employment on the outside, so their situation was not always better in "freedom" than it had been in the camps...
...Conquest recounts the Potemkin tour of Kolyma by Vice President Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore in 1944...
...Prisoners died routinely through cold, exhaustion, and malnutrition...
...Winter mining wasted gold that could have been recovered much more efficiently during the summer...
...We're here inside now, and our conditions are just the same...
...But the horror of Kolyma merits special attention...
...If Soviet existence determines consciousness, then it must claim as its own the millions who took up arms with or otherwise supported the Nazis against the regime of Stalin...
...Many of these present and former ''practical workers" (a self-description) wrote open or personal letters castigating Solzhenitsyn for his calumny against the Archipelago...
...Nobody was brought to trial...
...One expensive American excavator was discovered buried under a slag heap...
...Lattimore noted that Kolyma lacked the "sin, gin and brawling" of A.merican gold rushes, and that greenhouses furnished vegetables to "make sure the hardy miners got enough vitamins...
...Kolyma was, in Solzhenitsyn's words, the "pole of cold and cruelty" of Gulag...
...The postponed trial was subsequently staged according to the script-reminding one of justice through the looking glass, where the Mad Hatter serves his time before his trial...
...In the later period," as one commandant put it quite openly, "though the gold remained important, the central aim was to kill off the prisoners...
...But this thorough exposition of the meager information on the subject does not burn with the passion of Solzhenitsyn's work...
...If Soviet existence determines consciousness, then Soviet existence must claim responsibility for the endless stream of counter-revolutionaries born after the Revolution who have poured into Gulag...
...They approved of the progressive working conditions in Kolyma...
...This during the Khrushchev liberalization...
...For the rest, the state interest prevails...
...Solzhenitsyn says in Volume III of The Gulag Archipelago that he very much wanted to believe that Khrushchev had introduced a new era...
...For the fact that people will not grow into the shapes devised for them...
...Without it, who can be made to suffer for the errors of the Vanguard doctrine...
...Paid overtime was put in as a wartime necessity...
...General duty in the gold mines was tantamount to a sentence of death...
...Solzhenitsyn concludes with a despairing analysis of Soviet law...
...Some actually feigned concern...
...For Solzhenitsyn, the moral decency which restrained the Czars damns the Communists...
...He chronicles the succession of NKVD and apparatchik princes who ruled the nearly autonomous prison demesne...
...Machinery was misused, stolen, and lost...
...During his brief term of official favor, Solzhenitsyn made the rounds of various officials in charge of Gulag...
...Soviet society must ever depend on Gulag to purge those who cannot abide the Communist charade...
...We meet the brilliant engineer Vladimir Vasilyev, whose unrewarded innovation harnessed great rivers, and with whom the author shared the beginning of freedom after release into exile...
...Strikes and mutinies proliferated, and stoolies were "chopped" by avenging squads of assassins...
...Soviet troops massacre over 80 unarmed civilians...
...The wit, understanding, and compassion which penetrate this moral history of Gulag overwhelm the faults in the formal structure of the book...
...He limns the political economy of the region...
...But the response was essentially the same: We are not running vacation spas, and enemies of the people who have chosen to cut themselves off from socialist society must pay due retribution...
...But the prisoners died very nicely...
...commandants who exploited their camps like feudal fiefs...
...camp guards, "kids with Tommy guns," bred for cruelty and obedience, who frequently murdered for amusement...
...Do you or do you not hold that being determines consciousness...
...the rebellion ends only when members of the Central Committee fly in to pledge redress of grievances and inquiry into the massacre...
...The Law Today" was a misnomer for his final chapter, says Solzhenitsyn, because "there is no law...
...For the Marxist, the historical necessity which restrained the Czars excuses the Communists...
...Solzhenitsyn confronts a hypothetical Marxist historian with Gulag, with the endless litany of suffering and death rising from katorga, camp, prison, execution, and exile...
...The city of Novocherkassk rises against economic oppression...
...The verdict and sentence are politically resolved before the trial...
...But the book fairly pulses with the spiritual intensity of the enterprise...
...The American Spectator January 1979 He also damns the Communists in their own court...
...There is Petya Kishkin, the classic jester or fool, who disarms authority with apparent madness in order to deliver truth in riddles and mime...
...This "jerkiness," Solzhenitsyn apologizes, results from the fact that he never had the entire work in one place at one time-the risk of confiscation was too great...
...Prisoners were simply shot for punishment and intimidation...
...The regimen was relaxed in 1945-1947 after victory against the Germans was secured, so the distinction between katorga and regular camp faded...
...K olyma: The Arctic Death Camps by Robert Conquest is much more tidy than The Gulag Archipelago...
...the revolt is finally smashed with the slaughter of 700 zeks...
...And why didn't the Czars match the Bolsheviks corpse for corpse...
...The two were charmed by the theater (performed by zeks...
...Only 15 percent of cases, by his estimation, are decided strictly according to the law and the merits...
...Because they couldn't, replies the Marxist...
...Soviet exile began as an intermediate step to camp and developed into a versatile device for isolating troublesome groups, continuing punishment begun in camp, and facilitating readmission of released prisoners...
...Through . 1937, the purpose of the Kolyma camps was the mining of gold, and prisoners essential to this end were maintained with adequate shelter and diets...
...The contrasting cruelty and rigor of Soviet exile is portrayed in Part VI...
...Neither Conquest nor Solzhenitsyn forgive the quick credulity which abetted Gulag by letting Stalin work his infamy in the cover of darkness...
...No reform will ever completely expose, discredit, and abolish Gulag, because the pervasive miasma has marked too many Soviet citizens with personal responsibility: Kremlin bureaucrats who directed the expansion and brutalization of the ArchiTerry Quist is a graduate student in government at Harvard...
...Solzhenitsyn was disabused of his hopes when his past-tense reflections on the Archipelago were greeted with a flood of protests from recent and current inmates of Gulag: the usual politicals, the religious believers especially selected for persecution under Khrushchev, unrehabilitated veterans of the Stalin era living out their "twenty-fivers...
...Solzhenitsyn G ulag grew with the rest of Soviet society, metastasized, like an inoperable cancer that could not be excised without killing the organism...
...The history of these postwar Special Camps dominates Part V, partially because wartime katorga spared few witnesses...
...But in 1948, Stalin resolved to isolate politicals in Special Camps which were only somewhat less deadly than wartime katorga...
...He does not probe the spiritual dimension of the arctic death camp experience, Conquest assembles and quotes at length the extant personal accounts of the camp system in the Kolyma River region of far northeast Siberia...
...The same personnel ran the Archipelago, while former Gulag policymakers, administrators, and guards retired on comfortable pensions...
...Existence may not determine Solzhenitsyn's consciousness, but it determined the style of his book-uneven, spontaneous, disorganized...
...Said Wallace: "The eight-hour day is the legal work day in Soviet Russia...
...Conquest acquaints us with the severe environment of this corner of Siberia...
...Or only when it suits you...
...Like Wallace and Lattimore, Eleanor is too easily deceived by the progressive and enlightened representations of the Soviets, representations which thinly veiled the most gruesome reality...
...material on one subject is divided between two parts...
...One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn's bitter fantasy in The First Circle about a visit Eleanor Roosevelt makes to a Potemkin cell in a Soviet prison...
...Solzhenitsyn inspires this volume with stories of resistance...
...material logically belonging to one part is misplaced in another...
...What do you mean, never happen again...
...The due retribution exacted over the years from the zeks (prisoners) included the katorga, or hard labor, examined in Part V of The Gulag Archipelago (Volume III is comprised of Parts V-VII...
...Dedicated escape artists risk nearly inevitable death or beating to breathe a few days in freedom...
...Solzhenitsyn introduces unforgettable personalities in this volume...
...It was historically necessary, smiles the Marxist...
...In one case, an editor blundered and printed the full transcript of a trial which had not yet been held ("the murderer cynically answered...
...The Party was not responsible, the Party never makes mistakes...
...The preposterous 25-year sentences in vogue created widespread desperation...
...Serf-zeks performed every sort of service for this Kolyma royalty, including theater and music (premier actors, singers, and musicians were sometimes consigned to Kolyma...
...Unrelated moral ejaculations interrupt narrative passages...
...Discreet calls are made to relevant authorities...
...They found the Kolyma administrators to be sophisticated patrons of the arts, brimming with civic spirit, compassionate...
...Prisoners released into exile lived in fear of new sentences, and were seldom allowed to return to "the mainland...
...A few even returned voluntarily to the camps...
...Stalin used katorga to execute politicals generally and multitudes suspected of collaboration left behind by the retreating German army...
...Now, the constant features of Gulag are familiar from Solzhenitsyn: the debilitating rations, the tattered clothing, the lice, the thieves, the corruption, the padded work reports, the humiliation of women, the vicious camp guards, the stoolies, the trusties, the mindnumbing pain and death-nothing new here...
...politicals were restricted to general duty...
...Compared to mine laborers in old Russia, the men in overalls on the Kolyma had many more rubles to spend...
...This leviathan engine of death was pathetically inefficient for mining gold...
...Whole nations like the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans were chased from their homes on as little as twenty minutes notice and trundled to distant regions where they were often left to starve...
...He describes the corrupt administration of the camps...
...BOOK REVIEW The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn / Harper & Row I $16.95 Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps Robert Conquest /IThe Viking Press / $10.95 Terry Quist The Archipelago was, the Archipelago remains, the Archipelago will stand forever...
...When Stalin rehabilitated the Czarist sentence of katorga in 1943, he doomed the katorzhane to death by starvation rations and inadequate clothing and shelter under such grueling labor assignments as the arctic gold fields of Kolyma and the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan...
...We follow at length the engrossing escape adventure of Georgi Tenno, a brave and hardy soul who is thwarted when a white kitten reawakens his scruples...
...Conquest does not write with the vitriolic sarcasm and irony of Solzhenitsyn...
...The new Special Camps ironically fostered unrest and open rebellion...
...Of course the Soviet government attributed mistakes to "the cult of personality...
...An entire camp rebels against the authorities for 40 glorious but doomed days of independence...
...Exiles under Czarism, including prominent Bolsheviks, lived on allowances, published freely, and escaped easily...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
