The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III/The Arctic Death Camps
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr & Conquest, Robert & Kolyma
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...
...The two were charmed by the theater (performed by zeks...
...Solzhenitsyn introduces unforgettable personalities in this volume...
...There is Petya Kishkin, the classic jester or fool, who disarms authority with apparent madness in order to deliver truth in riddles and mime...
...The Law Today" was a misnomer for his final chapter, says Solzhenitsyn, because "there is no law...
...Only 15 percent of cases, by his estimation, are decided strictly according to the law and the merits...
...He limns the political economy of the region...
...Machinery was misused, stolen, and lost...
...Compared to mine laborers in old Russia, the men in overalls on the Kolyma had many more rubles to spend...
...He chronicles the succession of NKVD and apparatchik princes who ruled the nearly autonomous prison demesne...
...Conquest acquaints us with the severe environment of this corner of Siberia...
...the revolt is finally smashed with the slaughter of 700 zeks...
...Without it, who can be made to suffer for the errors of the Vanguard doctrine...
...the rebellion ends only when members of the Central Committee fly in to pledge redress of grievances and inquiry into the massacre...
...The wit, understanding, and compassion which penetrate this moral history of Gulag overwhelm the faults in the formal structure of the book...
...The American Spectator January 1979 He also damns the Communists in their own court...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Nobody was brought to trial...
...And why didn't the Czars match the Bolsheviks corpse for corpse...
...Or only when it suits you...
...Prisoners released into exile lived in fear of new sentences, and were seldom allowed to return to "the mainland...
...Of course redress and inquiry never come, and the rebel leaders and relatives of the slain are arrested...
...Strikes and mutinies proliferated, and stoolies were "chopped" by avenging squads of assassins...
...Winter mining wasted gold that could have been recovered much more efficiently during the summer...
...Solzhenitsyn inspires this volume with stories of resistance...
...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...
...The contrasting cruelty and rigor of Soviet exile is portrayed in Part VI...
...The Party was not responsible, the Party never makes mistakes...
...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...
...Some actually feigned concern...
...The preposterous 25-year sentences in vogue created widespread desperation...
...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...
...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 in 1948, Stalin resolved to isolate politicals in Special Camps which were only somewhat less deadly than wartime katorga...
...Neither Conquest nor Solzhenitsyn forgive the quick credulity which abetted Gulag by letting Stalin work his infamy in the cover of darkness...
...We're here inside now, and our conditions are just the same...
...In one case, an editor blundered and printed the full transcript of a trial which had not yet been held ("the murderer cynically answered...
...He describes the corrupt administration of the camps...
...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...
...Do you or do you not hold that being determines consciousness...
...But the book fairly pulses with the spiritual intensity of the enterprise...
...Because they couldn't, replies the Marxist...
...But the liberalization campaign was only cosmetic, a cynical tool in Khrushchev's power struggles within the Kremlin...
...For the rest, the state interest prevails...
...But the horror of Kolyma merits special attention...
...Prisoners died in droves establishing new mines and camps in the taiga...
...Unrelated moral ejaculations interrupt narrative passages...
...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...
...But the prisoners died very nicely...
...Solzhenitsyn says in Volume III of The Gulag Archipelago that he very much wanted to believe that Khrushchev had introduced a new era...
...One expensive American excavator was discovered buried under a slag heap...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Discreet calls are made to relevant authorities...
...A few even returned voluntarily to the camps...
...The same personnel ran the Archipelago, while former Gulag policymakers, administrators, and guards retired on comfortable pensions...
...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...
...Soviet society must ever depend on Gulag to purge those who cannot abide the Communist charade...
...This leviathan engine of death was pathetically inefficient for mining gold...
...Prisoners were simply shot for punishment and intimidation...
...material logically belonging to one part is misplaced in another...
...They found the Kolyma administrators to be sophisticated patrons of the arts, brimming with civic spirit, compassionate...
...The verdict and sentence are politically resolved before the trial...
...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...
...An entire camp rebels against the authorities for 40 glorious but doomed days of independence...
...Said Wallace: "The eight-hour day is the legal work day in Soviet Russia...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Things flow logically in their own proper sequence...
...camp guards, "kids with Tommy guns," bred for cruelty and obedience, who frequently murdered for amusement...
...Stalin used katorga to execute politicals generally and multitudes suspected of collaboration left behind by the retreating German army...
...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...
...This during the Khrushchev liberalization...
...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...
...General duty in the gold mines was tantamount to a sentence of death...
...commandants who exploited their camps like feudal fiefs...
...K olyma: The Arctic Death Camps by Robert Conquest is much more tidy than The Gulag Archipelago...
...The city of Novocherkassk rises against economic oppression...
...For the fact that people will not grow into the shapes devised for them...
...The regimen was relaxed in 1945-1947 after victory against the Germans was secured, so the distinction between katorga and regular camp faded...
...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...
...It was historically necessary, smiles the Marxist...
...Dedicated escape artists risk nearly inevitable death or beating to breathe a few days in freedom...
...Soviet troops massacre over 80 unarmed civilians...
...Exiles under Czarism, including prominent Bolsheviks, lived on allowances, published freely, and escaped easily...
...Kolyma was, in Solzhenitsyn's words, the "pole of cold and cruelty" of Gulag...
...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...
...Many of these present and former ''practical workers" (a self-description) wrote open or personal letters castigating Solzhenitsyn for his calumny against the Archipelago...
...Of course the Soviet government attributed mistakes to "the cult of personality...
...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...
...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...
...Conquest does not write with the vitriolic sarcasm and irony of Solzhenitsyn...
...Paid overtime was put in as a wartime necessity...
...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 removal of the thieves stoked morale...
...Conquest recounts the Potemkin tour of Kolyma by Vice President Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore in 1944...
...politicals were restricted to general duty...
...Existence may not determine Solzhenitsyn's consciousness, but it determined the style of his book-uneven, spontaneous, disorganized...
...material on one subject is divided between two parts...
...But this thorough exposition of the meager information on the subject does not burn with the passion of Solzhenitsyn's work...
...Prisoners died routinely through cold, exhaustion, and malnutrition...
...Solzhenitsyn concludes with a despairing analysis of Soviet law...
...For Solzhenitsyn, the moral decency which restrained the Czars damns the Communists...
...The new Special Camps ironically fostered unrest and open rebellion...
...The history of these postwar Special Camps dominates Part V, partially because wartime katorga spared few witnesses...
...They approved of the progressive working conditions in Kolyma...
...During his brief term of official favor, Solzhenitsyn made the rounds of various officials in charge of Gulag...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
