Kolyma Tales
Miller, Stephen
BOOKS IN REVIEWS - "Kolyma Tales" political content that on balance moves the analysis closer to the activist position. Ely is not so much concerned with the manner in which courts review legislation as he is with the subject...
...Shalamov's tales are major historical documents, for they provide us with evidence about daily life in the worst of the Soviet forced-labor LlbertyClasszs The Politicization of Society Edited by Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr...
...Such an emphasis makes sense, since the prison-ers themselves, in their desperate attempt to find ways of coping with the rigors of camp life, continually scheme to find ways of getting those things--an extra crumb of bread, an extra article of clothing--which might help them stay alive...
...Both he and his wife have a trained and sensitive interest in art and music," Lattimore said, "and also a deep sense of civic responsibility...
...The effects of this conversion provide Williamson with his primary theme, but this is, no dry treatise on the political economy of summer resorts...
...SALTBOUND Chilton Williamson, Jr...
...Fourteen scholars examine the central problem of modern society--the growth of the state--and its significance for the individual...
...And the soul shuddered and froze--perhaps to remain frozen forever...
...Yet this retaliation never occurred, says Ely...
...The state has increasingly replaced the church in determining how we should behave," writes Oxlord professor R. M. Hartwell in his introduction...
...I sneeze easily and often, never more so than when Mother Nature attempts to seduce me...
...Williamson's shrewdness in handling his material can be seen most plainly in his depiction of one Beatrice A. Conley, his landlady...
...They are Robert L. Carneiro, Felix Morley, Murray N. Rothbard, William Marina, Robert A, Nisbet, Jacques Eliul, Giovanni Sartori, Michael Oakeshott, Donald M. Dozer, Herbert Butterfield, John A. Lukacs, Jonathan R. T. Hughes, Butler D. Shaffer, and E A. Hayek...
...Saltbound comes alive through its people, the natives and newcomers who give the place its ,peculiar coloration...
...I say almost absent because the ideal of judicial neutrality does enter in at one crucial point...
...Conley is eccentric to the point of outright looniness...
...During his Block Island winter, Williamson collected a host of amusing stories, such as the saga of "OneBeer Allen," who would drive into town each night and drink beer at his favorite saloon...
...My language," the narrator of "Sententious" says, "was the crude language of the mines and it was as impoverished as the emotions that lived near the bones . . . . [A] few dozen words were all I had needed for years...
...F o r most of Block Island's history (which dates back to Puritan times), the economy of the place was based on fishing and agriculture...
...Hardcover $10.00, Paperback $4.50...
...She rented her house to the author for the winter and departed for Florida, but she appears in the "Winter" section of the book through her letters and postcards...
...We pay postage, but require prepayment, on orders from individuals...
...Please allow four to six weeks for delivery...
...Yet it is not clear to me that claims about the political system, especially assertions about the denial of political rights and representation, are any less chimerical than discoveries of fundamental values...
...Conley is ci3,ilized in her habits and kindly in her disposition...
...The best tales in this volume are carefully constructed, built around a controlling theme or metaphor...
...dozer is supposed to do a better job than the prisoners themselves, but it too fails...
...I have reached the point where I will Mitchell S. Ross is the author of The Literary Politicians and.An Invitation to Our Times...
...But both the structure of the current regime and the ideology on which it bases its legitimacy make it possible for Kolyma to happen again...
...Whether or not Block Island can be seen as a metaphor for New England and Sa/tbound as a bittersweet farewell to it~Williamson was raised partially in Vermont, and he is now at work on a book in and about Wyoming--we have in Sa/tboundan effort which is sound in every respect, a distinguished examination of regional culture, a searching and dignified exploration of American life...
...Perhaps the best story in the collection is "Lend-Lease," which centers on the peculiar array of objects sent to the Soviet Union by 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 the Americans during the war: spam, white bread, and a barrel of grease that was gulped down by the prisoners, who thought it was an American kind of butter...
...they are a Soviet invention, an invention of the last 60 years...
...George S. Patton II1, Elliott Abrams, Patrick Buchanan, Patrick Cosgrave, John Lofton, Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans, Huntington Cairns, Eric Hoffer, Herb-Stein, William Baroody, Tom Wolfe, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Michael Kinsley, Tom Winter, Gerald R. Ford, Henry Regnery, Roger Rosenblatt, Richard Lugar, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bartley, S.I...
...The experience of Kolyma was never an edifying one, Shalamov seems to say...
...F109, 163-09 Depot, Flushing, NY 11358 journal, yield moments of high humor...
...Moreover, the Soviet constitution is such that the government can still declare virtually anyone it wants toa political prisoner...
...Other stories focus on the cunning of the prisoners, on the strategies they continually devise in order to stay alive, although Shalamov makes it clear that survival in Kolyma is, above all else, a matter of luck...
...impressed by the Soviet commandant...
...And it is still official policy to give prisoners a diet that doesnot meet their average daily requirements...
...But they are also important works of art...
...That Shalamov could actually discipline himself to write these lapidary tales is exhilarating~ a sign that at least one man was not totally defeated by Kolyma...
...Richard Perle, James Hitchcock, Philip Crane, Shmuel Moyal, Hugh Kenner, Fred Ikl~, Tom Stoppard, Charlton Heston, Jim Fallows, Alan Abelson, Milton Friedman...
...Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, Ben Wattenberg, Neal Kozodoy, Alan Reynolds, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, William Satire, Charles Peters, Jeffrey Hart, Irving Kristol, David Packard, Henry Fairlie, Jean-Frangois Revel, Richard M. Nixon, Robert Nisbet, Leonard Garment, Norman Mailer, Frank Shakespeare, Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., Melvin Lasky, Ronald Reagan, Anne Armstrong, James R. Schlesinger, Richard Whalen, Dana Andrews, Midge Decter, William E. Simon, Ernest van den Haag, James Q. Wilson, Lewis Lehrman, Woody Allen, Nathan Glazer, Fred Silverman, Thomas Murphy, William Proxmire, Suzanne Garment, Maj...
...At other times, the subject of Shalamov's tales is courage--the courage to put an end to one's abject and miserable existence, the courage to attempt escape, which always ended in failure...
...If bones could freeze," the narrator of"Carpent~rs" says, "then the brain could also be dulled and the soul could freeze over...
...Something of an outsider despite her long residence on Block Island, Mrs...
...Politics is now religion...
...After finishing it, and wiping his mouth, he would walk slowly and with heroic self-control to his car, and drive at a snail's pace out of town, straddling the center line as though it were a tightrope...
...Payment enclosed City [], Bill me later PLEASE PRINT State Zip | x9Y I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 35 ately reduced the prisoners' diet and changed the kind of clothes it issued...
...Ely is not so much concerned with the manner in which courts review legislation as he is with the subject matter and results of judicial review...
...Conley is present.in the first section ("Fall") and the final section ("Spring...
...on the contrary, the power and prestige of the Court increased in the Warren period...
...They are, as one would expect, an assorted lot, and it is among Williamson's triumphs that he is able to sketch them in a convincing way without gross invasions of privacy, without unseemly condescension, and at the same time without sentimentality...
...In general, though, Shalamov dwells more on objects than on people...
...In recent decades and for various reasons Block Islanders have become heavily dependent on summer tourism to get along...
...Tr'dvLtips Dept...
...Recently he spent a winter among the people of Block Island, Rhode Island, which, we learn in Salthound's opening sentence, is "the terminal moraine of an ancient glacier" lying "at the juncture of Long Island Sound and Narrangansett Bay, longitude 71 ~ 30' west, latitude 41 ~ 8' north...
...Although Shalamov has no illusions about the effect of being-in a camp like Kolyma, he never suggests that in its crushing world the prisoners all behave the same way...
...It is certain too that the strictly historical school of restraint theorists, led by Raoul Berger, will sink their teeth into Ely's vulnerable democratic "presentism...
...Avegetarian, she disdains fisheating: "You put a piece offish and a piece of meat ,in the sun and see which crawls away first...
...Moreover, they are told with exquisite restraint, as if Shalamov knew that to be anything more than matter-of-fact would be melodramatic...
...There are also several arresting asides, and even the historical sections, which on the whole are less captivating than the contemporary SAVE YOUR GAS...
...Alas, a man of virtue is seldom honored in his own town: his withdrawal was always attended by banks of strong men and sober women, standing helpless with weepy laughter on the sidewalks...
...During the first three years of Kolyma's existence, as Robert Conquest has pointed out in his informative book on the subject, the camp was well administered and the death rate was low...
...By contrast, Chilton Williamson, Jr., feels very much at home among mosquitoes, fishermen, and other inhabitants of the watery and wideopen spaces...
...Forced-labor camps, as Solzhenitsyn rightly says, are not a Russian invention...
...Ely does not formally try to explain why this was so, but the clear inference is that the Warren Court's authority was enhanced by the substantive liberalism of its decisions in opening up the political process and promoting the representation of minorities...
...Half of them were' obscenities...
...After 1956 the daily life in these camps became less harsh and the death rate dropped significantly...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 Please enter a [] new Name [] renewal subscription to The American Spectator for one Address year (12 issues) for only $12...
...And yet Mrs...
...From time to time, moved by a desire to be amiable, I have held pole in hand and dropped bait into water, and I swear that I have never known any deeper tedium than this...
...Williamson's treatment of her is affectionate...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Jake Garn, George W. Ball, J. Peter Grace, and many others...
...A representation-reinforcing method will work, Ely insists, because judges as non-elective officers are beyond the reach of political pressures and influence, and hence will be able objectively to dispose of claims about denial of political rights and equal representation...
...These reservations notwithstanding, at a time when the judiciary seems to act as though there were nothing it couldn't do, it is encouraging to see a scholar of Ely's liberal credentials criticize judicial taw and policy making as undemocratic, and appeal for a return to the Constitution...
...rather it served only to reduce most prisoners to shells of their former selves...
...The devoutly religious prisoners, for instance, are generally shown to be unyielding, which often means that they are the first to die...
...Norton / $9.95 Stephen Miller I n the fall of 1944 a group of Americans, among them, Vice President Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore of the Office of War Information, paid a visit to the Soviet Far East...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 37...
...KOLYMA TALES Vartam Shalamov / W.W...
...But if the Kolyma of these tales belongs to the past, to the Stalinist era, it is also true that the current Soviet regime is in many ways a creature of that era...
...This aversion grows stronger still whenever someone tries to tell me of the joy of fishing...
...It is not clear, however, why or how judges can attain objectivity in assessing claims about the political system when in their quest for fundamental values in other kinds of cases, as Ely argues elsewhere, they invariably tend to rely on their own values and policy preferences...
...BEAT INFLATION...
...Undoubtedly Ely will be criticized by both sides in the activistrestraint controversy: by the activists for allowing legislatures too much latitude in the authoritative allocation of values, by the restraint advocates for allowing the representation of minorities to be carried to such an extreme as to politicize and fragmentize the constitutional community...
...But what should we make of our knowledge that Lattimore and others were absurdly wrong about Kolyma, especially when they spoke--as Lattimore did-of the old Tsarist regime's harsh treatment of prisoners...
...Shalamov says the opposite...
...For the deaths of thousands of party officials in Kolyma and in other forced-labor camps paved the way for the leaders of the current regime...
...Writing about his trip in the December, 1944, issue of National Geographic, Lattimore praised the Soviet development effort there as roughly comparable to "a combination of the Hudson Bay Co...
...Hayakawa, Luigi Barzini, Nelson Polsby, Joseph Coors, Peregrine Worsthorne, Tom Charles Huston, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Clare Boothe Luce, Clay La Force, Roger Milliken, Edward Banfield, Victor Lasky, Raymond Aron, Roy Cohn, Joseph Hazan, Eugene V. Rostow, Michael Novak, Thomas Sowell, Gen...
...In 1937, the government decided to make the primary purpose of Kolyma not the mining of gold but instead of the killing of prisoners, especially political prisoners...
...To order this book, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...Some writers of Gulag literature have implied that their experiences in the camps revealed depths in themselves of which they would not otherwise have been aware...
...As Conquest has said, these leaders "remain not only its heirs, but also its accomplices...
...This is especially remarkable because there seems just cause in many cases throughout the book for satire of the harshest sort...
...But this should not lead us to draw any uplifting conclusions about his experience...
...I suspect that Williamson refrained from indulging in it not because he is blind to imbecility but because he recognized here the value of a more serene treatment: In dealing with such a littleknown corner of America, the important thing was to portray it plainly and leave judgment to another day...
...This wonderfully aesthetic and deeply civic couple, in fact, ruled over Kolyma, a vast Gulag that claimed the lives of more than 3 million people...
...Little matter: It is so elegantly done that even a nature-hater loved it...
...I I I I I I I I I I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, P.O...
...As Conquest points out, more prisoners were executed in one particular camp in Kolyma alone in 1938 than were executed throughout the Russian Empire for the whole of the last century of Tsarist rule...
...I feel more at home in a shopping mall than in an open field, where I feel less inclined to hymn the glory of God's green earth than to swear violently at the nasty bugs...
...The north resisted with all its strength this work of man," the narrator says, " n o t accepting the corpses into its bowels...
...At several points he notes the apprehension often expressed during the Warren era that too much political intervention by the courts would provoke popular retaliation damaging to the authority and prestige of the judiciary...
...Librarians will have a hard time knowing what to do with it, as it could be fairly classified as history, journalism, or Americana...
...By virtue of Shalamov's tales, the corpses of Kolyma will not disappear from our minds...
...Mrs...
...indeed, he dedicates the book to her...
...So although Kolyma no longer exists, the demon of Kolyma hovers over the current regime...
...Kolyma came to be so murderous a place not because the winter temperature usually hovered around 50 degrees below zero but because in 1937 the Soviet government deliberWho reads The American Spectator...
...Arrested in 1937 for having declared Ivan Bunin, the Nobel Prize laureate, a classic author of Russian literature (Bunin was anti-Soviet and had emigrated to the West), he spent 22 years in the camps, surviving only because he managed to get a job as a paramedic...
...Almost entirely absent from Ely's analysis is any concern for the traditional juridical values of objectivity and impartiality as a "source of judicial legitimacy...
...and ~ T.V.A...
...Worse, she subscribes.to the beliefs of a moronic cult called .the Great I Am Activity, which deals in Etheric Records~ Ascended Masters, life on Venus, and similar stuff...
...Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales, which have circulated in samizd~tt for 20 years, is one of the few people to have survived Kolyma...
...James Jackson Kilpatrick ALSO: Paul McCracken, Brock Yates, Albert Shanker, Ray Price, James Wechsler, John Roche, Lewis Lapham, Norman Podhoretz, Jack Kemp, John Chamberlain, Edith Efron, Henry Salvatori, David Meiselman, Martin Peretz, Jeff MacNelly, John.Lukacs, William Rusher, Antonio Martino, Malcolm Muggeridge, Doris Grumbach, Colin Welch, Robert Bleiberg, William F. Buckley, Jr., Jude Wanniski, Gen...
...Eyes and ears open, he kept a journal and eventually produced this book...
...not fish unless a companion undertakes to fill the blank hours by reading aloud from a 19th-century novel while I wait for my worm to do its work...
...It is doubtful that the leaders of the current regime would summon this demon again, since they themselves might be destroyed by it...
...Methuen / $10.95 Mitchell S. Ross A city man born and bred, I am not the ideal customer for a book about rural life...
...Nevertheless, it is my hope--and cautiously optimistic expectation--that Ely's theory of judicial review will help set limits to judicial aggrandizement and thus restore a degree of vitality to o u r democratic political institutions...
...In one sense, of course, Kolyma is past history...
...Roam the world 1st class by freighter or cruise ship at savings of at least 50...
...He was also favorably Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...He spends as much time among them as his duties as "Books Arts & Manners" editor of National Review permit...
...Human vanity and cupidity are left here to speak for themselves...
...The central object of the tale is a shiny new bulldozer, meant for clearing the forest but first used to rebury a vast mound of corpses that had, in effect, become unburied (a common occurrence in the Far North because of the nearly impenetrable pei-mafros 0. The bull...
...Perhaps Ely would resolve the contradiction by saying that whereas the political process is an objective reality, there are no objective fundamental values...
...A37 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 camps...
...Alexander Haig, Randolph Richardson, George Will, Sidney Hook...
Vol. 13 • September 1980 • No. 9
