Conversations at Vorkuta
GERLAND, BRIGITTE
Conversations at Vorkuta Many inmates of Soviet forced-labor camps display an astonishing awareness of political theorists whose works are barred to most Soviet citizens By Brigitte Gerland Amid...
...These "Marxists,' however, were much fewer in number than the syndicalists...
...Former university students, they kept up organized resistance to the camp regime and maintained contact with members of the group in the men's camps...
...It held firmlv to the positions which had once been formulated by the old Russian Social Democratic party, though none of the members had ever met a living Menshevik or knew anything about them other than what they had read in books...
...not to mention Marx...
...At any rate, they showed an astonishing knowledge of the works of Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring, Eduard Bernstein, and Arturo and Antonio Labriola...
...Indeed, I found myself at times almost won over by some of their ideas...
...We want to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of every state, for the state is, in the final analysis, nothing but a cleverly devised machine for the exploitation and oppression of the toilers...
...The state apparatus must be replaced by workers and peasants' syndicates, which will govern not people but only the means of production...
...This article is based on longer account in the democratic Russian-language monthly, the Socialist Courier...
...Brigitte Gerland is one of two prominent former inmates of the Soviet slave-labor camp at Vorkuta...
...We say 'no' to Soviet imperialism, which is in the sharpest conflict with Marxist doctrine, for the revolution cannot be carried forward on the points of Russian bayonets...
...We want to establish a socialist soviet government without parties, a true representation of the people through workers' and peasants' Soviets...
...As far as I could judge, these young adherents of syndicalism or classical Marxism conducted their debates on a high level, displaying great knowledge of the literature on the subject and frequently quoting the famous political theorists as authority...
...I remember one bitterly cold morning in Vorkuta, when we were allowed to warm up around a stove in an old barn before going to work...
...Nevertheless, for us the solution is not to make slavish imitation of Western democracy, with its private capitalist economic system, the alternative to Soviet Bolshevism...
...Off in one corner were a number of young girls, members of the so-called "True Work of Lenin" group (an ironical name which was chosen because its Russian initials are the same as those for "corrective-labor camp...
...When the great Vorkuta uprising broke out in July these former students were among the leaders...
...Miss Gerland, a former German Social Democrat who spent several years at Vorkuta, was released last fall and narrated many of her experiences in ?series of articles in the Observer of London...
...I can reproduce it fairly accurately from memory: "Every resistance movement begins with a negation, with a 'no.' We say 'no' to the Party dictatorship, which has turned the promise of spiritual freedom into a pharisa-ical lie for all the peoples of the Soviet Union...
...Yet, it was these anarchist ideas which exerted the strongest attraction on the prisoners —no doubt a natural reaction to Soviet reality, to the hypertrophy of the state which characterizes the Soviet dictatorship...
...Shortly after we arrived, Rimma, one of the leaders, rose to read aloud a leaflet which had been sent to her from one of the men's camps...
...One of these called itself the "Marxists" or "Kautskyites...
...We say 'no' to state capitalism, for the Soviet state has become a more tyrannical exploiter than the most merciless private capitalism...
...The other is Joseph Scholmer, who described the July 1953 strike of the Vorkuta miners in The New Leader of last May 31...
...It is interesting that this group eventually adopted a new name: "League of Syndicalists...
...There may have been 100 of them in all in our camps, while there were many times that number of syndicalists...
...The resistance movement within the camps included other groups which did not share the syndicalist ideology...
...I gathered that, in the course of their university work, they had had access to the libraries where these early socialist classics were kept and had thus been able to familiarize themselves with writings which were forbidden fruit for the majority of Soviet citizens...
...Conversations at Vorkuta Many inmates of Soviet forced-labor camps display an astonishing awareness of political theorists whose works are barred to most Soviet citizens By Brigitte Gerland Amid all the suffering and deprivation, many prisoners in Soviet forced-labor camps retain a surprising interest in political organization and even ideology...
...Being much more familiar than my Russian comrades with Western Social Democratic ideas, I tried to challenge some of the points in this "manifesto" which sounded to me more like anarcho-syndicalism than like socialism...
...Engels, Lenin and Plekhanov...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 31
