A Glimpse of Stalin's Russia

A GLIMPSE OF STALIN’S RUSSIA

DR (MRS) ILA RAO

During the last fifty years the trend of Russian literature has undergone a complete change. A study of Russian fiction, during these years reveals that the thematic concentration seems to be more on the outside world rather than on spiritual values. This does not, however, mean that the writers in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century concentrated only on the spiritual sphere. They were as conscious and aware of the world around them as the contemporary writers, but their occupation was more with the motive of setting off their convictions and beliefs than is elaborating the happenings of an era. Dostoevsky, for instance, went deep down into his own spiritual and psychological self, and transferred the agonies of his spirit and mind into his creations. It is the inner struggle of man studied in certain universal human conditions that form the theme of Dostoevsky’s works. Tolstoy in his monumental work is quite aware of the outside world, and though he has described War and Peace as the “Picture of manners based on a historical event,” it can be better described as a “peace of life.”

It would perhaps be more appropriate to refer to literature published in Russia from the year 1917 as Soviet literature; With the exception of Sholokov and Pasternak, it has been noticed that the preoccupation of the novelists and writers of the Soviet Union is with special aspects connected with political changes in the era. Instead of the study of human character in certain situations, we find the concentration on special situations and the effect they have upon life.

In an essay in the Times Literary Supplement one of the Soviet literary critics has stated that Soviet literature has become more “closely involved with its readers,” and that it has come closer to concrete and authentic realities.” There are a number of Soviet novelists who concentrate on the Revolution and on the World War which left behind such bitter memories. These novels form a class by themselves and are united by a similarity of theme.

The Stalin regime was generally referred to as the “death of liberty” and the terrible happenings in that era form the subject of some recent books. The Times Literary Supplement refers to these books as “Russian purge literature,” and these are mostly based on the writer’s personal experiences during this terrible regime. Quite a number of these books were translated into English and published during the year 1967. In spite of Svetlana Stalin’s letters in which she tries to justify the actions of her father, all these books leave a very gruesome and horrible picture of Russia with its prisons and concentration camps and all the relentless machinery of crushing an individual. Lydia Chukovskaya’s novel Deserted House which is autobiographical tells of the hideous machinery that sent thousands of innocent people to concentration camps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich describes life in a concentration camp and Evegenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind ¹ is an account of the author’s life in various prisons and labour camps.

The only equivalent to the Stalin purges of 1937-’39 can be seen in the Whirlwind, an atmospheric disturbance that destroys masses of people in a ruthless manner. Only those who are lucky enough to survive the ravages of the whirlwind can describe what their experiences were like. Such was the political whirlwind that swept over Russia in 1937-’39. Many innocent men and women were affected, very few survived to narrate their experiences of  that reign of terror.

Evegenia Semyonova Ginzburg was one of those unfortunate individuals who was wrongfully persecuted in the Stalin era. She was a teacher and journalist and was happily married to a member of the central committee. As she was working under a historian who was accused of being a follower of Trotsky, she was arrested, tortured and thrown into prison where she spent eighteen years of the best part of her life. Later on her husband was also arrested and her family was completely broken up. Her children were given other names and deported to different towns. After her release in 1955 she made many efforts to find out the whereabouts of her husband and her children. She could get no news of either her husband or her eldest son Alyosha. Her youngest son Vasily Aksyonov is now a talented novelist, and has written many novels which have been very well-appreciated in the USSR. Into the Whirlwind is an autobiography, an account of three years of the eighteen that Evegenia Ginzburg spent in captivity. This book has not so far been published in the Soviet Union. The English translation was published in London in the year 1967. It is difficult to understand how after such a terrible experience Evegenia Ginzburg still manages to live in Russia. She is still a communist, and her ideologies have not changed in spite of her bitter experiences.

The book is a very powerful narrative of her personal experiences in the prison and labour camps of Russia. She has gone through unimaginable difficulties and tortures but what is remarkable is not just the horror of what she describes but how her will and determination to survive helped her to withstand the agony of these difficult years. It is the “story of a noble and intelligent person, persecuted though innocent, humiliated as a citizen and as a woman, deprived of the benefit of husband, children, home, profession, feminity, all this in her own country by her own party. She was kept alive in mind and body, by her determination not to let this just happen, but to observe and remember and one day to establish the historical records”. “One rarely comes across a woman of such tremendous courage who in spite of the tortures that were inflicted on her could still preserve her serenity and presence of mind. Her book gives us an insight into the infinite capacity of the human soul: nothing can debase or demoralize it; suffering on the other hand increases its greatness. The book can also be considered as the most important autobiography by a Soviet citizen and is perhaps the only book that can challenge Svetlana Stalin’s memoirs. The book need not be assessed as a propaganda against communism. Nowhere does Ginzburg criticize the ideologies of communism; in spite of everything she is and still remains a Russian Communist. From the literary point of view the book is important as the revelations of an intelligent and sensitive woman caught in a regime that was based purely on a mechanical formula with utter disregard for human values. In this type of a political set up the basic human and spiritual values are forgotten and sacrificed to preserve the ideals of a party that has its own selfish motives.

The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with the author’s life in the Russian prisons; the second part describes her life in a Siberian labour camp. The narration is restricted only to three years of her life in captivity. The publisher in his note has said that the author is at present engaged in writing another book which will cover the remaining years of her prison life. Each chapter has a significant caption which gives us an idea of the contents. The narrative starts with a telephone call at dawn. On the 1st of December, 1934, Evegenia Ginzberg was summoned to appear before the regional committee at 6 O’ clock in the morning. She had not the slightest idea as to why she was called, but this was the beginning of the end of her peaceful little world. The author was persecuted and cross-examined by the party for the simple reason that she refused to denounce Elvov. She was too proud and upright to go against her convictions. One of her husband’s very close friends was her very first interrogator. There were others too who ceaselessly interrogated her for two months until she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the end of the two months the licence to teach was withdrawn and this was the unkindest cut of all, for all her life Evegenia Ginzburg had either been a student or a teacher. When the schools and colleges reopened after the vacations and the town was full of activity, she had a very frustrated feeling when she realised that she would never again walk through the entrance of her own university. All her reserves broke down when she received a bunch of flowers and an affectionate note from her last year’s students. Her old mother-in-law advised her to save herself by going into hiding in a remote village, but again her sense of pride overcame her and she refused to do what her conscience did not approve of. It is only much later that she regretted having adopted this stiff attitude, having come to realize through her bitter experience that it is pointless to use the intelligence when struggling with a heartless monster–far better to use subterfuge. She was then summoned to Moscow for a fresh trial of her case that Evegenia Ginzburg realised that she was doomed and that every minute was precious. When she was expelled from the party she could see that her end was near, and eight days after this she was arrested. The day that she was called to meet the Head of the Department for Special Political Affairs, she knew that she was being arrested. It is the most touching account that the author gives of her last moments with her family. When her four-year old son sensing something unusual in her departure came running to her, she turned away from him and asked her mother-in-law to take him away; she says “ I could not so much as look at the children or kiss them. If I had, I would have died then and there”.² After the routine of interrogation she was assigned to the cellars of Black Lake. The cold despair in her heart was relieved to a great extent when she realised that she had a young girl as a companion in her cell. From then onwards, the author’s life was a game of shuttlecock between the interrogation room and the prison cell. Very often the torture and the interrogation lasted continuously for several days–this was known as a conveyor belt and prisoners were invariably left as mental wrecks after such an experience. After one such ordeal which lasted for seven days the author became unconscious. As soon as she was brought to her prison cell her co-prisoners gathered round her with food, drink, medicines and sympathy. Common suffering increases the bond between human beings. In a similar way when another prisoner was brought in, broken and unconscious from the torture room, Evegenia and the other prisoners pooled their meagre resources together to make him as comfortable as possible.

After a few months the author was told that she was being transferred to another prison. During the months a sense of comradeship had grown up between Evegenia and her cell-mates and she was sorry to be parted from them. Her watch was returned to her and when she looked at it she saw that it had stopped as it had not been wound since the day of her arrest, she then remembered that it was “2 O’clock on that memorable day–the day on which my life ended; Everything since then had consisted only of my wanderings through hell. Or could it be purgatory?” The words of her friend Garey come to her “Could Garey be right about fetters falling and prisons crumbling some day? What would have become of us all if it were not for the illusory light of that incessant hope”.² The only welcome piece of news she received while going from the jail to the other was information about the welfare of her family.

This new prison was as dirty and filthy as the other one. Here also she made friends with all her prison-mates and a bond of friendship soon developed between them. As speaking to each other was strictly forbidden and impossible they would communicate with each other by a series of taps on the walls...like the morse code. It is by this method that information was passed on from one prisoner to the other. One day she received the stunning news that her husband had been arrested. She had somehow resigned herself to the misery of life in prison with the belief that her children and husband were safe at home. This news shattered her peace of mind. From the time she had been arrested she had learned to withdraw her mind from thoughts of her home and children. She had been contended with the idea that the children were being looked after by their father. Only a mother can understand the thoughts and feelings that run through her mind at this stage. She is positively in agony when she thinks of her dependent children. Memories of trivial incidents come to her and torture her–Vasya, her little son, had always liked falling asleep in her arms with a red shawl wrapped round him–Sometimes he used to ring her up at work in the university–but, most vivid was the memory of when she had slapped her little son for having broken an expensive bottle of perfume, and she says, “Now this memory tortured me like fire. Nothing seemed to weigh more heavily on my conscience. My poor little one, alone in this dreadful work, and what did he have to remember his mother by? That she had slapped him for an idiotic bottle of scent. And worst of all, there was nothing in the world I could do now to put it right”. ⁴

Day by day the physical and mental tortures were increased, but, even in the darkest moments there was always relief and respite. She found great solace and consolation in composing and reciting poetry. She had such a powerful memory that she could easily recite the poems of Pushkin and other poets, and when her memory failed she composed her own verses. When she was put into the punishment cell which measured only three feet by five, she wrote –

“Between these walls of stone
All roads are just as short,
By any count this cell
Is never more than three by five”. ⁵

She wrote many poems, just for the sake of diversion. Such was her determination and will-power that nothing could destroy her will to survive. Life has to go on in spite of difficulties and troubles; no amount of physical degradation and suffering can destroy the excellence of the human spirit. At every stage of her life in prison the author clings to something or the other for salvation, at this stage it was poetry – so she says,

“Poetry, they couldn’t take that away from me; They had­ taken everything else–my clothes, shoes, stockings, comb. They had, left me half-naked in the Icy-Cold. But they could not take this. It was not in their power. What I had I held. I would survive even this dungeon”. ⁷

The second part of the book deals with her fife in the labour camp. This is the point at which the narrative of the first three years of her life in captivity ends. She is at present engaged in writing a book on the remaining years of her life in the labour camp.

            Into the Whirlwind is a very commendable and striking piece of work not merely because it gives information about events which are covered to darkness to the rest of the world, but because it shows the unchangeable quality of the human soul and how it can survive all physical difficulties if only the will is there. Though the book presents a devastating picture of the inhumanities of the Stalin era, nowhere does the author criticise or assert her own self. The book is mainly a record of her experiences and feelings in her life of captivity and how she surmounted all these tortures.

As they had not been given facilities for writing she has not recorded her experience in the form of a diary. The book is written in the form of a recapitulation of events. It is amazing how she is able to remember every minute detail of her life.

As a writer she has a very vivid and sensitive style. Her descriptions are always very graphic, and every word is fully expressive of her feelings and ideas. The credit goes also to the translator who has been able to convey the exact feelings and mood in English. Evegenia Ginzburg is a true artist with words, and uses them to the greatest advantage, keeping in view the poetic value. She is primarily a writer who evaluates her life in terms of a literary experience. One can rarely miss the effectiveness of such accounts.

“The prison hummed with life like a beehive. It seemed as if the walls were quivering and at any moment might give way under the pressure of the astounding news transmitted through them”. ⁷

Even when she was standing on trial before a military tribunal her powers of observations were keen, she could not help noticing the similarity in their expression and their stereotyped behaviour. She says then–

“Ah, that was it: It was the look in their eyes: They all had the glazed eyes of a stuffed cod, of a fish in aspic, they were all mummies, well that was to be expected. Could anyone carry out such duties, day after day, without cutting himself off from his fellow-men. ⁸

Evegenia Ginzburg has a very sensitive and expressive style of writing-typically feminine. She has an artistic sense of beauty and precision for details. Sometimes she elaborates a very trivial incident just because it had made an impression on her mind at that moment. In many aspects we can refer to her style as poetic. She is also very emotional and sentimental. “The Summer Breeze,” “The Rustle of the Trees,” “The Starry Skies” have a tremendous effect on her. It is this love of beauty and poetry that helped the author to live through her dreadful experiences and come out intact as a human being. She has also a quality of making unusual comparisons. Standing in front of her judges she suddenly looks at the clock and she describes it as “Large and round, with shiny handles like a moustache”.⁹

The book proves how even the most object conditions in life cannot kill what is good and beautiful in a human being. Even in the most degrading circumstances the individual by the force of his own will power can retain the greatness of his own characters. Suffering increases the sensibilities.

Evegenia Ginzburg is not only a very courageous woman but also an extremely compassionate and noble individual. Throughout her life in prison she tried to lighten her miseries by diverting her attention to the suffering of others. When by a turn of events the people who had been responsible for her arrest were thrown into the same prison, she tries her best to help and comfort them. Such was the case of Bari Abdullin, the second Secretary of the Party Regional Committee. He had openly condemned Evegenia Ginzburg and had been instrumental to her expulsion from the party. When he was arrested and tortured for forty-eight hours, she could think of him not as her enemy but only as a friend. Revenge would be a despicable action. She gladly shares her meagre allowance of cigarettes and food with him. She feels amply rewarded for her action when the man asks for her forgiveness. Then again, in the labour camp she sees a half-starved and emaciated man on the verge of death. She comes to know that it was the same man who had convicted her and had tantalized her with food when she was starving. She willingly offers her half portion of bread to him. She is inspired not by her ego but by her pity for a fellow-sufferer.

The book is a good example of the fact that the human will has infinite capacities. The author could rise above her terrible experiences only by her sheer determination to survive. In her postscript the author explains how her life in prison helped her to understand human nature more thoroughly. “An intense interest in the sides of life and of human nature which were then revealed to me for the first time often distracted me from my own suffering. ¹⁰ The book is an admirable account of the survival of the human soul and spirit in the most inhuman conditions of life.

¹ The book has been subsequently published by Penguins under the title Into the Whirlpool.
² Into the Whirlwind, p. 42.
³ Ibid, pp. 80-81.
⁴ Into the Whirlwind, p. 93.
⁵ Into the Whirlwind, p. 150
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Into the Whirlwind, p. 100
⁸ Ibid p. 130
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Into the Whirlwind, p. 316.