Category Archives: Reviews

Gulag Voices, Women in the Gulag

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The first posting about the Annals of Communism edited by Anne Applebaum gave a summary of the memoirs that gave a view into daily life in the camps called the Gulag, which was an acronym for the Soviet term, “Main Camp Administration.” This posting is about women in the camps. Most of the memoirs have descriptions that are difficult to read, but I consider these memoirs to be the most difficult. Women were gang raped and/or had to use sex to survive. There is a very brief mention that it wasn’t just women who were victimized. It is described that sexual depravity was rampant, and that raping men was common. My interpretation is that the brutally inhumane conditions and treatment of the people resulted in destruction of their health, but also destroyed the humanity of many if not most of the prisoners. The memoirs of Elena Glinka and Hava Volovich are particularly disturbing.

Elena Glinka was a young engineer when she was arrested in 1950 and imprisoned for six years. She talked little about her experiences. There is a description of how women on a prison transport ship were raped, killed, and thrown overboard. Elena’s third-person memoir, the “Kolyma Tram,” describes how the prisoners gave the guards alcohol until they were in a drunken stupor after the word spread that women had arrived in the camp. (No explanation is given why they had access to so much alcohol.) The prisoners threw rags on the ground for makeshift bedding, lined up, and began to rape the women. One prisoner was the “Kolyma Tram driver.” He would shout, “Mount Up!” to signal it was the next man’s turn until the driver shouted “Show’s over!” Women who died were dragged to a pile of bodies while survivors were doused with water. The lines then formed again. Elena was spared the treatment of the other women. She was young and pretty, and the camp boss chose her for himself. She “…thanked God that she’d become the property of just one. Continue reading →

Gulag Voices, Daily Life in the Gulag

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Gulag Voices is a volume in the Annals of Communism series edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum. Applebaum warns that the stories should not be taken as a complete cross section of experiences in the Gulag, which is an acronym for the Soviet term, “Main Camp Administration,” because all the writers were literate and survived. Most of the prisoners in the camps were not literate, and did not survive. There are estimates that as many as 25 million people or 15% of the population of the Soviet Union faced imprisonment and slave labor in the Gulag. The memoirs describe the brutality of life in the camps, and the treatment of the prisoners as work animals often results in them losing their humanity. However, there are sprinklings of humanity and kindness amongst the horror. The review will be split into three parts; this part will be about daily life, the second will be about women in the camps (the most brutal of the descriptions), and the final review will be about how people used their relatively good fortune, cleverness, religion, or strength of character to survive. 
 
Kazimier Zarod was a Polish civil servant and army reservist who fled from Warsaw to eastern Poland after the German invasion. He was arrested when the Soviet Union invaded Poland, and was sent to a Siberian forestry camp. There were 108,000 Poles sent to the Gulag and 292,000 were sent to “exile camps.” The Soviet Union concluded a temporary truce with Poland after being invaded by Germany. Stalin allowed a Polish army to be formed, and Zarod marched out of Russia with what was called “Ander’s Army.” He travelled to Tehran, Bombay, Cape Town, and Britain where he joined the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. He provided descriptions of daily life in the prison camp. The black rye bread that was the main diet was allocated based on the amount of work performed, and many were able to earn 75 percent or 800 grams of bread early in their captivity. The allocation shrank as the men weakened, and stealing another’s bread brought a death sentence. The work details began at 5:30 after the morning soup was served. Work continued until 6:00 P.M. and ranks formed at 9:00 to be counted and perhaps recounted if the numbers weren’t correct.

Anatoly Zhigulin became famous for his poetry after his imprisonment. He describes how some were arrested for telling a joke about Stalin or listening to a joke about Stalin. Zhigulin and his friends went further by forming cells to publish anti-Stalinist leaflets. Zhigulin realized he was going to starve to death when he became too weak to earn a decent allocation of bread. Malnutrition “was not on the official list of recognized illnesses,” so he made himself sick by drinking icy water and deep-breathing forty-below air to earn several days of rest in the hospital. He also described how his crew boss, Sergei Zakharchenco, had a knack for laying out roadbeds that required little digging. The crew then would meet their allocation of digging by mixing snow and branches with the dirt. However, he faced starvation again, and committed “Samorub,” which was cutting yourself with your ax. He carefully planned the cut to make it look accidental, because it was considered sabotage if it was intentional. He aimed at the gap beside the big toe, made certain the guard was watching, and chopped through his boot. It earned him a couple of months off. Continue reading →

Homage to Catalonia

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This is the third review about the Spanish Civil war. The first was written by an author sympathetic to the mostly Communist Republicans. The second was a book critical for how the Soviets used the conflict to rob the Spanish treasury while they spent as much time fighting allies as they did fighting Franco’s Fascists. This book was one of many written by Eric Arthur Blair under the name George Orwell, and I recommend it. Amazon has 123 reviews with an average rating of four and a half stars out of five. The book is based on Orwell’s personal experiences after he went to Spain as a journalist. He volunteered to join the Trotsky Communist army forces called the POUM as a foot soldier. The descriptions of his experiences paint indelible images of the harsh life of the soldiers. They maintained loyalty to one another while living in cold mud mixed with human waste in the trenches while dealing with continual infections of lice and shortages of food and fuel. Orwell’s battles ended after being shot through the neck by a sniper.

Orwell writes that the only real difference between the ragged, miserable men and boys in the trenches on the hills opposite his trench was the color of the flags and uniforms. The soldiers in both sets of trenches were there for no other purpose than to kill the people like themselves in the other trenches. People were enlisting their 15 year-old sons for the small enlistment payment and food they could return to their parents. Some were as young as eleven. Orwell says he was never certain he actually killed anyone. He describes how a “dot” that was a man’s (or boy’s) head above the lip of a distant trench disappeared after he fired a shot, and how he heard lengthy screaming after he tossed a hand grenade into a parapet. He observes he only wished to kill one Nationalist, because if every Republican killed one Nationalist, the war would be won. He maintained his loyalty to the Republicans despite admitting to atrocities being committed by them. He wrote “…the foreign anti-Fascist papers even descended to the pitiful lie of pretending that churches were only attacked when they were used as Fascist fortresses. Actually churches were pillaged everywhere….because….the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist racket.” 



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Spain Betrayed, The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War

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This is the second in a series of three reviews about the Spanish Civil War. The author of the first book sympathized with the Republican (mostly Communist) side that lost to Franco’s Nationalists. This book emphasizes the betrayals of the Republicans by the Soviet Union. The book was edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, and was “…prepared with the cooperation of the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) and the Russian Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.” There was significant research for the book, and translated Russian, French, and Italian documents are presented in full. The Abbreviations and Acronyms is an indication of the complexity of the political affiliations of the various parties involved in the war. There are a dozen listings for Anarchists, Communist, and Socialist organizations.

The Nationalists were initially led by generals Mola and Sanjurjo, but their failure to gain immediate success gave an opening to General Francisco Franco. He sent emissaries to Hitler and Mussolini to ask for help, the Republicans turned to Stalin, and the internationalization of the conflict assured that the war would be longer, more costly, and more brutal. President Franklin Roosevelt’s covert policy of providing military equipment to the Republicans in violation of the Neutrality Act and against the will of Congress allowed the Soviets to supply the Spanish Republican forces with American aircraft.

Stalin’s paranoia about Trotsky influenced the outcome of the war. Stalin believed anyone accepting Trotsky’s beliefs was an enemy, and a large number of the Communists fighting with the Republicans belonged to Trotsky’s “Worker’s Party of Marxist Unity” (POUM in Spanish initials). The fact that Trotsky eventually repudiated his support for the POUM didn’t stop the Stalinist Communists from imprisoning or executing members of that group. The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) devoted at least as much energy to murdering people they decided were POUM members as they did to fighting the Nationalists. The Anarchists also fell out of favor, and thousands of them were killed. The impact of Stalin’s paranoia didn’t end with the POUM and the Anarchists. Early in the war he had sent 700 military advisors to serve the dual role of taking over command of the Republican army and providing intelligence to the Soviets while being paid by Spain. Few of those advisors had survived Stalin’s purges by the end of the war in 1939. The only consolation for Soviet military personnel sent to Spain might have been that it wouldn’t have been safe for them in Russia either. The Soviet high command lost 90 percent of its leaders and 70 percent of the total officer corps to Stalin’s purges. There was a quote in Pravda that “…cleaning up Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist elements (in Spain) will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.” Continue reading →

The Spanish Civil War, An Illustrated Chronicle, 1936-39

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I intend to do reviews of three books (of the estimated 15,000) on this subject, and this book by Paul Preston leans heavily to Republican (mostly Communist) side and against the Franco Nationalists (Fascists). (Note that I did not find the book on Amazon, but there it is available at Abe Books.) The author writes, “…there is little sympathy here for the Spanish right, but I hope there is some understanding.” The book is liberally sprinkled with words such as “bourgeoisie,” the French word defined by Marxists as the social class which exploits workers and “proletariat,” the workers. The second review will be about the Soviet manipulation of those opposing Franco that, in my opinion, resulted in emptying the Spanish treasury and victory by Franco’s forces. The final review will be about George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia.” Orwell fought as a soldier in the trenches of the Trotsky Communist army, and the book gives an excellent insight into the miserable life of the soldiers and the complicated agglomeration of factions involved in the war.

One common thread in the books and articles I’ve read, regardless of point of view, is that Spain was used as a training ground for World War II. The armies of Germany and Italy on the Nationalist side and the Soviets on the Republican side used the conflict to test their equipment and train their military people under conditions of war. The German Condor Legion firebombed the almost completely military-free Basque town of Guernica to test their planes and train their pilots in dive-bombing during the 3-4 hour bombardment that destroyed the town. Ironically, the allies later used the same firebombing techniques to destroy the German city of Dresden, which also was a not a military center.

There were several years of political strife that led to the war. The book has a couple of chapters about the unrest in the country. The economy had decayed into a desperate depression, and the workers and peasants had little to lose. A strike by miners brought action by the military, and the conflict spread quickly. The allegiances within the two sides were complex. Simplistically, the Republican side consisted of several Communist, Socialist, and Anarchist organizations. The Nationalist side controlled most of the Spanish military and represented the Falangists (fascists), middle class, landowners, and Catholic Church. It was a brutal war, and thousands of people were tortured and executed by both sides. The Nationalists killed people suspected of supporting the Republicans. The Republicans destroyed Catholic Churches and executed priests, factory owners, landlords, and public officials. Continue reading →

The Loyalists in the American Revolution

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A member of our book club selected “Dreams of Glory” by Thomas Fleming as the book to be read for the April/May meeting. That fiction book is about espionage during the Revolutionary War, including a plan to kidnap George Washington. Reading that book convinced me I should learn more about the Loyalists. I selected the book by Claude Halstead Van Tyne copywrited in 1902. The book was written in formal language, and I wouldn’t characterize it as easy to read. The author makes it clear he was sympathetic to the Loyalists. He writes in the preface that the young American republic made many “…youthful errors…” that could have been avoided if the Loyalists had been part of the new country instead of being vilified and driven into exile. One of his primary references was “…files of Rivington’s Gazette, the greatest Loyal newspaper from 1774 until the close of the war.” The author asserts that most people in America were indifferent to the Revolution, although they would be “…ready to stampede along with the successful party.” He also quotes John Adams as saying that Great Britain “…seduced and deluded nearly one third of the people in the colonies.” The author adds that “influential Americans” and “worthy gentlemen” (the upper class) mostly remained loyal to the king. The book refers to the revolutionaries as Whigs. The Whigs and Tories were opposing political parties in the English parliament beginning in the mid 1600s.

The discussion and analysis of the tax placed on tea is fascinating and different than what I recall from high school history. The tax was three pence a pound, and the three pence sterling has a current value of five cents. A Wikipedia article says the tax was equated to about 10% of the cost of the tea. The king attempted to mollify the colonists and their resistance to the tax by compensating the East India Company to make English tea cheaper than other sources even with the tax. People such as John Adams weren’t impressed, continued to protest that there should be no taxation without representation, and the Boston Tea Party was the result. The author referred to those who participated in that event as “…the immortal band of Boston Indians…” Parliament reacted by passing five acts to further regulate American affairs. The one that attracted the most attention was an act to shut down Boston harbor until the town repaid the East India Company for the destroyed tea, which would be required to convince the king that Boston would submit to his authority. The colonists did not react submissively. One group issued a statement ridiculing the idea of paying for the tea. “If a man draws his sword on me…and I break his sword ought I pay for the sword?” The rest, as the saying goes, is history. The serving of tea was interpreted to be an insult to the revolution, and people began to refer to serving tea as “white coffee” to avoid visits from angry neighbors. Continue reading →