The first two parts of the review of Anne Applebaum’s collection of writings by survivors of the Soviet slave complex were about daily life and women in the Gulag, which Applebaum writes is an acronym for the Soviet term “Main Camp Administration.” (Wikipedia says it is “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies.”) The people who wrote the memoirs were remarkable because they were literate and they survived. A large number of the estimated 25 million people who were sentenced to the concentration camps, labor camps, exile villages, criminal and political camps, and prisons did not survive. One writer observed only a few people in the slave camps would survive the first few months of imprisonment. There was mention of an unfunny joke that the first few years were the hardest. This part of the review is about how people used cleverness and religious faith to survive.

Dimitry S. Likhachev was an intellectual who was imprisoned after he was accused of counter-revolutionary activities. He and fellow literature club members saluted one another in ancient Greek, which was interpreted to mean he was an enemy of the state. He was arrested after an acquaintance visited him and asked whether his library had anything anti-Soviet after looking at a copy of Henry Ford’s The International Jew, describes Jews as “vicious capitalists and Bolsheviks.” He describes his initial imprisonment and some of the people in detail. One person in his cell had been the head of the Petrograd Boy Scouts. He mentions that a favorite game of the “warders” was to sweep a rat back and forth with brooms as it attempted escape until the rat died of exhaustion. He writes about the irony that he was arrested for meeting once weekly for intellectual discussions to be thrown in with people who had similar discussions continually while in prison. Likhachev was released after four years and became “…Russia’s best-known literary historian, critic, and scholar.” Continue reading →

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 →