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 →

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 →