Frank Stein's Reviews > Journey into the Whirlwind

Most prison camp memoirs have a monotonous sameness about them. There are the inevitable discussions of makeshift tools, bone needles, paper shoes, and such. There is the constant yearning for food, water, sleep, and family. There is the surprising ingenuity of prisoners communicating under censorship, such as, in this book, the special prisoners' Morse code tapped through stone walls, or the prisoners' use of song tunes with substitute words to explain to each other about a new warden. This book has all of the usual variations of these survival stories in spades.

What makes this a special book, however, is both Eugenia Ginzburg's fantastic writing, and the bizarro Soviet camp world she describes. Most of all, Ginzburg has an eye for telling detail and for describing human personalities under pressure. She explains how some imprisoned women dreamed of nothing but beautiful dresses they had lost, which might very well help them keep touch with the outside world, while others lost all connection with their former lives and became nothing but amoral prison cynics. Some women fought to preserve every inch of their dignity, such as by refusing to walk naked past the male guards, and failed, while others preserved their dignity by refusing to treat their position and their degradation as a source of shame. Ginzburg shows that there were many ways to live and die in the camps, but that some tactics succeeded better than others.

Ginzburg also shows how the Soviets demanded things that other autocratic governments imprisoning their citizens didn't. The NKVD secret police not only wanted you in prison, they wanted you to admit you wanted to be in prison, and that everyone you knew deserved to be there as well. They wanted not just obedience, but hearty acceptance. The more outrageous the lie about your "terrorist" actions, the greater necessity for you to admit they were true (one peasant woman accused of being a Trotskyite said she didn't even know what a "tractorite" did, she hardly had even seen such machines). So the whole essentially violent, random and hateful system was papered over with the false image of bureaucratic regularity, trials, confessions, and transparent rules, even if all of them could be broken in a second. Prosecutors accusing people of violating the law knew they were spouting lies, as did the people who confessed to their crimes, as did the people who arrested and assailed them. As Ginzburg says, everyone had their own part to play in this grotesque pantomime, and yet everyone knew all the lines to be complete fantasy. Her story shows the strange desire of the Soviet Union to make even its most outlandish oppression appear as consent.

For its penetrating insights into human beings under maniacal autocracy, this work deserves its plaudits. It also deserves to be in the top rank of memoirs of 20th century totalitarianism.