Varlam Shalamov survived the Soviet Gulags, and shares the horror with us readers

Kolyma Stories: Volume One – Varlam Shalamov - Translated by Donald Rayfield (2018)

            A few years ago I read and reviewed the account of one Ferdinand Ossendowski, titled Beasts, Men, And Gods, which dealt with the author’s experiences escaping into the Russian wilderness to avoid the killing of intellectuals fermented by the Bolshevik Revolution.  That first-hand account led me to look for more books written by survivors of Russian pogroms, prison camps, and Siberian death camps.  I read and reviewed A World Apart, by Gustav Herling, an account of his time spent in a Soviet Gulag and the institutionalized insanity that was the Soviet criminal system.  It was an amazing book.  From that I moved on to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Whereas the previous books are biographical accounts, this work is a work of fiction, but it carries every horror and trauma that Solzhenitsyn suffered when he himself was a prisoner at a Soviet Prison Camp.  In doing some research, I found that the book I just read, the Kolyma Stories, by Varlam Shalamov, had recently been published in an English translation. 

            Varlam Shalamov was a Gulag prisoner for 15 years, enduring 6 years as slave labor in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most inhospitable corners of Siberia.  After he was released he began writing poetry and prose, including many of the stories contained in this volume.  The harassment from the KGB never stopped, and because of this he was unable to publish his work in the Soviet Union.  At home his work was stashed away in the Russian State Archives of Literature and Arts, likely never to be seen again.  These stories were leaked/smuggled out and printed in Germany and France under a pseudonym, with Shalamov never receiving any payment.  In the late 1970’s, Shalamov disappeared into the state-run homes for the elderly, the conditions of which were “as bad as the worst institutions in the Gulag”. (Donald Rayfield – 2018).  These stories were finally published in the late 1980’s in Russia, and shared with the world Shalamov’s unvarnished and unflinching look back at his Gulag experiences.  While these are all “stories,” pretty much everything that happens in them was something witnessed or experienced by Shalamov himself.

            Many of the stories are very short.  Some are two pages long.  What they lack in length they make up for in power.  There is little moralizing in these stories.  The horror is described in plain language, much like Vonnegut did when describing the trauma of the Dresden fire bombings.The plain, insane truth of what humans are forced to do when under totalitarian control is enough to scare the shit out of anyone.  Institutional horror is the worst creation of humanity.  But, when it is backed up by a Byzantine and self-negating government structure?  That is when the human mind shrinks to its smallest, only seeking to survive another day, another hour, another minute.  There is no thought for the life of freedom.  Those that dream of freedom are the first to die.  There is no escape from the forced labor.  Those too sick to work were often treated like lame horses, as wastes of food and resources.  These tales serve as a reminder of how ugly our shared humanity can be, how little we actually care about each other when the powers that be decide to erase our humanity.

            In 1961, Shalamov wrote down a list of what he saw and understood in the prison camps.  It is a list of 45 truths.  Here are just a few of them: 

·         The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization.  A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

·         I realized friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions.  Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the mine’s pit face)

·         I realized Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent – an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.

·         I realized the feeling a man preserves longest is anger.  There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

·         I realized that one can live on anger.

·         I realized that one can live on indifference.

·         I understood why people do not live on hope – there isn’t any hope.  Nor can they survive by means of free will – what free will is there?  They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.

·         I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards.  Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

·         I understood what power is and what a man with a rifle is.

         The stories within this volume will live on in my head for the rest of my life.  Soon there will be a second volume published.  I cannot wait to read that.  Thank goodness that people are able to share these experiences, no matter how horrible, through the power of the written word.  The written word is humanity’s greatest invention.  What an amazing writer.

(Four short stories from this book can be read here:  KOLYMA STORIES )

My first dive into Russian literature pays off

One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)

      The name Alexander Solzhenitsyn was known to me.  His place among the great writers of Russian literature was something I was taught as a matter of fact.  I knew very little else than that  when I picked up this, the author’s first published work, a novella that details the happenings of an entire day, from waking to sleep, of a man imprisoned in a Soviet-era prison camp.  It was only after finishing this oddly humorous book that I looked up Solzhenitsyn’s life, and learned that, like Ivan Denisovitch, he too spent some years of his life in a Soviet prison camp.  This came after he had served with honor in the Soviet military, rising to the rank of Captain.  His crime?  It was much like all the other stupid and tyrannical “crimes” used by despots to crush their people.  He was claimed to have made seditious statements against Stalin after his private letters were intercepted and read by the Soviet government.  After he was released from the prison camps, he turned to writing and this novella was the only one of his works to be published in his native Russia.  It is a sad shame that the writing that helped him win a Nobel Prize in literature had to be published surreptitiously in the West, and smuggled back into Russia.  Down with tyrants and despots everywhere!  Burn them all down.

      In this book I found a man who had become so accustomed to his life, and it was barely life, inside the prison camps that his every single thought, from waking to sleep, was concerned with his immediate concerns and needs, with no thought given to escape or freedom, and very little thought given to the state of the world outside the prison camp’s fences.  The tone of the novel reminded me of a Russian Vonnegut, the otherwise ordinary characters matter-of-factly resigned to the stupidities and irrationality inherent in the world they inhabit, finding cold comfort in gallows humor, and seeking every single opportunity to stretch the rules, gain a tiny advantage, or finding ten minutes somewhere to try and keep warm.  Nearly every second is spent by Ivan either plotting on how to make his current situation slightly better, or in watchful fear of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, or even looking at the wrong person for fear of retribution from the camp guards. 

      As Ivan tells it, there are very few moments of true rest for the prisoners.  One of them is the first moments of wakefulness after the morning alarm has been rung.  Ivan stated that, in these fleeting minutes, still in bed, eyes still closed, and his body somewhat warm, he was “free.”  There were no obligations for these few minutes, and he tries to make them last as long as possible.  One of the other times he stated he felt free and that his time was his own, and not the state’s, was the ten minutes he was allotted to eat his servings in the mess hall during breakfast and dinner.  The hour before meals was hectic, with lines, pressing, queues, counts and recounts of prisoners, all in an attempt to feed them in an orderly fashion.  That hour of stress was relieved by the ten minutes of quiet, slow eating.  The instant he was done however, the manic thoughts and worries return. Sad but true.

      As Ivan goes through his day, Solzhenitsyn has his narrator describe the nearly-fractal levels of bureaucratic bullshit that permeated every aspect of life in these Russian prison camps.  One small example is the numbers assigned to the inmates, and painted on their hats and shirts, making it easy for the guards to single them out individually from a distance.  There were several older trustys that were permitted to paint and touch up these white numbers on a black field, for a price, and theirs was a tricky art.  They had to make sure the numbers were legible, for illegible numbers would constitute a violation and ten days in the “cage.”  However, the prisoners requested that the numbers be slightly blurred, just enough that guards further than a few meters way would have trouble reading it.  It was a delicate balance, like everything in the prison camp.  This level of insanity suffused everything in the camps.

      Solzhenitsyn does an amazing thing with this novella.  As I read it and progressed through Ivan Denisovich’s day, I became filled with a dread.  Throughout the day Ivan had managed to save himself from bad situations, plan for the day ahead, manage to finagle two bread rations, get a little tobacco, find a piece of broken hacksaw blade, and lead a work crew building masonry.  I waited for the hammer to fall.  I expected tragedy to spring forth and engulf our narrator, for everything seemed to be going as well as it could for him.  This was not to be.  Solzhenitsyn is not after that.  Instead, he shows us a “good” day, but a day not unlike the hundreds that Ivan had before, and the hundreds that were yet to come.  In this way, it really hit me how BIG this novella was.  We humans can conform to nearly every horror, and assume it as our new normal.  We can go to work and see our fellow citizens be killed and mistreated, and we see it as the normal day to day life we lead.  This nightmare, this waking delusion, is what lies at the heart of all tyranny.  In showing us a non-tragic, normal, ordinary day in the life of a normal, ordinary man, Solzhenitsyn shines a harsh light on the true tragedy involved, that hundreds of thousands of normal, ordinary people were tasked with imprisoning and torturing millions of normal, ordinary people, all at the request of a distant, rich, and aloof government.  It is a great book.

     

(This book can be purchased here:  ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH )

(When Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, he was afraid to leave the USSR and go to Stockholm for fear of not being allowed to return.  He sent in a written acceptance speech, which is amazing and well-worth reading.  The speech is found here: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html )

The Horrors of the Soviet GULAG prison-camps and the humanity that survived

A World Apart – Gustav Herling (1951)

            Horror can come in so many ways.  It could be the sudden arrival of an incomprehensible terror.  It could also be the slowly dawning realization that hope is a feeling best left dead.  In many ways, the horrors experienced by Mr. Gustav Herling while serving in a Soviet GULAG hard-labor prison run the full gamut.  For several years, the author, a Polish native who had left for the Soviet Union after Poland had been annexed by the Third Reich, experienced horrors both physical and mental, and in sharing his story he helps us understand the true evil that totalitarian government inflicts upon the entire population.

            Reading Mr. Herling’s account of his time as a prisoner brought back memories of my youth reading Animal Farm and 1984, and of wondering in indignant rage why people tolerated the obviously absurd and illogical pronouncements of the ruling parties.  As a young teen, those books filled me with a deep hate for mindless subservience and for blind allegiance to any political system, especially those of a totalitarian state.  Mr. Herling’s life in this forced-labor camp shared so much of the idiocy and stupidity that the animals on Animal Farm or the citizens in 1984 had to accept or else be destroyed by the state.

            Mr. Herling meets prisoners from all walks of life.  One is a former diva of Soviet theater who was sentenced to ten years hard labor.  Her stated crime was being a traitor to the Soviet State.  What was her actual crime?  She danced for too long with the Japanese ambassador at a gala event in Moscow.  That was it.  Several of the inmates were there merely because they were not Russian.  These were Poles who got stuck in Russia avoiding the Nazi takeover of Poland.  There were people whose jobs pre-revolution were in education and intelligentsia, and of course a totalitarian state cannot abide having anyone else be an authority on anything.  The state must the ultimate authority on anything!  How fucking horrible.  With the Soviet Union officially banning all organized religious activities, priests and nuns were also laced in these ruthless work-to-death camps.  All kinds, even those that believed themselves deeply committed to the Communist Party, found out they were worthless pieces of a machine in which they had no control.

            The life in the camp is terrible, with surreal and illogical precision running everything.  The prisoners were fed according to their crimes, and according to how much they worked daily.  Those that worked heavy labor were lucky to receive a few grams of bread and a thin barley “soup” at the end of the day.  Those that were unfit for heavy labor received solely a thin warm liquid with no meat and no vegetables.  If you were sill or injured you spent some time in an unheated “infirmary” where you received the bare minimum food portion, and minimal medical care.  If you were unable to get better enough to work, they would send you to the Mortuary, where the dying waited to die in relative peace.  Mr. Herling spent time in the Mortuary and describes the twisted sense of calm and rest combined with the foreknowledge of your impending death.  There is no comfort anywhere. The paranoia, the pain, the SMELL of countless rotting, sickly, and dying men and women, awash in their own feces, ever-seeping sores, malnutrition, night-blindness from lack of vitamins, and eventually the complete loss of their conscious ability to think all wash over the narrator, as he slides into this horror himself.  Throughout all this, Mr. Herling manages to share any and all wisdom he gained, most of it bleak, and brutally honest about what a man has to deal with when hope is gone yet life continues interminably.  It is a brutal story, and the fact that we know he managed to survive and publish this a few years later does nothing to diminish the trauma of his and all of the other prisoner’s experiences.

            Prison for actual criminals is bad enough.  When the state sets up prisons for those who do no crime other than political opposition?  Evil.  When the state punishes people pre-emptively, trying to weed out supposed traitors before they even have a chance to act?  Evil.  When the state’s own reasoning is so twisted and flawed and fucking pointless that they have to retroactively invent methods to protect their own lies?  Evil.  Under Stalin, Soviet/Russian history was turned into a pathetic joke, with whole secret government entities erasing people’s entire lives from the historical record, solely to appease the whims of the mustachioed madman controlling everything. Whole families disappeared.  Whole generations of educated people were sent to Siberia to die in labor camps.  This same shit happens in all totalitarian states, and is happening right now in Saudi Arabia (religious rule by an autocratic family of assholes), North Korea (totalitarian rule by a fat man-boy with a tiny pecker and total control of his starving population), etc.  It could happen anywhere.  It could happen in the USA.  The only thing that prevents dictators is the willingness of brave people to stand up to them, to the death.  Never expect a despot to “make sense.”

            During WWII the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans all had forced-relocation camps.  The Germans used theirs to attempt a mass genocide of European Jews, as well as anyone deemed undesirable by the Reich.  This included the homosexuals, religious leaders, Romany, mentally and physically handicapped people, and anyone else deemed as “the Other.”  Russian forced labor camps were barely any better.  Their goal was not to solely exterminate enemies.  It was to suck out as much forced labor as possible with the bare minimum of food and support, thereby killing the state’s enemies while also benefiting the state’s GDP.  In the USA, our forced-relocation camps consisted of thousands and thousands of Japanese-Americans, many of them full citizens of the nation, including children and the elderly.  They were treated as if just because they were of Japanese ancestry, they were a treasonous threat to the nation.  While they were not treated as inhumanely as those in German or Russian camps, the very existence of such places in the supposed “Land of the Free” should be enough to strike terror in the hearts of free-thinking humans anywhere.  Who knows how bad it could have gotten for the Japanese-American prisoners if the war had raged on, or if the Japanese had managed a full on attack of the USA mainland?  Totalitarianism is a slippery slope indeed.  We must be ever-vigilant against it, even if it is an unpopular stance to take.

(This book is available for download as a PDF here: https://archive.org/download/worldapart007324mbp/worldapart007324mbp.pdf )

(This book can also be purchased here:  A World Apart  )

One man's journey to escape the Bolshevik revolution leads him to wisdom and experience he could never have imagined.

Beasts, Men and Gods – Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski (1922)

            This is another book that I had read mention of in many other texts and decided to go ahead and hunt it down.  It is the account of one Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski, and his escape from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia through the remote areas of Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet and China.  Like with most revolutions throughout history, the Bolshevik revolution was a purge, where countless families died because a member was once a Czar supporter, or an intellectual, or someone the communists labeled as an “enemy of the state.”  If they did not get executed outright, they were kidnapped and sent to Siberian work camps, or just taken into the empty wilderness never to be seen again.

            Mr. Ossendowski was an intellectual, a professor in Universities, and found himself out in a remote Russian country town when the 1917 revolution began and word spread that people were being rounded up.  With only a rifle, and a few supplies, he headed for the woods.  Nearly a year passed between this time and the time that Mr. Ossendowski was able to escape to the USA.  During that time, and with the help of many people, he managed to travel through parts of the world that at the time were so remote as to be nearly unknown to the rest of the world.  Interspersed between his stories of survival, near capture and gun battles, are amazing descriptions of the country he traveled through, the many people he met, the lamas, and the Buddhist temples and the Mongolian shepherds and the Tibetan chieftains and medicine men.  He was able to see things because of the friendships he made with high ranking Lamas that no westerners had ever glimpsed.  He wrote this account of his experiences 5 years later and the resulting book was the first time that real, eye-witness accounts from Mongolia and Tibet and upper China were available for everyone to read about. 

            Mr. Ossendowski’s escape took many months, and in the meantime the learned man changed into a rugged outdoors man, a fearless gunfighter, a skilled negotiator, and a Tibetan wise man.  It is amazing how quickly one can change and grow when the situation forces it.  The man that started this trip is not the man that ended it, and I am grateful he did, not only for the amazing information on Tibet and Mongolia and its proud peoples, but because he included all the horrors that came along with that revolution.  Traitors, informers, double agents, murderers, hired assassins, mysterious troops, wholesale warfare, massacres, and more are discussed.  It is too easy for the ugliest parts of history to be washed over by the details, but that is something Mr. Ossendowski does not allow.  He includes it all, and it all seems like more than one man could possibly undertake, but it is all true.  Some of the mystical experiences he experienced are described in a very matter-of-fact manner, but they nevertheless inspired many seekers to look for wisdom and knowledge in the high desert mountains of the far East.

This is what Mr. Ossendowski's mind looked like when he met the King Of The World

            Books like this are very important to me, as they allow a relatively unfiltered look at historical events that would otherwise be unavailable, or willfully obscured.  It is an engrossing read.  As the story goes along Mr. Ossendowski gains an inner strength, an ability to absorb the horror he experiences, and a deeper sense of wonder at the magic in the world.  Not only that, but he becomes a straight killer, ready to fight for his life at a moment’s notice.  This duality is mirrored in what he experiences in Mongolia and Tibet.  The people there live everyday understanding that the inner peace and wisdom of a monk can reside in the same body as the killer spirit of a warrior, and nature itself calls for this.  It is very interesting to see, especially as we live in a society that pretends to be all good, or that pain and hurt and war have no place, yet we kill each other, our cops murder children, and people live in fear.  Perhaps it is our unwillingness to accept or understand the darker side of human nature that keeps us enslaved and in fear of those that seek to hurt us. 

(This book is available in .pdf format here: https://ia902604.us.archive.org/20/items/beastsmengods00osseiala/beastsmengods00osseiala.pdf )