Journey Into the Whirlwind

Eugenia "Genie" Semyonovna Ginzburg spent seventeen years in the Soviet prison system, escaping death, unlike millions of others. She never again saw her husband after being imprisoned. The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, Man is Wolf to Man by Bardach, Kolyma Tales by Shalamov and Journey into the Whirlwind all include overlapping and similar information, but differ in format and style (although hers is most similar to Man is Wolf to Man in its telling). Her memoir of life in the Gulag is one of few written by women and so provides a unique and interesting perspective. All are fantastic books, well-written, often unbelievable and mesmerizing, but there is a noticeable difference between the multi-volume The Gulag Archipelago and Journey into the Whirlwind (seemingly short at just over 400 pages). Genie is first brought in for questioning in 1934. With her young children in the other room and her husband away on business, she takes the call. Her beliefs at that time are such that she would willingly die for the party. Soon thereafter, she is incarcerated at Black Lake and is eventually sentenced to ten years of solitary confinement for not denouncing a coworker who had written an article offensive to the party. During her interrogation sessions, in which she repeatedly refuses to "denounce" that is, lie, about the activities of acquaintances facing the same fate, she comes face to face with people who she thought were friends, but who have willingly denounced her in hopes of receiving special treatment, or lighter sentences. She herself never caves. Some of the interesting and different information found in her telling of life in the prison system during Stalin's rule, she is able to provide information about life within prison and receive information about the outside world using (coded) "Aesopian Language." Prisoners also use a system of knocks to communicate messages to one another and keep track of goings on within the prison and the status of their prison mates. Although it's a boring, lonely, (she has one cell mate most of the time), damp, horrible, hungry life, she survives long enough to be sent to Kolyma, where she realizes just how "good" she'd had it in solitary confinement. What she recounts from Kolyma is similar in many instances to the recollections of other Gulag prisoners, except for anecdotes referring specifically to life among the women. Readers who enjoyed the aforementioned books should include Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum, which provides a general overview of the prison system, in their list of companion reads.

"The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals." So wrote Aldous Huxley. Evgenia (Eugenia) Ginzburg's Journey Into the Whirlwind is a powerful memoir of one woman's descent, along with hundreds of thousands of others, to the rabble of men and women that were arrested, brutally interrogated and send to the Gulag in the Soviet Union during the great purges of the 1930s. Sergei Kirov's assassination in 1934 provided one of the pretexts for the great Soviet purges of the 1930s. The purges and great show trials began in earnest in 1937. Eugenia Ginzburg was a loyal party member, a teacher, and the editor of her local newspaper in Kazan, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. When she first heard of the mass arrests and imprisonments of loyal party members she was astonished that criminal elements had made their way into her party. This astonishment increased when she (and her husband) was arrested. As with thousands of other victims, Ginzburg was taken to jail, subjected to repeated interrogations and, over the course of the next year or so, traveled from prison to prison where the process of interrogation and mistreatment was continued. Ginzburg's memoirs in this volume continue through this initial imprisonment and her eventual transfer in cattle cars and a cargo ship to the frozen wasteland of Siberia. The second volume covers her years in exile, her Siberian reunion with her sole remaining son Vasily Aksyonov (a tremendous writer in his own right), and her eventual `rehabilitation'. There is a certain ineffable sadness to memoirs of the madness of the purges and the horrors of the Gulag. There is a numbing similarity in the descriptions of the deprivations, horrors, and, yes, stunning acts of grace and kindness experienced by those who lived to tell these tales. As Stalin once said, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. So I think it may be difficult for a reader to become emotionally invested in a book of this sort once he or she acquires more than a passing knowledge of the purges and the Gulag. A certain protective detachment evolved for me after reading time and time again of life in the Gulag. Yet Eugenia Ginzburg's words were so compelling, so insightful, and so moving that this detachment was lifted. Reading this book became an emotional experience. One example. During the initial months of her imprisonment, prisoners were allowed to read only or two books a week. Ginzburg, loved both poetry and prose would take her allotted book and devour it, soaking up every word. She and her fellow prisoners would memorize and recite whole chapters of their favorite books. She tells us that this provided her with a level of reading comprehension that she never experienced before. Silly though it may seem, this heighten

In her work Journey into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginzburg gives a personal account of the first three years of her eighteen-year ordeal during the Stalin purges of the 1930s. Teacher and editor of the Communist paper "Red Tartary," Ginzburg was accused of being a Trotskyist counter-revolutionary by a colleague and was thrown in jail, interrogated, dragged from prison to prison, kept in solitary confinement, and finally sent to a labor camp in the Siberian taiga. Ginzburg's position reveals the fact that party members (especially of high rank) were the first victims of the purges. Also, her past camaraderie with such people as the daughter of the notorious Soviet jurist Andrey Vyshinsky allows Ginzburg to offer the reader information about the important players of the purges that other victims may not have been able to provide.Politically, it must be noted that this is not an anti-Communist book. The author remained loyal to her party. If anything, this book reveals how very strong party loyalties were to the men and women who were victimized as "enemies of the people." Throughout the book, Ginzburg refers to her cell mates by their party affiliation. Old party rivalries even persisted in the prisons. Communists often refused to believe that their government was arresting loyal party members and would never question the "conspirator" accounts in the Soviet newspapers. Ginzburg's husband, for example, remarked after seeing such a report: "Have you heard? Petrov has turned out to be an enemy of the people! How cunning he must have been to get away with it for so long." Out of this loyalty to the party came a loyalty to Stalin. One inmate still exhibited hope asserting "We must all of us write to Stalin so that he knows the truth, and when he does, how can he let such things happen to the people?"Historically, Ginzburg's book is a document of the Soviet tactics to extract confessions and force accusations to incriminate others. The book does not contain descriptions of overly heinous crimes. Most of the abuse Ginzburg received was psychological. She did not, for example, experience the "standing cell" at black Lake where prisoners were placed in a dark room so narrow as to permit the prisoner only to stand with his arms at his sides. What Ginzburg describes is the social and psychological adjustment of the prisoners. For example, the inmates learned to communicate be tapping messages on their cell walls. Socially speaking, Ginzburg reveals that prison life "developed the better sides of my personality." No, this is not an apologist's work, but this book is also not a condemnation of the Communist party.

As we draw to the close of the 20th century we still have so much to learn from the century's greatest 'experiment' - Soviet Communism. Although I have read many excellent histories of the Stalin period, this book was the most personal and gripping testament of those dreadful years I have come across. What Shostakovitch did in music (especially the third movement of the fifth symphony), Ginzburg has done in prose. The sequel, by the way, is of nothing like the same stature.