In her powerful autobiography Into the Whirlwind, Eugenia
Ginzburg shares her experiences of being arrested in 1937, imprisoned, and
eventually sent to do grueling manual labor in a Siberian gulag. She was “officially” convicted as a political
terrorist and enemy of the people.
Naturally, none of this was true - she was part of Joseph Stalin's
"Great Purge" campaign. While
her experiences were unbelievably harrowing and heartbreaking, it is her
unrelentingly strong spirit that shines through this work.
Ginzburg was a highly educated woman, receiving university training
as a teacher, and later heading up the Culture section of a regional Communist
Party newspaper called Red Tartary. She was proficient in literature, poetry, and
political theory; could understand some German, and read other languages. She was solidly in the Soviet Elite social
class, as were most of her acquaintances.
This made her, and her family, a prime target for Stalin’s program of intellectual
and political repression.
When one of her coworkers was arrested
for supposed terrorist activities, she was brought in for interrogation. The violence she experienced in her
interrogation was purely verbal and emotional, as the questioners were not
permitted to use physical torture until a few months after. During one of her interrogation sessions, she
was pressured into writing a statement, one that the secret police could use to
discover other “enemies of the state”.
She knows that her fate has essentially been sealed, so she decides she
has nothing to lose. She tells her
questioner that, “Well, you yourself mentioned the kind of writing I do –
articles, translations. But I’ve never
tried my hand at detective novels, and I doubt if I could do the kind of
fiction you want” (pg. 58). She decides
that she should at least write something, as the time spent writing would be
time without the interrogator’s abuse.
So, she spends hours writing a letter to the head of the secret police,
explaining the illegality of the case against her and the methods used for the
investigation. The questioner verbally
abused her for this act, but ultimately could not do anything to harm her. It is this undercurrent of sass and bravery, appearing
throughout the work, which endears Ginzburg to the reader. She understands that she is powerless to
change her overall situation, but jabs at those in power when she has the
opportunity.
Because she refused to denounce her colleague, or to
implicate others, she was tried (in a show-court lasting only a few minutes)
and convicted of being a co-conspirator.
She was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, with a loss of civil rights
for 5 years. Instead of feeling
dissolute about her situation, she was almost euphoric because it meant that
there was the possibility of freedom and life.
However, this jubilant spirit is tested throughout the rest of the book,
because the conditions she endures are horrific at best.
Ginzburg’s imprisonment is described as being “buried alive
for a little over two years” (pg. 146). Ginzburg,
as a political prisoner, is kept in almost complete isolation in her cell. Deprived of much light, company, and fresh
air, she is afraid of losing language and her sanity, so she quietly recites
poetry and other works that she can recall, and reads whatever books she is
able to acquire from the prison library.
This solace in literature serves her throughout the rest of her time in
that prison, with its filthy conditions, meager food rations, brutal guards,
and the knowledge that all this was for false charges.
The cruel treatment of the prisoners leads to
near-starvation and suffering from a wide variety of malnutrition and
constitution sicknesses. After being in the
isolation of prison, the author and her fellow prisoners had to adapt to life
in a camp where there is a hierarchy based on the crime. As political prisoners, they were treated as
the lowest form of inmate, and given the hardest and least desirable
tasks. Ginzburg and many of her fellow
political prisoners, many of them unaccustomed to heavy manual labor, were
expected to fell large trees on very meager rations and terrible living
conditions. The author, herself, was
close to death on many occasions, and was saved through a kind-hearted camp
doctor.
Her experience of the camps, and the treatment of the
prisoners, seems eerily similar to the Nazi treatment of prisoners in concentration
camps. Although the USSR camps were
meant for labor and not necessarily extermination, the incarcerated often died
because of the harsh conditions and poor health. The most critical aspect of this novel is that
most of the individuals she encounters in the prisons and camps are of similar
social class to her. Therefore, the
reader gets no perspective of what conditions and treatment were like for
people from more impoverished conditions and rural areas. There is also no information about what life
was like for non-incarcerated peoples.
These criticisms are accurate, but also invalid because the book was
written as her own memoirs of this time. Into the Whirlwind is important because it bears witness to the ways
that the USSR treated its citizens during this time in history. In a world where political instability is a
real possibility, and human rights are violated regularly, works like this
remind us of how dangerous those things can be when unchecked.
