The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union [Paperback]

Avraham Shifrin (Author)

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Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Bantam Books (Mm); Bantam ed edition (April 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553013920
• ISBN-13: 978-0553013924
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 4.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,933,873 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Forgotten Gulag, October 19, 2002

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antimonopolist - See all my reviews

This review is from: The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union (Paperback)

This book, written by a former inmate, describes no fewer than 1,976 concentration camps in the Soviet Union, as of early 1980. Estimates of the population were in the millions. The author provides exact addresses as well as all the necessary instructions for reaching the camps, prisons and psychiatric prisons, inviting the reader to visit the inmates and their families; needless to say, few Western tourists accepted this challenge, amid their enthusiasm for détente and the Bolshoi Ballet.

The author describes a world of watchtowers manned by guards bearing machine guns, and electrically charged barbed-wire fences; he portrays prisoners in columns or transport vehicles, prisoners attacked by dogs, prisoners in camp uniforms with numbers across their chests, women prisoners, child and teenage prisoners (p3). These are people persecuted for thinking differently; reading "forbidden" philosophical, political or religious books; posting notices; raising a flag; demanding religious instruction for their children; or undertaking a private commercial initiative (pp3-4). Such were the "crimes" for which millions of Soviet citizens were savagely punished.

Perhaps the most distressing part of this work is the very first section, which lists 119 prisons and concentration camps built specifically for women and children (pp14-22): a picture of inmates at Orel, a camp with 3,000 children, contains a sign with the words "Honest work: the road home to the family," an obvious parallel with the Nazi slogan "Work shall set you free" ("Arbeit macht frei") (p16). As the author records, these camps were characterised by extreme violence and sadistic cruelty: thus in Novosibirsk, club-carrying guards "subject the young prisoners (aged 10 to 18) to merciless beatings" while children are sent to hard labour projects; in Gornyi, children endure backbreaking duties, despite the prevalence of hunger, while "[t]hose who fall ill and request transfer to a hospital are beaten;" and in Gor'kii, the victims were so brutalised that "[m]any of the children fell ill and died for lack of medical attention" (p18).

Then there is the short section entitled "Extermination Camps" (pp31-5), listing camps where prisoners, "forced to work under dangerously unhealthy conditions for the Soviet war machine, face a virtually certain death" (p31). The author identifies three categories: (1) camps where almost no-one ever comes out alive (the prisoners work in uranium mines and uranium enrichment plants); (2) camps where the prisoners are used for dangerous work in the arms industry (the prisoners perform high-risk duties in military nuclear plants); (3) camps where prisoners are used for dangerous work causing disability and fatal illness (the prisoners operate machines without ventilation). No fewer than 41 extermination camps are listed. By the second edition, the author had discovered another camp in Khaidarovka, where "prisoners die while mining uranium," and "a death camp with uranium mines" in the desert at Kul-Kuduk (p366); that brought the total to 43.

Next the author documents the existence of 85 psychiatric prisons, where mentally healthy human beings were administered heavy doses of neuroleptic drugs; where inmates were bound so that the victim's body becomes compressed as if in a vice; and where prisoners were beaten by criminals and subjected to electric shocks at the slightest provocation (p47). Former inmate Vladimir Bukovsky recalled the injections of sulfazine, which caused an abscess, high temperature and intense pain; torture with insulin shocks; and treatment with high doses of haloperidol to lower the dopamine level, inducing Parkinson's disease (Index on Censorship, October 2001). As the author points out, these horrors were inflicted as punishment for political dissent, for seeking to emigrate, or merely for expressing a belief in God.

The author reports that some camp inmates were driven to the point where they branded anti-communist slogans on their foreheads. At first, these were cut out of their flesh. Subsequently, the offenders were "tried in secret and shot" (p370).