Journey into the Whirlwind [Paperback]

Eugenia Ginzburg (Author)

Book Description

Series: A Harvest Book, Hb 304 | Publication Date: March 19, 1975

Both witness to and victim of Stalin’s reign of terror, a courageous woman tells the story of her harrowing eighteen-year odyssey through Russia’s prisons and labor camps. Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Editorial Reviews

Review

In 1989, the Sovremmenik Theatre in Moscow brought Eugenia Ginzburg's autobiography to the stage for the first time. When the curtain came down an emotional audience rose up and applauded for twenty-four minutes. The tragedy of an entire nation had finally been dramatized in one woman's poignant account. 1937, the year that Eugenia Ginzburg was arrested and falsely charged as a Trotskyist terrorist counterrevolutionary, was only the beginning of Stalin's purges. Nearly six million people were arrested on trumped up charges, and millions were executed or perished in prisons and camps. Eugenia Ginzburg, an historian and loyal Communist Party member, chronicles her own terrifying arrest, interrogation, and eighteen-year imprisonment. She speaks with brutal honesty; her ability to recount the minutes and hours of her internment is surpassed only by her extraordinary will to survive. These memoirs are important for those who wish to understand Russian history and for anyone who has ever wondered how they might survive in a maelstrom, facing constant betrayals, overwhelming physical hardship, agonizing loneliness, and a longing for the past. Eugenia Ginzburg shows us "how thin the line is between high principles and blinkered intolerance" and yet she emerges from these pages as a compassionate woman with the "conviction that dignity and honor are not just empty words." -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Rebecca Sullivan --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English, Russian (translation)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (March 19, 1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156465094
• ISBN-13: 978-0156465090
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,020,096 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars They Have Sown the Wind and They Shall Reap the Whirlwind., February 4, 2005

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Journey into the Whirlwind (Paperback)

"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 heightened comprehension made me wish to revisit books I had already read just to see if it could gain more from them.

Ginzburg writes with clarity and captures the lives and characters of her fellow prisoners and her captors with equal insight. Her look back at her years of imprisonment is not filled with bitterness. Her observations are more acute for their lack of self-pity. At one point Ginzburg explains that what kept her alive was not just fate but a will to survive "to live, to live no matter what." Reading Journey into the Whirlwind is both a humbling and ennobling experience.

This is a wonderful book and I urge anyone with an interest in this subject or simply looking to see a person's life come to light via her memoirs to read Journey into the Whirlwind and the successor volume Within the Whirlwind.

In addition, if Ginzburg's books leave you with a desire to read more accounts of life in the Soviet Union and the Gulag in the 1930s I recommend Kolyma Tales (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) and Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. Each book complements Ginzburg's exquisite memoirs.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Courageous Woman Who Remained Loyal To Her Party, January 10, 2003

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mwreview "mwreview" (Northern California, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Journey into the Whirlwind (Paperback)

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.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I am surprized beyond words!, February 5, 2001

By 

Anna Netchitailova (Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Journey into the Whirlwind (Paperback)

I have read this book many years ago in Russian, and now I wanted my husband, who doesn't speak Russian, to read it too. Nobody would be able to describe how upset I was when I actually received the book and found out that this was only the first part of it. Having looked through your site I realized that there is no second part sold here,and I am wondering who took the liberty of deciding how much of the original book is acceptable for the English speaking public to read.Can somebody enlighten me on that? This book is too precious to be cut!I'd rather think that it would be better not to sell it at all, then to offer a cut version of a misterpiece.