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Journey into the Whirlwind

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"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've read both Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind. I've also read most of Solzhenitsyn's work and this is different and all the more horrible because it is a memoir.

Imagine yourself, an up and coming professional, married to an up and coming professional, two kids, nice apartment, all the benefits of being successful. But there is something in the air, people are disappearing, and the government is denouncing traitors and conspiracies at a fever pitch.

People you know, professionals like yourself, start to disappear. The fear is palpable. To talk about it, it is believed, is to bring the same fate down on your own head. Everybody just carries on. But you can feel it coming. Your friends no longer contact you. Are they afraid of you? Is this your imagination? Do they know something you don't? You reflect back. Who could have denounced you? Did you make an ill considered remark? Were you friends with the wrong person?

When the authorities finally come it is not a surprise.

You enter into the maw of the gulag, slowly pass into its guts and there, utterly alone, isolated, you exist and time drips slowly by....

Eugenia Ginzburg chronicles the first three years of her eighteen years of misery (1937-1955) in Soviet prisons as a result of Stalin's purges. During these three years she was transferred to six prisons spanning thousands of miles. Each prison successively became more life-threatening and depraved (due to the increasingly changing subjectivity and, hence, tyranny of the "law"), and each year her crime became defined more differently. Ginzburg, a university teacher and loyal party member, was "convicted" as an "enemy of the people"--more particularly as a Trotsky sympathizer in 1937--but by the end of the book she was better known as an "international terrorist." I was struck by Ginzburg's naivete. Even to the bitter end she remained committed to the communist system, despite the great suffering she endured from the consistent outworkings of this philosophy. To her nothing was wrong with Communism, just the man Stalin. But Stalin was consistent: "If the State is god, and I am the ruler of the State, then my will be done on earth." (If God is removed from the picture, then anything goes, and those holding the power dictate the "anything"--see "Brave New World of the Enlightenment" by Louis I. Bredvold). Even the fact that her very accuser and judge, a high party official, would later suffer inside the same prison had no effect upon her loyalty to the party. She frequently ran across as prisoners the very people who had previously guarded her, transported her, fed her, etc. Ginzburg reveals a few parallels between Soviet Communism and German Fascism, one being that both "law" systems executed people for telling political jokes (see my book review on "In the Name of the Volk"). She details several frightful sufferings along with many interesting stories of prison friendship and techniques for prisoner communication in solitary confinement. Her account of prisoner transfers by cargo trains is very similar to what the Jews experienced during Hitler's "Final Solution." She includes a nice testimony to a group of women prisoners who outperformed everyone else in tree-felling and always succeeded in making their quota without cheating. These admirable women even refused to cut trees on the Sabbath, no matter how harsh was their punishment. When they refused to cut trees on Easter, they were forced to strip to complete nakedness and stand on the ice (in Siberia!) until their feet became frostbitten. They sang praises while enduring this treatment. The other women, after having come to their defense and consequentially punished for it, debated whether or not these women should be labeled virtuous or fanatical. Sadly, after being freed, Ginzburg heaps praises on the seeming restoration of "the great Leninist truths" (417). If the evils of Stalin's purges interest you, then I recommend the book.

Humorous quote of the book from her tree-felling days in Elgen (Siberia): "Our overseer was a criminal called Kostik, nicknamed the Actor, and a man of some education. At one period of his hectic career he had worked as a stage hand in a provincial theater, and this had added to his vocabulary such words as 'mise-en-scene,' 'farce,' and 'travesty,' which added a distinctive quality to his obscene language" (p.403). (Competing with this was the attempted seduction by an Islamic Turk (one of her overseers) who attempted to woo her by lying on a bed holding a necklace made of plastic beads!)

The moment I opened this book I was immersed within it. Eugenia Ginzberg is a superb writer who uses her skill to deeply communicate the horror that the political prisoners in the Stalin years experienced. The story reflects the extremes of the human spirit: evil and love. It's not possible to read this book without being emotionally effected. It gave me a deeper appreciation for many of the freedoms, rights, and simple pleasures I have in my life. The book ends rather abruptly, though it apparently picks up in another book, "Within the Whirlwind." I will be getting my hands on that because I really want to know what happened to Ms. Ginzberg. After reading this book, I feel like I know her in some way.

Ginzburg account of the Soviet GULAG during the 1930?s is one of the most descriptive accounts we have. Originally published in Italy in 1967 one can only wonder how politics affected this work. Ginzburg herself was a devout communist and was later ?rehabilitated? after serving her sentence. What is surprising in this book is not so much the torture and terrible circumstances that Ginzburg suffered both in solitary confinement and the labor camp, but the differences between the prisoners themselves. After being wrongfully accused, many communists were still fiercely loyal to their party refusing to talk to Mensheviks and even turning in their fellow prisoners for speaking against the great Stalin. This book is a brilliant insight in both the Gulag and the communist mind set.

Ginzburg brings to vivid life the meaning of brutal, dehumanizing imprisonment. I was struck by the plaintive detail and sharp observation that explained what "it" was truly like. And "it" was truly a fascinating journey. She brings to life her efforts to resist forced confession, the trial, interactions with equally tragic and desperate figures, solitary confinement, movement by foot, train and boat, and ultimately the brutal expanse of the labor camp. Pithy and focused analysis of the human dynamics around her produces an irresistable tempo and fascinating glimpse into the human psyche. Unfortunately, the abrupt ending left several unfinished themes, and left me wanting more. Overall, a fascinating book into a real-life heart of darkness that leaves one exhausted, contemplating such inhumanity.