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Within the Whirlwind

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Eugenia Ginsburg was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in 1937 on a false charge of terrorism at the height of the Stalin purges. In her first book 'Into the whirlwind' she describes her arrest, her interrogation, her mockery of a trial and two years in solitary confinement in prison. She was then transported to Magadan in the far East of Russia to a labour camp, and the first volume ends as she is beginning to cope with the undescribably harsh conditions in the camp.

'Within the whirlwind' describes the next fifteen years until her return and rehabilitation. She describes how her life was saved by gaining work as a nurse in the camp hospital where she met her second husband.

This book leaves the reader astonished how Evgenia could describe her life with such humour and at the same time with such human understanding. All the time, however, the reader is reminded of the inhumanity, lying and deception of the Stalin regime.

At one stage, the vice president of the USA, Henry Wallace, visits the camps, and the prisoners are removed and the guards temporarily take their place and manage to convince the gullible American that the camps are manned by well fed and enthusiastic pioneers.

Eugenia returns to Moscow, her life destroyed, having lost one of her sons. She ends on a note of optimism, that the truth will be told in her native land. She died however in 1977 and never saw her books published in her native land nor the destruction of the communist regime.

This book is now out of print, which is a pity. Everybody interested in Russia should try to get hold of a copy and read it and ponder on the demons that helped produce the country as it is today.

This book shocked, sickened, and inspired me. I never realized how terrible Stalin's purges were until I read Ginzburg's historically accurate and emotionally compelling memoir. Unforgettable characters, disturbing mental images, and harrowing brutality made up the Soviet Gulag and Ginzburg's book showcases them beautifully! Outstanding memoir!!

It is a long book but I read it in about 3 days. Compelling. Heartwrenching. Suspenseful. And ultimately hopeful. This is an older book that I happened upon and I will be recommending it to everyone.

Eugenia Ginzburg was the first Russian Communist to write extensively about being caught in the "meatgrinder" of Stalin's purges. It took her a long time to figure it out: "We were creatures of our times, of the epoch of magnificent illusions."

"Within the Whirlwind" is the second volume of her memoirs. I have not read the first, but the editors say she pulled her punches then, hoping for publication at home (which didn`t happen). She avers that this volume is only the truth. Not the whole truth, she admits, but nothing but truth.

This seems credible.

At least, her memoir is readable. I forced myself to go 100 pages in Solzhenitsyn's "GULAG Archipelago," but it was unreadable. Ginzburg's memoir is windy but readable, basically a series of vignettes of encounters during 18 years of exile/imprisonment in the Soviet Far East.

Her pen portraits of fellow zeks (political prisoners), free workers, apparatchiks, common criminals and commandants are deft, though there is no way to be sure how realistic they are. Each story has a point, often about little expressions of humanity or courage breaking out in what was otherwise a hellhole.

Like all memoirs of the great slave societies of the 20th century, Ginzberg's is shaped by survivor bias.

Although she spent some time in the more brutal camps -- felling trees where the temperature came to 40 below, on little food -- her background (teacher of literature, musician) got her easier posts most of the time, where she ate somewhat better and had some shelter. Also, she was never beaten or tortured.

The same survivor bias shows in memoirs of prisoners of the Germans and Japanese. The ones who did not get jobs in kitchens or offices seldom survived to write memoirs. (A.J.P. Taylor accepts that 2 million died building the White Sea Canal; they left no memoirs.)

The capsule story is that Ginzburg had two sons. One died of starvation in Leningrad. She adopts a foundling daughter and falls in love with a German doctor. After her final release, she stays in the east because Anton, her new husband, has not yet finished his endless sentences.

Later, when they are allowed to go back to European Russia, where Ginzburg's first, undivorced husband turns out to have survived both the Germans and the Russians, she skips over whatever arrangements were worked out.

Among many interesting tales, there are some broader generalities that come through that might surprise American readers.

One is that not everybody in the GULAG was an innocent zek. There were huge numbers of what Ginzburg calls common criminals, a not unexpected residue of tsarism and civil war. The zeks were terrorized by the criminals, in some ways even more so than by the Party.

During the war, the zeks were wild to fight the Germans. The notion, promoted today by some neocons, that the Russians would have revolted against Stalin if given the chance is not supported here.

In the end, Ginzburg takes a lenient view of her persecutors, viewing the common run of them as misguided, weak, ignorant. Her hatred is reserved for the few actors at the top.

Thus she excuses herself from a great earlier crime. She and her first husband were stalwart Communists until the knock on the door in 1937. In an epilogue, Ginzburg says she did not know much about what had been done to the kulaks.

In one sense, this may be believable. She was teaching literature in college far away in Kazan. In another, it is not. The drumbeat of hatred against the kulaks and wreckers was part of her daily life. It required a determined failure of imagination to avoid drawing conclusions.

Even after her first 10 year sentence, she was still failing to imagine. And that, to me, is the heart of the book -- a failure to imagine.

It's an absolute must to read the book - especially for those who (fortunately!) had no luck to leive in Russia at that period. I am glad that it has been published in English.

This book is a wonderful document about the goulag during Stalin era.

Having orginally read this book in a French translation (and compared it to the Russian one), I'm really surprised that this edition is only the second part of the original book. FYI, the first part is over 400 pages and is also worth reading...

I found the first book by Eugenia in the 70's I beleive...and later the second book "Within the Whirlwind" and these books are the first 2 books I pack even sending them to a new home 2500 miles away. I LOVE these books despite the grim subject matter. I read them both almost yearly and find each one hard to put down once I begin the book. When you find a book that you can't risk not ever being able to find it again...then it is a classic IMHO. I would never "lend" my copies to anyone other than my mother (lol) for I really can't bear to lose these treasures.