To Endure & Remember

JOURNEY INTO THE WHIRLWIND by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg. 418 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95.

In this century of horrors, the deadly concentration camps and prisons of Stalin in the '30s, relatively old-fashioned and bureaucratically cumbersome in their operation, were soon to be overshadowed by the smoothly functioning Nazi death camps and crematoriums of the '40s. But they were no less ruthless in quality for being more primitive and inefficient. Moreover, they existed on such a scale that ordinary Russians knew about them and stolidly accepted (or had to accept) the destruction of their fellow countrymen.

Journey into the Whirlwind is a deeply significant, lest-we-forget book. It recalls the days--and nightmares--of purges, when millions of innocent and apolitical Russians, caught up in the maelstrom of Stalin's paranoia, were brutally executed or jailed or swept across the continent into the slave-labor camps of Siberia.

This, of course, is not the first book to explore the camps or dig into the new subcellars that were constructed under the Lower Depths. It occupies a place on the same shelf as Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Lydia Chukovskaya's The Deserted House, another homefront view of the purges recently published in the U.S. But since Mrs. Ginzburg's book is a work of nonfiction, an intensely personal and passionately felt document in which every syllable clangors with awful authenticity, it is as affecting as an anguished letter from a friend, as morbidly vivid in its details as a neighbor's report of a harrowing automobile accident just down the road.

Stick & Carrot. On Dec. 1, 1934, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was assassinated in Leningrad. It was this event that Stalin chose to use as the excuse to rid himself of all potential opposition--real and imagined--and to inflict the cult of terror that would ensure his dictatorship.

At the time of Kirov's murder, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg was 27 years old, a happily married mother of three children, a loyal party member, and a schoolteacher and journalist in Kazan in eastern Russia. At that time, also, there was published a four-volume History of the All-Union Communist Party, which, in its coverage of the 1905 Czarist terrors, displeased Stalin; it contained certain "errors" in connection with the theory of permanent revolution. Professor Nikolai Naumovich Elvov, who had written the offending passage, also happened to be the author of a source book on Tartar history. Incredibly, Mrs. Ginzburg was arrested and denounced as a Trotskyite and counter-revolutionary because she had failed to write a review for her publication denouncing Elvov's Tartar book. In short, the masters of a Brechtian netherworld of logical non-reason accused her of not doing something she had not done--and of course she could not deny not doing it.

For this, Mrs. Ginzburg was stripped of her party membership, deprived of her job and separated from her family; by February of 1937, she was a prisoner in "Black Lake" prison in Kazan undergoing the traditional stick-and-carrot confession tortures. Steadfastly, she refused to confess the non-crimes she did not commit. Nor would she incriminate others, sensing that such actions would in no way diminish the severity of her fate. The burden of this book is a stark, uncompromising recital of the next three years of her painful imprisonment; that she managed to survive to serve another 14 1/2 years in captivity seems miraculous.

Victim & Observer. For it is all here again: the conveyor-belt system of continuous questioning by interrogators working in shifts around the clock; the sudden shooting of fellow prisoners in the night; solitary confinement in sweatboxes in which one had barely room to stand; the indignities of constant searches; the starvation diets in damp, sunless cells and the diarrhea and malnutrition and malaria that resulted; the sardinelike transport in Black Maria vans across cities and hothouse boxcar trips across the continent; and finally the forced labor in the taiga, those subarctic pine forests that end where the tundras begin, and where "the flies died like people."

"During those years," she writes, "I experienced many conflicting feelings, but the dominant one was that of amazement. Was all this imaginable--was it really happening, could it be intended? Perhaps it was this very amazement which helped to keep me alive. I was not only a victim, but an observer also." She was able to hold onto her sanity, she says, by constantly recalling the poets Pushkin, Blok and Nekrasov, and by endlessly framing verses of her own. But she found no words that quite described the conditions of her treatment until 1964 when, in a Saint-Exupery story, she came across a line spoken by an airplane pilot who was lost in a storm over the Andes: "I swear that no animal could have endured what I did."

Deviationist Dream. After Stalin's death in 1953 the thaw began. Mrs. Ginzburg was released from prison and returned to Moscow. Like so many others, she refused to let go of her faith in Communism, ascribing her woes to the evil gloss of Stalinism rather than to the Communist system itself.

A writer now for Novy Mir and Literaturnaya Gazeta, she has discovered, she says, "that the great Leninist truths have again come into their own in our country and party!" She decided to write her memoirs because "today the people can already be told of the things that have been and shall be no more."

Not quite. Journey into the Whirlwind has been published in Italy and now in the U.S.--but not in the Soviet Union. The emancipation of the downtrodden literary serf, as the recent trials of Sinyavsky and Daniel indicate, is still, alas, a deviationist dream. Russians, for all the alleged lifting and crossing of the bars, can only read this memoir in typewritten manuscript form, passed from hand to hand. The wheel of Communist history grinds exceedingly cruel, and turns excruciatingly slow.

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