Alaskan Range: Gulag
...I visited the KGB archives in Vladivostok a dozen years ago. Once past a very large and intimidating female guard, I saw miles of dim shelves filled with identical cardboard boxes. My guide opened several at random, revealing case histories from Czarist times next to some from the 70s, right by others from the 30s. A pale, haggard American researcher, the only other visitor, approached us and asked us to help get the word out that the tragic, compelling stories in the archive needed to be told...
Greg Hill draws attention to a book which details the cruelty perpetrated in Soviet prison camps.
George Bernard Shaw liked to say “There are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency; and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient.”
Decent bookshelves aren’t cheap, so librarians, being paragons of efficiency, maximize bookcase capacities by putting in as many shelves as practically possible. Most hardbound books are about the same size, and six shelves of them will fit in a seven-foot bookcase. The same bookcase holds only four shelves of oversized books. “Oversize” is defined by Niagara University’s online “Glossary of Library Terminology,” as “A book that is too large to fit on regular shelving, so it is located in a separate oversize section.”
Noel Wien Library’s oversize collection is at the end of the nonfiction books. There you’ll find many coffeetable-sized treasures, like Tomasz Kizny’s “Gulag: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps.” It’s received critical acclaim but weighs 8.55 pounds, so reading it requires physical and emotional stamina. The Booklist review noted that “Kizny, a Polish photographer and journalist, spent 15 years researching, and his book contains 550 black-and-white photographs of life in the Soviet Gulag.”
“Gulag” is the acronym for “The Chief Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies,” a huge operation created under Lenin’s directives by the OGPU, or secret police, to “reeducate” criminals, especially political prisoners. The Wikipedia article on the Gulag says “There were at least 476 separate camp complexes, each one comprising hundreds, even thousands of individual camps.” Camps were scattered across the Soviet Union, and special camps were established for children, for “wives of traitors of the Motherland,” and for imprisoned scientists working on secret projects. Over 18 million people entered the Gulag, but only a small fraction ever returned.
Kizny focuses on just seven of the installations, but his massive book is interlaced with small biographies culled from recently-opened Russian archives. For example, Kizny’s caption for photo of the emotionless face of Igor Kurilko reads “born 1904, nobleman, lieutenant in the Czarist army. Condemned to five years in the camps for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda.’ Foreman of the transit camp at Kem, renowned for his cruelty and sadism. He appears in many prisoners memoirs … He was condemned to death and shot in 1930.”
Most of the camp guards and officers ended up imprisoned themselves, including Alexandr Nogtev. He was one of Lenin’s henchmen, organized the Gulag camp system and was director of the first big one at Solovetsky Island. He, too wound up a Gulag prisoner. Until the revolution, Solovetsky Island housed a prominent 15th century Russian Orthodox monastery that became the Gulag home of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and criminals. “The Solovetsky camp,” Kizny writes, “was a sort of laboratory for methods that would be applied for years to come throughout the Gulag system. The main focus was on finding ways to raise productivity levels among the slave laborers.”
An entirely different Gulag enterprise was a zinc and lead mining camp established at Vaigach, another Arctic island. It was commanded by a tough OGPU officer named Fiodor Eichmans, “director of the Solovetsky prison camp in 1924-28. Gulag head from April to June 1930, and was condemned to death and shot in 1938”. Surprisingly, Eichmans’ prison camp featured nutritious food, 8-hour workdays, heated barracks, winter clothes, even guns for hunting and “a well-stocked library.” Kizny wrote, “Apart from the fact that its participants were taken to the island against their will, it was more like a pioneer mining town in Alaska … than a Soviet prison camp.” Unfortunately, mineral deposits proved too meager, and the camp closed.
I visited the KGB archives in Vladivostok a dozen years ago. Once past a very large and intimidating female guard, I saw miles of dim shelves filled with identical cardboard boxes. My guide opened several at random, revealing case histories from Czarist times next to some from the 70s, right by others from the 30s. A pale, haggard American researcher, the only other visitor, approached us and asked us to help get the word out that the tragic, compelling stories in the archive needed to be told. Maybe Kizny has done that, and maybe there are other and better qualities in the world besides efficiency.
