Christopher L. Bennett
World History III
SURVIVOR OF THE
WHIRLWIND:
Evgenia Ginzburg=s Memoir of the Stalinist Terror
Journey Into the Whirlwind is the 1967 account of Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, a loyal member of the Communist Party elite in the Soviet Union, who in 1937 fell victim to Josef Stalin=s paranoid campaign to Apurge@ the USSR of all potential rivals to his power. Despite the best efforts of the Stalinist machine, Ginzburg survived eighteen years of tortuous imprisonment and emerged stronger and wiser to tell the tale. The mental acuity, insight, wisdom and strength of will which she displays in the narrative are essentially the very qualities which led Stalin and his cronies to see her as a threat in the first place.
Ginzburg=s story begins when the Stalinist Terror began, with the December 1, 1934 assassination of prominent Party member Sergey Kirov.[1] The murder is blamed on fellow Communists, and a wave of suspicions and accusations begins to spread. Soon, a colleague of Ginzburg=s, Professor Elvov, is accused of Aerrors@ in his interpretation of revolutionary ideology.[2] This is soon magnified into accusations of allegiance to the Trotskyists, the faction with whom Stalin competed for control of the Soviet Union and who are thus considered enemies of the Stalinist state. To her surprise, Ginzburg soon finds herself under suspicion for failing to denounce Elvov=s work as treasonous.[3] She stands up to the ludicrous charges, refusing to Aconfess@ to things she has not done, and finds herself subjected to increasingly more extreme accusations, until she is ultimately arrested for membership in a Asecret terrorist organization.@[4]
Ginzburg is far from the only victim. Well before her arrest, it is clear that the USSR is engulfed in a paranoid frenzy to expose Atraitors,@ Aterrorists@ and Asaboteurs.@ The interrogations, arrests and executions engulf not only those who have disagreed with the Stalinist line, but anyone associated with them through even the most casual acquaintance. In prison awaiting her trial, Ginzburg is told by fellow prisoner Garey Sagidullin that Stalin is seeking A[p]hysical extermination of all the best people in the Party, who stand or might stand in the way of his... dictatorship.@[5] This comes to include a huge percentage of the Party elite, especially scholars and intellectuals -- essentially anyone capable of independent thought.
The system established under the Stalinist Terror was tailored specifically to weed out the independent thinkers. The only people who thrive under this system are those who are too dull-witted or weak to question orders and those who take pleasure in tormenting others (though the latter often find themselves victimized later on). The more that Ginzburg denies the charges against her and her colleagues, the more she stands up for her own point of view, the harsher the charges become. The truth of the charges is never at issue; indeed, they are issued quite arbitrarily. Yaroslavsky, an official who condemns Ginzburg for not denouncing a paper of Elvov=s, actually edited the paper in question, yet is not penalized for it.[6] The goal of the process is not to unearth actual criminals; neither is it simply to exterminate Stalin=s potential enemies. The charges are false and the convictions predetermined, yet the prosecutors still seek to coerce their prisoners into signing confessions or testifying to their own guilt. The interrogators employ extensive psychological torture, and ultimately physical torture,[7] to extract these confessions. The interrogators are trained to present a cruel, intimidating stare to their subjects.[8] Prisoners are placed on a Aconveyor belt@ of relentless interrogation, depriving them of sleep and food until they are too weak or confused to resist signing fabricated confessions.[9] The interrogators even employ the classic Agood cop, bad cop@ routine, offering a sympathetic Major Yelshin who tries to win Ginzburg=s trust and persuade her to submit -- and who provides enough respite to keep her from getting too used to the other interrogators= brutality.[10]
Given the deceptive nature of the whole process, one may wonder why it was deemed necessary to obtain authentic signatures on these imaginary confessions. But the effort served several purposes. One was to provide an air of legitimacy; in the early years, at least, the Stalinists found it necessary to persuade the people that their actions were just. Another goal was to persuade the victims to name further Apotential enemies;@ the paranoid is never convinced that all foes have been vanquished. But the ultimate goal was more subtle. It was not enough for the Stalinists simply to kill their victims; they wished to break their victims= wills, to achieve a spiritual victory over them by forcing them to embrace the Stalinists= lies as truth. The victim=s embrace of the persecutor=s construction of reality, one which both parties know to be at odds with objective reality, is the ultimate form of surrender. Moreover, it gave the Stalinists the illusion that they could reshape reality itself to fit their will.
Ginzburg, however, stands her ground, refusing to accept their lies, and this possibly saves her life. Had she broken and acceded to the Stalinists= construction of reality, their victory would have been complete and they would have been content to kill her. But since she remains unconquered, her persecutors send her to prison, where they can continue their attempts to defeat her through torment and trickery. During her solitary confinement, she is subjected to a long list of restrictions, violation of which could bring on a new trial and a possible death sentence. At one point, the prison authorities bring her up on a completely fabricated charge and attempt to make her sign a document acknowledging it. She realizes that the wording of the document, citing Acounter-revolutionary activities,@ would make her eligible for a new, capital trial if she signs it.[11] This is part of a pattern of arbitrary punishments and brutal deprivations designed, in Ginzburg=s view, to drive even non-capital convicts to their destruction.[12]
The very nature of the Stalinist system of persecution caused it to grow swiftly out of hand. Ginzburg relates that before long, Aevery national republic was obliged... to have its own crop of enemies so as not to lag behind the others.@[13] In a system where failing to condemn an imagined traitor was itself deemed treasonous, simply running out of people to arrest is enough to imperil one=s own freedom or life. Indeed, many of the persecutors themselves soon end up as victims, including top members of the secret police and Ginzburg=s own Agood cop@ interrogator Major Yelshin (who ultimately dies in the same labor camp to which he helped send Ginzburg).[14] Eventually paranoid mania must give way to practicality, and many solitary-confinement sentences, including Ginzburg=s, are changed to labor-camp sentences, simply because the USSR can no longer afford having so many able-bodied people out of work.[15]
But Ginzburg does not find the Siberian labor camps to be an improvement over solitary confinement. In retrospect, she asserts that the long solitude had an Aennobling influence@ on her spirit, increasing her appreciation of literature, poetry and humanity.[16] In contrast, she sees labor camps as destructive to the soul, the degrading environment and brutal conditions leaving many Aspiritually dead@ and incapable of human feeling.[17] (In light of this observation, it is interesting to consider that Stalin himself was exiled to Siberia twice in his years as a young revolutionary.[18])
Ginzburg offers little commentary on the personal aftereffects of her imprisonment. Her story ends near the beginning of her sixteen years of hard labor in Siberia, with only a brief afterword. What can be discerned about her views after the fact is present in the main body of the narrative. She states that she began as an utterly loyal Communist, accepting as gospel anything printed in Pravda,[19] trusting in the system thanks to Aa demagogic education and the mystic spell of Party slogans.@[20] She states, though, that she was made uneasy by Stalin well before the purges began, even feeling an instinctive hostility toward him.[21] Given her intervening experiences, Ginzburg=s recollection of her early perceptions of Stalin must be considered suspect. Still, it does symbolize the attitude Ginzburg appears to take throughout the book, namely that the Terror was not the Communist Party=s betrayal of its members, but Stalin=s betrayal of the Party. She remains convinced throughout that Stalin=s reign of terror will be ended by loyal members of the Party, by Ahonest people and true Communists.@[22] Indeed, it is difficult to fault this belief, given that it is essentially what came to pass. Still, the older Ginzburg is more flexible than her younger self, no longer uncritical of demagoguery. Her labor-camp experiences even lead her to question the Communist party line on religion, wondering whether religious devotion constitutes Aunenlightened fanaticism or... fortitude in defense of freedom of conscience.@[23] She still praises the Agreat Leninist truths@ that have regained favor after Stalin=s fall;[24] but she has matured into the kind of Party member who can follow those truths with intelligence, judgment and adaptability rather than the blind, animal obedience which Stalin craved. Reading the memoirs of such a Communist leads one to wonder how different the Soviet Union might have become had it never been scarred by the tyranny of Josef Stalin.
[1]Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1967), pp. 3-4.
[2]Ibid., 5ff.
[3]Ibid., 9.
[4]Ibid., 50.
[5]Ibid., 74.
[6]Ibid., 33-4.
[7]Ginzburg was spared the physical torture, for her conviction came before its institution in April 1937. Ibid., 69.
[8]Ibid., 49.
[9]Ibid., 83ff.
[10]Ibid., 64ff.
[11]Ibid., 217.
[12]Ibid., 201.
[13]Ibid., 25.
[14]Ibid., 389.
[15]Ibid., 258.
[16]Ibid., 205ff.
[17]Ibid., 340-41.
[18]Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 99 (Microsoft Corporation, 1998).
[19]Ibid., 5.
[20]Ibid., 24.
[21]Ibid., 3, 25-6.
[22]Ibid., 174-5, 417.
[23]Ibid., 413.
[24]Ibid., 417.