A book referenced in Masha Gessen's "The Future is History".
An account by a woman who lived through Stalin's Great Terror. She begins as a staunch and well-respected member of the Communist party, working in academia. She recounts her personal experience with the quota arrest system that led to her spending two years in solitary confinement and then sixteen years in the work camps around Kolyma. She explores the insanity, the double-think, the sadism of Stalin's system. (Though she never really gets to thinking about the underlying point of it all.) She describes the mind-wrenching logic of the justice system and trial, the types of torture used to get confessions, the daily details of life in the sub-human conditions of both the prisons and the work camps. She describes people who sell out dozens of others in a useless attempt to save themselves from the Terror. The sadistic interrogators who themselves later turn up as goners in the camps.
Strangely, when you read about her on Wikipedia, she never seems to have given up on Lenin and Communism in general, seeing the whole Stalin period as a "Cult of Personality" problem...
The book gives a good sense of the difficulty of trying to understand such an experience when reason, logic, social values and politics don't explain it. What was the point of all that suffering and death? This is what is so hard to get your mind around.
Also, makes it even more frightening or disturbing when you see how Stalin is again becoming a hero, a model, in Russia....
No comments:
Post a Comment