Kolyma Tales (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
by Varlam Shalamov
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Book Summary Information
Author: Varlam ShalamovTranslator: John Glad
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-02-01
ISBN: 0140186956
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of Kolyma Tales (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Book Review: Kolyma: "Don't Believe, Don't Fear, Don't Ask"
Summary: 5 Stars
In his book THE GREAT TERROR, Robert Conquest estimated that three million Soviet political and other prisoners lost their lives in the icy gulags northeast of Yakutsk known only as the Kolyma (with the accent on the last syllable, as in koh-lee-MAH). Since then, the estimate has gone down somewhat to a mere half million. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago referred to it as "the pole of cold and cruelty."
No one has written as much or as impressively about the Kolyma as Varlam Shalamov, whose KOLYMA TALES is a collection of short stories distilled from his seventeen years as an Article 58 political prisoner, in a place where the average prisoner typically lasts only three months before succumbing to the cold, the brutality, and starvation. According to Shalamov in his story "Major Pugachov's Rebellion":
"The arrests of the thirties were arrests of random victims on the false and terrifying theory of a heightened class struggle accompanying the strengthening of socialism. The professors, union officials, soldiers, and workers who filled the prisons to overflowing at that period had nothing to defend themselves with except, perhaps, personal honesty and naïveté--precisely those qualities that lightened rather than hindered the punitive work of `justice' of the day. The absence of any unifying idea undermined the moral resistance of the prisoners to an unusual degree. They were neither enemies of the government nor state criminals, and they died, not even understanding why they had to die."
The prisoners were carried by ship to the port of Magadan, which was free of ice only half the year. Once, when the prisoners on board ship mutinied, all the ship's crew had to do was hose down the holds where the prisoners were kept. The water froze within minutes, killing hundreds. Once the ships arrived, the prisoners taken to a transit camp and eventually reassigned to one of the "permanent" camps in the area. The most brutal duty was working in the gold mines in a region that is the coldest on earth. (Winter temperatures can be under -30° F for weeks at a time, and frequently under -60º F, and sometimes under -90º F.) It is the gold miners who tend not to last. The only reason Shalamov was able to last seventeen years was that he spent much of the time working in a hospital, where conditions were by far the easiest.
Once in the camps, political prisoners were subject to two terrifying hierarchies: the camp commandants and their security personnel and, by far the worse, prisoners from the criminal classes, those arrested for murder and robbery. If one runs afoul of one of the guards, one can be shot; but if one runs afoul of the felons, whether an officer, a guard, or a prisoner, one can be just as surely killed. At all times, the level of theft is epidemic: Clothing, food scraps, books--anything that can be conceived of as holding any value--is stolen without any chance for redress. Prisoners who get their hands on some extra food consume it immediately for fear of losing it to theft. The only people in the camps who have the power to ease the lives of the prisoners are the professional medical staff. Even in the worst days of the Stalin terror, doctors were never subject to political or security pressure, only from judgment by other, higher medical professionals.
Virtually all the prisoners suffered from scurvy. It was thought that the local dwarf-cedar needles contained Vitamin C, the lack of which is the cause of the disease. In "An Epitaph," Shalamov describes one character named Roman Romanovich, who was assigned to pick the needles:
"Only real `goners' were used for needle-picking. These starving semi-invalids were the by-products of the gold-mines, which transformed healthy people into invalids in three weeks by hunger, lack of sleep, long hours of heavy work, beatings. New people were `transferred' to the work gang, and Moloch chewed on...."
A few sentences further on, we learn that "the needles were not only useless as a source of Vitamin C but were even declared much later, in 1952, to be harmful to the kidneys."
Small details emerge from this great collection. For example, prisoners avoided the bottom bunks in the prison dormitories because they were icy cold. Heat rises, so that the most desirable bunks were closest to the ceiling. Naturally, these were all occupied by the criminal classes. Prisoners hated having to take baths, not because they loved their body lice, but because they had to surrender all their clothing to be deloused. What they got back was not necessarily their own rags; and often they had to wait naked and shivering while the door opened and closed to admit new prisoners.
One particular detail stands out in the story "Dry Rations":
"We'd all learned weakness and had forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, vanity, or ambition, and jealousy and passion seemed as alien to us as Mars, and as trivial in addition. It was much more important to learn how to button your pants in the frost. Grown men cried if they weren't able to do that. We understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither. We were overwhelmed by indifference. We knew that it was in our power to end this life the very next day and now and again we made that decision, but each time life's trivia would interfere with our plans. Today they would promise an extra kilo of bread for good work, and it would be simply foolish to commit suicide on such a day."
I can think of no comparable time in history where such a large number of innocent people suffered so grievously. Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn have performed a great service by documenting these horrors. But where Solzhenitsyn preached and moralized, Shalamov took it all as a starting point for great literature. What Shalamov takes for granted will make your hairs stand on end and give you nightmares of an icy hell. I will never forget his Kolyma Tales as long as I live.
About the title for my review, it comes from the prisoners themselves, whose watchword this was.
Summary of Kolyma Tales (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the north-eastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, their hopes and plans extending no further than a few hours.
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