Journey into the Whirlwind
by Evgenia Ginzburg, Paul Stevenson (Translator), Max Hayward (Translator)
4.38 · Rating details · 3,296 ratings · 258 reviews
Eugenia Ginzburg's critically acclaimed memoir of the harrowing eighteen years she spent in prisons and labor camps under Stalin's rule
By the late 1930s, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg had been a loyal and very active member of the Communist Party for many years. Yet like millions of others who suffered during Stalin's reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist and counter-revolutionary—and sentenced to prison. With an amazing eye for detail, profound strength, and an indefatigable spirit, Ginzburg recounts the years, days, and minutes she endured in prisons and labor camps, including two years of solitary confinement. A classic account of survival, Journey into the Whirlwind is considered one of the most important documents of Stalin's regime ever written. (less)
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Paperback, 418 pages
Published November 4th 2002 by Harvest Books (Harcourt, Inc.) (first published January 1st 1967)
Original TitleКрутой маршрут
ISBN139780156027519
Edition LanguageEnglish
SeriesLe Vertige #1SettingRussian Federation
Other Editions (43)
Крутой маршрут
Journey into the Whirlwind
Journey into the Whirlwind
Into the Whirlwind
Journey into the Whirlwind
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Ahmad Sharabiani
Jul 09, 2019Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it
Shelves: biography, non-fiction, literature, 20th-century, russia
Journey into the Whirlwind, Evgenia Ginzburg
Journey into the Whirlwind is the English title of the memoir by Eugenia Ginzburg. It was published in English in 1967, some thirty years after the story begins.
The two-part book is a highly detailed first-hand account of her life and imprisonment in the Soviet Union during the rule of Joseph Stalin in the 1930's.
Although Ginzburg sought to have the manuscript published in the Soviet Union, she was turned down. The manuscript was smuggled out of the country and later sold in many different languages. The first volume was published in 1967 and the second volume was published in 1979 two years after Ginzburg's death. A copy would not be published by a Russian publisher until 1990.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال 1992 میلادی
عنوان: در دل گردباد؛ نویسنده: یوگینا (یوگنیا سیمونوونا) گینزبرگ؛ با مقدمه: هاینریش بل؛ مترجم فرزانه طاهری؛ تهران، سروش، 1369؛ در بیست و یک و 485ص؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، نیلوفر، 1385؛ در 532ص؛ شابک 9644482980؛ چاپ پنجم 1395؛ موضوع سرگذشتنامه یوگینا (یوگنیا سیمونوونا) گینزبرگ از نویسندگان روسیه - سده 20م
این کتاب ترجمه ی بخش دوم یادمانهای نویسنده است؛ بخش نخست با عنوان: «سفری در گردباد»، در سال 1348هجری خورشیدی، در 454ص، با ترجمه جناب «مهدی سمسار»، توسط انتشارات «خوارزمی» منتشر و با چاپ دوم در سال 1361 تجدید شده است؛
کتاب براساس یادمانهای «یوگینیا گینزبورگ» نوشته شده؛ نویسنده و شاعری که کمونیست بود، ولی دستگاه امنیتی «استالین» به او ظنین شد، و پس از آزار و اذیتهای بسیار، که برای او و خانواده اش ایجاد کرد، وی را به زندان و اردوگاههای کار اجباری فرستاد؛ او هجده سال از عمرش را در چنان شرایطی گذراند؛ در آن دوره، به اداره ی کل اردوگاههای کار انضباطی «گولاگ» میگفتند؛ او تنها یکی از میلیونها نفری بود، که به آنجا تبعید شده بودند.؛ پسر اولش را در دوره ی تبعیدش از دست داد، و پسر دومش «واسیلی آکسیانوف»، نویسنده ی معروف روسیه است، که چهارده سال تمام، از او دور بود، و در سال 1980میلادی، از روسیه اخراج شد.؛ این کتاب سالها به صورت «سامیزدات (نشر زیرزمینی)» در روسیه چاپ، و سپس به بیشتر زبانهای دنیا ترجمه شد
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 05/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی (less)
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Steven Godin
Sep 11, 2019Steven Godin rated it it was amazing
Shelves: non-fiction, history, memoir-autobiography, russia-ukraine
Eugenia Ginzburg was one of millions of dedicated Communists and ordinary Soviet citizens swept up in the colossal purges carried out during the 1930's. Ginzburg, who was a teacher and wrote for the newspaper Red Tartary, was arrested by Stalin's secret police early in 1937, and sentenced to a ten-year term for being an active member of a nonexistent Trotskyite conspiracy. She survived, often only by a hair's breadth, the gruelling time spent in prisons and labor camps, living through some of the harshest conditions known to man. Ginzburg would go to write, what is possibly, the single most vivid report on Stalin's epoch of terror.
Her story is told over two books (this is basically both books in one review to save time). The first covering the period from her arrest up to 1939, when, on the eve of the Second World War, she arrived at the Kolyma gold fields of Eastern Siberia, which was the most desolate and foreboding of Stalin's camps. The second part 'Within the Whirlwind', which was released later in 1977, the year of Ginzburg's death, focuses solely with more detail on the inner circles of Kolyma, and is told with a greater frankness and a deeper feeling of pessimism at ever seeing a change of leadership in the Soviet Union. The chances of survival, especially at Kolyma, were certainly no better than one in several hundred, and living on a diet mostly consisting of potato peelings, stomach-churning soup, rancid water, and moldy bread, added to the fact of extreme temperatures both uncomfortably hot and bone-chillingly cold, plus the lack of any decent sleep, its little surprise really. She owed her life to her quick wits, the reciting of poetry which managed to pierce the darkness, and to the kindness and aid of fellow inmates, most notably Anton Walter, a German Doctor from the Crimea, with whom she fell in love.
I basically picked from these on the subject - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago', Varlam Shalamov's 'Kolyma Tales', and this. I went for this because it's told from a female perspective, and I've lost track of the amount of times I've read similar books dealing with captivity written by men. And there are obvious differences here, one most noticeably being menstruation, something that didn't even cross my mind until it first gets mentioned.
What I found most striking about Ginzburg’s narrative, is that it's not just simply recounting the day to day events she and her fellow inmates had to endure, but more to do with the fact that Ginzburg had such a powerful personality you pick up through her writing, and her strong beliefs in Communism and the Party aren't weakened. True, she had refused to join in denouncing a fellow academic as a Trotskyite spy. and she never saw Stalin as a God, but she truly believed in what she took to be the ideals of the Communist system. To think a faithful Party member could be subjected to eighteen years of incarceration in brutal Soviet prisons and concentration camps, and still remain loyal to the Party is difficult to get my head around, but it's something that was not uncommon.
Ginzburg’s remarkable story is an incredible example of human stamina and perseverance, and a stark reminder that we should all appreciate our comforts a whole lot more. As well as detailing the cruel regime of the time, her account challenges the reader, and offers a different perspective on life, when all that matters is trying to survive, a perspective most of us will never have to experience. (less)
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Jan-Maat
Jan 16, 2012Jan-Maat added it
Shelves: russia-and-soviet-union, read-in-translation, 20th-century, autobiography-memoir
A fantastic and heart rendering book. Evgenia Ginzberg had a comfortable life in the 1920s and into the 1930s in Kazan, For reasons unknown she was arrested in one of the early purges and sentenced to prison. Due to the continuing purges and concomitant necessary changes to accommodate all the people who were imprisoned, her solitary confinement was interrupted and she was forced to share a cell (prison wasn't bad (view spoiler)- there was a library service), later the two are deported, along with many others, to a labour camp in Siberia. The train journey is something almost magical for somebody who has been in a cell with one other person for several years - of a sudden there is a railway wagon full of women, one of whom slightly bizarrely declares herself to be a Menshevik, though it seems to me highly unlikely that anything of Menshevik party structures could have survived that long. In Siberia, rations are proportional to work completed and the work they are set to is felling trees with an axe and dragging them back to a central point. Everyday working in deep cold Ginzburg finds herself weaker and weaker, she fells less and gets less food as her productivity decreases eventually she realises that she will die. Instead due to luck and kindness she becomes a nurse. At which point the translation abruptly ends. There is a second part to Ginzburg's autobiography, I believe untranslated, detailing her years as a nurse in the labour camp, relationship with the Doctor (who if I recall correctly was a homoeopath and seventh day Adventist) and their eventual release and settlement in 'Golden Magadan'. Ginzburg drags the reader with her from a comfortable life through accusation and imprisonment, solitary confinement to Siberian labour camp up to the point of impending death, it is quite a reading experience.
Because this is an autobiographical account it contain a lot that who seem too impossible or ridiculous for fiction. For example having to share her prison cell despite being in solitary confinement or the brief intense romances between the male and female prisoners while they were waiting to be transported up the pacific coast to the labour camp. (less)
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Buck
Aug 16, 2009Buck rated it it was amazing
Shelves: life-writing, in-captivity, russians
After beavering away like a good little boy on a review of Into the Whirlwind, I got so disgusted with the falseness and inadequacy of my response (even more so than usual) that I eventually gave up in despair. Instead, I’ll take this opportunity to elaborate on some comments I made below, since I’m still kind of hung up on the ethics of reading ‘survivor literature’ – a topic of zero interest to anyone who’s not a complete tool like myself. So fair warning.
Despite all my prissy scruples, I think I could offer a plausible justification for this weird gulag obsession I’ve developed. The standard defence would be to claim that books such as Into the Whirlwind are educational in the truest sense, admitting us into a reality so incredibly, so monstrously alien to our own.
And there’s something to this argument. Speaking personally, I am – I have to face it – the spoiled and sheltered product of a relatively enlightened society. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful, extremely grateful. But what, frankly, do I know about evil? About suffering, injustice, degradation? As a matter of real, lived experience, almost nothing. When it comes to moral knowledge, I’m a mere child, a big, happy, thirty-something child. Of course, many of the people I see around me every day are similarly infantilized, but that doesn’t give me much comfort, since it only means there are fewer viable models out there. Lacking what you might call the ‘tragic sense of life’, I compensate by getting it second-hand from those who’ve acquired it the hard way -- in a Soviet labour camp, for instance.
It’s very tempting to just leave it at that, writing off my gulag fascination as a tax-deductible, personal improvement expense. But the very neatness of the self-justification makes me suspicious. I love literature; I take it more seriously than almost anything else in the world, but I’m very sceptical of the proposition that we can learn anything essential about life just by ingesting a certain quantity and quality of printed matter. It’s an illusion to which intellectuals are prone: the idea that all the answers are buried away in books, waiting to be excavated – when the really important lessons are the ones that are branded and beaten into you by life itself.
Conclusion? Dunno – I haven’t got that far in my thinking yet. I’m certainly not giving up on books, nor am I abandoning the gulag just yet. I suppose I’d just like to live a little more in the world and a little less in my head, to keep literature in its place.
Somebody should write a book about that.
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What does it say about me that I've created a separate shelf for Soviet prison memoirs? And that I can think of at least three others I want to read? This can't be healthy. (less)
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Haaze
Nov 17, 2011Haaze rated it it was amazing
Shelves: lit-russian, favorites, biographies, his-20th-century, nat_russia, memoirs, pol_tyranny, his_stalinism
Over the last few days Evgenia Ginzburg's autobiography 'Journey into the Whirlwind' has been a constant companion. Her book is one of the more well known biographies describing the insanity of the Stalin era as it follows her descent into a bureaucratic and inhumane machine of torture and imprisonment seemingly designed to devour the strength and humanity of an individual's existence. She starts out as a devoted journalist, communist, spouse and mother of two small children that innocently becomes accused of political crimes. She was arrested in 1937. From a modern perspective the situation is Kafkaesque in its surreal embrace. However, as the pages and hours pass Ginzburg's voice describes a dizzying array of psychological and physical horror ranging from her interrogation, isolation and transfer to the Gulag, where the book abruptly ends. It is a painting of inferno and human misery although the glow of hope glimmers constantly through the memories she evokes. Her humanity shines through every page as she describes the life she is forced to endure. There are numerous moments that are luminous in allowing us to appreciate the simple things in life. Ginzburg's love of poetry and literature in general permeates her memoirs as it is one of the strengths that lifts her above the situation she is immersed in and allows her to keep struggling through the ruthless inferno.
I felt such an injustice in my heart that this woman had to be dealt such a fate. The horror is of course that millions of innocent people endured similar experiences as the ones Ginzburg describe. Beyond the human qualities in Ginzburg's writing a sense to explore the time of the Gulag is awakened. Ginzburg did indeed write a second part to her autobiography ("In the Whirlwind") that I am looking forward to read. Of course, Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" and "The Gulag Archipelago" beckon in conjunction with Applebaum's study 'Gulag'. The book was not translated into English until 1975, and its sequel is currently out of print in the UK as well as the US. I am surprised that such a work has not received greater attention. Ginzburg's memoirs certainly makes one appreciate living in peace although it also makes one realize that such 'peace' cannot be taken for granted. Her voice and character lingers in my mind. Highly recommended! (less)
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Dem
Nov 21, 2011Dem rated it liked it
Journey into the whirlwind recounts the story of active member of the communist Party for many years, Eugenia Semonovna Ginzburg, who was arrested like many of her fellow citizens during Stalin's reign of terror on trumped up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary and sentenced to prison. This book recounts her many years spent in prison and labour camps.
This is a insightful story and sometimes while reading this book you may sometimes think " This has to be exaggerated somewhat as it could not possibly have happened to this extent" but the sad fact is, it did happen to millions of people and these are the sort of books that reminds us that;
“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.”
George Eliot
This book give a good insight into the prison system of the time and to arrests of ordinary people during Stalin's reign of terror.
A difficult book to rate, I did find it lacked the emotion I had expected from a memoir of this nature and I found the story ended rather abruptly.
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Zanna
Dec 10, 2018Zanna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: persephone, 500gbw
At the outset of this memoir I was wondering how it could be so long... how could there be so much to say about the monotony of solitary confinement or the struggle to survive in a labour camp without the account itself becoming tedious? One reason is Jenny's incredible memory. She never talks about her abilities or experiences as exceptional, but a number of episodes in the story reveal her literary knowledge and memory as outstanding. These talents, as well as resourcefulness, good luck, and the help of people who like her somehow kept their integrity, helped her to survive, sustaining her will, feeding her spirit. This book is one of those that shows you how much a person can survive and how much you the reader have to be grateful for. I felt every scene of it in my own body. (less)
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James
May 20, 2012James rated it it was amazing
Shelves: when-criminals-become-politicians, gulag
This was a curious book, I've read several others by Gulag survivors.
But there was an ambiguity in this book that puzzled me to the end.
Starting out, I thought, she thought,
that the entire insanity of the purges was the fault of Stalin.
And that she still believed in communism,
But as I continued through the book,
more and more I began to wonder if she was hiding her real feelings,
perhaps because, while it was possible to denounce Stalin in the 1960's,
it still wasn't possible to denounce communism.
She died in 1977 while the Soviet Union was still riding high.
She never saw the disintegration and repudiation of Marxism.
If she had written the book after 1990, how would it have been different?
In other words, was she to some extent an unreliable narrator?
I have no doubt that the horrors she describes happened,
if not to her, then to someone she met along the way.
But what was going on in her mind?
Was she a communist of pure heart?
or merely another opportunist who joined the party to get a better education, job, housing, and the right to buy in the special stores for party members?
And when the benefits were taken away, what use was the communist party to her?
Another reason I wonder if she was an unreliable narrator is because
she always makes herself out to be such a perfect human being.
People who make up psychology tests often use several techniques for determining if a person is lying.
Perhaps the most common is to include absolute questions that make a person seem too good to be true.
Like: I have never told a lie. Or, I have never stolen anything.
In never showing a dark side, she seems unrealistic.
One comment of her's I really liked was:
"how thin the line is between high principles and blinkered intolerance,
and also how relative are all human systems and ideologies
and how absolute the tortures which human beings inflict on one another."
Is there much difference between the US political parties and the communist party in their determination to impose their will on others?
When she found out she was only going to get 10 years in prison and loss of all personal property, she was ecstatic!
She had thought she was going to be shot.
How unstable our feelings can be depending on circumstances!
A few lines from the book I liked include:
"Thus, in full accordance with Marxist theory,
the business of replacing the rules began as a tragedy
and was then twice repeated as a farce."
"It was long ago and it never happened anyway"
This book only covers the first few years,
she wrote a second book "Within the Whirlwind", about the later years.
She likes to use the word "whirlwind" in her book titles,
is she referring to:
"The wicked sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."
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Lobstergirl
Nov 06, 2009Lobstergirl rated it liked it
Shelves: memoir, russia
In places, Ginzburg's tone seems oddly casual for a memoir with such horrifying subject matter. Maybe this is of-a-piece with her stating several times that prisoners laughed, joked, or were gleeful in certain situations, even prisoners who had been ripped from their families and small children. It's not my place to judge....and I don't fully understand human behavior. It just seems to me that laughter and glee might be hard to come by if you hadn't seen your kids in three years. And Ginzburg does mention several times how difficult it is to be away from her children, and that during the gulag she tried not to talk about them because it was too emotionally destabilizing. Understood.
Another issue with the book is that it's advertised as a memoir of Ginzburg's "harrowing eighteen-year odyssey" through the gulag. Yet it covers only the first three years, and ends abruptly, finishing with an Epilogue stating "Now I am in my fifties." (She was incarcerated in her early 30s.) She also wants us to know that she has "lived to see the Twentieth and the Twenty-second Party Congress" and that she tried to remember every detail of her experiences "in the hope of recounting them to honest people and true Communists, such as I was sure would listen to me one day." "How wonderful...that the great Leninist truths have again come into their own in our country and Party!" she enthuses, apparently in 1967. Oh dear.
It's always interesting to compare and contrast what was going on under Stalin with what was happening under Hitler. In Germany, if you were packed onto a freight car, it was very bad news. For Ginzburg, the freight car was so crowded "there was scarcely room to stand. But this cheered us up, in view of the prison rule: the more dirty, crowded, and hungry you are, and the more unpleasant the guards, the more likely you are to stay alive." If you were going to be shot, it would usually happen back at the prison before you were transported to the gulag. And in both countries there were those sad, deluded folks who believed that, if only Hitler knew about the horrors of Auschwitz, or Stalin about those of the gulag, they would put a stop to it! Why wasn't someone telling them?
Maybe other editions supply more information, but this one had no introduction or editorial content and left me wondering who Ginzburg was. I needed some context, both of her life before, and after her arrest and imprisonment. I have no idea from this memoir alone what happened to her husband, her two sons, and her stepdaughter. All the same, this is clearly a necessary first-person account of life in the Stalin-era prison system. (less)
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Suzanne
Aug 03, 2017Suzanne rated it really liked it
Shelves: memoir, non-fiction
Hailed an important work upon it's publication in 1967, Journey into the Whirlwind is Ginzburg's personal account her years in a Soviet prison during the reign of Josef Stalin.
As a teenager I read Solhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and was stunned at the brutality and inhumane treatment of political prisoners during the Stalin era. Ginzburg's work brought back all those memories and more. It's a detailed narrative of how easily a public can be manipulated to turn on their friends and neighbors, through fear, and also through propaganda. This alone makes it a valuable piece of literature - the fact that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
But Ginzburg also reveals a few equally important messages. First, that hope springs eternal. Even in the darkest moments, the prisoners held onto the belief that something good was going to happen, and to appreciate even the smallest of blessings. And second, human kindness doesn't cease to exist - even in the hell of a Soviet prison. (less)
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Andreea Ratiu
Dec 01, 2014Andreea Ratiu rated it it was amazing
I started to read this book without knowing it was an autobiography. After a few chapters I started doing some research about Kazan, Tatarstan, Stalin and the Gulag. It was then that I realized the book was real: people were actually send to labor camp for 10 years after fake trials. Innocent people, whose only fault was being born in the wrong time, were caught 'into the whirlwind' and they could not do anything else but go with the flow.
What impressed me the most about Genia, the women telling her story, other than her resilience, was her believe in the Party. Like most of the prisoners, she did not doubt the Party. She kept on hoping someone would come one day and say 'all this is a mistake, you are free' and all will be forgiven and forgot. (less)
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Aubrey
Aug 26, 2019Aubrey rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: reality-check, translated, russian, antidote-translated, person-of-reality-translated, antidote-think-twice-all, person-of-reality, person-of-translated, 5-star, r-2019
4.5/5
I do not want to sound like a heroine or a martyr. I am very far from thinking that my refusal to sign their lying records was due to any special courage on my part. Nor do I judge those comrades who, tortured beyond endurance, signed whatever was put before them.
On the march back, numbers of them had died like—I was going to say "like flies," but at Kolyma it was truer to say that flies died like people.
There's a certain phenomenon that seems to be less common these days, or perhaps is simply more derided and/or denormalized, amongst self-professed cultural connoisseurs: the -phile. Anglo, Franco, Asia getting its own specifically othering title under the name of "Orientalist", all those crop up every so often amongst nonfictions and even fictions to evoke a feeling of devotion/obsession with a country/culture/populace external to that of one's origins. Less often, I've come across a form known as "Russophile" and at the end of this book, I can see how one could be struck, as if by lightning, and subsequently set upon a path in almost worship of such a huge, foreboding landscape and its historical figures both real and fiction, sprung straight from the Opera or the Ballet. This may be a wildly digressive proclamation to make in view of the solitary confinements and the gulags of these pages, but Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg recites the entirety of Eugene Onegin on prison trains and commiserates with imposter Tsarina's in the same buildings that once incarcerated enemies of Tsar Alexander II, until all the events of the years ripped away from her attest, with blood and bone and agony, that Stalin was not capable of executing Russian culture by firing squad. It is still heartbreaking to wonder, though, what could have been, had all that this book contained not spawned into harrowing, idiotic existence on the eve of 1939, the dawn of World War II and all the violations that Ginzburg, in myany ways, had been witnessing for two full years, with sixteen more to go.
May I never experience all that it is possible to get used to.
Some may be wondering why, despite the five stars, I've knocked off a half up above. It's because, in the midst of all the comradery birthed in the face of abject fear and looming annihilation, Ginzburg managed to hang onto in spots antisemitism, classicism (in a socialist state, but honestly, that's no surprise if people haven't done the anti-bigotry work in all realms instead of one), and ableism. It's blink and you'll miss it at times and does alleviate near the end when Ginzburg is forced into close quarters with several of her maligned demographics, but it was immensely jarring to go less than 20 pages in and be confronted with "Who's the red-haired Motele [(A common Jewish first name)]...while he exercised his Talmudic subtlety", and even more baffling upon my looking up the author's bio and finding out that her father was Jewish. I don't expect her to be a saint, but as marvelous a document as this is, it's hard to sympathize with, and even glory in it at times, when the author falls into so many of the traps that her tormentors fell into that led directly to her persecution in the first place. Beyond this, this work is an extraordinarily full bodied testimony that interweaves grueling treks made by skeletons riddled with scurvy and diarrhea and with recitations of Tsvetayeva and Blok, to the point that I noted down several reading recommendations and have a new urgency to my desire to read Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Yes, my heart leapt into my throat with every starvation and execution, but to succumb momentarily to the language of stereotype, Russia and its people are really something else at times, and so to is their culture. I still plan on reading what books of Solzhenitsyn I have on hand about the subject of the gulags, but after this, it's hard not to wonder whether he may be redundant, or even not measure up.
Strange to say, one could obtain freely in prison a number of books which had long since been withdrawn from public libraries.
What a good thing for us that in modern times all processes have been speeded up. Those who devised and carried out the operations of 1937 found that it was simply not practical to keep such multitudes in prison for ten or twenty years: it was inconsistent with the tempo of the age and with its economy. Things were moving about ten times as fast as in the old days; and thus, instead of Vera Figner's twenty years in solitary, I served two.
This work was a surprise in some ways, but then again, every genuine five star awarded is a surprise at this stage of my reading career, and two in about one week is astonishing, to say the least. I simply have to give a magnificent work that records the wounds struck into the body of a people its due, a body that, for all intents and purposes, is still rising from the ashes today. On my side of the ocean, I'd like to think that Trump is no Stalin, but there are concentration camps on US soil, and just because the topic has mostly passed out of the media focus doesn't mean that there aren't still children dying from treatable diseases within barbed wire compounds, much as Anne Frank died of typhus long ago in Bergen-Belsen. I'm not the on in solitary confinement, but the one passing just beyond the shuttered windows and desperate tapping on prison walls. It therefore falls to me to do something.
"Do not speak for all of us," said someone from the top bunk.
"Naturally," Tamara went on, "I do not include those who are willing not only to knuckle under, but to justify it all in the bargain."
"And to produce theoretical arguments why it must be so,"[...]
"I repeat: I am not addressing all of you, but only those who have not lost their human dignity and self-respect."
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Frank Stein
Nov 16, 2017Frank Stein rated it it was amazing
Most prison camp memoirs have a monotonous sameness about them. There are the inevitable discussions of makeshift tools, bone needles, paper shoes, and such. There is the constant yearning for food, water, sleep, and family. There is the surprising ingenuity of prisoners communicating under censorship, such as, in this book, the special prisoners' Morse code tapped through stone walls, or the prisoners' use of song tunes with substitute words to explain to each other about a new warden. This book has all of the usual variations of these survival stories in spades.
What makes this a special book, however, is both Eugenia Ginzburg's fantastic writing, and the bizarro Soviet camp world she describes. Most of all, Ginzburg has an eye for telling detail and for describing human personalities under pressure. She explains how some imprisoned women dreamed of nothing but beautiful dresses they had lost, which might very well help them keep touch with the outside world, while others lost all connection with their former lives and became nothing but amoral prison cynics. Some women fought to preserve every inch of their dignity, such as by refusing to walk naked past the male guards, and failed, while others preserved their dignity by refusing to treat their position and their degradation as a source of shame. Ginzburg shows that there were many ways to live and die in the camps, but that some tactics succeeded better than others.
Ginzburg also shows how the Soviets demanded things that other autocratic governments imprisoning their citizens didn't. The NKVD secret police not only wanted you in prison, they wanted you to admit you wanted to be in prison, and that everyone you knew deserved to be there as well. They wanted not just obedience, but hearty acceptance. The more outrageous the lie about your "terrorist" actions, the greater necessity for you to admit they were true (one peasant woman accused of being a Trotskyite said she didn't even know what a "tractorite" did, she hardly had even seen such machines). So the whole essentially violent, random and hateful system was papered over with the false image of bureaucratic regularity, trials, confessions, and transparent rules, even if all of them could be broken in a second. Prosecutors accusing people of violating the law knew they were spouting lies, as did the people who confessed to their crimes, as did the people who arrested and assailed them. As Ginzburg says, everyone had their own part to play in this grotesque pantomime, and yet everyone knew all the lines to be complete fantasy. Her story shows the strange desire of the Soviet Union to make even its most outlandish oppression appear as consent.
For its penetrating insights into human beings under maniacal autocracy, this work deserves its plaudits. It also deserves to be in the top rank of memoirs of 20th century totalitarianism. (less)
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Jeseven
May 19, 2010Jeseven rated it it was amazing
Shelves: russian-history, autobiography, russia
This book is really gripping. Her story is so grim. It has taught me that I need to memorise as much poetry as possible, in case I end up in prison.
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Ali
Apr 19, 2014Ali rated it really liked it
Into the Whirlwind is really an extraordinary book, I had never heard of Eugenia Ginzburg, and frankly felt very ignorant of the terror unleashed by Stalin during the 1930s. Into the Whirlwind doesn’t always make for easy reading, but for those interested in Russian history it must surely be required reading. In the 1930’s Ginzburg was a loyal communist party member, a university teacher and journalist. A wife and mother, living a life surrounded by people who thought as she did, Eugenia (Jenny) found herself caught up in Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937, accused on trumped up charges when her colleague Elvov at the university was charged with leading a counter-revolutionary group – a group that was totally fictitious. From 1934 when prominent party member kirov was assassinated Jenny suddenly found herself, suspected, watched and frequently questioned.
“The year 1937 really began on the 1st December 1934.
The telephone rang at four in the morning. My husband, Paul Aksyonov, a leading member of the Regional Committee of the party, was away on business. I could hear the steady breathing of my children asleep in the nursery next door”
The tension and fear that surrounded Jenny and her husband at this time, as they struggled to continue with their normal family life was palpable. Many people advised Jenny to flee – to disappear until “they” forgot about her – or things settled down, many other people in her situation had saved themselves this way. Jenny refused to do so, her belief in the party, and her own innocence leaving her vulnerable to what followed.
“Perhaps I’ll just stop at my mother’s on the way” I said to my husband.
“No, don’t. Go at once. The sooner it’s all cleared up the better.’
He helped me as I hurried into my things. I sent Alyosha off to the skating rink. He went without saying goodbye. I never saw him again.
For some strange reason, little Vasya, who was used to my coming and going and always took it perfectly calmly, kept asking insistently:
‘Where are you going, mummy, where? I don’t want you to go!’
But I could not so much as look at the children or kiss them. If I had, I would have died then and there. I turned away and called: ‘Nanny. Do take him. I haven’t time for him now.’
Perhaps it was just as well not to see my mother either. What must be must be, and there was no point in trying to postpone it. The door banged shut. I still remember the sound. That was all… I was never again to open that door behind which I had lived with my dear children. “
In 1937 she was finally arrested – and from then on spent almost twenty years in a series of Stalin’s prisons and labour camps. The first two years she spent in solitary, although fortunately for her, a lack of space meant that she soon had a cell mate with whom she developed a strong friendship. The treatment of so called “politicals” was especially harsh, the rules of the prison incredibly strict – but after a few months Jenny and her cell mate Julia were allowed books, oh and I could so appreciate the joy when finally after weeks of nothing at all to do – they had reading again. Those books and a few minutes’ walk outside each day were their only pleasures. The women were kept strictly segregated; however they quickly developed a way of communicating with other prisoners by tapping out messages on their cell walls, in this way they kept up a little with what was going on. The food was foul and lacked any real nourishment; the women became skeletal, and were later to find themselves suffering from scurvy and night blindness through lack of vitamins. The punishment cells were a frequent threat, where they were taken for the smallest of transgressions – singing for instance.
In 1939 – Jenny was herded onto a train with the rest of the prisoners and transported at a snail’s pace, through the stifling heat of a Russian summer, to a transit camp in Vladivostok and then on to Kolyma camp – one of Stalin’s network of Gulag prisons. On the train which took a month to cross Russia, the women were crowded together with just one cup of water a day each; they developed strong bonds, but necessarily quarrelled too. Women from different political backgrounds sometimes regarding one another with a degree of suspicion forced together in an unbearable situation. At the end of this dreadful journey, Jenny’s physical condition is so poor she isn’t expected to survive, and yet she does. Once she is in the labour camp, Jenny has new rules to learn, she is instructed by others in basic survival, for now she is no longer among just political prisoners – but among all kinds of prisoners, many really criminal and violent. Jenny is destined to remain in these camps for the next eighteen years, although this book is merely the first volume in Eugenia Ginzburg’s memoirs, and take us up to about 1940.
What comes across most strongly in this book is the resilience of these women, women separated forever from their families, from their children; Jenny herself never saw her eldest son, her husband or her parents again. Just as Jenny had in 1937, many of the women imprisoned with Jenny, believe in Stalin still, maintain that “He” couldn’t possibly be aware of what was happening in his name, that at some future time, the mistake would be remedied and all would be well.
This astonishing memoir is a brilliant addition to the Persephone list, I was rather amazed in fact at how much I enjoyed it, Eugenia Ginzburg comes across as a brave, intelligent woman, whose life was destroyed by Stalin, and yet who found the strength within herself, to not only survive, but survive well, and to go on and write about her experiences. I can’t help but hope that Persephone decide to publish the second volume at some stage too.
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George P.
Jun 24, 2021George P. rated it really liked it
Shelves: 2021-country-challenge, author-not-us-canada-or-uk, nonfiction
Well-told memoir of the author's experiences in the Soviet political prisons during Stalin's time. Though she was a dedicated communist, I soon had a great sympathy for her struggle to survive. Reminded me a great deal of Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng who was imprisoned in China during the "Cultural Revolution". This book is listed in "500 Great Books by Women". (less)
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Wayne
Oct 11, 2011Wayne rated it it was amazing
Recommends it for: anyone whose Democracy is under siege by its politicians, radio jocksn tea parties and sarah Palins
Recommended to Wayne by: The Holy Spirit in an Athens bookstore
Shelves: russian-roulettes, movie-seen-as-well, re-reads, memoirs-biography, history
Discovered while teaching in Athens in 1978 in a treasure of a bookshop, this story has just STUCK in my head!!!
It made me realise that our idealistic ideologies from Democracy to Communism to Christianity to Workers' Unions have to be guarded and defended with rigour since Human Nature being what it is, will hijack it and twist it to its own purposes - usually perverted and hiding behind the original to practise the exact opposite.
Communism had its origins in Early Christianity...just read the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. Christianity in the West soon became a male-dominated, hierarchical, centralised Monolith which persecuted and stamped out any other form of Christianity - and there were many varieties...and then sold itself as established by some divine light, in this case the Holy Spirit/Ghost.
Many, many years later the Acts of the Apostles were resurrected in Tsarist Russia. Evgenia Ginzburg and her husband and friends were idealistic Communists, eager to make a society in which equality was all and nobody went without, a glaring contrast to Russia under the Tsars and most of the European Continent. Unfortunately the Bolsheviks and finally Stalin were not sold on this belief and this was soon evident when the Ideal disappeared and the usual persecutions of the Faithful followed. Her remarkable story of endurance and survival is inspirational and unforgettable.
A film "Within the Whirlwind", the title taken from her second book,
and starring Emma Watson is sitting on my coffee table and due back at the DVD store tomorrow.
See You!!! (less)
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AC
Sep 22, 2016AC rated it really liked it
Shelves: russia
Part I (63%), covering her arrest and her period in solitary, is extremely moving and effective. The second part of the book (Part II) is duller and not written as well. I am not sure if these two parts correspond to her two books (presented as one), as kindle does not supply that information.
Good, but a bit over-rated
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Shelley
May 14, 2018Shelley rated it really liked it
Shelves: memoir-biography, trauma, politics-war-legal, history
This narrative is the true story of life in Soviet prison camps in Siberia in the Stalinist era of purges starting in 1937. The twist is that it is written by a woman, who shows the female's experience was just as harsh as the male's. I am amazed she survived years of brutal treatment.
The Russians were very similar to the Nazis. They sent prisoners to Siberia in large groups crowded into boxcars, with no food and very little water, and in the camps were put to work doing hard manual labor and basically starved to death or near death. And as in the Nazi concentration camps, people tried to stay sane by doing small kindnesses for each other and maintaining dignity when possible.
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Karen
Feb 15, 2018Karen rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: russian, non-fiction, 20th-century
I think it's understandable I was trepidatious about reading a memoir about The Great Purge and survival in gulags. It's not heavy, at all, and is written in a very easy...almost chatty style. This book is not a series of horrifying vignettes (although there are many harrowing stories), but really, it is a story of hope, and of touching humanism. (less)
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Youp
Jan 03, 2020Youp rated it it was amazing
'Journey into the Whirlwind' stands out from other memoirs of gulag survivors I've read in two major ways. First of all, Ginzburg, as an intellectual, goes beyond describing the mere events of her imprisonment. She refers to numerous literary works and poems to illustrate her experience, which adds enormous depth and a certain beauty. Secondly, her ordeal as a woman was quite different from gulag memoirists such as Bardach or Solzjenitsyn. For example, the threat of being raped or the humiliation of having your head shaven makes for a uniquely female, yet obviously unsettling and tragic story. The ending of the book is quite abrupt, being continued in 'Within the Whirlwind', which I'm hoping to start reading as soon as possible. (less)
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Eve
Mar 07, 2013Eve rated it really liked it
Shelves: 20th-century, memoir, survival, nonfiction
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Rosemary
May 08, 2014Rosemary rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: persephone
Eugenia (or Yevgeniya) Ginzburg was a member of the Communist party accused of political crimes along with many thousands of others during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. She was sentenced to 10 years solitary confinement, the standard sentence for any party member who wasn’t shot, but after two years Stalin must have realised he’d locked up too many people of working age – not only were they not producing, but they had to be fed and guarded – and she and many others were sent to do physical labour in Siberia instead.
This is the story of her arrest, her time in prison and the first few years at the work camp. It’s a grim tale but she keeps a note of hope throughout. It was written afterwards, not at the time, so maybe that helped. Still, it’s a very sad story. She and her husband were both separately arrested, leaving their 3 children from various marriages to be divided between relatives. (view spoiler)
She wrote two volumes of these memoirs and this is the first. Some editions combine the two and I wish Persephone had done that, but perhaps the second volume is less interesting?
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Tonya
Apr 12, 2018Tonya rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
10/5 kinda book. I would recommend it to absolutely every human being. Apparently, "Into the whirlwind", the English version of it, is lacking a lot of material from the original book, and it's a shame. (less)
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Christina
Jun 22, 2019Christina rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: read-women, 2019-reads, genre-nonfiction, format-print, location-europe, source-purchased, read-translated, publisher-persephone
Despite the bleak content, Ginzburg writes in a beautifully lyrical style; for once, I didn’t wonder if the style was underserved by the translation. The level of detail in Ginzburg’s memoir is unmatched, and she speaks to the importance of communication in order to preserve hope for the prisoners. The memoir does end in a disappointingly abrupt manner, but there is a note at the end by the original English language publisher saying that Ginzburg was working on a second memoir.
I doubt I would have encountered this incredible memoir had it not been published by Persephone, but I will caution that the text arrangement in this edition was difficult to follow. Ginzburg provides numerous footnotes to her text that provide necessary background information for readers unfamiliar with this time period. However, the footnotes are compiled between the end of the memoir and the afterward by Rodric Braithwaite. This, unfortunately, meant that I spoiled the conclusion of the memoir for myself as I flipped back and forth. (less)
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Timba
4.0 out of 5 stars which I still have and am delighted to have found it in English now that I ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 February 2016
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I saw that this book was on David Bowie's "hundred books to read". I have already read a two volume version of this book in French some years ago, which I still have and am delighted to have found it in English now that I live here and can lend it to friends. It is part of Russia's history told by E Ginzberg as she lived though the Stalin period in prison mostly in Siberia for 18 years. Fascinating and frightening but a book that everyone should have on their book list.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Book as advertised
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 May 2019
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 October 2020
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I bought a second hand book that was in excellent condition, advertised as ''as new'' .
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