Word: kolyma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...another day of killing slave labor. There are no memorials, no cemeteries dedicated to Stalin's victims. Some of the camp names that dot the pages of prisoner memoirs are ordinary towns now: Shturmovoy, Elgen, Yagodnoye, Mylga, Magadan itself. "When you go to Magadan and stand upon the Kolyma highway," a Muscovite advised, "you must look down at the earth beneath your feet and think of all the bones buried there...
That haunting passage is from Journey into the Whirlwind, the first volume of Ginzburg's memoirs, published in the U.S. in 1967. There, she began recounting the 18 years she spent in the Gulag, mostly in the Arctic death camps of Kolyma. In this, the second volume, Ginzburg, who died in 1977, picked up her story about "the gradual transformation of a naive young Communist idealist into someone who had tasted unforgettably the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...
Evil abounds in the world evoked by Ginzburg. The Kolyma region where she was ultimately imprisoned was the largest and most terrible of the Stalin-era concentration-camp complexes, stretching a thousand miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has called Kolyma "the pole of cold and cruelty." It was a place of massacre, where 3 million died, the men digging for gold under the permafrost, the women felling trees at temperatures of -56° F. Young men dispatched to the mines quickly succumbed to tuberculosis. Ginzburg, who acted for a time as a medical...
...then the 16-year-old Vasya was a stranger. He had been four when his mother was taken away, and he was dispatched to one of the orphanages for the children of the enemies of the people. In Kolyma, mother and son found a means of communicating with each other by reciting poetry during their first night together. Those lines, she recalls, were "a bulwark against the inhumanity of the real world ... a form of resistance." Vasya (who grew up to be the brilliant Russian novelist Vasili Aksyonov) told her "Now I understand what a mother is ... you can recite...
Ginzburg experienced not only friendship and love in Kolyma but also snatches of happiness. The post-Stalin years found her desirous, not of bloody vengeance, like many ex-prisoners, but of telling her story of good and evil to Russia and the world. As her husband observed, "You just aren't very good at hating " How striking is the difference between Ginzburg's account of the camps and that of Solzhenitsyn, whose governing passion in the writing of The Gulag Archipelago was an unconquerable rage. No outsider in the West can hazard a judgment...