Into the Whirlwind

There are plenty of must-read books on Stalinism and the Gulags, many of which are far better known than this, but 'Into the Whirlwind' is possibly the most powerful I have read. It's the autobiography of a woman caught up in Stalin's terror of the 1930s onwards, and every page seems very immediate and personal.Engrossing, horrifying, and above all deeply humanistic, 'Into the Whirlwind' will certainly move you. Ginsburg narrates her own story in detail - from the first signs that her life and existence was under threat by the Soviet regime, through her arrest and initial imprisonment in Moscow on trumped up charges, to her first years in the Gulag in Russia's frozen far east.One slight qualification is that this book ends near the start of her long sentence, as she is adjusting to life in the camps, so there is no description of how she survived and was (as the notes to this volume tell us) eventually released and able to return to European Russia. I would have found that further volume of her autobiography just as fascinating, but at the moment it does not seem to be available in English.

This is an amazing book. It's also very thought provoking. Though the theme is the survival odyssey in a Soviet Gulag. Its not grim. There is always a reason to lighten up the hope for survival and how can people endure a life in a hellish setting by having literature and poetry to bring a sense of worth in their lives and make them feel they still are human beings. Its scary too to think of a state which can inflict that torment and terror on its citizens out of the blue. A materialization of the worse nightmares imagined by Orwell.

I read this book in Russian, and my son is reading it in English now. Inspiring and optimistic in spite of horrible times and events it describes. I admire the author.

This is a staggeringly good book and I cannot imagine why it is not better known. I have never read such a gripping account of one person's experience of the Stalinist terror. Ginzburg is unflinching in her description of the horrors that she and hundreds of thousands of other totally innocent people went through in the late thirties and forties. It ought to be thoroughly depressing but again and again she lifts your spirits by remembering small acts of kindness, the resilience and comradeship of her fellow prisoners, and her own indomitable curiosity and good nature. There are unforgettable moments, like the words of Ginzburg's friend Helmut when he finds out about her kindness to one of the men who had tried her, but is now also caught up in the Gulags: 'because you have given bread to your enemy, you'll live, you'll know what it is to be free.'A century on from the Revolution, this book offers much food for thought about the soviet system and Russian history. But equally importantly, it has so much to say about human nature and what people are capable of surviving.

his formidable human document illustrates painfully `how tenuous was the line between high principle and bigoted intolerance, and also how relative are all human ideologies, and how absolute the tortures to which men submit their fellow men.'Purge, accusers and accusedThe brutal purge of 1937 in the USSR in the aftermath of the killing of the Leningrad party boss S. Kirov, targeted all potential political `enemies' of Stalin and accused them under the common denominator of `Trotskyite terrorists'. Nearly all the accused were political party members, like socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks and, most of all, orthodox communists, members of the party machine and the party intelligentsia.The instruments of the purge were all sadists. `They were bewildered by the fantastic events of those days', but also `terrified for their own skin.' Some accusers (judges, stool-pigeons, party bosses, apparatchiks) became themselves victims of the whirlwind already after a few months.Solitary cell, books and the gulagEvgenia S. Ginzburg, a loyal party member, was very lucky to survive (on the day of her trial only 3 out of 70 accused were not shot).First, she was incarcerated in a solitary cell: `Nothing is simpler to explain the profound effect of books on a prisoner's mind. Isolation from everyday life and from its rat-race favors a kind of spiritual lucidity. Sitting in a cell, you don't compromise with your conscience.'The gulag showed the worst and the best ingredients of the human character. People's personalities completely changed by the struggle of life in camp conditions. Some `without moral standards never attempted to recall the days when they were still free and human beings.' Stool-pigeons ruined the lives of many inmates, but also their own life. On the other hand, there was also formidable solidarity: `the humanity of their compassion and their readiness to share their last rags with us.'Human, all too humanThis terrible and shocking ordeal was inflicted by men on men. Why? As David Chandler states all too rightly in his depressing book, `Voices from S-21', about the Red Khmer dead camp, `the real truth is to be found in ourselves'.All human communities should prevent by all means that their country could be turned into a bloody slaughterhouse by ruthless individuals through a one party State, fascism and all kinds of political, economic or religious dictatorships.This book is a must read for all those interested in the history and the character of mankind.