Review: Andrea Gullotta, Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki 1923-1930

At his 1926 trial, the fascist prosecutor of Antonio Gramsci, leader of the Italian Communist party, famously declared “For twenty years we must stop this brain from working”. So Gramsci was sent to a fascist prison where he was supplied with pen and notebooks and a censor who duly stamped each page of what became the Prison Notebooks and Gramsci’s claim to enduring intellectual fame.

You can take this well-known story as evidence for many things, including the claim that totalitarianisms never quite succeed in controlling the human element – down the line, there will always be someone too lazy, too drunk, too bribeable, or too tinged with humanity to apply the full rigour of the law and who for an extended period of time may simply do things the way they see fit, until some interfering busy-body calls them to order.

In the early 1920s, Russia’s Soviet regime began to organise prisons and camps for the many opponents – real or imaginary - who for one reason or another were not simply shot on the spot. There was already to hand an Imperial model which involved sending prisoners far away from the principal cities and into remote and inhospitable areas – the east and the north. Russia is a very big place (look at the map) and you really did not need to bother with walls in places so remote that escape was hardly realistic (though, as always, there were escapees who lived to tell the tale).

The Solovetsky islands in the White Sea of the Arctic north west of Russia had been used before for this purpose, and the Soviets decided to use them again. There were already many buildings in place since the islands had for centuries housed Russian Orthodox monasteries. With an infrastructure already in place, it was a no brainer as somewhere to send people you wanted well out of the way. Out of sight and, as a side-effect, out of mind.

Largely as a matter of policy, Solovki became the place to which the Bolsheviks consigned opponents who claimed to be socialists themselves and, more generally, troublesome intellectuals – poets (a large occupational group in Russia), philosophers, theatre actors and directors (another large group), priests and theologians, natural scientists. Many of these did not claim to be socialists at all. Ordinary, uneducated trouble-makers were also sent to Solovki too but from Gullotta’s book I don’t get a clear sense of the relative sizes of the different groups or how the relative proportions shifted over time.

What is clear is that the Solovki camp admininstrators, and regardless of what Moscow may have had in mind, decided that the simplest way to organise the camp was to allow some of the intellectuals to go on being intellectuals, fully exempt from manual work, and to assign the manual work – principally, logging in the forests - mostly to those who were used to manual labour. The intellectuals were allowed not only pen and notebooks but a library, a theatre, a printing press, time and places to discuss and debate. They kept themselves very busy and the censors couldn’t keep up even when they wanted to (which was not always). So there is a large literary legacy from the Solovki camp – a camp which Solzhenitsyn called “the mother of the Gulag”. 

All this happened in a context where it was also possible to fall foul of some guard or other and end up out with the loggers, or in the punishment block, and possibly dead.

Gullotta’s scholarly, in-depth but quite readable book primarily examines the content of the printed output of work from Solovki in the early period 1923-30 and also considers the circumstances of it production, including the constantly shifting and always ambivalent relations between prisoners and camp administration.

I think there is a very simple point which can be made, that prison administrators and guards feel that it enhances their status if they are in charge of high-status prisoners. In non-totalitarian regimes, it is a commonplace that celebrity prisoners – prisoners whose crimes have been all over the newspapers – get better treatment than those who are not notorious. They find it much easier to work the system to their advantage. On Solovki, the intellectuals made life more interesting for the camp officials. It is not unimportant that some of the intellectuals knew how to make camp administrators laugh. Gullotta singles out Iurii Kazarnovskii, "the only satirical writer in the SLON camp who was appreciated by the camp administration" (page 246). (Even in the camps of Nazi Germany, humour could achieve things which other methods could not).

The printed literary output of Solovki appears from Gullotta’s book to be well-preserved and well-studied. There was also other written output, as I discovered by chance a few years ago. Prisoners did have right of correspondence, both inwards and outwards. There was a post office on the islands which Gullotta illustrates (see below):

Click on Image to Enlarge

The camp printing press produced picture postcards with views of the islands and these were sold to prisoners who clearly had money. Money is important in prison camps; in totalitarian systems, it is one of the perks of being a guard that people – both inside and outside the camp -  will offer you bribes.

Some of the postcards are photographic, others were based on paintings and sketches by the well-known artist Osip Braz, best known for a portrait of Chekhov which now adorns many paperback covers, and who spent two years on Solovki (1924 – 26). Here is an example of Braz’s work in my possession; the card was printed on the press of the camp administration (USLON) in an edition of 1000:

Click on Images to Enlarge

Prisoners wrote home on these cards, which were carried to the mainland at Kem and then passed through the regular mail. They were censored before leaving the islands but in a fairly perfunctory way – on the card shown below, the censor’s mark is simply the blue-pencil initials scrawled over the message. 

Click on Images to Enlarge

The writer, a prisoner called Lisovsky writing to a family member in Smolensk, describes the card’s panoramic view, singling out the white house in the centre which houses the camp administration and where he works or studies every day in the accounting department. He identifies the Kremlin on the left of the card and in between he has arrowed the 10^th company barrack where he lives. On the right, he identifies the Preobrazhensky cathedral with its bell tower “without bells”. In front of it all is the frozen sea. “Now you see where I am”.

Review: Svetlana Alexievich, Second-Hand Time

It’s often said that in Russia human life has never been valued. Ever since the Romanovs installed themselves back in 1613, human beings have been at the mercy and disposal of state and state-backed power. Tens of thousands serf labourers died to create Peter the Great’s capital, St Petersburg. Plough a field almost anywhere in Russia and you turn up more recent human bones.

I don’t often read a 700 page book now, but Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Second-Hand Time is gripping. It’s also harrowing and I found myself putting it down at the end of a section, as if it would be indecent to hurry on to the next tale. People tell her their stories back to the 1930s and in to the early 2000s and the themes are repetitive but realised in different ways in every case. State violence, a mendacious bureaucracy, poverty, alcoholism (without end), domestic violence, forced separation of parents and children, husbands and wives, love in a cold climate, the importance of books, the failure of perestroika, a seemingly unshakeable loyalty to Stalin. And then there is the thin and uncertain line which separates those who do evil from those who try to do good.

Alexievich is a seventy year old Nobel Prize winner and what is remarkable in this book is how she elicits narratives from her cast of mainly female characters and how, in what I guess is an exceptionally good translation, those narratives pull you along. You never want to stop reading.

Many of her cast want to memorialise lost grandparents, parents, lovers, children. It’s one of the few things you can do to try to make reparation to them and to heal yourself. In the week when I was reading this book, I came across a story of a man, Andrei Zhukov, who has just completed a twenty-year  self-imposed task. He has sat in the archives and made a list of all the names of all the 40 000 NKVD officers who executed Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s. The victim count is thought to number 12 million and the Russian organisation Memorial has so far managed to list about a quarter of the names. In Alexievich's book, that Terror still affects everyone.

This book should sit alongside the kinds of memoir and historical work which I have reviewed elsewhere on this Blog – see the labels to this post.

The footnote apparatus provided by the translator to assist the reader is excellent; I noticed only one error, Latvia rather than Lithuania (page 341). As for the translation itself, I queried only kikeling (basically, little Jew) finding that little kike sounded better to me.

Review: Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky, Gulag Boss

In 1940, aged 22, Fyodor Mochulsky, candidate member of the Communist Party, graduated from the Moscow Institute of Railroad Transport Engineering and - having rejected the offer of a graduate studentship in favour of "practical experience" - was assigned to work on the northern section of the railway being built from Kotlas to Vorkuta via Pechora. The rail link was being constructed so that coal could be shipped south from the Vorkuta coal mines and, in the context of a possible conflict with Germany, was regarded of great strategic importance.

The railway was being built by GULAG NKVD and Mochulsky became an NKVD employee, working inside the Arctic circle, foreman and boss over a prisoner labour force. He continued with this work until 1943, when he was (unexpectedly) moved sideways into Komsomol work with civilian employees along the railroad. After the war, he was re-trained as a diplomat and served in China and at high levels in Moscow. He retired in 1988, aged 70, and shortly thereafter - and it seems before the collapse of the Soviet Union - wrote out this Memoir of his Gulag years. Later, in the 1990s, he added further reminiscences (Part III of this book). At some point before his death in 1999, and having failed to find a publisher in Russia, he handed his manuscripts to Deborah Kaple and asked her to translate and publish them as she has now (2011) done.

I got the feeling that he has not been well-served by Kaple - and not just because of the delay. The translation of his Memoir quite often made me wonder what Mochulsky had actually written; and I found Kaple's Introduction and Afterword unimpressive.

Equally, it seems without a doubt that Mochulsky is not a good writer in any ordinary sense. But it is this which partly makes his book so interesting.

Right at the beginning of his professional life, Mochulsky is hauled up before a Party meeting for fiddling his very first statistical returns from his work Unit, for which it is proposed he should lose his Communist Party candidate status (p 43). He is allowed to offer a defence, and he gives an account of himself ( 43 -44) which repeats what he has already (32 - 37) told us: on arriving at his first assignment in the Gulag, he finds his forced labourers sleeping in the open air in Arctic conditions. And they are dying. So he suspends work on the railway for two weeks while the men build themselves barracks. At the same time, he continues to report upwards that track laying is continuing at the scheduled rate. Then when the barracks are built, the labourers work doubly hard for two weeks to make up lost output. Mochulsky continues to report normal output. By the end of one month, the books are balanced. But the daily returns have been faked and that's why he is in trouble.

Mochulsky escapes punishment because he gives a good account of himself. Nearly fifty years later, he again gives an account of himself in his Memoir - and I suspect he still has this idea that being honest and forthright is the best way to get yourself out of a fix, whether with the Communist Party or your soul.

When I read the opening narrative just described, I thought Mucholsky was going to use his Memoir to make out a case for himself as a Gulag Schindler, but he doesn't. At no point does he suggest that his actions are primarily guided by humanitarian considerations. Kaple writes, "His family says that he often spoke about the Gulag and his work there because the experience deeply troubled him all his life" (page XX). That is as far it goes. And Kaple also writes, "In his talks with me, Mochulsky stressed the importance of patriotism. In the face of a war on Soviet soil, he said, a patriot would do any job the government needed to be done, to win the war" (179).

His employers early on recognised that if you gave Mochulsky a job, he would get it done. Ironically, in the context of Soviet bureaucracy, Mochulsky gets things done not just because he is technically competent and hard-working, but because he is willing to take decisions and take risks. He uses his initiative. And this in a system which often penalises that. On one occasion, for example, he only gets to do what he thinks he should do because he signs a chit "stating that I had been warned of the dangers and that I took the responsibility for any possible consequences" (59) - most likely, getting killed.

I do not know if Mochulsky's account is "warts and all" but he does write about things which clearly - at the age of seventy - make him uncomfortable. He does not like the loss of self-control involved in drinking, for example, and stuck in the Gulag he is both sexually frustrated and curious about sex. But despite his reserve, he gives an account of these things and hopes for the best.

The awkwardness of the prose is one of the things which makes him quite endearing, as well as opening up many more avenues for reflection than a more polished performance would permit.

This book could be read alongside Orlando Figes, Just Send me Word, reviewed here recently. Both books are centred on Pechora and the Kotlas - Vorkuta railway. It would be good to have Figes' thoughts on the book now under review.