Kolyma stories
"Kolyma Stories is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the fifteen year that Varlam Shalamov spent in the Soviet Gulag. This is the first of two volumes (the second the appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma before finding a less intolerable life as a paramedic in the prison camps. He began writing his account of life in Kolyma after Stalin's death in 1953. His stories are at once the biography a rare survivor, a historical record of the Gulag, and literary work of unparalleled creative power, insight, and conviction"--Page 4 of cover.
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What Hacker News says
- Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.
- Kolyma Stories and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago are an incredible pair. For Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag is deeply personal and his rage seeps through every page. Shalamov is the complete opposite, and his book is an inhumanly dispassionate sequence of vignettes of camp life. Some of the mental images stick with you for life, like the zek (camp inmate) who broke into the camp larder, barricaded the door from the inside, and feasted by gnawing on raw, frozen bacon. He was still smiling when they broke in, dragged him out, beat him and threw him into the isolation cells, because at least his belly was full...
- Kolyma Stories is probably the best book about the reality of communism.
Is what I'm replying to. It's a very narrow slice of a much bigger thing.
Life after (or even before) Stalin was not free from such abuses.
I'm not sure why you think I said anything of the sort.
As to 'figured out', no, of course they didn't have a sudden epiphany while taking a shower one morning. The paranoid nutcase that ruled them died.
The thing that I was getting at, really, is that there is a fairly common but mistaken notion that the Soviet system was all about overt repression; that it depended, throughout its entire lifespan on the direct and immediate threat of deadly state violence. It didn't and that's, in many ways, a more interesting and disturbing thing to consider.
This isn't a particularly original or new thought - if you've run across, say, Masha Gessen's recent writing, it's often reiterated (as a kind of starting point) there as well.
- I am not sure how readable Solzhenytsin is in English, but his Russian is atrocious (he was also obviously not a nice person).
For sheer horror of life in worker's paradise, I think Varlam Shalamov's [0] Kolyma stories are much better written.
- While it did get quite a it better after Stalin's death, in a sense that people wouldn't keep an "emergency bag" of things one could take to prison by the bedside, with pretty much everyone knowing someone who had passed through the Gulag, a lot of Gulag has been internalized in the populace. The evil was very much banal, as it were, and the changes were mostly a matter of degree. Being seen reading "Kolyma Stories" would have you spending a few years on the "Sunny Kolyma" as it was called.
- It lasted as long as Soviet troops were stationed nearby and ready to roll in at a moment's notice. As soon as it became clear that they wouldn't, the Wall fell, and the rest followed. In most places even relatively bloodlessly.
And because you didn't have the Big Terror to the same extent, life in Eastern Europe was quite a bit better than in the USSR. When we visited a friend in Prague in 1985, he had a collection of "anti-soviet" literature (including Kolyma Stories that would be enough to send anyone in USSR reliving Shalamov's experience. And he didn't even hide it...
