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At Large
Wrestling the Gulag Story to the Ground
Peter Weir’s new film, The Way Back, will be cause for many a reflection on the most extensive prison network in history.
The old Soviet gulag system, the most extensive prison network in history, killed some 2.7 million people, most of them innocent of any charge other than loose talk. And yet this staggering human tragedy has rarely been tackled by commercial film makers. History has moved on, eyewitnesses have died off, and survivors are not inclined to talk about their memories. The wounds seem too fresh for inspection by strangers.
But now a director of stature has found a way into the story by way of a daring escape yarn, drawing on a book called The Long Walk by the late Polish Army officer Slawomir Rawicz. When the film opens in U.S. cinemas at the end of January it is likely to stun audiences. The Way Back, directed by Australian Peter Weir, convincingly re-creates the pain of cold, hunger and despair in the Siberian wasteland where the Soviets dumped most of their hapless prisoners.
Weir’s story takes place in 1940 and 1941. Arbitrary arrests had been part of Soviet life since the gulag system was created in 1930 but now, as the story evolves, the 1941 invasion by German forces produces a double sense of terror among the Soviet population. The camp system eventually swept up an estimated 27 million people, continuing to expand until Josef Stalin died in 1953.
The camps operated a smaller scale under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, crippling millions more until Mikhail Gorbachev finally ordered the system shut down in 1987.
The Russian gulag never quite caught the Western eye the way the Nazi death camps did, for reasons historians still debate. The most obvious explanation is that the Russian tragedy was largely self-contained and in a distant country — pitting Russians against Russians. Moreover, the Soviets did not set out to liquidate their prisoners. They only worked them to death.
The most complete account of the gulag system is the 2003 book Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by Anne Applebaum. She finds similarities in the German and Soviet systems, which were built on the same continent at roughly the same time. “Hitler knew of the Soviet camps and Stalin knew of the Holocaust. There were prisoners who experienced and described both systems. At a very deep level, the two systems are related.”
Harrowing stories of the Soviet camps surfaced periodically when I was a correspondent for Associated Press in Moscow from 1967 to 1971. Elderly survivors were in evidence in the large cities. They could sometimes be spotted by their vacant look and their poor physical state. Although foreign journalists had only minimal contact with the local population, those of us who spoke the language did manage clandestine contact.
I recall heart-rending conversations with broken men and women who had lost five, ten or more years of their lives on the tundra, living on gruel and stale black bread. Many never recovered their health. One prisoner told me of Siberian work details in temperatures of minus 70 degrees centigrade. I asked him what work he was carrying out. “We felled frozen trees from dawn to dusk,” he said, looking away as if this conversation were just too much for him.
Others insisted that after the exhausting workday, they enjoyed a strange kind of intellectual freedom that they had lacked before their arrest. Although life was dangerous, with “politicals” bunking alongside hardened criminals, lively debate among the camp intelligentsia helped keep their spirits up.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short 1962 novel of the camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, opened the floodgates for memoirs and signaled a brief political thaw under Khrushchev. But the freeze quickly returned, and all his writings were banned while I was living there. Many other survivors wrote in private and awaited a better day.
The first prominent camp survivor I met was Lev Kopelev, a writer who was at a friendly stage in his relationship with Solzhenitsyn. They had been fellow zeks (colloquial of “ZK,” short for zaklyuchonniy, or “locked-up prisoner”) in a camp in the 1940s and 1950s. They argued ideology with such fervor that Solzhenitsyn portrayed Kopelev as Lev Rubin in his novel The First Circle. Later in life, both living abroad, they sadly had a final falling out. Kopelev died in 1997 without making peace. Solzhenitsyn died in 2008.
Lev was a burly, bearded, bear of a man but my visit, with my Volkswagen and foreign license plates visible to all outside his flat, clearly made him nervous. At my request, however, he finally agreed to be the messenger if Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he did a few weeks later. From the AP office I rang Lev before the bulletin cleared the teleprinter and he flashed the news to the reclusive Solzhenitsyn.
A few days later, when Solzhenitsyn was secretly at work on his Gulag Archipelago, I met him in a secluded hideaway. I had tracked him down with the help of a few Russian friends. We had a brief chat before he decided I was a danger to his safety and invited me to leave.
Many other camp survivors have since produced memoirs of the Stalin camps, and more voluminously from the Brezhnev period. I found Edouard Kuznetsov’s book, Prison Diaries, for sheer atmosphere, to be among the most interesting accounts of 1970s camps. Kuznetsov had been arrested for leading a failed skyjack attempt in Leningrad to flee to Sweden. He now lives in Israel.
As he wrote in his book:
Letter to the Editor View all comments (53) | Leave a comment
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Frog In Uniform| 1.11.11 @ 9:02AM
Very good article Monsieur Mike. It would probably take me a few weeks of carefully scanning every magazine in my islamo/liberal country before I could find any mention of the Gulag... I remember years ago, during a stint in Italy where the leftist mindset is almost as widespread as in France, I found a book in English in a 2nd hand item store, it was: "You'll need a guardian angel" and it was the true story of a Polish officer's escape from gulag who finally managed to reach (of all places!) China...
That book is gone, lost in too many furniture moving trucks and I doubt it will ever get printed again.
I just wonder how you can live in my country, despite the terrific Saint Emilion you certainly agree is the best red wine in the world.
Knowing what most people should know but don't is not the best way to appreciate one's country, right?
Bonne chance chez nous, Monsieur, et attention aux rebeus et aux manouches quand ils sont plus de 2 après huit heures du soir...
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 10:18AM
The book The Long Walk is alleged to be the true story of Polish officer Slavomir Rawicz' escape from a gulag near Lake Baikal in Siberia. He eventually accumulated a group of other prisoners, and they walked across the Soviet Union, across Mongolia's Gobi Desert, over the Himalayas, and on into India, where they met the British Army and got away successfully. Maybe that's the novel you remember. It's perennially in print, and you can easily find a copy in the U.S. or order it from amazon.com wherever you are.
Frog In Uniform| 1.11.11 @ 11:59AM
Thank you Bill, just found it! should have thought of Amazon...
http://www.amazon.com/Youll-Ne.....t_ep_dpt_1
The officer's name was Victor Piasecki.
Bob K.| 1.11.11 @ 12:59PM
I read it twice, over a 25 year period. It never struck me as a "novel" or an adventure tale (it does not have the "ring" of either), but as a remembrance. It is literate and graphic and obviously written by an educated man. It was first published in 1956. Time has passed and potential footnotes of proof are long gone. The Movie, if it is succesful, may cause another discussion of it bona fides. I believe it is as true and accurate as memory will allow.
Bob K.| 1.11.11 @ 1:14PM
In clarification, and to avoid confusion with the book frog in uniform writes about, I am talking about Rawicz's book; "The Long Walk."
Trish| 1.11.11 @ 9:05PM
My husband and I listened to this book in audio. It is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. One enters the depths of evil that the marxist monsters inflicted on innocent people. I hope that it will be as excellent as the film Defiance.Thank God Weir has made this film. May it wake Americans up. Can't wait to see it.
tdiinva| 1.11.11 @ 9:32AM
Mr. Johnson:
I think you meant 27 million not 2.7 million. 2.7 million is good number for Kolyma alone. Kolyma was known as the Soviet Auschwitz.
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 10:12AM
Kolyma, where they operated placer hoses to extract gold in -70C temperatures. Sunrise to sunset.
Kolyma, where at least one group of zeks was sent to some area where they were expected to build their own shelters on the treeless tundra. They just disappeared.
Magadan, the Kolyma city where every citizen was a zek, a spouse or child of a zek, and where people stayed for the rest of their lives after they were released because the USSR made no provision for released prisoners or their families to get transport (which was only by sea) to some other part of the USSR.
George True| 1.11.11 @ 9:49AM
I hope the movie is a big box office hit, and that we see more such films in the future. We have several generations of young people in this country who have no clue what communism even is, and who as a result do not understand the consummate evil it embodies.
Ole Sarge| 1.14.11 @ 12:23AM
I hope they have luck educating those in the US, but my experience says no. They have had life to easy, nothing really required of them. Most can't and won't see it, though they type folks we have in our military give me hope.
obama wishes to do in the current military and go to the draft, giving him a simplier mind to deal with, troops that will be easier to turn to the dark side.
Read the other day that he is thinking of enlisting those who can't qualify to get in the military. Remember the last time we tried this, it was a disaster, though I am sure all papered over. It was called Project 100,000.
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 10:08AM
As I recall the book The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz did not dwell on life in the gulag for very long. My most vivid memories of the book deal with his group crossing the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas.
Frog In Uniform| 1.11.11 @ 10:29AM
I think you're right: 27 million dead is a more realistic figure. You can't teach nazis allies (thanks to the Rapallo Treaty) how to kill people en masse, run such a mass murder operation for 60 years and end up with the quoted number in the article. There is a road in the Kolyma that is paved with the bones of zeks...
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 10:45AM
I believe it was Robert Service who stated that during the Terror Famine of 1932-1934, 8 million Ukrainians died in the gulag and in resettlement camps. I think in the same book he estimated that about 1 million persons were sent to the gulag from 1937 onward until the death of Stalin in 1953, and of that number of imprisoned zeks, about one-half of them died. That tends to support the 27 million number, which probably comes from Applebaum, the inspection of the Soviet archives (which were not very reliable), and study of the reported census numbers in the USSR after Service wrote his book.
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 10:46AM
That's one million persons PER YEAR sent to the gulag between 1937 and 1953.
Bob K.| 1.11.11 @ 10:45AM
I first read Rawicz's "The Long Walk" while I was in college in the early 1960's in Washington DC. It was a torn, dog eared copy that had lost it's cover, passed hand to hand from one reader to another almost as if, it itself, was a samizdat copy of the original.
I never forgot it. I have since got a new reprint of it by The Lyon Press, Conn. 1997, 11th printing! ISBN 1-555821-684-7.
I have given it to my sons to read. The fact that these people were willing to endure the travails of this journey to freedom is a testament alone about the capability of Socialism to descend into Hell!
Mikecampbelly2k| 1.11.11 @ 10:54AM
Anyone wanting more info on the Gulag system should check out the books by Robert Conquest - the "Dean" of authors on Stalinism, The Great Terror, the forced famines, and other horrors of the Soviet system.
Lisa| 1.11.11 @ 11:26AM
"With God in Russia" by Fr. Walter Cizek is another horrifying yet inspiring story of man's inumanity to man but the spirit of man rising above that inhumanity. Fr. Cizek, a native of the U.S., was a missionary in Eastern Europe when he was imprisioned for the crime of being a spy. Everyone one from the West, especially priests, were considered to by spies by the regime. Father kept on serving his fellow man through the horror of the gulags and was eventually released about 20 years after his imprisionment.
Fr. Cizek's case for beatification is currently under consideration by the Vatican.
Seek| 1.11.11 @ 11:39AM
An astounding and true story. And the Aussie, Peter Weir ("The Year of Living Dangerously," "Witness" "Master and Commander"), is just the director to tell it.
Mojo Risin| 1.11.11 @ 1:27PM
Based on the book "The Long Walk" being an enthralling account of an escape from the Russian gulags, an excellent read, up to a point. I read it some time ago and was intently reading their adventure, although when I got to the part about a mountain top sighting of a pair of Yeti, my intensity went poof, gone!!! Now don't get me wrong, maybe there's a colony of Big Foot/Yeti's out there and are just masters of evasion and disguise, but this scene in the book, I felt was extraneous/unnecessary/suspect, the destroyer of a non-fiction book.--- Okay, I'm through and will admit this is a great story and will make a great movie adventure and maybe those pesky Yeti's will make their appearance and render my disapproval moot...
As far as feats of daring and survival go, the book "Endurance" about the accounts of Sir Ernest Shackleton's South Pole expedition gone bad and the subsequent escape from the pack ice in three life boats is an eye-opener and if you haven't read it, check it out...
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 2:34PM
There's some controversy about the book The Long Walk being true. British soldiers who were stationed at places where Rawicz and his group made an impact don't remember him. Polish officers after the German/Soviet partition of Poland were murdered by both the Germans and the Soviets, so it seems unlikely that Rawicz would have wound up in a Soviet labor camp. The rolls of the Polish Army in London and other places don't carry the name of Rawicz.
On the other hand, it's remotely possible that Rawicz made an impact on the camp commander's wife and obtained her help in escaping (stranger things have happened), and it's entirely possible that the guard system at a gulag in Siberia might have been lax enough to allow an escape. It's happened; read The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III. Still, it's difficult to see how the prisoners could have gathered, and even harder to see how they could have been joined by a woman. But coincidences DO happen.
But none of those things is entirely determinative, so The Long Walk just might be a true story. Seeing the yeti in the Himalaya may have been due to hallucinating by poorly-clothed, exhausted, and starving people.
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 2:42PM
A link to an interesting story in a British newspaper:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/t.....-21364916/
Mojo Risin| 1.11.11 @ 2:47PM
I just came to the realization the story reads like a Screen Play, containing all the requisite hooks...
RRF| 1.11.11 @ 3:34PM
Another true gulag survival story: "Coming Out of the
Ice" by Victor Herman. It was made into a pretty fair movie.
Pelligrino| 1.11.11 @ 11:54PM
How about another escape from the USSR story, that of a German Army officer (captain?) captured by the Russians at the end in Berlin May 1945 and spirited (like so many German soldiers) to Russia for....however many years or death.
Except he escapes and survives due to aid by the Volgadeutsch who heal him so he can begin his long, long trek. Eventually out of the USSR and into...Iran? Actual years of the story 1945 - 1949?
I read it many years ago. It makes for a fantastic story!
The German officer POW is resourceful, tenacious, intelligent, and won't quit.
Does anyone know the title of this book (also made into a movie, I believe)? Thank you.
Stormzeye| 1.11.11 @ 3:37PM
I haven't read any of the accounts of the gulag since reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in high school. It was required reading in my Massachusetts high school in 1963...my, how times have changed! But my point is that it's so difficult, I'm sure, to write about the grinding boredom and poverty of the spirit that accompanies years of forced labor under unimaginable conditions. An author would have to take a novelistic approach to such a subject just to hold a reader's attention. I am ordering Applebaum's book today after having read so many good reviews of it.
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 5:42PM
Please let me recommend Kolyma Tales by a writer named Shalakov (a friend of Solzhenitsyn's), and Into the Whirlwing by Evgenia Ginzberg.
Ned the Red| 1.11.11 @ 3:45PM
Touching.
And how many lives did George W. Bush destroy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay??
You wingnuts lied about he Soviet Union for 70 years, and you're still lying about it today.
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 5:47PM
Yes, those lying right-wingers used to talk about "the knock on the door in the night" in the USSR back in the 30s and 40s, and on into the 50s.
Then they said that if you wrote things critical of Communism or of the Soviet system, you would end up in a labor camp or a mental hospital. They said that stuff back in the 50s and 60s.
Then they said that there were Soviet Communists who had burrowed their way into high positions in the U.S. government, even into our intelligence-gathering agencies, and were spying for people who were talking about burying us and who had been talking that way since 1917. Even Congressmen and Senators got into the act!
Then those damn right-wingers found a few economists who would claim that they had a rationale that explained why Communism, the Wave of the Future, wouldn't work.
They made a bunch more claims, and even made a few inroads into the claim of legitimacy that those of us who hate American so bad said we had.
Skippy| 1.11.11 @ 5:47PM
As many as it took, Ned.
When you get to be a big boy we'll tell you about China.
If you have returned from your pilgrimage to Mother Russia, that is.
Don Spratt| 1.13.11 @ 1:50PM
"There are none so blind as those who will not see."
My wife's parents were both born in Mennonite colonies north of the Black Sea, and emigrated as small children to Canada with their parents about 1924. All her great uncles and aunts (who had large families of 10 or more) and their families either died in the communist created famines in Ukraine after their farms were confiscated or later in the gulags where they disappeared for good. We were surprised to be contacted by a very few exceptions; a few cousins who finally got out to the Finland and were brought to Canada after the fall of the Soviet Union. You came too late to fool my wife or I, Ned! Lenin, Stalin and the rest up to old Brez promised a worker paradice, then enslaved and murdered millions of their own citizens in the most savage ways. Lyda, my wife's cousin, who lived through the gulags told me in her own words. As someone who did humanitarian aid work in Russia in the early '90s, shortly after the fall of communism, and have friens there, I know who is either decieved or lying.
David| 1.13.11 @ 5:41PM
I think some translating is in order here.
In Ned the Red-speak "wingnut" means "loyal American."
In my speak "Ned the Red" translates as "worthless asshole."
Brian B| 1.11.11 @ 4:04PM
--You wingnuts lied about he Soviet Union for 70 years, and you're still lying about it today.--
Cool, a Stalinist sighting.
Thought these beasts were getting as rare as Yetis.
Bill| 1.11.11 @ 5:52PM
I think it was Robert Conquest who interviewed a citizen of the USSR, who told him that at one point during Stalin's reign, one-third of the country was sent to a labor camp by the KGB, one-third of the country consisted of informers for the KGB, and one-third of the country was the KGB!
Pelligrino| 1.12.11 @ 12:04AM
There should be an entire American Spectator article and blog devoted to the former USSR and Warsaw Pact nation jokes that the normal, everyday people told. There were so many good ones. Really good ones. Jokes they told that always had some truths to them, jokes to help with some meager humor to get them through the drab, awful, sullen, and scary years under the evil old men in Moscow's Politburo as well as the long reach tenticles of the full Communist Pary apparatus.
Those jokes should be maintained, archived, and periodically published again so as to remind all of us of the hardships, suffering, and completely unnecessary control of every aspect of life.
ExPat| 1.12.11 @ 4:44PM
Like the popular Soviet TV sitcom of the 60's: "Father Knows Better but Nikita Knows Best".
Richard W| 1.11.11 @ 4:52PM
I, too, have read "The Long Walk," and found it very powerful. I believe it was supposed to be an accurate description of the author's experiences escaping from a camp, but have since read that it was highly exaggerated. I have no opinion either way. Another book about the camps (by someone who'd experienced them) is "Into the Whirlwind," by Eugenia Ginzberg. It's unforgettable.
Jeremiah| 1.11.11 @ 4:56PM
He still has that webcam on: he just crapped in his pants.
Renaissance Nerd | 1.11.11 @ 5:23PM
Another excellent book is "Dear America" by Thomas Sgovio who used to live in my neighborhood. His daughter went out with my younger brother. It is a very interesting story and the unusual perspective of a young American communist and his whole family's emigration to Russia in the 30s, and his time in the Gulag for 'suspicion of espionage.'
kc| 1.11.11 @ 9:24PM
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawucz has been discredited by a 2007 BBC radio documentary. Evidence and files, seen by me, and other historians clearly state that Slavomir did not escape but was amnestied by Stalin under the Anders-churchill- Stalin plan that released Poles in August 1941 (predominantly Polish soldiers) who would fight for Stalin against Hitler. Once the Russians put the Nazis in retreat Stalin rescinded the amnesty!
The Way Back movie is a fictional account of The Long Walk book. It is inspired by the real events of several prisoners escaping a gulag and three of them surviving the trek from Siberia to India. Three Polish men did this walk as evidenced by first hand accounts spoken of by authenticated sources as early as 1947. The Long Walk was first published in 1956 and it seems evident, even to the family of Slavormir Rawicz';s own family, that the author took stories he heard in Palestine and other army facilities. See reviews of The Way Back and you read about the authenticity of life in the gulags.
hugh bnyn| 1.12.11 @ 6:31AM
---Can't say how disappointing it is to see the truly talented Weir wasting time on the Hollywood
WW2 franchise sideshow ---when the world at
large is awakening to the RED China genocide
and New World Order eugenics issue...
tracy| 1.12.11 @ 4:40PM
I know a woman who lived outside of Lwow who was 'arrested' with her family at 12 years old (including younger siblings) and sent to the gulags. She eventually was released due to the amnesty agreement and made her way through the middle east, found a brother in Egypt, and ended up in Polish colony in Mexico. Then at I think, 21, she was able to come to Chicago to go to school and made her life here in America. She's an amazing person with a powerful story and I feel blessed to have met her.
REB| 1.12.11 @ 10:16PM
Yes, and unless Americans get a backbone and a good shot of history and of the constitution ...then we will see it here under a fascist corporate type tyranny!
This kind of tyranny is the new improved version,if people arnt careful it will murder more of them than anything Americans have ever gone up against and many will even support it!
Every generation has its madmen and its gulag ours will be no different if we dont restore the foundations of law and liberty and demand with force if nessesary that govt respect the rule of law!!
Pavel| 1.13.11 @ 12:13PM
My grandma was a European (Austria) educated psychiatrist, who returned to USSR in 1918 and spent next 20 years as a physician and a lectured in Ukraine. In 1938 her husband, a party functionary, was arrested and executed during one of the endless purges. She was arrested and sent to Gulag as a "family member or an enemy of the state". She survived 17 years of Siberian and Kazakhstan labor camps. I remember meeting her at the train station after her release in 1955... I was young and stupid and did not make records of her stories, but I've met some of the people she rescued, from Ukraine to Estonia to Poland (as a medical doctor, she has some means to help others). "Ned the Red" would not last a month in the Gulag, that I can guarantee. First, he would become a snitch, and I can tell you what zeks did to snitches, but that's a different story.
Krystyna Mew| 1.13.11 @ 12:14PM
You might be interested in a book which has just been published. It is called 'Lost Between Worlds'.
It is my Polish father's first hand experiences of WW2 including his time in a Gulag. Check it out at
http://www.troubador.co.uk/_info.asp?bookid=1347
Krystyna Mew| 1.13.11 @ 12:53PM
Sorry, wrote the link wrong!!!
http://www.troubador.co.uk/boo.....ookid=1347
Note there is an underscore between 'book' and 'info'.
fungoking| 1.13.11 @ 2:33PM
I am a high school American history teacher. When I teach the cold war I always show the movie "I am David", a great story of a boy who escapes from a communist labor camp. Kids love the story (based on the book North to Freedom) but can't believe there were camps like that outside side of WW II Germany. Helps them understand the whole "evil empire" quote.
Ming the Merciless| 1.13.11 @ 7:33PM
The horrors the Hitler, Stalin or Mao's death camps cannot make us forget that the whole native human race was murdered at 90% in the Americas, that at the same time of Stalin, orphan or pauper children where systematically kidnapped and given as slave workers to farmers
in Canada and the USA(Check the Orphelins de Duplessis, those of the Irish Catholic Church
and the millions shipped from England to
America during AND after wartimes...)
People of the times where hideously ruthless
in America as well, witness the hundred of millions of wild horses captured, beaten to submission and worked to death in a couple months in the lumber industry that I personally witnessed.
It was the same thing with surveyors of Northern Canada, vast breeding farms of dogs, hundred of thousands where send in their early age to be swiftly worked to death in the north...there was NO survivors.
The Hindus are right in their saying, "As you treat your animals, you will treat your people!"
Ole Sarge| 1.14.11 @ 12:40AM
Some interesting thoughts on your writings on the abuse of people, most whine pitiously about the way slaves were treated, they really haven't got a clue, slaves in many ways had it better then free whites. We used to hire the potato Irish to do work we did not want the slaves doing, to dangerous. Ignorance is comical at times. My relatives a few greats back were plantation owners in Georgia.
hugh BNYN| 1.14.11 @ 3:26AM
---AGAIN, where's Weir???
WHY such predictable, anachronistic, off point
project choices.
WHY????
arnold stein| 1.25.11 @ 6:20AM
Pelligrino, the name of the book about the German POW who escapes is "As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me" based on the life of Cornelius Rost.
Adidas | 8.11.11 @ 5:49AM
is good
العاب | 4.10.12 @ 12:59PM
thank you very nic