Authors: Vasily Grossman
a cook can govern the State
Lenin was popularly believed to have said, “Every cook must learn to govern the State” or even “Every cook can govern the State.” What Lenin in fact wrote, in an article published in 1917, “Will the Bolsheviks Retain Government Power?”, is more or less the opposite: “We know that an unskilled laborer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration.”
quick-witted Newtons
In his “Ode on the Anniversary of the Accession to the Throne of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna” (1747), the poet Mikhail Lomonosov expresses the hope that the Russian Earth will give birth to “her own Platos and quick-witted Newtons.”
zeks
People sentenced to a term in a labor camp were known as
zeks
, an abbreviated form of the word
zaklyuchenny
, meaning “someone who has been confined.”
Greens
Participants in a peasant rebellion in the Tambov Province under the leadership of Aleksandr Antonov, a Socialist Revolutionary. At the rebellion’s peak in late 1920, the Green Army numbered as many as fifty thousand.
A vast world with its own language
The best dictionary of camp language, Jacques Rossi’s
The Gulag Handbook
, runs to 610 pages.
even under armed guard
Grossman wrote
Everything Flows
at a time when there was almost no reliable published information on such topics as the Gulag, Collectivization, and the Terror Famine. Given his dependence on oral sources, it is remarkable how little he has got wrong. Here, however, he seems to have been seduced by legend. There are references in Gulag memoirs to small groups of predatory female criminal convicts, and to men in some camps not seeing a woman for years, but I know of no other reference to camps where men never set foot.
chifir
This is an ultra-strong tea (about fifty grams of tea per cup, and boiled rather than brewed). This was used as a narcotic and was greatly prized by the camp criminals.
remain faithful to illusions they had dreamed up
Cf: “In the Kengir special camp, there were prisoners…who developed elaborate relationships with people they had never met. Some actually married one another across the wall that divided the men’s and women’s camps, without ever meeting in person. The woman stood on one side, the man on the other; vows were said, and a prisoner priest recorded the ceremony on a piece of paper.” (Anne Applebaum,
Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps
[New York: Doubleday, 2003], p. 317.)
Butyrka
A pre-trial investigative prison, the largest prison in Moscow. At the height of the purges around twenty thousand prisoners were kept there.
“58–6–12.”
She has been sentenced under Article 58, Sections 6 and 12. Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code related to “counterrevolutionary activity” in general, Section 6 to “espionage,” and Section 12 to “failure to report counterrevolutionary activity.”
Arbat
The name of an important street in central Moscow, and also of the fashionable, bohemian quarter around this street.
Mukha
Clearly a nickname. The word means “a fly.”
camp barracks
It is likely that much of Grossman’s information about women in the Gulag came from the philosopher Tatyana Nikolaevna Gornstein. Like Grossman, she was born in Berdichev. Arrested in 1937, she survived the camps thanks to her “privileged” work as a nurse in a camp hospital. She was released soon after Stalin’s death. Tatyana Menaker, a second cousin of Grossman, remembers Gornstein telling her about “the mathematicians, poets and philosophers who had begged her to preserve their manuscripts as they lay on camp beds dying from scurvy, diarrhoea and dysentery.” [Personal correspondence from Tatyana Menaker.]
Magadan
The capital of Kolyma Province, an area of northeastern Siberia that was, in effect, one vast labor camp.
special settlements
“The liquidation of the kulak as a class—dekulakization for short—was an integral component of collectivization and vital to its realization. Dekulakization was Stalin’s first Great Purge. It was a purge of the countryside: an endeavor to remove undesirable elements and to decapitate traditional village leadership and authority structures in order to break down village cohesion, minimize peasant resistance to collectivization, and intimidate the mass of the peasantry into compliance.” (Lynne Viola,
The Unknown Gulag
[New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 7.) Special settlements were not—legally—a form of imprisonment, but they were under the direct control of the OGPU. They were often just areas of uninhabited forest where kulaks were dumped and told to build shelter for themselves. From 1933 their importance diminished as the importance of the network of labor camps increased.
we are all human beings
Robert Conquest writes, “The Party’s...rationale for everything done to the kulaks is summarized with exceptional frankness in a novel [by Ilya Ehrenburg] published in Moscow in 1934: ‘Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.’” (
The Harvest of Sorrow
, 143.)
all their pay went into special books
They were therefore only able to spend their pay in particular shops.
‘Dizziness from Success.’
On March 2, 1930, Stalin published in
Pravda
an important article, “Dizziness from Success,” that marked a partial and temporary retreat on his part.
they dug up vegetable gardens
Robert Conquest writes, “Their technique consisted of beating people up and of using specially issued tools—steel rods about five-eighths of an inch in diameter and from three to ten feet long, with a handle at one end and a sharp point—or a sort of drill—at the other, to probe for grain.” (
The Harvest of Sorrow
, 229.) And Conquest quotes from a memoir by a former activist, Lev Kopelev: “I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it.” (
The Harvest of Sorrow
, 233.)
subkulak parasites
Peasants who were considered hostile to collectivization, but who were too poor to be considered kulaks, were labeled “subkulaks.”
one big show
Grossman is alluding to a visit made to the Ukraine in late summer of 1933 by the French radical leader Edouard Herriot. Conquest quotes the following account of the preparations made to receive Herriot at a collective farm near Kiev: “A special meeting of the regional party organization was held in Kiev for the purpose of transforming this collective farm into a ‘Potemkin village’...experienced agronomists were made into brigade members of the farm....Furniture from the regional theatre in Brovary was brought, and the clubrooms beautifully appointed with it. Curtains and drapes were brought from Kiev, also tablecloths. One wing was turned into a dining-hall, the tables of which were covered with new cloths and decorated with flowers. The regional telephone exchange, and the switchboard operator, were transferred from Brovary to the farm. Some steers and hogs were slaughtered to provide plenty of meat. A supply of beer was also brought in. All the corpses and starving peasants were removed from the highways in the surrounding countryside and the peasants were forbidden to leave their houses. A mass meeting of collective farm workers was called, and they were told that a motion picture would be made of collective farm life, and for this purpose this particular farm had been chosen by a film-studio from Odessa. Only those who were chosen to play in the picture would turn out for work, the rest of the members must stay at home and not interfere.” (
The Harvest of Sorrow
, 314–15.) Not all foreigners, however, were duped. As Malcolm Muggeridge reported in the early summer of 1933: “On a recent visit to the Northern Caucasus and the Ukraine, I saw something of the battle that is going on between the government and the peasants. The battlefield is as desolate as in any war and stretches wider; stretches over a large part of Russia. On the one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldier members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.” (Quoted in
The Harvest of Sorrow
, 260.)
on the stove
A Russian stove was a large brick or clay structure taking up between one-fifth and one-quarter of the room it stood in. Sleeping places were often arranged in relation to it. Sometimes a sleeping bench was attached to one side of it; sometimes people slept on a wide shelf above it; often people slept directly on the warm brick surface of the stove itself.
The whole village had died
“Of a Ukrainian farm population of between twenty and twenty-five million, about five million died—a quarter to a fifth. The casualty rate varied considerably by area and even village, from 10% to 100%....Time after time, officials tell of entering villages with few or no survivors, and seeing the dead in their houses. In villages of 3,000–4,000 people...only 45–80 were left.” (Conquest,
The Harvest of Sorrow
, 249–51.) Tim Snyder’s estimate for the number of deaths in the Ukraine is three and a half million. (“The Real, Ignored Holocaust” in
The New York Review of Books
, July 16, 2009.)
chalked on your back
The translator and editor Natasha Perova has written of the queues she remembers from her own postwar childhood: “There were activists who supervised the queue and wrote numbers on your palm with an indelible pencil. There were also roll calls from time to time. Sometimes someone’s number would get erased accidentally. That was a tragedy. Then they started writing numbers on people’s arms or elbows to keep them safe. In some queues they chalked numbers on backs to prevent cheating, but that was rare.” (Personal correspondence.)
people stripped of their civic rights
That is, those who had been designated as belonging to the category of citizens “deprived of rights which they have used to the detriment of the Socialist Revolution.”
bread rings
Similar to Italian bread sticks, but in the shape of small rings.
Lefortovo
An important Moscow pre-trial prison. In the late 1930s it was notorious for the tortures carried out there. During these years, the corridors and cells were painted black.
numerus clausus
An 1887 decree limiting the number of Jews allowed to study in Russian universities. The proportion of Jewish students was limited to 10 percent in cities where Jews had the right to live, 5 percent in other cities, and 3 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These restrictions were removed after the 1917 revolution.
Pale of Settlement
The area along Russia’s western border in which Jews were allowed to live. Comprising around 20 percent of the territory of European Russia, the Pale existed from 1791 until 1917 and included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, and Ukraine, as well as parts of western Russia. Jews were, with certain exceptions, forbidden to live elsewhere in the Russian Empire.
district and provincial Chekas; of RevKoms, UKoms, and GubProdKoms; of KomBeds, PolitProsvets, and SovNarKhozes
That is, of district-level and provincial-level security organs; of Revolutionary Committees, Regional Committees, and Provincial Provisions and Foodstuffs Committees; of Committees of the Poor, Political Enlightenment Organizations, and Soviets for the National Economy.
Socialism in One Country
This theory—that it was no longer necessary to encourage revolution in the capitalist countries, since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone—was first articulated in 1924 by Bukharin. It was only then taken up by Stalin.
Moscow Tailoring Combine
Clothes produced by this factory were notoriously ugly. The poet Osip Mandelstam declared ironically during the 1930s, “I am a man of the epoch of the Moscow Tailoring Combine.”
Golden Library and on the adventure stories of Louis Boussenard
The Golden Library was a famous series of classics for young people, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Louis Boussenard (1847–1911) wrote popular adventure novels somewhat in the manner of Jules Verne.
Talmud Torah schools
A form of primary school, dating back to the first century of the Common Era, for Jewish boys of modest backgrounds. They were given an elementary education in Hebrew, the Torah, and the Talmud.
everything is real and rational
An allusion to Hegel’s famous dictum, much discussed in Russian radical circles during the nineteenth century, that “everything that is rational is real and everything that is real is rational.”
voluntary working Saturdays
There was a tradition in the Soviet Union of voluntary working Saturdays (
subbotniki
). Lenin himself participated in the first all-Russian
subbotnik
(May 1, 1920), helping to remove building rubble from the Kremlin. These voluntary working Saturdays soon ceased to be voluntary—if they ever were.
set Russia on a new path
During the June 1917 Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, the Menshevik minister Irakli Tsereteli said that Russia could achieve democracy and victory in the war only if the different political parties cooperated. To his assertion that there was no single party that could take power and maintain order in Russia, Lenin famously declared from the back of the hall, “There is such a party. It is the Bolshevik Party!” To most of those present, Lenin’s statement seemed absurd. The Bolsheviks had 105 delegates; the other parties, between them, had 822.