Journey into the Whirlwind by Evgenia Ginzburg



Journey into the Whirlwind by Evgenia Ginzburg

Story summary

In the first volume of her memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) published in England under the title Into the Whirlwind Ginzburg chronicled the years 1934 to 1939, from the time of S. M. Kirov's assassination in Leningrad, through the Stalinist purge of suspected or imagined anti-Party traitors that followed, and culminating in 1937 with her own arrest and expulsion from the Party on the grounds of “participation in a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary group.” Far from threatening the Stalinist regime as a terrorist, Ginzburg at that time the wife of Pavel Aksyonov, an important Party functionary in Kazan had been a loyal Communist. Instead of following the jackals in their purge of innocents, she demanded justice and forced the bureaucrats to make a conspicuous example of her intransigence (James 2004).

Placed in solitary confinement in a damp cell, she suffered indignities almost too terrible to describe, but managed somehow to survive in prison until July, 1938, when her sentence was “commuted” to ten years of forced labor in Siberia. From Vladivostok, she and other “counter-revolutionary terrorists” were shuttled from camp to camp, until they took up their miserable residence in the Kolyma region of permafrost and desolation. By 1939, when Journey into the Whirlwind concludes, Ginzburg, nearly dead from exhaustion, malnutrition, and exposure from working as a tree-cutter, had through good fortune been saved by a Leningrad surgeon to work at a less exhausting task. Employed in the Elgen camp as a nurse for children born of prison inmates, she had little cause for optimism.

The second volume of Ginzburg's reminiscences begins at this point. At first she is content working under the kindly supervision of Dr. Petukhov, but her position in the camp worsens some time after German armies invade the Soviet Union. Because of her German-sounding name, Ginzburg is interrogated by authorities of the Registration and Distribution Section, who release her for the ironical reason that her name indicates Jewish origin as well. “This must have been the first time in the history of the world,” she comments wryly, “that being Jewish was an advantage.” In time, however, her security is endangered by the Elgen commandant, Valentina Mikhailovna Zimmerman, a ruthless and fanatical puritan who persecutes with zeal any miserable inmate who violates the slightest deviation from camp regulations. Ginzburg runs afoul of Zimmerman for committing ...