Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

It is impossible not to cry when reading this memoir of Stalin’s Terror – which means it is not for the faint-hearted – yet it is not merely a historical document: the dialogue is life-like and everything is portrayed with extraordinary realism.

A teacher and Communist Party activist, Eugenia Ginzburg was married to the mayor of Kazan. In Into the Whirlwhind, and in the 2009 film starring Emily Watson, the perfectly ‘normal’, bourgeois, seemingly stable nature of her life is heartrendingly portrayed. When a university colleague is arrested for alleged Trotskyist activities, the 30 year-old Eugenia is charged with not having denounced him. Soon she is expelled from the Party and interrogated. In 1937 she was imprisoned, then later she was sent to Kolyma, an enormous complex of labour camps in the Russian Far East. She always hoped to write about her experiences one day and seems to have had total recall.

In the most beautiful prose (the translators were Paul Stevenson and the renowned Manya Harari, who translated Dr Zhivago), Eugenia Ginzburg records her shock at being arrested, the unremitting cruelty of the ‘authorities’ and the agony of being in custody, forced labour and exile. She describes friends who helped orphaned children, prison guards who were sometimes kind but mostly cruel, reciting poetry in the freight cars, felling trees at fifty degrees below zero. And yet through all this suffering she gained a deep insight into what it meant to be human. 

Translated by Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari

Afterword by Sir Rodric Braithwaite

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