On Tomasz Kizny's photo album Gulag, Acropole – Balland publishers, 2003
Kizny's voluminous book is the most extensive publication dedicated to this subject to date. The Polish author spent several years travelling across the former Soviet Union, speaking with former Gulag prisoners, visiting the sites where they were once located, examining archives and amassing a huge pile of photographic evidence of one of the saddest episodes of 20th-century European history.
Yet the final result leaves a sadly unsatisfactory impression. Like most people from the West, I don't know much about the Gulag. I know that it existed. I know that it was terrible there. I know that countless people died in these camps from disease, malnutrition and exhaustion. But I have never experienced it.
I had hoped that this book would help me create a visual image of the horrors of the Gulag – as dramatic as those photographs of British and American soldiers taken in 1945 after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which forever and unequivocally embodied the horrors of the Holocaust.
But Kizny's book contains no such images. The photographs are oppressive by their content alone, yet it cannot be said that they inspire horror. They show people working with primitive tools in extreme cold on vast industrial construction sites. They show camp commanders posing with their wives in cosily furnished apartments. They show close-ups of unforgettable faces of unhappy people swept up in the historical storm of Stalin's power. And yet, I repeat, I have seen nothing.
Perhaps this book also reveals my own weaknesses as much as the author's shortcomings. Is my mind wired so that I can only measure horror by how grim the images are? There is no doubt that the Gulag was a very real nightmare for everyone who was imprisoned there. I can only try to imagine what they had to endure. But without tangible photographic evidence of their experiences, I am unable to empathise with these people because I cannot vicariously live through their horrors by vividly imagining them. Words can only express ideas; they do not possess the instinctive power of an image.
I have been interested in the Gulag for many years and have often wondered what I would have done if imprisoned in such a camp. But the Gulag has always been for me just a word denoting something extreme and almost unimaginably cruel. Kizny's book did not bring me a jot closer to understanding the reality hidden behind this strange-sounding word.
Instead of talking about the book as a whole, I will focus on a few carefully chosen photographs from it. I cannot shake the feeling that the Gulag still exists, even though it was liquidated long ago and the camp sites have been overgrown with grass. Perhaps my understanding of the Gulag cannot be captured in photographic frames because it is not entirely explainable at all. More than anything, the Gulag symbolises a lack of meaning. Kizny's book shows this, too, mostly through everything that has been left out. This publication will be a rather heavy addition to any bookshelf, yet it does not truly allow one to feel how heavy the subject of the book actually is.
Kolyma
This huge pile of abandoned boots was found near the Central camp long after its closure in 1958. At first glance, the footwear seems piled up like corpses in a mass grave. Crooked, torn and without any signs of life, these boots are an absurd testimony to the lives of the people who once walked in them.
However, the image is desperately abstract. The longer I stare at it, the more absurd and insignificant it starts to seem to me. I examine the boots, searching for any detail, traces, marks – anything that would help me find some meaning in these shoes and why they were thrown into a pile among the rubble. But I find nothing. I keep my own worn-out shoes for years before throwing them away. Actually, it's silly, but I tend to become very attached to my footwear. Take the boots I am wearing right now, for example. I have had them for about a year, but they look much older. My boots seem worn and tattered compared to the well-polished shoes that most people wear. But, good lord, how comfortable they are! I have walked near and far in them. I have spent many a great moment in them. I will certainly feel a painful regret when the time finally comes to throw these boots into the rubbish truck.
If I had seen my own boots in this pile of dead footwear, I would probably feel moved to tears. But the boots in the photograph are just outlines, abstract shapes, and I am forced to extrapolate their meaning from a broader context. To feel something upon seeing these shoes, I must force myself to remember what they had to go through, what they had to endure in the harsh emptiness of Northern Siberia.
“Kolyma značit smertj,”[1. Kolyma means death (Russian).] people used to say about the horrifying Kolyma Gulag. But just by looking at this image, I cannot understand it. I can only learn that by searching for information about the Kolyma camps on the internet. And much has been written about them. I just spent an hour away from work reading the memoirs of Polish prisoner Stanisław Kowalski, who survived Kolyma. In the epilogue, he writes: “I am one of those who felt the cruel terror of Stalin in the agonising imprisonment of the Kolyma gold mines and the Magadan high-security labour camps in the harsh Arctic climate of Siberia. Being one of the lucky ones who survived the insane era of Stalinism, communism and degrading slave labour, I consider it my duty to write about those who suffered and died, and to preserve the truth about these events for future generations.”
Moving words, but they do not help me bring these agonisingly abstract boots to life.
Although the boot photograph was taken recently, it is in black and white. In my opinion, that is a mistake. Without the rough context of colour, which is the only scrap of life that these boots have left, they take on a sort of quasi-historical look. The fact of their existence is lost, their feel buried under a layer of superficially aesthetic embellishment. These particular boots are in danger of being taken for art.
I would like to touch these boots, to smell them. I would even like to try one on. Maybe then I could capture some vague sense of the Gulag. But this black-and-white montage is more the raw material of myth than anything else. It is not hard to imagine the photographer, in a fit of excitement over his find, pointing his lens at the boots and – click! – remaining in the complete conviction that he has captured a precious Gulag relic.
But for me, these boots show nothing. The Gulag that I want to reveal to myself is not some grand truth – it is a banal and pedantic meaninglessness.
Vorkuta
I find this photograph particularly disturbing. I am completely convinced that, if the necessary circumstances arose, both the Holocaust and the Gulag, and the wars and political systems that birthed them, could happen all over again. People have not changed over the last half-century – only the institutions and social structures that regulate their lives have.
When I look at these three young men, I am struck by how ordinary they look. I can easily imagine them in modern clothes. I can easily imagine their faces passing me by on the street. Neither the slightly blurred black-and-white patches of the image nor its dreamy graininess change anything. The sad thing is that, even without knowing these three young people, I already hate them. I look at them and feel total disgust. And what if I had been their prisoner? Would they have insulted me, laughed at me, mocked and beaten me? Knowing my big mouth, I realise they could have acted even worse.
Let's imagine that I move these three to a park bench on a summer evening in modern-day Riga. There they sit, drinking beer from bottles, talking loudly among themselves. Approaching them, I would bristle with fear alone. I would realise that nothing connects me to them except that, as a result of coincidence, we are in the same place at the same time. Perhaps they would ask me for a cigarette. Perhaps they would try to provoke a fight. Most likely, the moment I walked past them, they would simply cast a fleeting glance of meaningless dislike at me.
Perhaps I would even feel a little sorry for them once I had reached a safe distance. They are not to blame for being so dim-witted, I would tell myself. They are not to blame for being so primitive – almost like animals. Only the circumstances in which they grew up are to blame. That is the only life they know.
The Gulag, like Nazi concentration camps, is usually described in the most exalted phrases possible. The Gulag was evil. It was brutal. It was inhuman. But that is exactly the problem we face if we try to understand the Gulag with any seriousness. It was not evil. And it was certainly not inhuman. On the contrary, it was quite human.
Both young men sitting on the wobbly bench leave a slightly awkward and artificial impression. That is how everyone looks who has stood before the gaze of the future. Did they think they belonged to a phenomenon often referred to as one of the “greatest evils” of the 20th century? Almost certainly not. For these people, it was a job, and it is unlikely they had much of a choice whether to work it or not. Did they experience acts of indescribable brutality? Most likely, yes. But they certainly did not perceive them as such.
No, the awkwardness that is perceptible in the guards' poses is the same as that which is characteristic of any moment frozen in a snapshot. In some intangible way, these guards were killed the moment the photo was taken – their youthful features froze in time, just as the faces of the prisoners in the Vorkuta Gulag froze in the permafrost in Arctic working conditions.
There is an empty space on the bench. I would gladly sit down next to these three guards and have a chat with them. Generally speaking, we would not have much in common to discuss, but I would ask them about their work. Do they like it? What do they do in their free time? Do they get drunk often? What are their future plans? Do they really believe in the ideals they are guarding so brutally? Do they sleep well at night?
The answers would probably seem thoroughly banal and easily predictable to me. The men themselves would probably cause me disgust with their readiness to impose such unbearable and unnecessary suffering on completely innocent people without question. But I would hardly condemn them for what they do. That is the eternal mistake of history.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that if I were imprisoned in the Gulag, I would either die from a purely physical inability to endure such hardships or, as best I could, try to put an end to myself. Either way, I would be killed by the meaninglessness of what was happening. And yet, perhaps I would have seen a certain meaning in the world of the Gulag. Not political. Not personal. Not even philosophical. A strangely irresistible meaning that dictates that language serves as a barbed-wire fence and ideas are encapsulated in a hardened crust of bread.
I already mentioned that the Gulag fascinates me as a symbol. It existed not only in the furthest corners of the inhabited world but also in the world of thought. It was not a place for thinking. It was not a place for living. It was not a place suitable for anything much more than weeds and single-celled organisms. I look at those who endured the Gulag and stayed alive with an admiration that I could feel for almost no one I might meet on the street today.
Natalia Zarzitskaya
Natalia Zarzitskaya's late husband had survived in Vorkuta. Here she is seen by her apartment block in Odintsovo. In my eyes, this photograph stands out among others because it suggests that the spirit of the Gulag is still alive, albeit in a much more diluted and everyday form. After the successful experience of using prisoner labour in the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal in the early 1930s, the Gulag began to supply free workers for many gigantic industrial construction projects. The way the Gulag used people as consumable labour was something almost unprecedented. Prisoners worked in extremely harsh conditions for up to 16 hours a day, often receiving less than the minimum food ration required for survival. The Gulag existed within the framework of a hurriedly created legal system; its only task was to ensure unlimited power for tyranny. And yet, it cannot be said that the Gulag, with its unlimited exploitation of people, had no historical precedents. The medieval feudal system and the first wage-labour structures of early industrial England operated with brutal efficiency, squeezing the maximum amount of work out of people for the absolute minimum reward. And it did not require barbed wire or armed guards.
Looking at the multi-storey residential building that looms gloomily behind Natalia Zarzitskaya, I have to think about the sad logic that underlies modern history. How are we to understand this block of flats, which could be located almost anywhere else in Europe? Does it symbolise freedom? Progress? Independence? It seems to me to be saying: “Only as much as is necessary.”
Gulag camps are usually perceived as isolated islands of brutal savagery somewhere in the underground of the civilised world. This notion was further reinforced by the word “archipelago,” which Solzhenitsyn used to describe the Gulag, as well as the “veil of secrecy” that shrouded these places of confinement and the remarkable lack of visual documentation in attempts to uncover this world.
But by separating the Gulag from reality in this way, it is dehumanised. The mere fact that these camps existed in such extreme conditions does not in the least make them inaccessible to rational understanding. The block of flats in front of which Natalia Zarzitskaya stands is, in a sense, a distant relative of the Gulag, just as the vast residential districts in Western Europe are unwanted offspring of the free market. It is a grave mistake to contrast capitalism and communism in their extreme manifestations as two radical opposites. In fact, they share many fundamental similarities, rooted in the senseless logic that justifies and elevates both one and the other to the level of ideology.
Natalia Zarzitskaya's husband survived the Gulag. Afterwards, he lived behind one of the windows that looks out at us from the facade of the apartment block seen in the photograph. There is no doubt that any of these apartments was like a palace compared to Gulag conditions. But perhaps, after a few years, he was nevertheless slightly oppressed by the low ceilings and the sea of greyness all around. Perhaps he started to think that this house for him was only as much as is necessary.
I would be happy if I could say that the Gulag was a separate anomaly in the course of history. That it was one act of unforgivable cruelty committed by one of the most terrible tyrants the world has ever seen. But I cannot. Every day I see traces of the Gulag, for example, in the overcrowded and dilapidated housing that millions of people are forced to live in, without being in any way to blame for it. I see a milder, more modern – if you like, even postmodern – Gulag, where people work painfully meaningless jobs for a minimum wage, to earn only as much as is necessary to somehow keep going, but in the meantime, the notion of some blurred idea of freedom is ever receding. But the essence of the Gulag has never been entirely material...
Road of Death
Perhaps no other photograph expresses the entire madness and meaninglessness of the Gulag as powerfully as this one. After the war, Stalin decided to build a port in Arctic Siberia; naturally, a railway was also needed to connect somewhere with nowhere. This image beautifully captures the elusive essence of the Gulag; the isolated camp barracks resemble primitive and undeveloped brushstrokes in a large, yet unfinished, painting.
The barracks, which are barely visible in the vast and scar-ridden landscape, are a grim and ghostly testimony to the almost surreal nature of the Gulag – it existed in the remotest corners of the earth for one single reason: because it was possible.
It is difficult – no, even impossible – to imagine how a person might feel who is imprisoned in such an inhospitable and isolated corner of the world that even escaping from it would be completely futile. Hopefully, in these few semi-ruined barracks, there were at least some semi-ruined elements of humanity that made life at least somewhat bearable for those imprisoned there.
The railway, of course, was a complete failure. Its remnants remain even today – in some places under the vegetation, in others flooded with water; the tracks, ravaged by time, are as crooked as the logic that birthed this idea.
To tell the truth, I simply cannot talk about the Gulag. I have not been there. I have read several reviews of Tomasz Kizny's book – starting from Anne Applebaum's article in The New York Review of Books and ending with Peter Rollberg's publication in The Moscow Times. And they were excellent, sensible words in which the Gulag was examined in a historical context, its existence viewed within a set of causal circumstances, explaining that the Gulag existed for this reason and then also for that reason. But perhaps the Gulag should be perceived not only as a historical phenomenon but also as a way of thinking. I think with the deepest empathy about the many people who endured it all, and, as I already said earlier, I have no particular doubt that I myself would have been killed by the Gulag in one way or another if I had ended up there.
In moments of greatest hopelessness, I sometimes grasp at a childish fantasy of escaping to Siberia, where I would invisibly vanish from people's sight and memories. That, of course, is a ridiculous idea, but the awareness that there is such a harsh place in the world that is so inhospitable to life and so welcoming to death gives me a sort of perverse comfort. The Gulag both fascinates and horrifies me in equal measure because it is a symbol of the systematic colonisation of such extremes. In truth, the Gulag camps had no other task – except to remove people from sight and erase them from memories.
Anne Applebaum wrote that Kizny could have made better use of the art of “visual archaeology” by trying to uncover the true face of the Gulag. Undoubtedly, if he had included some more shocking images in his book, which set quite high goals, then the Gulag could finally take its historical place alongside Nazi concentration camps, and that is exactly what very many people would want to see.
But the Gulag still exists. I do not know where or even how, but it is right here – all around me. Amnesty International recently called the US military's detention centre at Guantanamo Bay “the Gulag of our times,” and that only proves that this word truly now belongs to the realm of symbolism. In my understanding, the Gulag is nothing quite so dramatic, and for it to exist, there is no need at all for armed guards, guard towers or electric fences. Most often, all that is needed is a shocking indifference to the suffering of others.
Translated from English by Sabīne Ozola
Article first published in the January 2006 issue of Rīgas Laiks magazine