Rating: 
Summary: They Have Sown the Wind and They Shall Reap the Whirlwind.
Review: "The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals." So wrote Aldous Huxley. Evgenia (Eugenia) Ginzburg's Journey Into the Whirlwind is a powerful memoir of one woman's descent, along with hundreds of thousands of others, to the rabble of men and women that were arrested, brutally interrogated and send to the Gulag in the Soviet Union during the great purges of the 1930s.
Sergei Kirov's assassination in 1934 provided one of the pretexts for the great Soviet purges of the 1930s. The purges and great show trials began in earnest in 1937. Eugenia Ginzburg was a loyal party member, a teacher, and the editor of her local newspaper in Kazan, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. When she first heard of the mass arrests and imprisonments of loyal party members she was astonished that criminal elements had made their way into her party. This astonishment increased when she (and her husband) was arrested. As with thousands of other victims, Ginzburg was taken to jail, subjected to repeated interrogations and, over the course of the next year or so, traveled from prison to prison where the process of interrogation and mistreatment was continued. Ginzburg's memoirs in this volume continue through this initial her imprisonment through her eventual transfer in cattle cars and a cargo ship to the frozen wasteland of Siberia. The second volume covers her years in exile, her Siberian reunion with her sole remaining son Vasily Aksyonov (a tremendous writer in his own right), and her eventual `rehabilitation'.
There is a certain ineffable sadness to memoirs of the madness of the purges and the horrors of the Gulag. There is a numbing similarity in the descriptions of the deprivations, horrors, and, yes, stunning acts of grace and kindness experienced by those who lived to tell these tales. As Stalin once said, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. So I think it may be difficult for a reader to become emotionally invested in a book of this sort once he or she acquires more than a passing knowledge of the purges and the Gulag. A certain protective detachment evolved for me after reading time and time again of life in the Gulag. Yet Eugenia Ginzburg's words were so compelling, so insightful, and so moving that this detachment was lifted. Reading this book became an emotional experience. One example. During the initial months of her imprisonment, prisoners were allowed to read only or two books a week. Ginzburg, loved both poetry and prose would take her allotted book and devour it, soaking up every word. She and her fellow prisoners would memorize and recite whole chapters of their favorite books. She tells us that this provided her with a level of reading comprehension that she never experienced before. Silly though it may see, this heightened comprehension made me wish to revisit books I had already read just to see if it could gain more from them.
Ginzburg writes with clarity and captures the lives and characters of her fellow prisoners and her captors with equal insight. Her look back at her years of imprisonment is not filled with bitterness. Her observations are more acute for their lack of self-pity. At one point Ginzburg explains that what kept her alive was not just fate but a will to survive "to live, to live no matter what." Reading Journey into the Whirlwind is both a humbling and ennobling experience.
This is a wonderful book and I urge anyone with an interest in this subject or simply looking to see a person's life come to light via her memoirs to read Journey into the Whirlwind and the successor volume Within the Whirlwind.
In addition, ff Ginzburg's books leave you with a desire to read more accounts of life in the Soviet Union and the Gulag in the 1930s I recommend Varlam Sharlamov's Kolyma Tales and Janusz Bardach's Man is Wolf to Man. Both books complement Ginzburg's exquisite memoirs.
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: Amazing book, recounting the horrors of "an honest Communist" who suffered under Stalin's repression. Ginzburg describes the 18 years she spent in prison and in work camps, from Kazan to Yaroslavl to Kolyma. A must read for those who want to understand the Stalinist period and the legacy of suffering that lingers in Siberia.
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: Amazing book, recounting the horrors of "an honest Communist" who suffered under Stalin's repression. Ginzburg describes the 18 years she spent in prison and in work camps, from Kazan to Yaroslavl to Kolyma. A must read for those who want to understand the Stalinist period and the legacy of suffering that lingers in Siberia.
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: Amazing book, recounting the horrors of "an honest Communist" who suffered under Stalin's repression. Ginzburg describes the 18 years she spent in prison and in work camps, from Kazan to Yaroslavl to Kolyma. A must read for those who want to understand the Stalinist period and the legacy of suffering that lingers in Siberia.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: An amazing personal account of the Stalinist purges. Not only does it giving all the horrible details of those deemed enemies of the people, but also a gripping insight into the interworkings of the Communist mind. This book sheds light on Russian people and Russia in the middle of the century.
Rating:
Summary: An Outstanding Testament
Review: As we draw to the close of the 20th century we still have so much to learn from the century's greatest 'experiment' - Soviet Communism. Although I have read many excellent histories of the Stalin period, this book was the most personal and gripping testament of those dreadful years I have come across. What Shostakovitch did in music (especially the third movement of the fifth symphony), Ginzburg has done in prose. The sequel, by the way, is of nothing like the same stature.
Rating:
Summary: Woman's study/People study/ A Book about Bravery
Review: Crazy as it may seem, this is the supreme statement about feminism, powerfully standing against the most profound atrocities that man willingly inflicts upon his follow men and woman. Of course, it, too, is a grim and poignantly revealing revelation of the horrors of 20th century Russian exposing first hand the maniacal behavior and crimes of the Stalinist years of purges, pogroms and penal suffering common in 1930-1940 Russia. Ms. Ginzburg, amazingly a devout communist at the end of her days, gives us all, despite her direct experience of human depravity, the reasons to believe that there is always truth and goodness in the hearts and minds of man. Kindnesses and acts of love which reveal themselves in the most unlikely times and in the most brutal conditions, will arise and we must believe that we can, we must, maintain our dignity while others destroy their own. She teaches all of us to continue to trust in mankind and have faith that the best of us can uphold the best of what it is to be human. She gives us a revealing demonstration of how to live and love and why we should love and how to love mankind bravely. An amazing book which should be read in all our schools by all children to prevent them from falling into the insidious, lazy conformity of thought and action that our schools teach our children today. Ms. Ginzburg advocates in Whirlwind to live always aware of the dangers in a world where most of us seek the comfort and cowardice of accepting unthinkingly our passive committment to ignorance and lies that are everywhere to be seen and that reflect our passivity. This book is about understanding the big picture and not losing hope when you easily can: a brave book.
Rating: 
Summary: Engaging Narrative
Review: Eugenia Ginzburg chronicles the first three years of her eighteen years of misery (1937-1955) in Soviet prisons as a result of Stalin's purges. During these three years she was transferred to six prisons spanning thousands of miles. Each prison successively became more life-threatening and depraved (due to the increasingly changing subjectivity and, hence, tyranny of the "law"), and each year her crime became defined more differently. Ginzburg, a university teacher and loyal party member, was "convicted" as an "enemy of the people"--more particularly as a Trotsky sympathizer in 1937--but by the end of the book she was better known as an "international terrorist." I was struck by Ginzburg's naivete. Even to the bitter end she remained committed to the communist system, despite the great suffering she endured from the consistent outworkings of this philosophy. To her nothing was wrong with Communism, just the man Stalin. But Stalin was consistent: "If the State is god, and I am the ruler of the State, then my will be done on earth." (If God is removed from the picture, then anything goes, and those holding the power dictate the "anything"--see "Brave New World of the Enlightenment" by Louis I. Bredvold). Even the fact that her very accuser and judge, a high party official, would later suffer inside the same prison had no effect upon her loyalty to the party. She frequently ran across as prisoners the very people who had previously guarded her, transported her, fed her, etc. Ginzburg reveals a few parallels between Soviet Communism and German Fascism, one being that both "law" systems executed people for telling political jokes (see my book review on "In the Name of the Volk"). She details several frightful sufferings along with many interesting stories of prison friendship and techniques for prisoner communication in solitary confinement. Her account of prisoner transfers by cargo trains is very similar to what the Jews experienced during Hitler's "Final Solution." She includes a nice testimony to a group of women prisoners who outperformed everyone else in tree-felling and always succeeded in making their quota without cheating. These admirable women even refused to cut trees on the Sabbath, no matter how harsh was their punishment. When they refused to cut trees on Easter, they were forced to strip to complete nakedness and stand on the ice (in Siberia!) until their feet became frostbitten. They sang praises while enduring this treatment. The other women, after having come to their defense and consequentially punished for it, debated whether or not these women should be labeled virtuous or fanatical. Sadly, after being freed, Ginzburg heaps praises on the seeming restoration of "the great Leninist truths" (417). If the evils of Stalin's purges interest you, then I recommend the book. Humorous quote of the book from her tree-felling days in Elgen (Siberia): "Our overseer was a criminal called Kostik, nicknamed the Actor, and a man of some education. At one period of his hectic career he had worked as a stage hand in a provincial theater, and this had added to his vocabulary such words as 'mise-en-scene,' 'farce,' and 'travesty,' which added a distinctive quality to his obscene language" (p.403). (Competing with this was the attempted seduction by an Islamic Turk (one of her overseers) who attempted to woo her by lying on a bed holding a necklace made of plastic beads!)
Rating:
Summary: Engaging Narrative
Review: Eugenia Ginzburg chronicles the first three years of her eighteen years of misery (1937-1955) in Soviet prisons as a result of Stalin's purges. During these three years she was transferred to six prisons spanning thousands of miles. Each prison successively became more life-threatening and depraved (due to the increasingly changing subjectivity and, hence, tyranny of the "law"), and each year her crime became defined more differently. Ginzburg, a university teacher and loyal party member, was "convicted" as an "enemy of the people"--more particularly as a Trotsky sympathizer in 1937--but by the end of the book she was better known as an "international terrorist." I was struck by Ginzburg's naivete. Even to the bitter end she remained committed to the communist system, despite the great suffering she endured from the consistent outworkings of this philosophy. To her nothing was wrong with Communism, just the man Stalin. But Stalin was consistent: "If the State is god, and I am the ruler of the State, then my will be done on earth." (If God is removed from the picture, then anything goes, and those holding the power dictate the "anything"--see "Brave New World of the Enlightenment" by Louis I. Bredvold). Even the fact that her very accuser and judge, a high party official, would later suffer inside the same prison had no effect upon her loyalty to the party. She frequently ran across as prisoners the very people who had previously guarded her, transported her, fed her, etc. Ginzburg reveals a few parallels between Soviet Communism and German Fascism, one being that both "law" systems executed people for telling political jokes (see my book review on "In the Name of the Volk"). She details several frightful sufferings along with many interesting stories of prison friendship and techniques for prisoner communication in solitary confinement. Her account of prisoner transfers by cargo trains is very similar to what the Jews experienced during Hitler's "Final Solution." She includes a nice testimony to a group of women prisoners who outperformed everyone else in tree-felling and always succeeded in making their quota without cheating. These admirable women even refused to cut trees on the Sabbath, no matter how harsh was their punishment. When they refused to cut trees on Easter, they were forced to strip to complete nakedness and stand on the ice (in Siberia!) until their feet became frostbitten. They sang praises while enduring this treatment. The other women, after having come to their defense and consequentially punished for it, debated whether or not these women should be labeled virtuous or fanatical. Sadly, after being freed, Ginzburg heaps praises on the seeming restoration of "the great Leninist truths" (417). If the evils of Stalin's purges interest you, then I recommend the book. Humorous quote of the book from her tree-felling days in Elgen (Siberia): "Our overseer was a criminal called Kostik, nicknamed the Actor, and a man of some education. At one period of his hectic career he had worked as a stage hand in a provincial theater, and this had added to his vocabulary such words as 'mise-en-scene,' 'farce,' and 'travesty,' which added a distinctive quality to his obscene language" (p.403). (Competing with this was the attempted seduction by an Islamic Turk (one of her overseers) who attempted to woo her by lying on a bed holding a necklace made of plastic beads!)
Rating:
Summary: Unimaginable evil of communism.
Review: Eugenia Ginzburg, a highly educated and patriotic communist in 1930's Soviet Union, was falsely accused on a preposterous charge of counter-revolutionary terrorism and sentenced to ten years imprisonment that included horrible periods of solitary confinement and eventually labor in the infamous Siberian gulag archipelago made famous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The utter senselessness, depravity, and human waste of these years are almost impossible to imagine, but Ginzburg's intricate descriptions of interrogation, prison life, and Siberian work camps make the reader shudder with bone-chilling cold and despair. This book should be forced reading for apologists of communism and the old Soviet Union. It eloquently, but shockingly, makes obvious why tyrannical power (in this case, Josef Stalin) is humankind's greatest evil and, without intending to do so, explains why (now) Russia is a nation tormented by its past and struggling to find a respectable path for its future. This book is not, however, a political commentary. It is at its core a heart-wrenching account of a very courageous woman who lost her husband, children, citizenship, and freedom to the paranoia and criminal evil of Stalin and communism. Throughout Ginzburg's tale, though, shines her indefatigable spirit. I read this book in only three sittings and the only complaint I had was its abrupt ending in the middle of her confinement. Ginzburg takes up the rest of her story in "Within the Whirlwind," which really should be volume two of this novel
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