Free The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation by Oliver Bullough Page B

system.After
    hisreleaseinthe1950s,hecollected
    accountsfromotherformerinmates,
    and welded them together into a
    great sprawling epic of oral history
    that
    he
    called The
    Gulag
    Archipelago .
    Solzhenitsyncomparedthecamp
    system itself to a cancer, spreading
    from its original point of mutation
    on
    the
    Solovetsky
    Islands
    –
    colloquially known as Solovki.
    Camp officials were aggressive
    cancer cells, the camps they set up
    werethesecondarygrowths.Instead
    of voyaging up blood vessels and
    lymph canals as cancers do in the
    body,
    the
    metastasizing
    prison
    system spread up railways and
    rivers.
    ‘In the summer of 1929 an
    expedition of unconvoyed prisoners
    was sent to the Chibyu River from
    Solovki,’ he wrote. ‘The expedition
    was successful – and camp was set
    up on the Ukhta, Ukhtlag. But it,
    too, did not stand still on its own
    spot,butquicklymetasta-sizedtothe
    north-east,annexedthePechora,and
    was transformed into UkhtPechlag.
    Soon afterwards it had Ukhta, Inta,
    Pechora, and Vorkuta sections – all
    of
    them
    the
    bases
    of
    great
    independentfuturecamps.’
    The conditions, he wrote, were
    ‘twelve months of winter, the rest
    summer’. The camps expanded
    rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s,
    when the likes of Father Dmitry’s
    father were imprisoned. But they
    became still worse in the 1940s
    whenthewarstretchedthecountry’s
    resources and left even free citizens
    hungry, let alone prisoners. Work
    norms increased, while food rations
    were cut. According to statistics
    published later, 352,560 prisoners
    diedin1942,whichwasoneinfour
    of the prison population. In 1943,
    thedeathrateimprovedslightly,and
    only one in five prisoners died:
    267,826people.
    Solzhenitsyn wrote how nothing
    was wasted on human comforts, not
    even to honour the dead. ‘At one
    time in Old Russia it was thought
    that a corpse could not get along
    without a coffin. Even the lowliest
    serfs, beggars, and tramps were
    buried in coffins,’ he wrote. ‘When
    at Inta after the war one honoured
    foreman of the woodworking plant
    was actually buried in a coffin, the
    Cultural and Educational Section
    was instructed to make propaganda:
    work well and you, too, will be
    buriedinawoodencoffin.’
    More than two million people
    died in the camps of the gulag
    during the war years, many of them
    building this railway line I was
    travelling on. When Nazi Germany
    invaded the Soviet Union, its troops
    rapidly overran the rich coal fields
    around Donetsk in Ukraine. Stalin’s
    government, in desperate need of
    fuel, charged the prisoners with
    laying rails across the tundra to Inta
    –foundedin1942–andtoVorkuta.
    The rails laid, the prisoners that
    survived worked in the mines to
    producethecoaltokeepthefactories
    churningoutbombsandguns.
    The soldiers and the factory
    workers
    are
    honoured
    now.
    Surviving veterans are greeted by
    the president every Victory Day,
    afforded special privileges, given
    medals. Its triumph in World War
    Two has, if anything, become ever
    more sacred to the country as the
    years have passed. The role of the
    prisoners in forging that victory has
    been all but forgotten, however,
    even though many of them had
    committed no crime at all and
    worked harder than anyone. They
    were guilty only of being slightly
    richer than their neighbours, or of
    failingtojoinacollectivefarm,orof
    telling a joke. Their torment is
    largely unacknowledged in Russia
    today.
    Although Vladimir Putin in
    2010, during his spell as prime
    minister between his two stints as
    president,
    made The
    Gulag
    Archipelago compulsoryreadingfor
    schoolchildrenintheireleventhyear,
    he does not encourage modern
    historianstodelveintothepast.The
    K G B’s files are closed to all but a
    chosenfew,andtherehasbeenlittle
    acknowledgementoftheoppressors’
    guilt from Russia’s new supposedly
    democraticgovernment.
    Asthetrainrattledalong,Ihada
    strange feeling that the suffering