Author : Irakli Laitadze
I saw and understood in the camps that human culture and civilization are extremely fragile. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labour, cold, hunger, and beatings.
Varlam Shalamov
A very wise man once said, ‘What does not kill us, makes us stronger.’ I do not think so. If a universal saying (or formula, or phenomenon) has exceptions, then it cannot be universal. A situation or a condition may not kill a person, but at the same time, it can damage their psyche for a long time. In my opinion, if a person remains strong after an ordeal, it happens not because of the hardship they endured, but despite it. An ordeal only strips bare what is already within us.
Writer Varlam Shalamov’s book, Колымские Рассказы (Kolyma Tales) is about the absurdly cruel events that took place in Soviet concentration camps (cynically and officially dubbed ‘labour-correction colonies’) and the people whose psyches were mutilated by participating in or witnessing them. In my opinion, he should have been a Nobel laureate, but Shalamov’s books were never published during his lifetime; they circulated only through ‘Samizdat’1 within a narrow circle. Like all great writers, Shalamov takes a specific locale and time and elevates the search for the human soul—and human inhumanity—to a universal, global orbit.
Varlam Shalamov was a prisoner for 12 years. He was a man who survived the most horrific place in the Gulag Archipelago—the Kolyma camps. To him, the idea of ‘what does not kill us makes us stronger’ is out of the question: ‘I am convinced that the camp is an entirely negative school. One cannot spend even an hour in it—it would be an hour of degradation. The camp has never given, and can never give, anything positive to anyone, ever.’
The Soviet Union, much like Nazi Germany, is, strange as it may seem, a child of Western civilization, albeit a mutant one. The ideas of Communism were not penned in some dark basements; they were written in the universities and library reading rooms of Berlin, London, and Geneva. These lethal theories became both a domestic commodity and an export product of this civilization. The project was first realised on the territory of Tsarist Russia, and it was named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The USSR was the last European empire, and it existed with the same violence through which it was born. Soviet concentration camps, especially during the 1930s-1950s, served both as an instrument for consolidating power through rabid terror and as an inseparable attribute of the state itself. If the gates of Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz and Dachau cynically bore the inscription ‘Work sets you free’ (Arbeit macht frei), the entrances to Soviet concentration camps displayed an equally cynical slogan: ‘Labour in the USSR is a matter of honour, glory, brilliance, and heroism.’ In reality, this ‘labour’ meant felling timber or deadly mining work in -25°C temperatures for 12–13 hours every single day.
Between 1929 and 1954, approximately 17 million people passed through the Stalinist camps; of these, about 2 million perished. The Kolyma camps were not hell. Because of the randomly selected, mostly innocent prisoners, they were worse than hell. In hell, sinners suffer, which is a manifestation of Biblical justice; however, the Soviet camps were a manifestation of absolute evil, where hundreds of thousands of innocent people died, and good could never triumph over evil.
Soviet camps shatter our perceptions of a reasonably ordered world, of good and evil, and of the boundary beyond which a human ceases to be human. Against the backdrop of this new reality, everything looked different: scales shifted. A prisoner lived for a single day: only ‘here and now’ (Varlam Shalamov’s The Measure of One Man, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). For many, the ‘here and now’ is a cheerful and optimistic slogan, but in a different time and dimension, it carried a crushing weight for millions: I must survive today, here and now. And again tomorrow—here and now. And the day after—here and now. And so on, from month to month and from year to year. We can roughly imagine, we can know as facts what happened and how, but it is impossible to truly internalize the humiliation and the mortal fear that was the daily existence of the Kolyma prisoners.
Those who survived the Stalinist camps possessed a knowledge of human nature so profound and heavy that it almost likened them to Biblical prophets. Paradoxically, it was precisely because of this otherworldly knowledge and experience that they often did not allow themselves to become moral mentors to others. They realized something extraordinary: ‘In the camp, I learned and understood that you should not divide the world into good and bad people, but into the fearful and the fearless. The vast majority of people are cowards, and even at the slightest threat, they are ready for any act of villainy—even deadly villainy. Shalamov believed that the aforementioned is the well-packaged and hidden core of the human psyche. Culture, then, is merely a thin layer laid over this core, one that shatters easily in difficult situations over a short period of time (see epigraph). This is human nature, and fighting it is as futile as tilting at windmills.
Unlike Germany, which underwent full denazification, the former Soviet republics—including Georgia—never truly carried out de-sovietization. Not only were the various levels of leaders of the Great Soviet Terror never punished, they were never even exposed. Tens of thousands of perpetrators, those who applauded them, and the authors of the letters of denunciation remained unexposed. Practically, the Great Terror was never systematically and publicly addressed. There was no catharsis, no repentance. Slowly, everything is fading into oblivion, making it impossible to draw the necessary conclusions, and thus, this burden will remain an unshakeable weight from generation to generation.
Anatole France has a story in which Pontius Pilate cannot remember Christ 17 years after the crucifixion.
1. Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader.
