The Short Story Collection Everyone Should Read
By: Jacob Wilkins
Tags: Communism, History, Politics, Totalitarianism, Books

The Short Story Collection Everyone Should Read

A photograph of Varlam Shalamov, 1937 (Wikimedia Commons — image resized by Author)

The history of totalitarianism is wrought with bloodshed. If you want to understand just how terrifying these regimes can be, a read through Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is a good place to start.

The book is a collection of short stories based upon the author's experiences as a Gulag prisoner during the infamous regime of Joseph Stalin. Though the stories are not for the fainthearted, they are a powerful reminder of what can happen when radicals gain power.

The Chill

During the Stalin era (1929–1953), there were hundreds of labor camps throughout the Soviet Union and some were more bearable than others. Shalamov didn’t get off lightly. He, along with thousands of other citizens, was arrested during the Great Purge and taken to Kolyma in 1937.

Located in the far east of Russia, the temperatures in Kolyma are well below freezing. Working in such conditions was a horrific experience and the Gulag inmates dreaded their hours of labor:

“In winter we lined up inside the barracks, and even now it is agonizing to recall those last minutes before you left for an icy twelve-hour night shift.” — Kolyma Tales, Shalamov

Regardless of the work the prisoners were forced to carry out, the relentless cold made everything worse. It affected their ability to move, to think, to feel, biting away hour and after hour without a shred of remorse:

“The same cold that turned saliva to ice in midair had gotten to the human soul. If your bones could freeze into insensitivity … You couldn’t think about anything in the freezing cold.” — Kolyma Tales, Shalamov

Starvation

Energy was essential for survival in such temperatures, but the inmates were rarely given sufficient nourishment. Proper food was so rare that prisoners would savor every moment of their meals:

“And when by some miracle the soup was thick, we couldn’t believe it and were so joyful that we ate it as slowly as we could. But even thick soup in a warmed-up stomach left us with a nagging pain, so long had we been starving.” — Kolyma Tales, Shalamov

A photograph of a gold mine in Kolyma (Wikimedia Commons)

And as with the cold temperatures, the lack of nutrition influenced the prisoners’ minds as well as their bodies. It was hard to stay sane with such a low amount of sustenance:

“Any human feelings — love, friendship, envy, charity, mercy, ambition, decency — had vanished along with the flesh we had lost during our prolonged starvation. The miniscule layer of muscle that was still left on our bones … had only enough room for resentful anger …”

Transformation

Years of harsh conditions took a toll on the prisoners. They started to transform in ways they could never have imagined and their moral compass was lost along with their physical deterioration:

“The most terrible is when a man begins to feel, forever, that lower depth in his own life, when his moral criteria are borrowed from his camp experience.” — Kolyma Tales, Shalamov

Given inmates regularly fought each other for food, they started to become animalistic, losing their humanity inside the Gulag’s twisted culture. Indeed, the only way to survive was to transform into something savage:

“The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.” — Kolyma Tales, Shalamov

Freedom?

When it comes to the study of the past, we often focus on particular events and forget about the aftermath. In the case of Stalin’s Gulag, those who survived were left with deep scars:

“That was what happened to the soul; it froze, it shrank, and, maybe, it would stay cold forever.” — Kolyma Tales, Shalamov“

Soviet society had little time for those who crossed back into freedom. Ex-prisoners weren’t given enough support despite their mental trauma and physical decline:

“The intellectual becomes a permanently scared creature. His spirit is broken …” — Kolyma Tales, Shalamov

Of course, there are always exceptions. Given some of the camps were more brutal than others, some survivors were able to recover. But for many, freedom was far from liberating. Though the prisoners left the Gulag, the Gulag never truly left the prisoners.

A photograph of Stalin, 1937 (Wikimedia Commons — image resized by Author)

Afterword

For Stalin and his fellow communists, the Gulag was justified — anyone who was against the regime deserved to suffer in such harsh conditions.

This is a common element of all radical perspectives. Those in power justify their acts of villainy because their ideologies allow them to. It is paramount, therefore, that we learn from writers like Varlam Shalamov and avoid political extremism at all costs.