Journey into the Whirlwind

Russian author Eugenia Ginzburg’s two-volume memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind (1967, 1979), chronicles her brutal imprisonment in the 1930s under the repressive Soviet Union regime led by Joseph Stalin. To publish the book, Ginzburg was forced to smuggle the manuscript out of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and into the hands of an American publisher. The work was not published in her home country of Russia until 1990, when the fall of the Soviet Union was imminent.

In 1934, Eugenia Ginzburg is a successful 30-year-old educator and journalist specializing in Leninist history. A card-carrying member of the Communist Party, Eugenia is married to Pavel Aksyonov, the mayor of Kazan, Russia with whom she has a two-year-old son, Vasily. Eugenia also writes for the Red Tartaria newspaper.

On December 1 of that year, Eugenia receives a phone call informing her that Sergei Kirov has been assassinated. The secretary of the Communist Party's General Committee and a close personal friend of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Kirov's assassination is used as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, a campaign of political persecution during which millions of suspected dissidents are imprisoned and hundreds of thousands killed.



The following year, Eugenia's friend and colleague Professor Nikolay Naumovich Elvov is arrested for contributing a chapter in a book perceived to support Leon Trotsky, Stalin's rival. Due to her friendship and academic association with Elvov, Eugenia is interrogated by Comrade Beylin, the chairman of the bureau of Communist Party political control. Though initially accused of disloyalty to the Party, Eugenia is charged with "insufficient vigilance," the punishment for which is ejection from the Communist Party.

In 1936 in Moscow, Eugenia pleads her case to the court. There, seeing Joseph Stalin in person for the only time in her life, she can sense his evil. Eugenia's appeal fails and she is forced to relinquish her Party card. Being removed from the Party paves the way for one of Stalin's most sadistic purge agents Captain Vevers to arrest Eugenia.

In a basement at Black Lake Street, Eugenia is imprisoned with many other charged dissidents. She shares a cell with Lyama, a young woman who eats both Eugenia's and her own portion of food when Eugenia is too disgusted to eat the rancid meal of fish given to prisoners. Throughout this early stage of her imprisonment, Soviet interrogators repeatedly urge Eugenia to admit her guilt and implicate other comrades. When she refuses to do so, the interrogators starve her and make her undergo sleep deprivation.



Throughout the interrogation process, various colleagues of hers from the Red Tartaria newspaper are brought in to substantiate the allegations against Eugenia. She is shocked that some of her closest journalist colleagues are so quick to condemn her to save themselves. After certain documents are signed by her colleagues, Eugenia is relocated to an even filthier prison. There, she learns how to communicate incognito with her fellow prisoners through code languages set to opera songs. Her stay there is short-lived as Eugenia is soon put on a coach packed tightly with prisoners and freighted to the Butkyrki prison, where her days and nights are haunted by the screams of tortured inmates.

At a military tribunal where Eugenia fears receiving the death penalty, she is sentenced to 10 years in prison. Though happy to have not received a death sentence, the two years she spends at Yaroslavl are a period of unimaginable suffering. Finally, after two years, Eugenia is deported to a labor camp in Siberia, known in the Soviet Union as a gulag. The journey involves an excruciating month in which she is packed tightly in a train car with 75 other female prisoners. Worse still is her journey aboard the SS Dzhurma to Siberia, during which she nearly dies of malnutrition made even worse by seasickness. Only after she is on dry land does she recover her health.

At the camp, Eugenia bribes one of the guards into assigning her to housework rather than manual labor. She also serves in the kitchen for a brief time. However, after being relocated to a new camp, Eugenia no longer has such a comparatively comfortable existence. Relegated to chopping down trees in freezing temperature, she once again becomes deathly ill. Fortunately, the doctor who treats her says he is friends with her son. In an act of sympathy, the doctor arranges for Eugenia to serve out the rest of her sentence as a doctor's assistant in an orphanage. She writes that had the doctor not been so generous, she would have surely died at the camp.



In closing, Eugenia characterizes the narrative as "the story of an ordinary Communist woman."

Journey into the Whirlwind is a harrowing survival story and a shocking firsthand account of Soviet oppression.