One Day in the Gulag

A hot summer evening in NCR Delhi, sitting on the terrace with a mug of hot coffee, a bowl of banana-chips, and a book: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

What could be be more incongruous?

The book describes a world quite difficult to imagine  - especially on a day when the temprature touched +46C! Bleak life within the Gulag - prison camps set in the barren, icy wastelands where the teperature dips to -41C; where the inmates are mostly those who offended the Soviet politial system, and are condemned to spend 10 to 20 years of their lives.   

It is appaling to even imagine a system that destroyed the lives of more than 10 million citizens for the most whimsical reasons. Many were prisoners of war who managed to escape Hitler's invading armies and return home only to be suspected of being counter-revolutionaries or spies. One man was sent as a military attache to Western Europe. After he returned back home, his patriotism and loyalty became suspect after he received a Christmas greeting from an aquaintance. This greeting landed him for 10 years in the Gulag.

The life of the protagonist, Ivan Denisovich Sukhov, is perhaps based that of the author himself who, as a young man, was arrested on the charges of 'making derogatory remarks about Stalin', and spent the next 8 years in labour camps: first in 'general' camps (Ust-Izhma?) with common criminals, and then later in Beria's 'special' camps for long-term prisoners. This book is set in one such camp in the region of Karaganda in Northern Kazakhstan.

Most prisoners did not survive their terms, and perished in the freezing labor camps. Chances of surviving aparently depended a lot on the team-leader of your unit:

"You've only to show a whip to a beaten dog. The frost was severe, but not as severe as the team leader...More depended on the work-report than on the work itself. A clever team-leader was the one who concentrated on the work-report. That is what kept the men fed. He had to prove that work which hadn't been done had been done, to turn jobs that were rated low to ones that were rated high. For this a team-leader had to have his head screwed on, and to be on the right side of the checkers. Their palms had to be greased too.."

Not an easy world to imagine while munching banana chips...  :(

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LINKS

* Book - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17125.One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich
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