Volume 36, Number 9 · June 1, 1989
Winners
By J.M. Cameron
Grey Is the Color of Hope
by Irina Ratushinskaya, translated by Alyona Kojevnikov
Knopf, 360 pp., $18.95
Fear No Evil
by Natan Sharansky, translated by Stefani Hoffman
Random House, 437 pp., $19.95
Zek, gulag…such terms are now familiar and they speak to us from an increasing number of works: histories, eyewitness accounts, memoirs. The landscape of the Soviet prisons and penal colonies is now become as familiar as that of the prisons and camps of the Hitler period. For a long time the European Left sought to make distinctions between the brutalities of the Soviet and National Socialist regimes, the former being the consequences of 'mistakes'; but this distinction is now hard to maintain. The German system had as its peculiar enormity the industrialized killing of Jews, though in its later days the Soviet regime was moving in this direction, and there may in fact have been more popular anti-Semitism—this is brought out in Sharansky's memoir—in the Soviet Union than in Germany. Those who speak from firsthand experience of the Soviet system all give us the same picture of savagery, coarseness, bureaucratic blindness, pedantry, with here and there a touch of the comic and now and then a sudden blaze, a radiant witness, of humanity and goodness. Comedy and simple goodness resemble evergreens poking their heads above a snowy waste, signs that beneath the apparent blankness individual life is nourished and makes its occasional miraculous, as it were, presence known.
Review, 2246 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |