Q&A: A fresh look at the Soviet 'Gulag Archipelago'
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One of the odd things about interviewing gulag survivors is how different their reactions were to their experiences. I met some people who were still afraid to talk much at all: Many had signed statements at the time of their release, promising not to reveal anything, and they were afraid they could still be held to them. Others told me they'd been talking about their experiences for decades. Still others had more or less devoted their lives to telling the stories, and collecting the stories of others.
Their attitudes to the past were no less varied. Some found it almost impossible to speak, because the memories were so difficult and tragic. One woman, on the other hand, literally howled with laughter as she told me about the ridiculous clothes she had to wear, as a prisoner, and seemed to really enjoy re-telling the story. Meeting survivors was like a lesson in the many types of human nature: There was really no rule about their reactions at all.
What in your research surprised you the most? What reader response gave you the most satisfaction in the reception to your book? Is this chapter of your writing life over, or will there be more works on the subject? If you would, how did writing this book change your life? How did it change you?
I think what surprised me the most in my research was the frankness of the inspectors' reports in the archives. I suppose I'd been vaguely expecting them to cover up the truth about what life was really like in the camps, but they were in some ways more brutal than memoirs. Describing conditions in Volgolag, a railroad construction camp in Tatarstan in July 1942, one inspector complained, for example, that: "the whole population of the camp, including free workers, lives off flour. The only meal for prisoners is so-called 'bread' made from flour and water, without meats or fats." As a result, the inspector went on indignantly, there were high rates of illness, particularly scurvy - and, not surprisingly, the camp was failing to meet its production norms.
The outrage ceased to seem surprising after I had read several dozen similar reports, each of which used more or less the same sort of language, and ended with more or less the same ritual conclusion: conditions needed to be improved so that prisoners would work harder, and so that production norms would be met. Yet very little was actually done. While it might have been expected that camp living conditions would be poor during the war, as they were all over the Soviet Union, a nationwide inspection of twenty-three large camps in 1948 still concluded, among other things, that 75 percent of the prisoners in Norillag in northern Siberia had no warm boots; that the number of prisoners unfit for hard labor in Karelia had recently tripled; that death rates were still "too high" in half a dozen camps - too high, that is, to allow for efficient production. The reports reminded me of the inspectors of Gogol's era: the forms were observed, the reports were filed, and effects on actual human beings were ignored.
As for reader reaction - by far the most satisfying responses have been from people who were in the camps, who found my descriptions accurate. If they feel it's a good book, then I'm pleased: They are the best judges. And yes, it is a subject I'd like to pursue, although probably in a different way. What really interests me, at the moment, is the opposite problem: Why do people come to believe in totalitarian ideologies in the first place. To put it differently, I'm interested in the perpetrators, at the moment, as much as the victims.
