Donald Rayfield
Hell and After
The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin
By Stephen F Cohen
In 1968 the city of Tübingen rather fatuously invited its Jews to return. There were very few able or willing to accept that invitation. However, once the million or more survivors of the Gulag were released (or ‘unloaded’, to use the Russian term), they were usually not invited anywhere. They received a railway ticket, a few roubles for food and, in most cases, access to basic medical care, employment and housing. Only one-third of those falsely convicted of crimes against the state ever got a certificate of rehabilitation (though some victims loathed their oppressors too much to want to petition them for this valuable scrap of paper). Those who once had fine flats and dachas generally lost them to their torturers and betrayers; only the most valued specialists could get their prestigious jobs back. No Soviet returnee had anything like the compensation paid by the German government to the victims of Nazism. Understandably, Russian and foreign writers, from Solzhenitsyn to Anne Applebaum, have focused on the millions of lives and deaths in the Gulag, not on the millions of afterlives.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad