“We Russians have always had a sadomasochistic relationship with our country.” This is a reflection by Galina Ivan Levinson, an elderly survivor of the Gulag, Stalin’s gigantic empire of labour camps. Barry Lewis’s often utterly heartbreaking photographs are the illustration to Galina’s words. In a rare, probably unrepeatable period of change – the last months of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule and of his short-lived policy of glasnost (openness) – Lewis was allowed to visit the Gulag regions of north-eastern Siberia. It was 1991. The archaeology of the gulags was still lying in the snow: the wreckage of huts and fences, wooden stakes and rusted barbed wire, an old boot stiff in the permafrost. Starting in the port of Magadan, he travelled north along the “Road of Bones”, the 2,000km (1,240 miles) Kolyma Highway, to the gold and uranium mines built by slave labour at the cost of uncounted lives.
Lewis was able to explore the aftermath as well as the past. An unimaginable total of 18 million people experienced the Gulag system from the 1920s to 1953, the year that saw the end of mass political arrests, deportations and executions after Stalin’s death. But huge numbers of survivors stayed in the region after the end of their sentences. Some were condemned to further exile, but many – just as in the tsarist times – chose to remain and settle in ramshackle villages near their old sites of suffering. Their former camp guards, now elderly pensioners, often became their neighbours. It’s often said that warders are as much in prison as their convicts.
Reading the savaged, unforgettable faces here in these photographs, you see human beings whose experience has led them far beyond any thirst for vengeance, “restorative justice” or a rebalancing of official history.
They ask only not to be forgotten.
One of the most extraordinary images here is a worn-out hank of string with a series of knots. This was Asir Sandler’s memory. As a convict, there was no way he could keep anything like a written journal. So instead he tied a succession of tiny knots in his lengths of string, each knot coded differently to remind him of a separate incident or significant moment. He had been serving a 25-year sentence, commuted from a death penalty, for carrying a book of forbidden poems. His “crime” was meaningless, his sentence was meaningless, and his long life in the gulags and in exile would also have been without meaning if it were not for the little knots on pieces of string – memory, the last and inmost shelter to which the soul of a brutalised man or woman can retreat.
A handful of good, brave Russians decided, well before the Soviet Union ended, to make memory into a public institution. Memorial – abused, bullied and now closed down by Vladimir Putin – set to counting the dead and deported millions, giving them names, recording their fates and publishing the terrible history of the Stalin years, the “Great Terror” of the 1930s, the Ukrainian famines, the pantomime of the treason trials. Its work was never popular, and it was not only the leaderships of the Soviet Union and then Russia who resented all these revelations. For very many ordinary Russians, there was something unpatriotic, even perverse, about resurrecting a particular past that could only bring shame and international contempt on their great country.
In a very small way, it’s worth comparing that reaction to the indignation of British super-patriots over revelations about the contribution of Caribbean slavery to national and private wealth. Why bring all that up again? Why – in the Russian case – recall distant bad times when we should eternally be celebrating a closer history: Russia’s victory in the Great Patriotic War against fascism?
The ordering of public memory has always preoccupied autocrats. Few nations have plural versions of history and even relatively free countries promote something like an “approved’ account of their recent evolution. But private memory is harder to get at. Dictators burn books and they close journals that are nostalgic in “the wrong way”. But they scrabble in vain to find the key to that small sealed room, the place in which individuals remember what happened to them and what their mothers whispered to them when nobody else was about.
This is why Putin is so anxious about memory. It’s a well-worn joke that the Russian past is unpredictable, but his reordering of history is not hard to understand. He wants people to recognise him in Peter the Great, in the Empress Catherine – great tyrants who expanded Russia and fashioned it into an empire feared by its neighbours. Today, once again, critics are sent to labour camps, like the opposition protester Alexei Navalny, or simply murdered (the fate of journalist Anna Politkovskaya). And yet Putin is not a tsar. His authority rests not on popular adoration but on a gang of ambitious men who might conspire against him if he shows weakness. He has said that he is a “Eurasian”, turning Russia away from the west towards its own “traditional values” and civilisation. But that requires silencing the public memories which have warned that – not so long ago – traditional values of pity, mercy and humility were hideously distorted, that there was once also a “westernising” policy that promised Russians more liberty and prosperity. In the hands of a rising Russian generation, the women and men who will take their country into climate change and up to the 22nd century, there is a hank of string. They feel the knots, which cannot be undone, and begin to remember what they mean.
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This is an edited extract from Gulag: A Journey into the Darkness of Stalin’s Siberian Prison Camps by Barry Lewis, published in March by Fistful of Books (£40). An exhibition of the work will also be featured at the Photo North festival in Leeds, 12-14 April
