Mick Hartley

Timothy Snyder, historian and author of books such as Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, has written a powerful foreword to Julius Margolin's memoir of life in Stalin's gulag, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, which is soon to be published in a full English translation for the first time. Snyder's foreword is reprinted at Tablet:

We speak of memory, but memory is empty without witness. It is too much to expect that all who suffer speak. Yet without witness, memory devolves into propaganda that serves the moment. Julius Margolin asks whether the real Russia is the one that celebrates victory over Nazi Germany on Red Square, or the one that exists in the uncharted universe of concentration camps that he calls “the land of the zek.” He wrote in 1946 and 1947, right after five years of Soviet penal servitude; the question is still pertinent in the Russia of the 21st century. Margolin was himself a “zek,” a convict, who survived incarceration in the largest concentration camp system during its most murderous period. […]

As Margolin saw matters from Łódź or Pinsk in late 1939 and early 1940, the Nazis and the Soviets had together destroyed Europe. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939,and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that followed, was the end of the life he thought he was leading. Poland, from which he had emigrated but for which he had sympathy, was destroyed by its powerful neighbors. In Pinsk Margolin watched as local resources, grain and meat, were directed by Soviet power to the Nazi ally, even as Germany invaded western Europe. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union declared that the Polish state did not exist; this created a basic problem of access to law and protection for tens of millions of people who were subject not to a conventional occupation but to annexation and colonization. In Margolin’s case, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp for having the wrong papers. […]

During Margolin’s first year as a zek, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies. His forced labor served an economy that supplied the Wehrmacht. We might be tempted to think of this as ironic; for Margolin it was simply the end of his world: “Both sides were inhuman reflections of everything we held dear and sacred.” There was nothing surprising, for him, in “Russia’s alliance with Nazi Germany.” A Jew in Soviet confinement, he had to endure pro-Nazi propaganda: “The rare Soviet newspapers that landed in the camp were full of pro-German publicity.” The Soviet press was reprinting the speeches of Nazi dignitaries. “In line with Hitler’s successes,” Margolin recalls, “antisemitism increased in the camp.” Although he was a Polish Jew, and well aware of Polish antisemitism, no one called him a kike until he was in a Soviet camp.

As to the question of whether the real Russia is the one that celebrates victory over Nazi Germany on Red Square or the one that exists in the uncharted universe of concentration camps that formed the gulag, there's little doubt which answer Margolin – and Snyder – would give.