Journey into the Whirlwind

by Max Hayward, Paul Stevenson, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg

Release Date: November, 2002

Edition: Paperback

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Unimaginable evil of communism.

Eugenia Ginzburg, a highly educated and patriotic communist in 1930's Soviet Union, was falsely accused on a preposterous charge of counter-revolutionary terrorism and sentenced to ten years imprisonment that included horrible periods of solitary confinement and eventually labor in the infamous Siberian gulag archipelago made famous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The utter senselessness, depravity, and human waste of these years are almost impossible to imagine, but Ginzburg's intricate descriptions of interrogation, prison life, and Siberian work camps make the reader shudder with bone-chilling cold and despair. This book should be forced reading for apologists of communism and the old Soviet Union. It eloquently, but shockingly, makes obvious why tyrannical power (in this case, Josef Stalin) is humankind's greatest evil and, without intending to do so, explains why (now) Russia is a nation tormented by its past and struggling to find a respectable path for its future. This book is not, however, a political commentary. It is at its core a heart-wrenching account of a very courageous woman who lost her husband, children, citizenship, and freedom to the paranoia and criminal evil of Stalin and communism. Throughout Ginzburg's tale, though, shines her indefatigable spirit. I read this book in only three sittings and the only complaint I had was its abrupt ending in the middle of her confinement. Ginzburg takes up the rest of her story in "Within the Whirlwind," which really should be volume two of this novel

A must read

Amazing book, recounting the horrors of "an honest Communist" who suffered under Stalin's repression. Ginzburg describes the 18 years she spent in prison and in work camps, from Kazan to Yaroslavl to Kolyma. A must read for those who want to understand the Stalinist period and the legacy of suffering that lingers in Siberia.