Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag

439 Pages·1999·1.95 MB·English

by  Janusz Bardach

Man Is Wolf to Man

Man Is Wolf
to Man
Surviving the Gulag
Janusz Bardach
Kathleen Gleeson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
.
Berkeley Los Angeles
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
© 1998by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bardach, Janusz.
Man is wolf to man : surviving the gulag / Janusz Bardach and
Kathleen Gleeson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-520-90094-4
1. Bardach, Janusz. 2. Political prisoners—Russia (Federation)—
Kolyma Mountains Region—Biography. 3. Kolyma (Concentration
camp)—History. 4. Kolyma Mountains Region—History—20th century.
I. Gleeson, Kathleen. II. Title.
DK771.K67B373 1998
940.54(cid:1)7247(cid:1)09577—dc21 98-5402
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of American National
Standards for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
To the memory of my parents,
Ottylia and Mark Bardach.
JB

Contents
Maps and photos follow pages xvi and 172 respectively
Foreword by Adam Hochschild ix
Acknowledgments xv
Prologue 1
September 1939 3
Witness 26
Red Army Soldier 54
Court-martial 78
Cattle Car 92
Retribution 109
Burepolom 122
Siberian Trail 140
Buchta Nakhodka 163
Slave Ship 181
Welcome to Kolyma 195
The Isolator 213
Winter 224
Kolyma Highway 240
Central Hospital 259
Tuberculosis Patients 280
Antechamber to the Morgue 302
Psychiatric Ward 324
Letters 347
Free, But Not Home 364
Epilogue 385
Glossary 389
Foreword
The Soviet empire of Stalin’s day is a world hard for most of us
to imagine. Seldom has any nation endured such a massive, self-
inflicted genocide. And seldom, if ever, has a major country kept
so high a proportion of its own people, and those of countries it
dominated, in prison. We know now that during Stalin’s lifetime
more than 20 million Soviets—more than one out of eight men,
women, and children—were executed by firing squads or sent for
long terms to the gulag. After the Soviet Union and Nazi Ger-
many divided Eastern Europe between them in 1939 and 1940,
hundreds of thousands more people from Poland, Romania, and
the Baltic states found themselves in Soviet execution cellars or in
the far-flung network of labor camps. A traveler today can find
Polish and Lithuanian names on prisoners’ graves from the Arc-
tic Ocean to the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Few Americans are aware that the most notorious corner of
the gulag, that country within a country, lay only a few hundred
ix