Coming To Terms

• Main Author: Jack, Andrew
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 2004
• Subjects: kolyma river
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195177978.003.0002; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52140231/isbn-9780195177978-book-part-2.pdf

Abstract On 21 December Every Year, Yevgeniya lvanova respectfully raises a glass of vodka to her persecutor on his birthday. She toasts the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose portrait still hangs on her wall even though his bloody regime condemned her to more than a decade in the country’s horrific Gulag labour camp system. In 1943, at the age of fourteen, Ivanova was arrested by the secret police in her native Leningrad, her only ‘crime’ that her uncle supposedly collaborated with the Germans. She passed through a series of prisons and work camps before arriving in the Kolyma river basin in Russia’s extreme north-east district of Magadan in 1949. Though freed in 1956, she long remained under police observation, and was only formally rehabilitated in 1993. For the past forty years, she has lived near Susuman, a township of crumbling concrete buildings constructed on pillars above the ground to withstand the extreme conditions. ‘I don’t consider myself an enemy of the people, but my conscience is not clean,’ she said, puffing on a papirosa, a Soviet-era cigarette made with coarse tobacco. ‘We studied Stalin’s words in school, sang ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin” - and rightly so. I was raised in that tradition.