Under the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev there was a post-Stalin easing of oppression emerging from the Kremlin and a Cold War ‘Victorian’ Ice Age thaw for writers allowed this remarkable, unique, little tale to unbelievably evade the censor and make it into the real world, even traversing the fixed barriers of the Iron Curtain. It was common, particularly during the purges of Uncle Joe, to send the masses off to gulags in Siberia. It didn’t take much of an excuse for the NKVD to send any form of dissident or suspected dissident on a long holiday to pretty much a concentration camp where forced labour and a strict military-controlled regime was used to assist in the growth and development of the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn openly admitted he had spent a long time out in the harsh icy Siberian environment, a gulag survivor, with a story to tell. ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ is the product of this internment. Although strictly a work of fiction, the book would not be possible without direct experience of life in the gulag. It’s tale which isn’t particularly long in length but in its minute detail of a day in the life of our political prisoner, Ivan, we get a real rare and accurate and quite disturbing account of the gulag, a system which was notorious in its terror propaganda value and this is a story which literally affected many many Russian citizens and their families as such vast numbers of people ended up being relocated to gulags, whether justly or more likely as innocent victims of the regime.
I read a lot of literature about sadistic internments and prison camps etc in wacky political extreme environments as I totally empathise with the stories of condemned political prisoners after my own 25 year career as an incarcerated mental patient in Wales, a prisoner of the government here in the United Kingdom. It’s dark material and often sad and disturbing but I find that I can relate a lot more in my daily life to Ivan Denisovich than I can perhaps relate to stories on the BBC News or in newspapers or chats in pub or coffee shop etc. Try a bit of gulag-living and it sure changes your outlook on life. The drudgery of Solzhenitsyn’s tale is only set over the course of a day. Most prisoners had at least ten years of day like this, some as many as 25 or more. The what, where and why you got there is immaterial really. The fact is you aren’t getting out. You are forced to live within your community and have to accept you fellow inmates and you are set against the strict discipline of quite brutal guards and are totally powerless to resist them, to think of escape or top hope for some miraculous form of justice arriving to end your misery. It’s keep your nose down, take joy in the littlest of pleasures available, don’t dream of hope, and crack on with your work. Yes, Ivan may have to stitch stale bread crusts into his dirty mattress but this treasure of nutrition will keep him alive in the dark winter days of permafrost. If one can scrounge and extra helping of watery cabbage soup through a bit of corruption and skulduggery then it is a bonus. The joy of seeing a bird or the emergence of a single sprig of a spring flower amidst the snow. Take pride in your work, work as a team, improvise and focus on anything that eases the slow, painful passing of incomprehensible time. The psychology of fellow inmates and the psychology of the omnipotent guard detail. Harsh punishments and death awaiting in every nook and cranny and corner of your existence. To survive the day is to survive the year and to survive the whole sentence.
This book is a unique story and one that must be told and it documents one of the darker elements of twentieth century history and the Cold War. It is testament to the author that it is in our hands in the West and in the modern world. Life is a struggle and sometimes in our decadent comfort we can fail to recognise that some people on this planet really do have a tough time of it and for all material niceties and life essentials we take for guaranteed it would do us no harm to learn from Ivan and to appreciate the simplest of things and joys in life and this is evolution and natural selection in its most brutal form.
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