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A review by liisp_cvr2cvr
The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps by Dan Healey
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
Not an easy read in any sense, but the research gone into this is incredible. An important book for various reasons, I think the most important being that it continues to take the history into the future.
There is ample personal detail about the doctors in this book - how they dealt with camp life and the system. How in this particular evil, they chose to do a little bit of good at personal risk.
But of course, it's also an important portrayal of Stalin's regime and how people, no matter how intelligent and valuable to society, were only suitable for hard physical labor that likely killed them when they happened to speak against the Soviet.
In cases you could see how one human went from a prisoner being the victim of and hating the system, to making their way to a position of comfort - e.g. no longer in the mines or hard labor, and instead to a position of a nurse. Once a nurse, they settled into it, some even becoming doctors later in life, and thus becoming a cog in the system. In a sense, they paid the good deed done to them forward by helping others, but at the same time, the system was not so bad to them anymore so why shake the status quo. I know, it's a bit harsh, but it is what it is.
It never ceases to amaze me how humans alone can make this world a hell on earth. It never ceases to amaze me how every now and again there is one human who seems to garner a mass following, or causes a mass hysteria that transcends generations... and all of it to do horrible things. These "great" leaders who are an immovable tank in the face of the few who will try to fight it... secretly, silently, at great risk, by helping. I mean, mind blowing.
Anyway... some quotes:
"In Berzin's first year as a Dalstroi chief executive, he delivered half a tonne of gold; the rates climbed dramatically in the mid 1930s, until in 1937 alone Dalstroi gave 51.4 tonnes to the Soviet state. Dalstroi's gold fed Stalin's Five-Year-Plan hunger for imported Western technology to fuel industrialisation. It also fed the Berzin team's love of flashy cars: the Dalstroi chief drove a Rolls Royce, and other officials brought - to this roadless corner of Eurasia - at least one all-terrain Citroen and a Mercedes. Yet as late as 1939 Magadan's Sanotel only had one automobile at its disposal for ambulance duties."
*
"The Gulag made some prisoners so desperate to be ill that they literally became mentally ill."
*
"'You're not mentally ill,' he said to me softly and assuredly. 'You are in a reactive condition tied to extraordinary psychic burdening. Do not make anything up: there's no need to play at being mad. I do not intend to send you back. Act naturally and do not do anything stupid.' I looked at Sokolovsky with mistrust. When you have seen so much evil from people it is hard to believe in the benevolence and noble intentions of a stranger. I was 25 years old."
*
"In Glazov's own words: 'The Sangorodok was not so much a hospital, as a throng of the dying. A transport of prisoners arrived with many dead, and he notes how their frozen remains made a grim impression: These corpses were brought to us in the morgue. In the morning we were to conduct several autopsies. We entered the morgue; it was crowded with frozen corpses. [...] Some of the dead were standing on their legs and leaned against a warm stove. The sight of reclining corpses surprised no one, but the dead standing on their feet and warming up by the stove was unusual and unpleasant.'"
There is ample personal detail about the doctors in this book - how they dealt with camp life and the system. How in this particular evil, they chose to do a little bit of good at personal risk.
But of course, it's also an important portrayal of Stalin's regime and how people, no matter how intelligent and valuable to society, were only suitable for hard physical labor that likely killed them when they happened to speak against the Soviet.
In cases you could see how one human went from a prisoner being the victim of and hating the system, to making their way to a position of comfort - e.g. no longer in the mines or hard labor, and instead to a position of a nurse. Once a nurse, they settled into it, some even becoming doctors later in life, and thus becoming a cog in the system. In a sense, they paid the good deed done to them forward by helping others, but at the same time, the system was not so bad to them anymore so why shake the status quo. I know, it's a bit harsh, but it is what it is.
It never ceases to amaze me how humans alone can make this world a hell on earth. It never ceases to amaze me how every now and again there is one human who seems to garner a mass following, or causes a mass hysteria that transcends generations... and all of it to do horrible things. These "great" leaders who are an immovable tank in the face of the few who will try to fight it... secretly, silently, at great risk, by helping. I mean, mind blowing.
Anyway... some quotes:
"In Berzin's first year as a Dalstroi chief executive, he delivered half a tonne of gold; the rates climbed dramatically in the mid 1930s, until in 1937 alone Dalstroi gave 51.4 tonnes to the Soviet state. Dalstroi's gold fed Stalin's Five-Year-Plan hunger for imported Western technology to fuel industrialisation. It also fed the Berzin team's love of flashy cars: the Dalstroi chief drove a Rolls Royce, and other officials brought - to this roadless corner of Eurasia - at least one all-terrain Citroen and a Mercedes. Yet as late as 1939 Magadan's Sanotel only had one automobile at its disposal for ambulance duties."
*
"The Gulag made some prisoners so desperate to be ill that they literally became mentally ill."
*
"'You're not mentally ill,' he said to me softly and assuredly. 'You are in a reactive condition tied to extraordinary psychic burdening. Do not make anything up: there's no need to play at being mad. I do not intend to send you back. Act naturally and do not do anything stupid.' I looked at Sokolovsky with mistrust. When you have seen so much evil from people it is hard to believe in the benevolence and noble intentions of a stranger. I was 25 years old."
*
"In Glazov's own words: 'The Sangorodok was not so much a hospital, as a throng of the dying. A transport of prisoners arrived with many dead, and he notes how their frozen remains made a grim impression: These corpses were brought to us in the morgue. In the morning we were to conduct several autopsies. We entered the morgue; it was crowded with frozen corpses. [...] Some of the dead were standing on their legs and leaned against a warm stove. The sight of reclining corpses surprised no one, but the dead standing on their feet and warming up by the stove was unusual and unpleasant.'"