(The Nationalist, 23 January 2007)
The historian, Robert Conquest, in his book, Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps, (Macmillan, London, 1978) states that, in 1952, which was the last full year of Stalin’s rule, there were between 12 and 14 million people in the Soviet system of penal camps known as the Gulag. They had an annual death-rate conservatively estimated at one-third of a million. These were not an accidental and regretted by-product of the system, but a policy designed to keep the numbers from getting out of control. The Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his study published as The Gulag Archipelago, which he based on Soviet records, supports this view. (A “warm” camp in the Arctic was one where the temperature dropped to “only” minus 50 Celsius in winter, while, in a “cold” camp, it went down to minus 70.)
Conquest, in Kolyma, tells of how, one day, a train-load of new prisoners arrived during winter at the terminus of a railway line inside the Arctic circle. The prisoners were ordered to walk to their camp, several hours’ march away. The long line was led off by guards. Before long, it began to snow heavily, but the prisoners shuffled on, each following the one in front.
The snow-fall developed into what mountaineers call a white-out. This is when snow falls heavily, and visibility is severely reduced. Everything is white – the sky, the air, the ground. People lose a sense of perspective; there is nothing to refer to, no sense of distance, or even whether the ground in front is rising or falling. I experienced it once on Mount Ruapehu in New Zealand and it’s disconcerting. There is a sense of directionlessness, with all the familiar reference points missing.
The prisoners marched on into the thickening blizzard. The guards had made the same journey many times before and were sure of themselves. It was only after hours of marching that – seemingly – they realized they must have taken a wrong turn, because they were climbing up a valley between two spurs of a mountain chain. They ordered the prisoners to turn back, but it was too late. All two thousand of them, prisoners and guards, died in the snow. Months later their frozen bodies were uncovered in the Spring thaw.
If you know you’re lost, you can at least begin to think about how to find your way. But if you don’t know you’re lost, and keep plodding on, assuming that those up front know what they’re doing, then you’re in real trouble. Maybe the prisoners felt a sense of safety in numbers. Or maybe they picked up a feeling of uncertainty from the guards as time passed, but felt all the same that it couldn’t happen that two thousand people would walk to their death. Something so horrifying couldn’t happen that simply. But the fact is that it did.
Ireland used to be known, probably sentimentally and in idealized fashion, as the island of saints and scholars. What are we now? The island of commuters and consumers? Film-stars, footballers and “celebrities” have their cult following, and almost one-quarter of Irish adults are functionally illiterate. Materialism is our national creed, and greed is its motivator. We sacrifice personal and family life in its service. Faster is better than slower; bigger is better than smaller; richer is better than poorer; now is better than later; and for now is better than for ever.
Do we know we’re lost, or are we blindly plodding on up the valley?