FORCED LABOUR

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26593, 1 December 1951, Page 3

FORCED LABOUR

It Happens in Russia. Seven Years Forced Labour in the Siberian Goldfields. By Vladimir Petrov. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 470 pp. This restrained and factua] account of the author’s experiences as a “political prisoner” in ‘the Kolyma goldmines is one of the most impressive indictments ever written about the system of forced labour by which Russia maintains her economy and her public works. In 1935, Vladimir Petrov was a student of 19, favourably disposed toward the Communist regime but taking no part in political life. At the time of the assassination of Kirov, when the first purges began, he encountered a young girl who worked in the N.K.V.D. Because he repelled her advances, she denounced him as politically suspect. After going through the routine of interrogations, brutality and hunger, already familiar to those who have read other accounts of Russian prisons, Petrov was given a “trial” and sentenced to six years’ forced labour at a notorious concentration camp from which few emerge to tell any tales. He describes his trip to Siberia in a filthy overcrowded train, the unbelievabte working conditions at the mines, and the gradual degradation which overcomes even the most stalwart and gallant human beings when fear, pain, cold and hunger fill their minds to the exclusion of every normal feeling except the instinct of self-preservation. Having a retentive memory and a gift for narrative. Petrov is able to make his story absorbing—if horrifying—reading. He records the moments of relief and cheerfulness as well as the periods of despair and terror. He purposely refrains from drawing conclusions and making generalisations, since his aim is to allow the reader to judge for himself what “the great experiment” in Russia amounts _ to when one actually lives in the midst of it. When Petrov had completed his term and was released, he was unable to find work or to join the army because of his record as a convicted political prisoner. Having returned across Asia to his native town in the Caucasus to see his mother, he was there when the invading German army arrived, ex-convicts being also refused the right to be evacuated. His account of the reactions of the ordinary Russian citizens of the town to the coming of the Germans —their initial joy and hopefulness, then disillusion, followed by fear at the prospect of the return of their former Communist overlords —is intensely interesting. Petrov himself, with many others, chose not to remain, and retreated into Europe at the heels of the Germans. Eventually he found his way to Italy—luckily escaping the fate of so many of his compatriots who were often forcibly returned by the democracies to certain death in Russia—and finally to America, where he is now an instructor in Slavonic languages and literature at Yale University. The evidence he supplies in this book is of the first importance to all who desire to understand the mature of contemporary Russia.