I Speak for the Silent: Prisoners of the Soviets
by
[Hale, Cushman & Flint, $2.50]
PROFESSOR TCHERNAVIN has written a heartbreaking account of his experiences as a non-party expert in the Soviet fishing industry, the circumstances of his arrest and confinement under unspeakable prison conditions, and his life in the ill-famed Solovetzki Islands concentration camp in the White Sea, where he was sentenced to five years’ forced labor. His story, told bitterly but with remarkable detachment considering his trials, is an overwhelming arraignment of one aspect of Soviet bureaucracy. It represents, be states, ‘the tragedy of thousands of Russian men and women of education still languishing in GPU prisons and concentration camps.’
In Escape from the Soviets the author’s wife, Madame Tatiana Tchernavina, described vividly how she and her husband pushed their way without compass or map through forests and swamps to Finland and freedom. Professor Tchernavin’s book takes the reader from that first dread moment at Murmansk, far beyond the Arctic Circle, when there came a knock at his door and a voice, — ‘Open! This is the GPU!’ — through the weary months of surveillance, of imprisonment and emlless grillings, to his final plans for escape from Solovetzki.
Because the author, a distinguished scientist and ichthyologist, has minimized his personal sufferings and described impassively the workings of the bureaucrat mind as exemplified in the form-prescribed third-degree methods of his ‘examiners,’ and the gradual disintegration of literally hundreds of the country’s best intellects under the tortures of the System, his book takes on added significance, often lacking in the emotionally colored accounts of most political exiles — whether they be exiles from Soviet, Fascist, or Nazi concentration camps.
Professor Tchernavin throws much light on the present rôle of the pre-war educated class in the U. S. S. R. Scores of these have held prominent posts in good faith under Soviet rule, only to become enmeshed in the administrative maze. Surveillance by the secret police involved sooner or later arrest, imprisonment, and in many cases execution on charges of ‘wrecking’ — the official term for sabotage, used to describe any activity ‘undertaken for political reasons with intent to damage industry.’ The epidemic of so-called ‘sabotage’ which raged particularly in 1930—1933 is described in detail, with special emphasis on the shooting of fortyeight specialists in the food industry, many of them lifelong associates and friends of the author. ‘You will be the forty-ninth,’one of the latter’s official tormentors was fond of repeating. This, then, is an absorbing and authentic account of the pressure often brought to hear on men of science in the U. S. S. R. whose chief crime is that for the official record they can be enrolled on the ledger as, at most, merely ‘sympathetic’ to the new regime — and that is not enough for the grim keepers of the book.
JOSEPH BARBER JR.