There are two historical nightmares in the Western mind: The Holocaust and the Gulags. These are the two events that have been plucked out of the bloody and violent 20th century as "meaningful." I don't make the rules, I'm just explaining how it is. The Armenians, Native Americans, Bengalis, Chinese, Mau Mau rebels don't really matter. They're either inconvenient or plain boring to most educated Americans or Western Europeans. The Holocaust began similarly: the almost-complete eradication of the European Jewry by a coalition of German, Ukrainian, Polish, Croatian, Hungarian, and Italian fascists. It then turned from a historical event into mythology: The shoes, the trains, the gold teeth. One of the world's most well-documented historical events, an almost inevitable consequence of Western imperialism and nationalism, carried out with the help of IBM soon became "unthinkable." Logical and historical causes of this tragedy were banished into the land of mushy-headed sentimentality, alongside the other inconvenient victims of the Nazis: Romas, homosexuals, transsexuals, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses. This coincided with the birth of an industry, deeply connected to the United States government, that turned the Holocaust into a political tool to support Israel and demonize Palestinians. The story of how this happened is told in Norman Finkelstein's "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering".

The Gulags have not achieved the same level of mythology---a high bar to clear---but it has a somewhat complementary role. Like some religious fetish for balance, we demand the great Left Wing Tragedy to the great Right Wing Tragedy. The two mythologies are intrinsically linked: To this day, mention Hitler to someone and they will respond superluminally that Stalin killed 1000 million and Mao killed 1 billion people---the numbers seem to grow every year. Or maybe this is way too mystical an explanation and the thing is much more easily explained: The Soviets were our enemy and scaring people with the Gulags was good politics. And like with the mythologized Holocaust, the Gulags live entirely in our emotional hemispheres: Few could tell you a single thing about them. What did they do there? Who was sent there? How did it work? Did the United States and Europeans know about them? We neither know nor care. Everything we want to know about Stalinism we can read in Orwell, Ayn Rand, or even "lefties" like Ursula LeGuin.

If they did want to know about it, they could read about it in "Kolyma Tales," which is like an encyclopedia of life in the Stalinist camps, told through mostly disconnected vignettes. Among the topics they cover, just from memory, are: The horrors of having to take a bath, the tragedy of receiving underwear that doesn't fit you, seeing a brand new American tractor being used to cover an enormous mass grave, the brave escape of a businessman by pretending to be a geologist, the strange flora of the taiga, and... I could go on for a while. It is truly comprehensive. And it is all told, as far as I can tell, honestly. Of course, I cannot tell whether Shalamov is telling the truth or not, and as far as a I know, he made no claims to tell the truth and considered it a work of fiction.

But I have found that narrations of tragedies and hardship by those who experience them are often far more absurd, trivial, and funny than fiction. This farce-like quality is like an indelible watermark of reality. There's something darkly funny in almost half of these stories, or something so stupid, like getting the wrong pair of underwear, that doesn't fit neatly into the pious morality tales we usually get in fiction. Which is not to say that these stories are not also horrifying: They are. The cold and the hunger are present in every single story. For some reason, the one that really got me was the rusted freight ships full of convicts which, if they misbehaved, would be sprayed with arctic water. But because this horror is displayed in its proper context, it is both more understandable and more horrific. For example, I had no idea they were mining gold in the camps. Who knew? But it makes sense, since the Soviet Union was in the business of industrializing and therefore had to buy a lot of heavy machinery. The Gulags weren't there to crush the spirit of man or nonsense like that. It was about money, plain and simple.

So why isn't this fantastic collection of stories more famous? The obvious answer is the simple one: People don't actually give a shit about Stalinism or Gulags; it's just a political cudgel. But if I had to dig deeper, it's also because Shalamov describes the horrors coldly. There is no moralizing. The suffering did not make him or anyone else a better person. In fact, as he says repeatedly, it broke them irreparably. Physical, mental, and moral ruination. Neither does he blame communism nor exculpate it. If anything, all he sees is human nature when allowed to do whatever it wants. This kind of message is dangerous, as it allows one to draw connections to the atrocities being committed by one's own countrymen.

Rating: 5 political prisoners