Some questions about Against Destiny: The author responds

Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny

(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)

Many questions have been asked about Against Destiny before and after its publication. An interesting set of questions was raised in my very first interview which appeared under unusual circumstances - it appeared before the book was published, and not in the original English, but translated into another language, and on the other side of the Earth.

How did it happen? The interview (originally in English - below) caught the attention of Rev. Marian Szablewski, CR, a Polish-speaking priest in Adelaide, South Australia, which is more than 10,000 miles from where I live. He had the interview translated into Polish, by Teresa Wilkans, and published, a month before the release of Against Destiny, in the March 2009 issue of the most important publication in Polish in South Australia, the magazine Panorama. If your Polish is good enough, you can read the first page of the Polish translation by clicking here and the second page by clicking here.

Here is the interview:

What is your book about?
--It is about a daring escape of five brave men from a GULAG camp in North-Eastern Siberia to Alaska for a safe haven. More generally it’s about men, destined to seemingly inevitable death in a human hell, who choose to resist their grim fate rather than succumb to it.

Why did you decide to write it?
--In the literature about the GULAG and Stalin’s epoch in general, there was occasional brief mention that probably there were some successful escapes from camps in the Kolyma region to Alaska. There was no detail on the topic, but it somehow inspired me to think how such an escape could have happened and what kind of people could do it. And the novel sort of naturally developed from these considerations with some addition of my own fantasy to fill the gaps in real knowledge.

We already have The Gulag Archipelago. What’s the point of having a work of fiction about the same thing?
--Well, first of all fiction and documentary literature are different things, and one can hardly substitute for another. Documentary literature has the primary task of describing with maximum accuracy what really happened, while in fiction the author is entitled to apply his fantasy and apply it to what and how people think, feel and do in different situations they encounter. And apart from that, the primary topic of The Gulag Archipelago is life in the GULAG, while the primary topic of my novel is escape from it.

Isn’t this just a relic of the Cold War, which ended in 1989? Why should people in 2008 be interested in Stalin’s Gulag?
--For the same reason that they should be interested in Nazi crimes against humanity. Because such tragic periods of history are something that humanity should learn lessons from, at least for the purpose of preventing similar tragedies from happening again.

How would you compare the camps of Stalin’s Gulag to the concentration camps of Hitler? Weren’t Hitler’s camps much worse?
--No, I can’t agree with that. The GULAG camps certainly lacked gas chambers, but there were numerous other no less hideous ways of putting inmates to death, like for example freezing them alive. And above all the number of people who died there is no less, in fact more, than in the Nazi camps–although the GULAG prisoners lived much longer than the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps before they succumbed. In fact, the claim of some historians, that unlike Nazi Germany in Stalinist USSR there were no killing fields, is erroneous: there were a number of places of regular mass executions. Kurapaty in Byelorussia and Butovo Place near Moscow being the most famous. And there were so-called penal camps, in different sections of GULAG, where almost no-one survived, except for those who were lucky enough to be sent there not long before the camps were dissolved.
In general, I find the question inappropriate about who was worse and who was better: Hitler or Stalin. Whatever the intention, recognition of one as worse almost inevitably leads to partial rehabilitation of the other, as happened in the official historiography of Russia in the 2000's. To my mind, the attitude should be that both were extreme evil, which must not be forgiven or forgotten and from whose regimes we should take historic lessons.

Why do you think that there has been so much more written about the Nazi Holocaust than about the Gulag?
--It’s a good question, because so many people see no connection between Hitler and Stalin and, while preserving active memory of the Holocaust, prefer to forget Stalinist terror. I think there are two factors which can explain this situation.
First of all, the Nazi regime was vanquished, completely dismantled, and all its archives and other materials were publicized; as well, Auschwiz and Dachau were taken over by enemy troops. Nothing like that happened in post-Soviet Russia, where for example the KGB archives were opened only partially and some time in the mid-90's were closed again. This was because many people in authority at that time were former Soviet officials, who for understandable reasons were not interested in complete disclosure of the dark parts of Soviet history. And around then the campaign for so-called national reconciliation and concord started under the motto “Not everything was bad”, which reached its peak in recent years under the Putin-Medvedev regime. This regime made it known to the international community that it would regard the mere comparison between Nazism and Communism as an act of hostility towards Russia, which most of the Western public does not want to engage in.
Secondly, there was a difference in the strength of the lobbying to prevent historical amnesia towards the particular tragic events. The Western Jewish community did its best, and is still doing its best, to prevent the Holocaust from being forgiven or forgotten–and rightly so. There is no equally powerful pressure with regard to GULAG.

Do you think that the greater attention to the Holocaust is reasonable?
--No, I firmly disagree with that. Stalin’s terror took at least 20 millions lives, and to my mind that in itself explains why it deserves equal attention with the Holocaust. Above all, if we forget such tragic events, we risk their repetition at some different time in a somewhat different form.

There is a lot in your novel about the Chukchi, an aboriginal people of Northern Siberia. You don’t look Chukchi yourself. How do you know so much about them?
--Well, as I said before, in the beginning I was thinking about what kind of people could manage a successful escape. And I came to the conclusion that one of them had to be a native, who knew both the escape route in that territory and the required survival skills. And Chukchi is the main aboriginal nationality in the extreme North-East of Siberia. So I read several ethnographic reports on them, the main one being the fundamental book Chukchi Material Culture, written by the prominent Russian ethnographer Vladimir Bogoraz in the early 20th century. I also read Russian translations of Chukchi tales and legends. And all that gave a reasonably comprehensive knowledge of this people.

You have five different characters, each with a different type of background, escaping from their labour camp in Northern Siberia and trying to get to Alaska. How did you decide what backgrounds of the prisoners to choose? Do they cover the range of the different types of people who would have been in the camps in the late 1940s?
--Well, again, I started with figuring out what kind of men would be capable of such an escape. This led me to the choice of Trofimov, Bondarenko and Yatta, each of whom were essential for the success of the enterprise. Trofimov is an experienced combat officer, a captain of infantry with a nearly four years of war experience, Bondarenko an equally experienced partizan with expertise in fighting a guerilla war in the woodland, and Yatta a nomadic aboriginal who knows the terrain and all the skills of living in the extreme north in both taiga and tundra. Also, they represented certain types of people who were in GULAG at the time described. The other two were chosen mostly on the ground of representing two distinct groups that were downtrodden and oppressed by Soviet authorities, as they were previously under the tsars: Russian peasants and Jews–Timoshkin being a Russian peasant and Goldberg a Jew. Also, the figure of Goldberg, the most morally reflective of the five, helps to raise the uneasy and controversial issue of whether and to what extent forcible resistance to a reign of terror is justified.

Why do the escapees in your novel head for Alaska rather than for some other place?
--Well, Alaska was the closest foreign safe haven from the point of view of distance as well as availability–being separated from their camp only by land and by a strait which was ice-covered in winter. And the way there lay through wilderness away from populated places and major highways, which made pursuit far more difficult. And, as you can understand, after they killed several camp guards they could not even think of going anywhere within the borders of the Soviet Union.

Was it really possible to escape from the Gulag, or is your novel just an unrealistic fantasy?
--In fact, though official Soviet propaganda claimed that escapes were absolutely impossible, it was not so. There were numerous escapes from GULAG with varying success. A few of them are described in Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG archipelago, volume 2, in the chapter called “Changing one’s fate”. Others are described in one of the Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, “The Green Prosecutor”. As you will read there, some of them were actually successful, although some of the successful escapees were later re-arrested. Also, some successful escapes from GULAG were widely known in the West, and even described by escapees - the most famous accounts being The Long Walk by Slawomir Rawicz and As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me by Josef Bauer.

The Chukchi: a people who would not submit

Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny

(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)

The colonization of Siberia and North America followed roughly the same pattern: the European settlers built for themselves a better, freer and more prosperous life at the expense of the subjugated aboriginals, who were territorially as well as culturally displaced. There was however one Siberian aboriginal nationality that was not subjugated and fully incorporated into Russia until well into the 20th century: the Chukchi.

This small nationality, which historically numbered between 8,000 and 15,000 people, inhabits the extreme north-east of Siberia, roughly from the lower Kolyma river in the west to the Bering Strait in the east and from the Arctic coast in the north to the Anadyr River valley in the south. The Chukchi belong to the so-called Paleoasiatic peoples, the most ancient population of north Asia, to which probably the ancestors of American natives also belong. In appearance too, the Chukchi resemble North American Indians more than people of Mongolian or Chinese stock. By the time the Russians came, they lived, like most other north Siberian aboriginals, by raising reindeer herds, each of which numbered many hundreds or even thousands of deer.

From the mid-17th century to modern times, the Russians failed to subdue the Chukchi. By using tactics from both conventional and guerilla warfare and by taking advantage of their superior knowledge of their rugged land, they defeated many Russian government units and settlers’ militias. Like the Prairie Indians of the American West, they bothered Russian settlers with raids. Catherine the Great of Russia even signed a decree authorising their total extermination. She sent a military expedition, headed by Major Pavlutsky, remembered in Chukchi folklore as the most cruel of the Russian officers who fought them. Like its predecessors, the Pavlutsky expedition was beaten, and Pavlutsky perished; according to Chukchi narratives, he was captured and brutally executed. The genocidal order of the empress was never implemented, because of the vastness of the mountains, tundra and woodlands, which provided shelter not only to small guerrilla groups but even to whole tribes, and because of the Chukchi’s acquisition of fire-arms, probably from European traders via the North Pacific.

By the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian imperial government was finally forced to make peace with the recalcitrant people. It recognized their independence, and until the very end of the imperial period they, unlike other Siberian aboriginals, did not pay tribute to the imperial treasury and lived by their millennia-old customary laws. In return, Russians got the right to trade and build settlements in Chukotka. This situation persisted not only until the 1917 revolution, but for more than a decade after it. During the Russian civil war (1917-1923), some units of Whites from time to time came to Chukotka and tried to plunder Chukchi, but were repulsed. The Red Army units that arrived later in this period also did not interfere with the traditional Chukchi lifestyle and customary law.

Drastic change came only in the early 1930s with the start of collectivization. The Siberian Soviet authorities successfully imposed collective farms and the Soviet system in general on the previously fiercely independent people. For the first time in history, they could not resist the conquerors. Unlike Russian forces of earlier periods, these invaders were armed with machine guns, armoured vehicles and a few air squadrons. From the 1930s on, the Chukchi shared the fate of other rural Soviet people, Russian and non-Russian alike: forced collectivization, internal exile or labour camps for many, execution of others (particularly all shamans), work on Soviet construction projects. Their children, like many native children in Canada, were forcibly sent to boarding schools, with similar widespread abuse by school authorities. However, a few graduates of these boarding schools rose to prominent positions in Soviet society. The best known is the famous writer Yuri Rytkheu, whose writings are widely read throughout the former USSR and have been translated into European languages.

In the post-Soviet Russia of the 2000s, Chukotka, the most remote region of this country, paradoxically became, under the governorship of the ex-business magnate Roman Abramovich, one of its most prosperous regions, comparable to Moscow and the oil-rich regions of Western Siberia. This prosperity resulted from the successful management of the businessman-governor, who skilfully ran the regional economy and who used his government connections to negotiate a share of profits for the region from its mineral resources. Thus the ancient aboriginal people now enjoy a level of prosperity unknown in any previous period, whether pre-contact, imperial or Soviet.