Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps (review)

Tomasz Kizny is a highly talented and politically engaged photographer from Poland. In the 1980s he co-founded the "Dementi" photographic agency that documented the struggle between the Polish Communist regime and its opposition. He is also well known for a series of photographic installations called "Passengers. Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Paris," which consists of large portraits of subway riders from these four European capitals (see http://fototapeta.art.pl/fti-metro.html for a sample). The collection is in ways reminiscent of the pictures of the interwar German photographer, August Sander, who took large numbers of photographs of people from different occupational and social categories. Kizny does not pose questions about society in the way that Sander did; instead, he deals with national character (or at least its construction).

Another major vein in Kizny's work is the photographic documentation of the Soviet gulag. Some circles of the Polish underground in the 1980s became fascinated by the place of the Poles among the victims of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This issue was raised in a number of contexts, breaking the silence over the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in Katyń Forest and at other camps in the Smolensk area, the brutal Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941, and the fate of Polish prisoners and deportees in the USSR from 1939 to 1953. Since 1989 these issues have been raised anew in a number of contexts; including by the Polish Institute for National Memory (IPN) and in the pages of the highly professional journal Karta, for which Kizny now works. Kizny's photographic fascination with the gulag has two important aspects. First, as an active photographer he has traveled extensively in the former Soviet Union and taken photographs of the ruins of the Gulag Archipelago (some of this work was displayed in the show "Time of Empire"). Second, Kizny is a collector. He has assembled an extensive collection of photographs of the gulag from the time of its operation. Many but not all of these were smuggled out of the USSR by Polish survivors of the camps who were repatriated to Poland or stranded in the West after World War II (e.g., members of the Anders Army or the government-in-exile) or returnees who came back to Poland following de-Stalinization in the USSR. Both veins of Kizny's work are on display in Gulag.

The book itself, like its subject, is monumental. Oversized at 12.5 inches by 11 inches, it numbers some five hundred pages with 550 different photographs. It includes three short prefaces written by important public figures—the historian Norman Davies, the writer Jorge Semprun, and the Russian human rights activist Sergei Kovalev. The book is organized into several chapters, most of which are devoted to individual camps or camp complexes (Solovki, Kolyma, Vaigach Island, and Vorkuta), major construction projects (the White Sea Canal, the Great Northern Railroad), and the phenomenon of camp theater. Each chapter begins with a short factual overview of the subject, followed by a section devoted to historical photographs and a short historical chronology of the campsite in question. The final part of each chapter is devoted to Kizny's contemporary photographs. The presentation of the photographs is diverse, ranging from snapshot size to a full two pages. Some of the photographs require no captioning, whereas others depend on more elaborate texts to render them comprehensible. How does one make sense of boats frozen in a river next to a pack of reindeer in a barren patch of Kolyma landscape? The answer lies in differing seasonal methods of transporting gold.

The selection of experiences is quite illuminating. The Solovki camp, located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, was home to an extensive monastery complex and was one of the earliest camps to be established. Prisoners were sent there in the aftermath of the civil war and succession struggles of the 1920s. The Solovki inmates enjoyed...