As a Button to a Coat

John Lloyd

• Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin’s Russia by Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, translated by Ann Healy
  Westview, 195 pp, US $30.00, September 1997, ISBN 0 8133 2390 8

Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov spent eight years, from the late Twenties to the mid-Thirties, on the Solovetsky Islands: part of the time in a monastery fortress where, as we now know, the punishment included lashing prisoners to trees in summer to be eaten to death by mosquitoes, or tying them spreadeagled on heavy logs and letting them be crushed to death as the logs were rolled downhill. Like many survivors of the gulag, he leaves this unrecorded. The Alexander Solzhenitsyns and Primo Levis, who gave their post-camp lives to bearing witness, are the exceptions and, it could be said, paid heavily for that. Instead Andreev-Khomiakov talks about fate: ‘fate was written on the faces of innocent people dying in the camps by the hundreds, marked for sacrifice’; ‘I constantly defied fate, walking the tightrope between life and death’; ‘in 1935, fate suddenly summoned me to the office that issued release papers.’