STALIN'S CONCENTRATION CAMPS
Alexander A. Gudzenko, a 79-year-old fruit grower who was freed in 1953 after 17. years in Stalints labor camps, mostly in the Karaganda coal mines, thinks that Soviet writers are now inclined to paint too gloomy a picture of these institutions. He advocates a more "balanced" picture.
In a letter to the editor titled “We Remained People," which was printed in the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, the octogenarian reported some of the more heartening aspects of life in the labor camps.
A Ukrainian composer, imprisoned for an unspecified crime, organized
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y a fine choral group in 1951, "the likes of which I had never heard."
Unfortunately the seamier side of labor-camp life soon affected the choral group. The composer was sentenced to solitary confinement because he refused to write a cantata in honor of Stalin.
A violin virtuoso, Ludwig Bertavsky, likewise in the camp for a crime the nature of which is not disclosed, played for the prisoners, “trans-. — porting them into another, wonderful world,"
A kind camp commander N.M.Rusanov permitted the fruit grower to write anonymous technical books, to plant an orchard and even develop new _ varieties of plums, apples and pears which now doubtlessly add to the ‘enjoyment of the Soviet people.
Unfortunately, as punishment for the infraction of being too humane to the prisoners, the camp commander was fired.
The high point in Gudzenko's admonitions about taking a "balanced" view comes in the story of how he himself managed to survive a two-month stretch of solitary confinement in bitter weather. A young guard named Kosarev “would pass me an occasional’cup of hot, sweet barley coffee or bread or hot cereal with lard, not from our prison kitchen but from that of the supervisory personnel." Apparently this flouting of rules and regulations remained undetected and Kosarev kept his job.
"This aspect of the period of the cult and of repressions," says _ Gudzenko, ‘has not been touched on in our literature."
For what crime did Gudzenko have to spend 17 years at hard labor? . He was arrested after attending an international conference on horticulture at which King Victor Emmanuel presided and Mussolini made a welcoming speech, The charge: Traveling to Rome "as a guest" of Mussolini and the King. \ :