Conference “The Soviet Gulag: New Research and New Interpretations”
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. April 25-27, 2013
Opening lecture by Michèle Sarde
Jacques Rossi: An education in the Gulag
In the spirit of the Jacques Rossi Fund, I will address this lecture to the future
Gulag researchers, that is, our own students, in order to encourage them to work
in this field. Jacques Rossi would have liked the idea of passing the torch to
young generations.
But who was Jacques Rossi?
He survived twenty years in transit, high-security, and central prisons, as well as
in camps for “re-education through labor.” The term GULAG, which describes
the entire soviet penitentiary system, encompasses both the prisons and places of exile
in one single administration, roughly the size of a country’s government. Jacques
Rossi devoted the rest of his life to a massive effort of research into the Gulag system
where he had spent his youth. For you, Georgetown’s twenty-first century students,
if you decide to do research on the Gulag, you will not be required to live in one of
the camps or prisons. Count yourselves lucky!
I would like to tell you how I met this great man, who witnessed the Gulag at first
hand and recorded it for posterity.
One day he simply knocked at the door of my office ICC-419. It was in the fall of 1985.
The door opened to reveal an unexpected visitor. He said his name was Jacques Rossi.
A man of about seventy-five. He was dreadfully sorry to disturb me, he said. Would it
be possible to teach some French classes in our department, he asked. He was coming at
the suggestion of Aurélia Roman, my colleague originally from Romania, who still
teaches here at Georgetown. I asked what qualifications he had. And he gave me his CV.
Under the heading Education, this is what I read:
Fine Arts Graduate, Berlin Akademie, and École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1929 to 1934
Oriental Civilizations, Sorbonne and École des Langues Orientales, Paris, 1929 to 1936.
And then, to my great surprise:
Survival Studies, Gulag Archipelago, 1937 to 1957
“Survival Studies”? To my knowledge, the subject had never been included in any
university program. However, this man, claiming to be its first graduate, had first-hand
knowledge of this very specialized area. He had survived almost twenty years in one of
the most horrific concentration camp systems of the twentieth century — a century
of darkness that is now behind us.
Even so, he did not see himself as a victim, but rather as someone who was himself
responsible. Yes, fully responsible for what happened to him. Why? Because, as a
young man, he had been a committed communist, ready to die for a cause that he then
believed was just. For him, the Gulag did not represent an unfair punishment, but
a place of instruction.
As he put it, he had been punished for his sins. He had believed in a fantasy, a
utopia. And it took all those years of captivity for him to understand the myth
of utopia, to understand his error, to strip it down, extract the universal truths,
and draw the conclusions.
The facts
First, I wanted to know who he was, to hear the story of his life. Over time, he gave
me various versions of his account. I am summarizing here the most plausible ones.
Jacques Rossi was born in 1909 in Breslau, a town that was German at the time; it is now
Wrocław in Poland. His father was Polish, and his mother French. His rich family
came from high society. When he was a little boy, his mother refused to send him to
school, as she thought him too frail.
After Poland’s independence in 1920, his father decided to move to Poland with his
family. One day, while the boy was walking on the grounds of the family estate with his
English governess, an old peasant woman came up to him and kissed his hand. He was
utterly revolted by this incident. It was this spectacle of the injustice of the ruling
class in Polish society of the time that, he said, led him to follow the path of
communism and militancy. At the age of seventeen he joined the underground Polish
communist party. He was arrested for distributing pamphlets calling upon young soldiers
to revolt. When he was freed after six months, he was sent to Berlin by his party and
entered the service of Comintern.
And so he became a secret agent. Undercover and using false names, Jacques Rossi studied
languages and fine arts in Paris, Berlin, Cambridge, and Moscow.
However, Jacques was no James Bond. “I was only an instrument, but one that was proud
to serve the great cause of social justice.”
NOTE
, he explained. He stressed that he was only an insignificant messenger with no
responsibility in the larger institution. Above all, he emphasized his communist
convictions bordering on fanaticism. He stated that, if someone had told him that it
served the cause for him to jump off the Eiffel Tower, he would have done so without
a second thought.
In 1937 he was sent to Spain, which was at the time in the middle of the civil war.
His mission on Franco’s territory was to liaise with the Spanish republicans. A
few weeks later he was called to what was known as “the village,” that is
Moscow. Despite the fact that all of the western press was by that time reporting
Stalin’s great purges, he immediately answered the call. Rossi was becoming a
victim of what is known as the Great Terror.
In Moscow, he was asked to report to his headquarters. From there, he was sent
directly to Lubyanka prison. Later he was transferred to Butyrka, the Moscow
remand center, for sixteen months. During that time he was tortured in order
for him to provide the reasons for his own arrest. After all, he had been arrested
for nothing. No trial, no sentence. Much later, he was informed of the verdict: a
sentence of eight years in a labor camp “for reeducation”, in
accordance with Article 58, paragraph 6. In other words he was accused of
espionage. In his case, this was supposed to be on behalf of France and Poland,
because he was Franco-Polish and spoke both languages.
From there (we are now in 1939), Rossi was taken in a Stolypin rail car to an
unknown destination, which turned out to be the Arctic, beyond Siberia, beyond
the polar circle. After passing through countless transit prisons, he ended up
in the Krasnoyarsk transit camp on the Yenisei river. There, a massive barge
transported thousands of zeks —that is prisoners— down the
river across the Taiga and then the tundra toward the port of Dudinka, which
was part of the Norilsk camp.
Rossi’s sentence was to have ended in 1945, but he was not released until
April 15, 1947. His release was conditional; thus he was not allowed to leave Norilsk.
During this time, new evidence was fabricated against him and he was arrested again
in March 1949. This time, he was sentenced to twenty-five years and incarcerated
first in the remand prison of Norilsk and then in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk
and Aleksandrovsk.
That is where he was in 1954 when Stalin died, when the process of de-stalinization
and the release of political prisoners began. In 1956 he returned from there via
the various transit prisons toward Moscow and ended up in his final prison, the
central prison of Vladimir, close to the capital. But release from the little
Gulag did not bring freedom in the great Gulag, that is, the Soviet Union.
Rossi was given a compulsory order of residence in Samarkand in central Asia and
was only allowed to leave the Soviet Union for communist Poland five years later,
in February 1961.
These facts that make up the fabric of Jacques’s life-story, we reconstructed
together in the eve of his life. By then he was ninety years old. After making
several attempts to write his autobiography in collaboration with various,
journalists or historians, he ended up coming to me with the following suggestion:
“Let’s do the book together. You are a novelist, so you can make it
into a novel.”
A novel? The difference between a novel and a testimony is that in fiction you can
invent, imagine, and elude. Only later did I understand the meaning of his desire
to turn his life into a novel, by his reluctance to speak directly of certain
things, and by his habit of secrecy, his addiction to secrecy. Secrecy may become
second nature. In Paris at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jacques
Rossi still wrote his Parisian address book in secret code.
Jacques feared, above all, that any indiscretion could harm friends who were still
alive. I, on the other hand, was demanding absolute transparency. His first
reflex was, therefore, to refuse, to rebel, to treat me as an interrogating
officer, in other words, as a torturer. And then, suddenly, he would reveal
things that, in turn, shed light on other things. For me it was like detective work.
Testimony and memory
Testimony, while it is always reconstructed to a greater or lesser degree, has to meet
standards of accuracy. Of truth. This is what we discovered together while
writing the book. Rossi’s experience was too powerful, too intense, and, above
all, too universal to be transformed into the stuff of a novel. He had no right
to lie, even by omission. He had a duty to bear witness on behalf of the
millions of companions who disappeared in the Gulag.
After all, Rossi’s deep, inner motivation to tell his story, regardless of me
or any other person, was precisely that: to bear witness, and to tell the whole truth,
at least the whole of his truth, of an experience that was at once exceptional
and sadly representative. To tell the truth of his experience was also to speak
on behalf of his dead comrades. An enormous responsibility.
A witness, especially when he or she has had to wait a long time before speaking,
engages in a work of memory rather than of history. Certainly Rossi’s memory
was prodigious. He exercised it like a muscle, not only when he was a secret agent,
but also when he was in the Gulag where nothing could be written down and kept.
On the way to the camps, he remembered Solzhenitsyn’lesson: “Let your
memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter
seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.”
NOTE
What distinguishes a witness from a historian, first and foremost, is his subjectivity.
It is he who determines, when recounting the past, which parts to delete and which to retain.
Above all, the witness has a point of view on his story, while the historian is supposed
not to have a stance. Rossi’s subjectivity was based on two features that define
him in relation to the universe of the Gulag. On the one hand, he had been a committed
communist who religiously believed in the cause of the proletariat and social justice.
On the other hand, in this soviet concentration camp system inherited from the tsarist
House of the Dead, this cultivated man of Franco-Polish origin was a foreigner.
This ardent communist was not a Soviet by culture, even though he spoke Russian perfectly.
In a way, therefore, he looked at the soviet concentration camp system with fresh eyes.
He was perhaps more sensitive than the Russians to the absurdity of the system. For
example, he recognized that he seldom encountered pure sadism among the individuals
implementing the system, such as guards, officers, or even the secret police torturers.
“In communist Russia, he said, it was not necessarily man, but the system that was
criminal.”
NOTE
If he was freezing to death in his cell, it was not because the guards were cruel, but
because the rules forbade them to give him his undershirt. Quite simply, these men were
obeying orders, orders that would probably turn them as well into victims of the same
system in the not-too-distant future.
Being a foreigner also helped Rossi, as his fellow prisoners trusted him more than they
would have trusted another Soviet. “Many of my soviet companions felt the need to
unburden themselves of their experiences. I don’t know why, but they seemed to
believe that, as a Frenchman, I would perhaps have the good fortune to get out one day.”
NOTE
Their trust saved his life on more than one occasion. And it also helped his fellow
prisoners to confide in him, which would later facilitate his work of passing on the
story. Several of these confessions appear in fiction in his short collection of stories,
unpublished in English, called: Qu’elle était belle, cette utopie!
(How beautiful was that utopia).
This position on the margins, which allowed him to be both inside and outside the system,
was strengthened by another of Rossi’s personality traits; a sense of humor that
was black and biting, which enabled him to rise above the most dramatic situations
through laughter, and to allow the untellable to be told. Here is an example:
When Rossi was a Comintern agent, he had to carry secret documents on a cruise ship in the
Mediterranean with a fake Swedish passport. On boarding the ship, he learned that there
was another Swede on board. He was seized with panic at the idea that he would be
unmasked by a real Swede. And so he pretended to be sick and missed out on the whole
of this beautiful voyage.
This story he told Rudy, a prisoner who, between two interrogations, has just arrived in
his miserable cell. He did so in order to distract his prison mate from the torture he
had just undergone. Rudy, a Pole like Rossi, listened to the story and smiled:
— The other Swede... that was me!
Another advantage for this particular zek was that he had been a scholar of
fine arts and languages. For this gifted linguist who spoke more than ten languages,
studying the language spoken in the Gulag became a springboard to constructing a work
that is not just a work of memory, but also a work of history.
History is distinguished from memory by its objective, or at least its intersubjective
nature. And this is the case here. It is in the name of thousands of witnesses that
Rossi speaks. And it is no longer a matter of one individual point of view on the
Gulag. It is an academic type of research based on primary sources as well as references
to archives, documents, and statistics. This is what allows for as accurate a
reconstruction as possible of the reality of the Gulag. Jacques Rossi did not content
himself with passing on the memory of a first-hand witness. He wanted to leave behind a
legitimate, historical record by constructing his monumental Gulag Handbook.
Memory and History
What I want to make clear is that Rossi’s originality lies not just in his
testimony, or that of his fellow prisoners. After all, there have been so many
testimonies. His originality is that he became the historian of his own history by
giving it a universal dimension. “For seventy years,” he writes, “the
Gulag was used as a secret laboratory for the soviet regime. That is why knowledge of
the Gulag is fundamental to the study of the communist totalitarian regime.
Unfortunately, no sovietologist ever did the apprenticeship there.”
NOTE
How did this particular “apprentice,” this simple zek, become a
sovietologist? As we have seen, for years and years, Rossi listened to fellow
prisoners who confided in him. They were very diverse. They included dekulakized
peasants, major thugs, good patriotic communists who did not renounce their
convictions, true “enemies of the people,” and former torturers who one
evening became victims of the same system. All these Soviets spoke to him, in their
individual jargon, the Gulag slang, a specific language born of a specific culture.
Rossi was multilingual and passionate about languages. He had a remarkable memory,
which he used during his time as an undercover communist.
That same memory would retain hundreds and thousands of Gulag expressions that were
not part of the Russian language proper. It was a composite language, consisting
of the accumulation and sedimentation of several linguistic strata, the slang of
the ordinary prisoners, the legal language of the penitentiary administration, the
specific vocabulary of the political prisoners, and words from pre-revolutionary
Russian penal colonies.
This “real” language, with its acronyms and neologisms that included a
material and human reality, was in counterpoint to the wooden official language
that sought to mask this same reality. He used it to describe and indeed explain
the concentration camp universe from which it sprang.
There are words and there are testimonies. He gathered both and began his first
approach to the Gulag that he took for what it was, in words of Nicolas Werth:
“an extraordinary sociological laboratory, a place of social and political
experimentation, where all was laid bare, both the regime and the human material.”
NOTE
The first step was, therefore, to assemble the facts. But, when Rossi undertook this
Dantean task, he was no quiet researcher in the Library of Congress. He was a
zek who had been held in the Gulag, for years on end, who had not been
allowed to take any notes, and who was subjected to regular searches, even in the
most intimate places. Nevertheless, he managed to write and keep records. He also
made sketches of what he saw, which were confiscated... and await some curious
young researcher in the archives of the secret police. How did he manage this? He
refused to reveal it to me, to avoid betraying a secret that could be of use
against other detainees.
The second step was to take place in communist Poland, after Rossi had left the
Gulag, and had started, thanks to his still fresh memories and his secret records
full of recollections, to set up a gigantic file. But here, too, he was not
living in a country with freedom of expression. And so, to transfer his work to
the west, he had to use the diplomatic bag of the French embassy, where he had
some contacts.
The third step is of particular interest to you and to me. It took place right here
at Georgetown University, the University of Jan Karsky, our university. Upon
leaving Poland, Rossi set off for the United States at the invitation of a former
Polish student and, in Washington, met Father Bradley, Dean of the College, who
invited him to take advantage of the freedom of expression and make use of the
library at Georgetown. So it is here that he completed his work on primary sources,
which he gathered through patient, detailed, encyclopedic research, and wrote a
book on all aspects of the soviet concentration camp system.
The result is, first of all, a fascinating linguistic investigation of an unknown
idiom, the language of the Gulag: several thousand entries in the original Russian
edition, published in London in 1987.
The exemplary erudition of the Handbook covers all the dimensions of the
Gulag “culture”, if I can use that word: geographical, material,
sociological, economic, and legal dimensions all at once.
In this manner, the subjective witness gave way to the intersubjective historian
and drew closer to the challenging goal of objectivity. Usually, witnesses do
not much like historians who have not, themselves, suffered the situations they
describe and analyze. Historians, for their part, mistrust witnesses, suspicious
of their good faith, accuracy and veracity. Rossi managed to reconcile the two.
He spent twenty-four years of his life listening, recording, and conceiving his
project. Then he applied himself to editing the records, drawing up the files,
checking and confirming his work by searching through archives, documents,
studies, and works by other people.
If Memory and History are to complement and benefit each other, the past must not
be cultivated for itself but must, above all, be used to serve. This is how
Jacques Rossi saw it. He wanted to place his experience at the service of
education with a view to warning the world. His individual testimony as a
zek crushed by an oppressive system was to be placed at the service
of a universal cause.
The universal cause
In this mass slaughterhouse, what became of the individual? What happened to the
human being? What about forgiveness and the spirit of vengeance? How can a
human being protect his soul in this gigantic crushing machine of degradation
and destruction? How can he or she survive twenty-four years of captivity? This
is where individual testimony is of greatest value. And it is a mark of the
greatness of the existential choice of Jacques Rossi, the former zek,
that in the final analysis he concluded that he had no personal resentment
against these men, even the criminals who abused him in the Norilsk camp,
even the policemen who tortured him in Butyrka prison, even the false
companions who betrayed him and who helped to have him sentenced for a
second time. Jacques told me: “The scale of the evil obliterates
any thought of vengeance. The more the desire for revenge, which only
impedes the search for truth, is reduced to a pitiful settling of personal
scores, the more noble is the task of struggling to avoid repeating the
nightmare.”
NOTE
Rossi wanted this awful experience endured by millions of men and women to serve as a
lesson. Will it prevent new blindness?, new forms of fanaticism? The question
remains open.
Survival is at the heart of the problems surrounding the concentration camp system.
“Anyone who has survived in these circumstances will always have at the bottom
of his heart the lingering sensation that this life is somehow shameful and
shaming, says Andrei Sinyavsky. Why am I not dead? That is the ultimate question...
and in reality, why am I still alive, while all the others have died?”
NOTE
Why didn’t you die? When I asked this question over and over again, Jacques replied
wearily as if he were always being asked to explain the unexplainable. “I had a
strong constitution, I didn't get beaten up too much, I had no family and so no weak
point, I was inured to the harsh ways of underground existence, I was infinitely
curious about other people, and I wanted to make sense of what was happening to us.
And I had read. I had studied. In short I was lucky. I wasn't forced to commit dirty
tricks. I met a few human beings. In the end, it was a matter of resilience...
and I had France.”
NOTE
Each of these good reasons is worthy of close inspection and affects us all, as they
touch upon the limits of human capacity to endure. I would add another good reason,
another trait that characterized Rossi: namely his spirit of resistance. It was immense.
For example, he underwent three hunger strikes while he was in the Gulag. How can you go
on hunger strike in a world where you are constantly deprived of food?
Indeed, as with many other questions, Jacques could never really provide a final answer.
And that is why, however significant his work of memory and history, however important
his testimony and his attempts to prevent such horrors being repeated, it calls for
further research so that the why and how of totalitarian systems, and their attendant
crimes against humanity can be better understood and explained.
There is always a certain amount of subjectivity in research, however academic and
objective it may be. The reason why the impact of my first meeting with Jacques Rossi
was so strong is that I, myself, am the granddaughter of people deported to the Nazi
camps. Jacques Rossi may have come back from the Gulag, but my grandfather never
returned from Auschwitz.
Indeed Rossi had some blind spots. For him nothing was worse than the Gulag and he believed
that the Holocaust had been given too much media coverage in comparison with the
silence that surrounded and still surrounds the memory of the Gulag. He did not
deny that in the Nazi camps, death was an end in itself, while in the Soviet
concentration camp system; it was life that had no value. However he showed
that the Nazi concentration camp system had been inspired by the soviet one,
which had preceded it both in time and organization. He highlighted the fact that
communism turned on its own people, while the Nazis didn’t exterminate other
Nazis. “As for me, he said, if I had not been a communist, I would never have
been in the Gulag. In fact, I went there of my own free will.”
NOTE
But he didn’t take into account the issue of the children, or the gas chambers,
or the Final Solution, and could only offer a unique, subjective, personal point of
view on these terrible matters.
However immense a testimony, a work of memory, or a work of history, it also has its
limits. These inevitable boundaries can be crossed by other individuals, the new
experts, like the participants in this conference. They can be enriched with the help
of new archives and previously unpublished discoveries. And so it is up to to
you—students—to continue the work, to ensure through description,
analysis and further interpretation of these horrendous systems, that they are not reproduced.
Contrary to Shalamov, for whom the camp is definitely a school against life
NOTE
, for Jacques Rossi, the Gulag was a place of study, research, and reflection: in sum
a school of truth and at the same time a laboratory and a university. And he invited us
to follow in his footsteps, to fill in the gaps in his information, to research even
further: now, new technologies have been developed, certain archives have been opened,
time and distance make it possible to discover and disseminate truths that, until just
a short time ago, were too uncomfortable to be discussed openly.
Jacques Rossi may have disappeared physically ten years ago, but his spirit remains in
this very place where I met him, where he wrote The Gulag Handbook. Through me,
he is asking other researchers to continue the work that he sought to achieve until his
dying breath. He would encourage us, above all, to denounce, to elucidate those systems
that massacred so many people in the darkest days of the past century and still exist today.
This task is important for democracy. It’s important for human rights. It’s
important for the future of humanity. It is a just cause.
Michèle Sarde
Professor Emerita, Georgetown University
