The merciless North devours the Gulag prisoners – Viktor Remizov describes the atrocities of Stalinism in his novel

Every century, an epic comet appears in the firmament of Russian literature. In 1869, Tolstoy explained in "War and Peace" how Napoleon's Moscow campaign had changed the relationship between state and society in the Tsarist Empire. In 1980—sixteen years after the author's death—Vasily Grossman's critical account of the Second World War, "Life and Fate," was published by a Lausanne publisher. In his Stalingrad epic, Grossman dared to compare the Soviet totalitarian system with the Nazi dictatorship.

In 2021, Viktor Remizov published his monumental novel "Permafrost," in which he describes the late-Stalinist life of camp prisoners, exiles, and secret police officers in northern Siberia. The more than 1,200-page work is now available in German in a crystal-clear and stylistically assured translation by Franziska Zwerg.

"Permafrost" exhibits all the hallmarks of an epic: individual biographies unfold against the backdrop of a tragic national history. While the individual characters have a certain range of action, they are simultaneously subject to a merciless fate. The plot therefore emerges less from a sequence of human decisions than as the often seemingly random product of various factors.

The epic quality rests on the artistic composition of the whole: life stories with their sudden twists and turns are imbued with a fateful rigor. Stalinist ideology, the state's repressive apparatus, and an absurd construction project of the Soviet dictator play an important role in Remizow's novel.

After World War II, Stalin decided to connect the Siberian rivers Ob and Yenisei with a railway line. Although the project had no economic benefit and completed sections quickly became impassable due to landslides, over 100,000 forced laborers were employed for years on the construction. Only after Stalin's death in 1953 did the Soviet government dare to put an end to this organized madness.

As if in a laboratory experiment, Remisow observes his characters under the most difficult climatic and political conditions. He artfully interweaves various narrative threads in which people's courageous will to live prevails even in a totalitarian system.

His protagonist undergoes a remarkable transformation: Belov, the captain of a tugboat on the Yenisei, appears at the beginning of the novel as a committed Stalinist. He believes in the construction of a socialist state and justifies the terror as a necessary evil. After being arrested on absurd charges, his tormentors force him to choose between slandering his fellow sailors or sending his lover and child to a camp. Even after severe torture, Belov remains steadfast, seeking a way out in suicide, but is saved at the last moment by Stalin's death.

The respected geologist Gorchakov works as a field surgeon in a penal camp. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison before the war during the Great Terror. His wife lives in Moscow and is being harassed by the authorities because she is married to a supposed enemy of the people. Gorchakov has stopped writing her letters and advises her to find a new husband.

In desperation, she sets off with her children to the far north, hoping to show them their father. On the journey, she gives herself to an intelligence officer in order to save her family. Her younger son drowns in the Yenisei. When she finally finds Gorchakov, she initially feels only grief and alienation. However, she becomes pregnant and plans a difficult life together near her imprisoned husband.

The real hero of Remizov's epic, however, is the harsh and dangerous landscape of the North. The title "Permafrost" not only signals the adverse living conditions of the people who must protect themselves from the piercing cold, piled-up ice, and hungry wild animals. The entire late-Stalinist society also exists in the permafrost. This unruly nature cannot be tamed, neither by a railway nor by the establishment of mines for the extraction of valuable metals.

The merciless North devours the Gulag prisoners, who are shipped by the thousands to the newly established camps. The forced laborers toil hard—not to fulfill the dictator's megalomaniacal plan, but to preserve a last vestige of human dignity. Some fail even to do this: they become "wastes," languishing indifferently toward death.

Ultimately, however, nature triumphs over the self-proclaimed demiurge in the Kremlin: No sooner has Stalin died than an uprising breaks out in the Norilsk camp. The political prisoners demand a review of their sentences, but the system strikes back brutally, setting the violent criminals on the protesting victims of Stalinism.

Viktor Remizov is not a typical figure in contemporary Russian literature. He had to fight for his place among the cultural elites of the capitals. To this day, he remains an outsider, even though he lives near Moscow. His books are published by publishers in the Russian Far East, in Khabarovsk, and in Vladivostok. Remizov was born in 1958 in the provincial town of Saratov and initially trained as a geologist at the local technical college. He then explored northern Siberia with an expedition. After studying literature at Moscow University, he earned his living as a teacher and journalist.

In 2014, he first attracted the attention of literary critics with his novel "Freedom." In this book, he describes hunters in the taiga who come into conflict with Russian police. Remisow rarely comments on the political situation in Russia. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he recommended reading the essays of WH Auden.

Remisov advocates a religiously based humanism and points out that it would be too easy to simply blame all historical guilt on the rulers. In an interview, Remisov stated that the novel "Permafrost" is neither about Stalin nor "anti-Stalinist." In fact, the protagonists even refuse to condemn Stalin as a criminal after his death. Gorchakov's wife calls Stalin the "most unfortunate of all people," and although Belov recognizes that his love for Stalin has vanished, he is unwilling to "accuse him for his torment and humiliation."

Looking at the present, Remizow criticizes the state's actions against the Memorial Society, which systematically collected and published information about Soviet crimes. At the same time, he emphasizes that the people of Russia must assume their civic responsibility. He made his own contribution at the highest moral and literary level with the novel "Permafrost."

Viktor Remizov: Permafrost. Novel. Translated from the Russian by Franziska Zwerg. Europa-Verlag, Munich 2025. 1254 pp., CHF 57.90.