Gillian Slovo's 'Ice Road'

Gillian Slovo Ice Road Virago Press Reviewed by Geoff Ryan Gillian Slovo's Ice Road is a gripping account of the brutality of Stalinism, from 1933 to 1942 - from the purges and show trials, to the siege of Leningrad. The 'ice road' of the title was the passage across frozen Lake Ladoga, which allowed the workers of Leningrad to survive the Nazi onslaught through the winter of 1941-42. Ice Road ends with ice but begins there too. The narrator of the novel, Ira, is a cleaner in the Smolny Institute. One day she is approached by a middle-ranking bureaucrat. Boris and offered a job as a stewardess on a scientific expedition ship, going along the coast of Siberia and around the Arctic Circle. Disaster strikes when the ship becomes stuck in the ice and eventually sinks. All but one of the crew are eventually rescued, events based on a real Arctic expedition. In the struggle to survive for six weeks on the Arctic ice Gillian Slovo shows us the importance of solidarity, comradeship and refusal to give up all hope, epitomised in the Commander of the expedition. This is the heroic side of Soviet society and the experience changes Ira. During the voyage she learns to read which later gives her the confidence to leave her brutish husband. During the struggle to survive the icy grip of the Arctic Ira begins to see herself as part of a collective 'we' yet always remains somewhat cynical about politics, 'Rules and rulers may come and go, but dirt never changes' remains her view throughout the novel. And Stalin is about to extend his icy grip throughout the Soviet Union. On 1 December 1934 Kirov, head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was murdered. Although Kirov did not stand against Stalin at the 17th Party Congress that year he was seen as a potential rival. Slovo has little doubt about who ordered the killing, 'Stalin killed Kirov: Got him in the corridor.' Through the thoughts of Ira, who is working for Kirov at the time of his murder, Ice Road depicts the brutal purges unleashed upon the Soviet people on the pretext of punishing the murderers. 'How many people does it take to kill a Kirov?' is the first line of what Ira believes to be a joke. She then goes on to enumerate all those supposedly responsible. Ira sees the absurdities of the allegations against all those 'eradicated through strange dock-side pairings as those age- old opponents - Rightists and Trotskyites - [are] accused of membership of the same anti-Soviet bloc'. She doesn't understand how monarchists and White Guards fit into this Zinovievite-Trotskyite plot, or how Jewish communists can have been working for the Nazis. But she is a survivor and therefore keeps her doubts to herself. Simply saying nothing is, however, no guarantee. For much of the brutality is arbitrary, with no rationale but terror. Kolya, son-in-law of Boris, is a model worker. He plays no active role in politics, spending his evenings with wife Natasha and daughter Katya. This does not prevent him being arrested and shot in prison, without even the pretence of a trial. And the terror extends to the families and friends of all those arrested. Every day when Natasha tries to find out what has happened to Kolya she has to go through a ritual of giving her husband's full name, state her relationship to him and then hand over her permit. After which the clerk slams down the window shutter. When he returns he announces, 'The case of your husband, Kozlov, Nikolai Vladimirovich is being 28 SLOVO ICE ROAD looked into', before slamming down the shutter again. The only variation from this inflexible routine is after Kolya has been shot. The clerk merely announces 'no-one of that name After Kolya's execution Natasha loses her job and as the widow of a 'traitor' she has no choice but a loveless marriage to her father's underling, the cold bureaucrat Dmitry Fedorovich Anninsky. Natasha, like Ira and many other characters in the novel, has to find a way to survive the brutality and madness of the terror. Survival is at the heart of Ice Road. Resistance to the Nazi siege at Leningrad was undoubtedly heroic, as was the constant daily struggle of Leningraders to find food and fuel. And Slovo captures well this mundane heroism, the struggle for every day existence. Only Dmitry Fedorovich expresses any real political motivation for his decision to fight on the front-line - but he is also escaping Natasha and their increasingly hostile relationship. Everyone else struggles to survive because not Ice Road is a long but absorbing book. Slovo has written detective novels in the past and is skilled at keeping her readers' attention. We are swept up in the brutalities of the Stalinist purges and the struggle for survival. For those with little or no knowledge of the Stalinist terror Ice Road provides a good introduction. For those who know more it confirms the horrors of the purges and show trials. This is perhaps surprising since Gillian Slovo is the daughter of Joe Slovo, now deceased leader of the South African Communist Party. Of course we can quibble about some aspect of the politics of the book, in particular the somewhat flattering portrait of Kirov. But it is a novel not a political tract. And Slovo is to be admired for her ability to blend real and fictional characters in a powerful story.