Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  For the fantastic sordor of the slave ships we again rely on Michael Solomon:

  … my eyes beheld a scene which neither Goya nor Gustave Doré could ever have imagined. In that immense, cavernous, murky hold were crammed more than two thousand women. From the floor to the ceiling, as in a gigantic poultry farm, they were cooped up in open cages, five of them in each nine-foot-square space. The floor was covered with more women. Because of the heat and humidity, most of them were only scantily dressed; some had even stripped down to nothing. The lack of washing facilities and the relentless heat had covered their bodies with ugly red spots, boils and blisters. The majority were suffering from some form of skin disease or other, apart from stomach ailments and dysentery.

  At the bottom of the stairway … stood a giant cask, on the edges of which, in full view of the soldiers standing guard above, women were perched like birds, and in the most incredible positions.29 There was no shame, no prudery, as they crouched there to urinate or to empty their bowels. One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age. Yet seeing a man coming down the stairs … many of them began to smile and some even tried to comb their hair.

  The biggest ship in the fleet (grossing 9,180 tons) was called the Nikolai Yezhov, after the Cheka chief who presided over the Great Terror; when Yezhov was himself purged, in 1939, the Nikolai Yezhov became the Feliks Dzerzhinsky, honouring the Cheka’s ferocious founder. Eugenia Ginzburg’s ship, the Dzhurma, ‘stank intolerably’ from a fire in which many prisoners, hosed down with freezing bilge during a riot, were boiled alive. In 1933 the Dzhurma sailed too late in the year and was trapped in the ice near Wrangel Island: all winter. She was carrying 12,000 prisoners. Everyone died.

  It was on board the ships that the ‘politicals’ – a.k.a. ‘the 58s’ (after Article 58 of the Criminal Codex), ‘the counters’ (counterrevolutionaries), and ‘the fascists’ – would usually receive their introduction to another integral feature of the archipelago: the urkas. Like so many elements in the story of the gulag, the urkas constituted a torment within a torment. Mrs Ginzburg sits in the floating dungeon of the Dzhurma: ‘When it seemed as though there was no room left for even a kitten, down through the hatchway poured another few hundred human beings … [a] half-naked, tattooed, apelike horde …’ And they were only the women. The urkas: this class, or caste, a highly developed underground culture, ‘had survived,’ writes Conquest, ‘with its own traditions and laws, since the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and had greatly increased in numbers by recruiting orphans and broken men of the revolutionary and collectivization periods.’ Individually grotesque, and, en masse, an utterly lethal force, the urkas were circus cut-throats devoted to gambling, plunder, mutilation and rape.

  In the gulag, as a matter of policy, the urkas were accorded the status of trusties, and they had complete power over the politicals, the fascists – always the most scorned and defenceless population in the camp system. The 58s were permanently exposed to the urkas on principle, to increase their pain. And one can see, also, that the policy looked good ideologically. It would be very Leninist to have one class exterminating another, higher class. How Lenin had longed for the poorer peasants to start lynching all the kulaks … Imprisoned thieves were amnestied under Lenin, as part of his ‘loot the looters’ campaign in the period of War Communism. As Solzhenitsyn says, the theft of state property became and remained a capital crime, while urka-bourgeois theft became and remained little more than a misdemeanour. Apart from the new privilegentsia and a few ‘hereditary proletarians’, the urkas were the only class to benefit from Bolshevik policies. The urkas, who played cards for each other’s eyes, who tattooed themselves with images of masturbating monkeys, who had their women assist them in their rapes of nuns and politicals. In Life and Fate Vasily Grossman writes almost casually of an urka ‘who had once knifed a family of six’. The gulag officially designated the urkas as Socially Friendly Elements.

  In the case of Kolyma another strange cruelty was provided by topography. It is not clear to me how they built up their sense of it (the guards seemed to disappear and prisoners were seldom taken from the squirming hold), but there was a near-universal feeling that the ship was disappearing over the shoulder of the world. ‘And so, finally,’ writes Conquest,

  the columns wound down to the boats. It was for the great majority of the prisoners their first sight of the open sea, for almost all of them their first sea voyage. On the Russians, in particular, the effect of the long cruise northward over the open ocean greatly enhanced the feeling already common to prisoners that they had been removed from the ordinary world. It seemed not merely a transportation from the ‘mainland’ (as the prisoners always referred to the rest of the country) to some distant penal island, but even to another ‘planet’, as Kolyma was always called in songs and sayings.

  25 This presented a logistical challenge in oft-purged Petrograd/Leningrad during the long days of arctic summer. Witnesses describe the two or three hours of darkness as something like a Monte Carlo Rally of black marias. The Cheka preferred the night, but they needed you to know that you were never safe. They could come for you at any time, in any place: on the street, in hospital, at the office or the opera.

  26 Conquest notes the case of an eight-man cell at Zhitomir prison containing 160 inmates. ‘Five or six died every day,’ wrote a survivor. The bodies ‘continued to stand up because there was no room to fall down’. It was known as ‘cell torture’.

  27 These ‘specially displaced’ people were usually led to some crag or snowfield with a peg sticking out of it (bearing a number) and nothing else. Jonathan Glover in his recent book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century succinctly passes on the following case: ‘In 1930, 10,000 families were sent on a journey over the ice of the Vasyugan river. Many, especially children, died on the journey. The survivors were left, with no food or tools, on bits of land in the middle of the marshes. The paths back were guarded with machine-guns. Everyone died.’

  28 These words could hardly be an attempt to placate Moscow. Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind (London: Harvill Press, 1967), a much more harrowing book than Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Novy mir, 1962: under Khrushchev), had no chance whatever of being published in the Soviet Union.

  29 For what prison life was like without a latrine bucket see The Gulag Archipelago, Volume One, page 540 ff.

  The Epic Agony of the Gulag

  The shoes: sections of old car tyre, secured with a wire or an electrical cord.

  Made from buckwheat, the thin porridge is found by one inmate (P. Yakubovich) to be ‘inexpressibly repulsive to the taste’.

  In the Arctic camps the prisoners were not supposed to work outside when the temperature fell below minus fifty – or at any rate sixty – degrees Fahrenheit. At fifty below it starts to be difficult to breathe. It was forbidden to build fires.

  A group of prisoners at Kolyma were hungry enough to eat a horse that had been dead for more than a week (despite the stench and the infestation of flies and maggots).

  Scurvy makes the bones brittle; but then, ‘Every prisoner welcomes a broken arm or leg.’ Extra-large scurvy boils were ‘particularly envied’. Admission to hospital was managed by quota. To get in with diarrhoea, you had to be evacuating (bloodily) every half an hour. The hospitals were themselves deathtraps, but inert deathtraps. A man chopped off half his foot to get in there. And prisoners cultivated infections, feeding saliva, pus or kerosene to their wounds.

  Goldmining could break a strong man’s health forever in three weeks. A three-week logging term was likewise known as a ‘dry execution’. Solzhenitsyn: ‘[Varlam] Shalamov cites examples in which the whole membership of the brigade died several times over in the course of one gold-washing season on the Kolyma but the brigadier remained the same.’ And the brigadier, typically, was an urka.

  At Serpantinka, the anus mun
di of the gulag, prisoners were crammed upright into a shed so tightly that they were denied the use of their arms. They had to catch the pieces of ice thrown in to them with their mouths, like penguins. The men were in there for ‘several days’; and they were waiting to be shot.

  According to Solzhenitsyn, almost all women prisoners – many of them wives and mothers – would sooner or later find themselves walking up and down the corridors between the men’s bunks saying, ‘Half a kilo. Half a kilo’: ‘A multiple bunk curtained off with rags from the neighbouring women,’ he writes, ‘was a classic camp scene.’

  During the early 1930s every non-apparatchik in the USSR was hungry, and the peasants were starving in their millions. The zeks of the gulag, from 1918 to 1956, were always somewhere in between.

  The mature gulag ran on food and the deprivation of food. Illuminatingly, the history of Communism keeps bringing us back to this: the scarcity or absence of food.

  In 1929 Stalin made the acquaintance of a talented maniac called Naftaly Frenkel. Notice Solzhenitsyn’s tone:

  Here once again the crimson star of Naftaly Frenkel describes its intricate loop in the heavens of the Archipelago … [He] did not weary of thirsting for the one true service, nor did the Wise Teacher weary of seeking out this service.

  The style is mock-epic, and it is appropriate, because Frenkel is a figure so freakish in his severity. It seems he had no ideology (he wanted only money and power), but in his literalism, his scientism, and his natural indifference to all human suffering Frenkel was an excellent Bolshevik. It was he who advised Stalin to run the gulag on the steady deprivation of food.

  Again they used norms and quotas:

  for the full norm: 700 grams of bread, plus soup and buckwheat

  for those not attaining the norm: 400 grams of bread, plus soup

  The ‘full norm’ was near-unachievable (sometimes more than 200 times higher than the Tsarist equivalent). A socialist-realist superman might manage it, for a time. But you were not meant to manage it. As the zek increasingly fell further behind the norm, he weakened further too, and his ration would soon be demoted to ‘punitive’ (300 grams). As for the rations, Conquest cites those of the Japanese POW camps on the River Kwai (Tha Makham): ‘There, prisoners got a daily ration norm of 700 grams of rice, 600 of vegetables, 100 of meat, 20 of sugar, 20 of salt, and 5 of oil …’; all these items were, of course, great rarities and delicacies in the archipelago. Solzhenitsyn describes a seven-ounce loaf (218 grams): ‘sticky as clay, a piece little bigger than a matchbox …’

  Marx dismissed slavery as unproductive by definition. But Frenkel argued that it could work economically – so long as the slaves died very quickly. Solzhenitsyn seems to be quoting Frenkel here: ‘“We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months – after that we don’t need him any more.’” Three months: you can read a whole scholarly monograph on world slavery without once seeing an expectancy as low as three months. Three months. The photographs on the walls of the Auschwitz Museum commemorating a few score victims who were not killed immediately give the date of arrival and the date of death. The median period is three months. That is evidently how long the worked human body lasts without solace or sustenance or, finally, hope.

  What made the difference between succumbing and surviving? Easily the most powerful force in the cosmos of the gulag was chance, was luck; but you had to make yourself a candidate for luck. One reads of two Bulgarians, two brothers, who hanged themselves with their scarves on the first day; and part of you concedes that this was an entirely reasonable act. Others were able to absorb something of the gulag into themselves, and take inner strength from it. In a place dedicated to death, what you needed in your self was force of life: force of life. Our witnesses are unrepresentative – they are professionals, intellectuals. The others’ tales, the peasants’ tales, for example, remain largely untold, or unwritten. But I am repeatedly struck by the quality of these testimonials, not just in their breadth of soul but in their talent: the expressiveness, the level of perception. And these, too, are subsidiary manifestations of force of life.

  ‘The worst prison is better than the best camp,’ formulated Tibor Szamuely (the nephew). ‘Prison, and more particularly solitary confinement,’ writes Eugenia Ginzburg, ‘ennobled and purified human beings and brought to light their most genuine resources.’ In one of his more extraordinary strophes Solzhenitsyn insists: ‘Prison has wings!’ What lies before you is a great project of self-communion and, to begin with at least, a great argument with fear and with despair; then, perhaps, comes the moment when (as Solzhenitsyn puts it), ‘… I had the consciousness that prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life.’ Not the conviction but the ‘consciousness’, the discovery of something in yourself that was already there. After that, a different spiritual state, a different degree of humanity seemed to be achievable. Here are two glimpses of it. First, Solzhenitsyn’s (this comes at the end of seven days and nights of solitary and interrogation):

  … by the time I arrived, the inhabitants of Cell 67 were already asleep on their metal cots with their hands on top of their blankets.

  At the sound of the door opening, all three started and raised their heads for an instant. They, too, were waiting to learn which of them might be taken to interrogation.

  And those three lifted heads, those three unshaven, crumpled pale faces, seemed to me so human, so dear, that I stood there, hugging my mattress, and smiled with happiness. And they smiled. And what a forgotten look that was – after only one week!

  And here, again, is Eugenia Ginzburg:

  There are no words to describe the feelings of a ‘solitary’ who, after two years and countless warders, catches sight of her fellow-prisoners [all of them strangers]. People! Human beings! So there you are, my dear ones, my friends whom I thought I should never see.

  So human, so dear.30

  But the worst prison is better than the best camp. In the camps, such words (dear, human) are used facetiously or contemptuously or not at all; the future tense is never heard; and for the zek, more generally, the ‘natural desire to share what he has experienced dies in him’ (Solzhenitsyn); ‘He has forgotten empathy for another’s sorrow; he simply does not understand it and does not desire to understand it’ (Varlam Shalamov). Thus there was nowhere to turn but inwards. Speculating on the ‘astounding rarity’ of camp suicides, Solzhenitsyn writes:

  If these millions of helpless and pitiful vermin still did not put an end to themselves – this meant that some kind of invincible feeling was alive inside them. Some very powerful idea.

  This was their feeling of universal innocence.

  Because they were all innocent, the politicals. None of them had done anything. On arrest, the invariable response was Zachto? Why? What for? When she heard that a friend had been picked up (this was in the early 1930s), Nadezhda Mandelstam said: Zachto? Anna Akhmatova lost patience. Don’t you understand, she said, that they are now arresting people for nothing. Why, what for? That was the question you asked yourself each day in the gulag archipelago. And we must imagine this word carved on the trunk of every tree in the taiga: Zachto?

  There are several names for what happened in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s. The Holocaust, the Shoah, the Wind of Death. In Romani it is called the Porreimos – the Devouring. There are no names for what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 (although Russians refer, totemically, to ‘the twenty million’, and to the Stalinshchina – the time of Stalin’s rule). What should we call it? The Decimation, the Fratricide, the Mindslaughter? No. Call it the Zachto? Call it the What For?

  30 The circumstances are of course very different, but one can respectfully infer an interesting sex difference in these two little epiphanies. After a few expressions of gruff solidarity, Solzhenitsyn’s cellmates (one of whom, incidentally, was a stoolie) adjured him to silence: ‘Tomorrow! Night is for sleeping.’ Mrs Ginzburg and her new friends, by contr
ast, all talked incessantly – and without listening – to the point of clinical exhaustion: ‘“Yes, it’s lovely to be with people, but what a strain!”’

  The Isolator

  ‘By pressing men against each other, totalitarian terror destroys the space between them,’ writes Hannah Arendt. This feels profoundly true of life as it was lived under Bolshevism. Does the size of Russia (easily the largest country on Earth: a sixth of its land surface) – does the very size of Russia perversely account for its prodigies of overcrowding, of claustrophobic densities, of cramming, of stacking people up against one another? In the countryside there were the huddled huts, and, in the cities, there was a family behind every window. The trams (and the trains) were always dangerously full; riding them was a physically bruising experience, and one long-pondered by anyone over fifty. Then, too, we think of punitive proximities: the men at Stapianka, awaiting death, wedged together, upright, with their arms stuck to their sides; the men at Kolyma, trussed and stacked like logs in vans and then driven off for execution; the men in Zhitomir prison, 160 in a cell for eight, with no room for the dead to fall or, it seems, even slump. And this form of torture was no secret for ordinary Russians. It was part of the atmosphere, the rumour, the terror. The old British FO hand, Reader Bullard, records in his diary entry for 2 April 1934 (in the calm before the Purge):