An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  After we had been compressed into the cell, a guard came around to the cell door and called out our names; when we answered with our prayers, the guard checked against the file, which contained a photograph of the prisoner and his transportation details, including the destination. I was lying on the top bunk against the bars so I was able to peer down at these files. I saw my own when it came. The destination was marked as a steplag (steppe camp) in the Kazakh Republic, at Dzhezkazgan, but that meant nothing to me at the time. I also noticed in red pencil on the corner of my file, in huge letters printed by hand, SKLONNY K POBEGU—likely to attempt escape. I thought that was pretty funny, given my physical condition, but I was glad to have the reputation all the same.

  The Stolypin cars in our convoy were pulled to another location after we boarded, and there we waited while a passenger train was connected on behind. Then, after a long delay, we began to move. And at the end of the day we were taken to the toilet one by one and yelled at and abused by the guards until we did what we had to do. The door of the toilet was open all the time. In the evening the people in our cell tried to work out a rotation system, so that everybody could get a little sleep. I found myself watching an old priest down below me, who occupied himself with prayers and with concern for a pair of very fine-quality heavy felt boots he was carrying, one stuffed into the other. The boots were awkward for him to handle. Other prisoners cursed if he let them bump against them or fall on them, and yet he could not manage comfortably to hold them on his own person.

  Finally someone said, “Look, Father, put the boots on the floor. Nobody can get away with them here!” There was some laughter at this and finally the bearded old fellow accepted the idea and the boots were shoved under a bunk. Sometime that night or the second night some prisoner managed to use the boots for a toilet and left a big pile in one of them. This would violently come to light at Kuibyshev on the third day.

  Before boarding the train we had been given rations for the trip: two days’ supply of bread, sugar, and, as Orlov had predicted, several pieces of salt herring. I warned everyone close to me against eating the herring. Some understood. Others thought I was lying in order to get their herring. Others knew I was right but were too hungry to do without it and went right ahead, even eating the pieces rejected by those like me who knew what it would lead to.

  Within two hours there were cries throughout the car, begging for water. The guards strolled up and down and laughed at the poor pinched faces pressed against the bars, pleading for a drink. All the guards on the trains were overtly cruel and abusive. In prison, both m Lefortovo and Sukhanovka, and of course in Lubyanka and Butyrka, all the guards except that terrible woman had been more or less correct.

  They did their job in a straightforward way and left the abuse to the interrogators. But there was a change when we boarded the train. These men were coarse in their appearance and brutal by temperament. Perhaps it was a requirement for the position. Usually the brutality was expressed in the crudest, most direct form, with kicks, rifle butts, and curses. Sometimes it had a kind of low-grade ingenuity. This group on our car withheld water until the screams became a constant wail and then brought all the water anyone wanted, and sat back to watch the fun that began in half an hour or so when bladders began to cry out for relief and people went into silent agonies or else humiliated themselves by wetting their clothes at last, or urinating on the floor. One poor fellow let go through the bars into the corridor. In seconds the guards had pulled him out while he was still doing it, one beat him about the head and shoulders, screaming curses at him; when they shoved him back in the cell, he was still feebly dribbling through the rough slit in the front of his trousers. He had been a captain in the army.

  In the night I got into conversation with another man on the top layer, incapacitated like myself, but not from exhaustion and illness. He was a cripple and his crutches were kept just outside the cell, where he could get at them to go to the toilet. This old man was going to prison for whatever time he had left in life. The sentence was ten years and he was already seventy-three and feeble. His name was Nikiforov, and his crime was writing letters to Stalin, reporting on conditions in his community as they actually were. He always read the papers, he said, and he could tell from the glowing speeches the Leader always made about the marvelous state of things in the Soviet Union that someone was keeping the truth from the great Father and Teacher, and that he, this old fellow, would set that right by writing to the Leader directly and telling him how things really were.

  Nikiforov was not totally naive. He knew that his letters might be intercepted and that officials afraid for their jobs might seek him out and punish him. So he never signed the letters and he mailed each one at a different mailbox. Since he was a cripple, his range of operations was not very big, and the MGB tracked him down by the following technique: they knew from the postmarks the district in Moscow from which the letters all came. They made a search from apartment house to apartment house. It would have been impossible to enter every apartment, so they went to the building management offices and asked for the files of complaints. In Moscow you can complain about the water service, or lack of heat, or electrical problems only in writing, and the building management committee must keep all the letters. The secret police sent out agents with samples of the old man’s handwriting, and simply kept looking through tenants’ complaints until they found that handwriting.

  His interrogator boasted to him about this masterpiece of detective work, Nikiforov said. The old man did not seem to think it strange that such a massive manhunt had been deployed simply to entrap the man who wrote the truth to Stalin.

  Kuibyshev is about six hundred miles east of Moscow, almost in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. It is built along the middle reaches of the Volga, where it drains Lake Kama and begins its thousand-kilometer run southward to Astrakhan and a shallow, many-mouthed delta spreading nearly fifty miles out into the Caspian Sea. The Soviet government fled to Kuibyshev during the war, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow. Stalin had gone there secretly, though the propaganda had him bravely holding on m the capital. The U. S. Embassy was there for a while as well. I have been told it is a fine city, but all I saw of it that morning was cobblestoned streets and poor, shabby houses with peeling stucco and loose boards and no paint. In the distance we could see some taller buildings and we sensed it was a good-sized town. The guards made no attempt to conceal us from the population here. We were simply dragged out between lines of armed soldiers with huge German shepherd dogs snarling and pulling on their chains, and marched through the town while people stared or more often went indifferently about their business. I had to be helped by other prisoners and when I fell down, which was pretty often, the guards would scream at me and at the poor guys who were helping me, to get me up and get going. The march was perhaps two kilometers and by the end I was being dragged because I could not walk.

  When we came to the yellow stone wall of the prison, with barbed wire along the top and watchtowers with machine guns, and they opened the huge gates and marched us in, I was able to look around and became aware that there was an immense group in this convoy. There were women as well as men. Some of the women were carrying babies that were a few days to a few months old. It was a bizarre scene—several hundred men and women, some in their teens, a few gray and bearded and near death. Some were vigorous and sleek, though most were pale and thin and weak like me. Some were clearly new, “from freedom,” and were dressed in good clothes, with all their buttons intact, clean and free of tears and patches. Others wore the worst shredded rags. The smell of dirty bodies was heavy even in the open air. We all sat on the ground, or lay down, waiting for the next order. Some of the prisoners, particularly women, went around seeking news “Where did you come from, brother? Potma? Have you seen my husband? Vasili Grigoryevich Kravchuk? No? And you, brother, where have you come from? Moscow? The Lubyanka? Did you hear any news of my husband? Vasili Kravchuk? No? And you, brother”—piteou
sly going from person to person. Occasionally there was a buzz and heads came together, and faces shone faintly through their own filth and despair, and you could tell that contact had been made.

  I watched all this from the ground.

  After an hour or more had passed, a major of the MVD came out. It was the MVD, the ministry of the interior, that was responsible for the security of the prison camps. Its army was a branch of the Soviet armed forces. It was separate from the MGB, the ministry of state security. The major told everyone to stand up and form lines. People helped me up. He then called for silence. When he got it, he called out in a loud voice, “All chestnyagi step forward!” From the two or three hundred people gathered in that dirty yard, perhaps thirty or forty men stepped forward. I do not think there were any women, but I am not sure. I tried to figure out what the word chestnyagi meant. All I could tell was that one of them had been in my cell, and that I had surmised from his manner and the tattoos on the backs of his arms that he might be a professional criminal and not a “fascist,” or political prisoner. Most of the men in the group who had identified themselves as chestnyagi looked relatively healthy and their clothes were in good shape. The major nodded to a group of guards and the chestnyagi were led away separately. All right, 1 assumed, professional criminals.

  Then the major called out again, “All suki. Step forward.” Again I did not recognize the word. Again the twelve or fifteen men who responded were marginally better dressed than the average. There was certainly no one in totally derelict rags.

  The average age in the two groups was younger than the total average. I asked the old cripple if he knew what the words meant, but he did not, and no one else near me knew.

  Once the suki and the chestnyagi were out of the way we were taken inside. I think the women with babies were separated from the main group, but more than two hundred men and women were lined up in the large barracks-like building with showers rigged along one wall, and told to undress and put their clothes on the floor in front of them. The women screamed and protested but the guards came up and smashed them in the face if they hesitated about undressing. Soon we were all naked, two hundred sweating, dirty, scabbed, pale, skeletal, vulnerable human bodies. A file of fifteen or twenty unarmed guards had marched into the room and stood in a line facing the several lines of naked prisoners. The guards were laughing and joking about the physical characteristics of the naked bodies in front of them. “Hey, look at the boobies on that one, she must be new.”

  “Not much here for you, Boris.”

  “That one’s so long you could tie a knot in it. Reminds me of you, Sasha,” and a lot of just coarse, insulting stuff, mostly aimed at the women. The women whimpered and tried to cover themselves. When the guards were lined up and all our stuff was in poor little piles in front of us, we were told to take a step backward and the line of guards moved forward to search the bundles. The old priest stood next to me, his felt boots on the floor in front of him. They did not give away what they contained because the stink in the room was already too strong. When the guard plunged his hand into one of the boots to search it for contraband, he pulled it out again with a yell. It was smeared with brown halfway to the elbow. “You bastard!” he yelled at the old priest, who was just as amazed and even stopped praying. The guard just stepped up to him, wiped the filth all over the old man’s face and beard, and then knocked him down and kicked him hard in the ribs. The poor old priest lay doubled up with pain, moaning and clutching his pale, wrinkled belly.

  Soon we were led, men and women in separate lines, to a long, low table where two trusties with hair clippers came along and made us raise our arms. They clipped our armpits, our heads, our beards. Then we had to step up on the table while they went to work on our pubic areas. The women were almost all crying and pleading for mercy, while the guards and trusties with the clippers made lewd remarks like, “Move your lip to the left a bit there, sister. Smile, now.” Another one said, “This one has more hair on her tits than she has between her legs. Do I get to do her tits too, Sergei?” There was terror and humiliation in the big room. After the shaving we were herded to the showers, men and women together. There were screams and yells of rage as we were scalded with terribly hot water for several minutes. Our clothes were hung on hooks on wheeled carts like those in the garment district in New York, our other belongings put on shelves at the bottom of the carts, and these carts were wheeled into a huge oven where they were disinfected with heat. Afterward we had to scramble through totally unsorted jumbles of trousers and skirts and stockings and boots to try to find our own. Then the men and women were finally segregated into groups and taken outside again and lined up facing several long stone barracks buildings.

  The cell that I and about fifteen others were taken to opened directly on the yard. It was cell number 12. At the door we formed a line and one by one repeated our prayers and then were roughly pushed inside. I stumbled going across the threshold and fell against a jumble of people just inside the door. I rolled on the floor and ended up against a wooden pole. I pulled myself up by grabbing this pole, found it was a support for some sort of long bunk, or shelf, and grabbed a space to sit down.

  My first impression was of bedlam. The cell reverberated with chatter. Later I counted and found that we were 129 people in a cell sixteen feet wide and about forty feet long. Two layers of bunks, which were nothing more than hard plank platforms, ran down each of the long sides and across the end. At the far end was a large window, open in the warm air, with bars on the outside. In the glare from the window it was hard to see the far end of the cell clearly, but I know that it was already packed with people standing on the floor and sitting or lying on or under the sleeping platforms. By the door, at the opposite end from the window, was a large wooden barrel that served as a urinal. The floor around it was damp, as the barrel was too high to use without difficulty unless you were very tall. The smell of urine would have been suffocating if the window had not been open at the other end of the room.

  I remember that several people came up to me almost immediately to hear news from outside. The first question was always, “Are you from freedom?” And then, even when I explained that I had been in prison for a year and a half, many still wanted to know what it was like outside; they had been in prison for five years, ten years, some for twenty years.

  For some reason I was standing up. Perhaps I had been squeezed off the crowded bunk. I was weak, but sitting on hard wood with my buttocks gone was not comfortable and I know that I often stood up to relieve the pain on my hip bones. The talk around me went silent suddenly and the heads of the people who had gathered to hear my meager news swung around toward the central part of the room. Then they moved away from me anxiously. I saw three dirty, ragged young men advancing toward me, grinning wickedly. They stepped up to within a couple of feet of where I stood, hanging on to a bunk support, and looked me over with insolent eyes. I still had my navy surplus gray gabardine trousers, and even after a year and a half of prison they were in much better shape than most prisoners’ clothes. These toughs were shobla yobla, the lowest of the urki, or criminal class. They were very nasty-looking guys. They looked at my pants with obvious interest. The one in the middle said to the others, “Look, brothers, he has my trousers on!” He started to feel the cloth.

  I said, “What the hell are you talking about? These are mine. Hands off!”

  The leader kept pushing at me roughly. “Now, look at this, brothers! A common thief wearing my pants! And claims they are his own! Well, well!”

  Then he grabbed a bundle from one of the other young jackals and held it out to me, a bundle of rags. “These are your trousers,” he said between his teeth, holding them under my nose and pushing his face very close. “Now give me mine and give them to me quick,” and thrust out two fingers as if to jab them in my eyes.

  I had been up against tougher guys than he for a year and a half, and I was certainly not going to take this lying down. I was too weak for a good swing,
but I held tight to the post with my left hand and brought my right up from below in the hardest and fastest uppercut I could manage. It hurt my hand like hell because it connected beautifully, right on the button, and the kid went down on his back. He looked astonished and he looked ready to kill. The other two began to close in and they were still grinning, but the grin had hardened a lot and their hands were held out like wrestlers’.

  The room had gone absolutely silent. All the friendly people who had been so eager to hear my news had melted away. I felt totally alone in this weird crowd. The guy on the floor got up, rubbing his chin. There was blood on his lip. He spread his hands and held the other two back. His eyes looked murder. “I’ll take him,” he said curtly. He took a step toward me. I tightened my grip on the post. I was trembling but I figured I could at least duck and butt him in the stomach with my head, and then go for the crotch of one of the others before he got me. I was pretty scared, but I was pretty mad, too, and quite ready to throw myself at them, as feeble as I was.

  But it never happened. A loud call from the back of the room, where the glare from the window hid the speaker from me, stopped the shobla yobla cold.

  “Off!” this voice said, very clear, with great authority.

  “Lay off, now. That man is a dukharik!” Dukh is the word for “soul,” but it means pretty much the same, in this context, as the English word “guts.”

  “Bring him, to me,” the voice said, more quietly. I was squinting into the shadow under the glaring window to try to see who this was. All heads in the room were looking either at me or toward the invisible speaker at the end of the room.