An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  I told them about Kuibyshev. I won some time, before they started asking me about my own career in crime, by telling them how the pakhan had escaped. Many of them knew Valentin well, and all of them without exception knew his reputation.

  They looked at me with great respect when I told them that I had been invited to join the escape, and clucked in sympathy when I said I had been hospitalized and had to miss out on it. By now I thought I had gone about as far as I could with my masquerade. I let my shivers become a little more pronounced than they needed to be, and I said, “Brothers, I’m afraid I’m desperately sick; the fever is coming back; I hope I don’t infect anyone!”

  They fell away from me. But one bold fellow with stars on his nipples and a snake coiled around his belly came up close, and although he looked very fierce he had a soft voice and the manner of a nurse or a doctor. He felt my head with the back of his hand. He said, “Brother, you are really in bad shape.” Then he turned around and called for silence. He called out, when everyone was listening: “One of The People is close to death, brothers. He must have a doctor, quick!”

  Without a pause some of these monkeys ran to the open windows and began to yell. Others pounded on the cell door, yelling. “Urgent cry for help!” They yelled, “A chelovek is dying! It’s terrible! Help! Help! These tormentors won’t let us have a doctor! Help! A doctor! Help!”

  Pandemonium.

  Amid all the other yells, I could hear screams. Now that they had satisfied their curiosity about me, they were turning their attention to my fellow politicals. Here it was no discreet bag-slitting with a moika. They simply knocked the poor fellows down, and while one or two held the victim, others stripped off his clothes and searched his person.

  The once-fat Armenian minister was on his back with his struggling legs held apart, squeaking like a puppy. They found his money roll and there was much laughing and rejoicing. Within minutes the poor fascists were struggling to cover themselves in the filthy and ill-fitting rags that the urki had given them in exchange for their clothes. The former Hero must have tried to fight because he was sitting on the floor looking stunned, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his nose and shaking his head in a pitiful way.

  Shortly the cell door was unlocked, and a senior officer came in with two or three guards. He shouted, “This is terrible! There has been a terrible mistake!” Then, as if he were furious with the guards, “Get these political prisoners out of here, you fools! Don’t you know this cell is only for coloreds?” As the bewildered fascists were led from the cell with what was left of their rifled bundles, the major apologized to each one: “A terrible mistake. It has never happened before. These blundering fools will be punished, you can be sure.” The guards smirked at this. One political, bolder than the others, said, “What about getting our stuff back, then?” But the officer just kept on clucking about the terrible mistake as if he had not heard, and the guards shoved and prodded the seven men out into the corridor. As the door was closing on them, the officer stuck his head back in the cell and winked at the urki.

  As soon as this performance was over, the urki set up their cry for a doctor again. “One of us is dying!” Some of them took the heavy wooden cover off the urine barrel and banged the door with it until I was nearly deafened. There was at least another ten minutes of this noise, and then the door opened again and the prison doctor (a prisoner) and the block commander came in. The doctor took my temperature and felt my pulse. I was dragged off to the hospital. There he did a more thorough examination, gave me some quinine and aspirin, and discharged me, and I was taken to a cell for politicals, with twenty or thirty men in it. I felt sick, but I was relieved to be out of India with my bundle intact.

  I was in that cell less than a day before the next leg of the etap began. It was long enough to get a sinister foretaste of the next period of my life. There was a tall, emaciated man in the cell who paced up and down incessantly and coughed as he walked. His face and body looked wasted, and his clothing was striking and unpleasant. It consisted of a black cotton jacket and trousers and a black cotton cap. A rectangle was cut out of the left breast of the jacket and a strip of white cloth sewed in. There were letters and numbers on the white patch, something like CB 551. The same cutout patch and numbers were sewn on both arms, on the front of his cap, on the left leg of his trousers, on the back of his jacket.

  He was too old and weak, and yet he kept pacing, coughing, pacing. I asked him his story. He stared at me out of cavernous, miserable eyes for a long time before he answered. I had to keep walking with him because he could not stop.

  They were sending him to Spassk, he said finally, a camp for the dying. He had silicosis from the copper mines and certainly could not last long, he knew that. The only consolation was that you did no work in Spassk, or so he had been told, but perhaps that was a lie like everything else. The numbers were worn by prisoners in all the camps where he had been for seven years, in Dzhezkazgan. Yes, he was terrified of death, but it could not be worse to die than to live in the living hell of Dzhezkazgan. I was horrified and told him in a kind of gasp that I was going to Dzhezkazgan. He just shook his head and coughed heavily but said nothing more, and when I tried to get him to talk again later, he refused.

  This walking Death made me deeply afraid. I had stopped shivering from the fever after the drugs I had been given. Now I quite literally started to shake from fright. Somehow I got hold of myself, and began the old pep talks. “Remember what Orlov said,” I reminded myself. “Some die quickly and some survive very well, and I am not the kind to die quickly. Remember the dungeon in Lefortovo. If you can survive that, you can survive anything. Remember to find an enterprise to earn your bread. Watch out for a friend. Remember the maxims for conserving energy.”

  I was able to rediscover some shreds of the old optimist and start cheering up. Gossip arrived that helped the process, just because it was fascinating and distracting. This was in the spring of 1950, and there had been another major purge. A group of party bosses in Leningrad had been arrested. Many had been shot, along with their families, and many others sent to camps. Here in Petropavlovsk there was a whole wing, it was said, reserved for the wives and children of these men who were purged.

  By the time we were loaded back on the train I had pulled myself together. I was still physically weak, but I felt morally tough and even a bit adventurous once again.

  Soon the green-treed hills were left behind and the train labored as we began to climb through grassy steppe land. At first the cities and towns retained their Russian sound: Kokchetav, Akmolinsk, and so on. Then the names began to sound more Asian: Temir Tau was one stop, and then Karaganda, early in the second day. Not long after Karaganda, the grasses began to thin out and there was nothing to see but flat expanses of rock and sand. The guards told us maliciously that it was called Bet Pak Dala, the Dead Steppe, and that we’d all be part of it soon enough. We were very high. This land is all more than two thousand feet above sea level. At night the car was freezing and the guards wore their greatcoats while we all huddled together. In the daytime it was over a hundred degrees.

  At three o’clock on the third morning, the train stopped at a station that seemed to be in the middle of empty space. The first sound I heard was a continual barking of dogs, as if the train had run into a huge kennel. When we came out, there was nothing but flat rock reaching off into the darkness, and milling dogs pulling at their leashes, and dozens of guards in tropical uniforms, shivering a lot in the cold because it was not dawn yet, and holding back their German shepherds.

  They sat us on the ground and came around to us with file folders and heard our prayers. Several of us were judged too weak to walk the eleven kilometers to camp and were put into a truck with several guards. The sky was brilliant with stars. By the time we got to the camp it was beginning to get light in the east. We were unloaded beside a huge stone wall that seemed to stretch for half a mile in each direction. There were watchtowers and barbed wire on the top, and a
great gate a hundred feet or so from where we were told to sit and wait for the rest of the prisoners, who were marching in convoy from the station. The gate was timber, about four meters high. Outside it was a rough wooden barrier, a pole with a counterweight like a railway crossing barrier.

  When the sun came up, it was hard and sudden. It was like a stab, only the warmth was welcome. You could feel it immediately.

  Almost immediately after the sun appeared, there was some noise from inside the gates, and in a moment they swung open. A thin, tired horse appeared, drawing a flat farm wagon with wooden wheels. Ten or twelve corpses were stretched out on the wagon. Somehow I found this normal. I was watching indifferently until the wagon stopped and two guards appeared with axes. Then I felt quite sick. The guards methodically walked from corpse to corpse and swung the axes up and down. Soon each skull was split wide open. The man leading the horse tugged the reins and led it off. Each corpse had a small metal tag wired to a big toe and the metal tags waved back and forth as the wagon moved away across the steppe.

  I began to feel as though I was hallucinating again because I could hear music, a band, playing some kind of bravura march. It sounded weak and the instruments were not well tuned, but the rhythm was fast and I was sure it was coming from inside the gate. I had a sense of deep cosmic horror that made me dizzy. In the distance I could see the silhouette of the corpses on the wagon. The band seemed to be playing some kind of grotesque farewell. Then it got worse. Out of the gate came, in lines of five abreast, a column of walking corpses in black cotton jackets with white number patches. They could hardly drag themselves. Their faces were pale and drawn and expressionless and they stared straight ahead. Somehow I learned that they were from a hard punishment barracks called BUR. The band is for them, then, I thought. They marched, or shuffled, away into the distance surrounded by guards and dogs. All directions seemed the same in front of this flat wall on top of this flat rock. All directions led away from the prison except the one in through the gate.

  The band kept playing. Now in one of the distances I saw a black line approaching and heard more dogs. It was the rest of our eta p. When it arrived, we were formed into columns of five and marched through the gate. We passed other columns of prisoners marching out. They looked a little better than the group from BUR, but only a little. Most were tanned. All wore the black jackets with the number patches. Unlike the column of the walking dead men, some of these looked at us—some in curiosity, some indifferently, some cordially, some, I thought, in pity.

  I was terribly thirsty. I asked for water repeatedly, but no one paid any attention. Guards were going around with files and papers again, checking on each prisoner.

  Inside the walls the camp appeared to be a village of low stone buildings, plastered white, with low-pitched slate roofs and a. barren dirt road or plaza running between them. This road or street stretched straight away from the gates, and what gave the appearance of a town was the movement of people back and forth between these buildings. One building was much larger than the others. It turned out to be the mess hall and kitchen. The rest of the buildings were mostly barracks. On the right was a small bathhouse and another small building, the bakery.

  The music, when I found it, peering around in the shadows inside the walls because the sun was still very low, came from a pitiful little band of prisoners lined up near the vakhta, the guardhouse, sitting on a bench, playing away with desperate eyes—a tuba, a trumpet, a drum, an accordion, and a violin. They were still playing the same march. The eyes of the brass players looked profoundly hollow over their puffed cheeks. The whole picture was so bizarre I still felt myself in a kind of dream state.

  Am I really seeing this? Human ghosts with numbers on their arms. Faces of death playing a lively march.

  I began to feel more real again with the touch of rough hands searching us.

  Our bundles were searched and their contents registered, and they were taken away to storage. Prisoners going to the toilet or the mess hall or back to their barracks came and tried to talk to us. The guards were not too severe about stopping them, so some acquaintances began to be made.

  We were taken by fives to the supply room after a hopeless bath with half a pail of water, since water was very short in the camp, and given our black clothes and numbers. My number was Ess Ya 265 in Russian letters: CЯ 265. It would remain the same all the time I was in Dzhezkazgan. The clothes were badly worn and we were told they were called thirty-third-term clothes: that they had been worn for thirty-three full terms. They seemed threadbare enough. The numbers were painted on by prisoners with brushes and pots of black paint.

  The next several days passed uneventfully except for talk. This was the quarantine. I was glad of the rest. After that we were sent for “medical examinations” and then assigned to our barracks. I had almost no buttocks. I discovered that this was desirable. If you had buttocks, you were assigned to the copper mines, which meant silicosis and early death. If you had no buttocks, you were too weak for the copper mines, so they would send you to outdoor construction or the rock quarry.. The medical examination was conducted not by a medical man but by an MVD noncom; it consisted almost entirely of having your buttocks squeezed.

  Then we were assigned our barracks number and turned out into the road between the barracks and the other buildings. I was to go to barracks number five. I had to ask the way. When I got there I was supposed to look for the chief of the work brigade I was assigned to, known simply as the brigadier. His name was Vtyurin, and he showed me where I was to sleep, on an upper bunk in section one of the barracks.

  The barracks were long, rectangular buildings divided into four normal sleeping sections for the work brigades, two at each end of the building, and a central section which was part wash house and part barracks for the pridurki, the soft-job workers, who were assigned to the hospital or the various administrative posts that the MVD delegated to prisoners. There was a corridor on each side of this central section, and an outside entrance to each of these two corridors. You could walk from, say, the south corridor into work brigade sections one and two, and from the north corridor into work brigade sections three and four. Only one corridor had a door to the pridurki barracks, and both gave onto the washrooms. The washrooms had long troughs. You lifted a lever and a trickle of water came down to wash with, when there was water. The barracks had two layers of bunks. If the camp was crowded, as it was when I arrived, the spaces between the sets of bunks would be boarded over to make a continuous sleeping platform. In this way each section held about 120 to 150 people—between 600 and 750 altogether in each barracks, including the pridurki administrative workers.

  I had been provided with a pillowcase, a blanket, and a mattress case—just a sort of flat bag. It was up to me to find the stuffing, and for the first several days I slept on the wood with nothing but two layers of thin cloth beneath me. I began to think about finding some sawdust or soft earth or something to stuff it with, and speculated that perhaps there was an industry for me in mattress stuffing, if I could find a good supply of something desirable.

  The first person I got to know in the barracks was a Moscow biologist serving the second of two ten-year sentences because he had dared to disagree with Lysenko and his famous theory that environment and behavior can change hereditary characteristics. His name was Vladimir Pavlovich Effroimson. We became very friendly in prison, although years later when I tried to look him up in Moscow he refused to. see me because I was American and he feared a third term. But here in Dzhezkazgan, on our first meeting, he gave me some extra food he had saved and began to explain the camp routine to me. He seemed a man who knew his way around, and I decided to stick close to him at first, for as long as I needed his help.

  After we had talked for a while, he asked me about my case. That was always the way. Like Ragozin tapping through the wall in Lefortovo, it was Article? Section? And within minutes of any encounter you were always launched on an elaborate version of your prayer. It was cred
entials. It placed you, so the other person knew who he was dealing with. It was like, What do you do and where are you from, in a normal world.

  As soon as I told him my story, Effroimson said, “Well, you’re in luck. There’s a man from the U. S. Embassy here in camp.”

  My jaw must have dropped. I said “Quick! Tell me! What’s his name?” I assumed it would be poor Morris Seltser. Effroimson said, “Victor S”. Victor!

  Impossible. He was shot in 1941. I never met him, but I heard his story all the time. His wife was Armenian. She was a kind of a lost soul in Moscow. We gave her a job in the embassy as a clerk. The Organs told her Victor was shot.”

  “Well,” Effroimson said, “then you’ll have the pleasure of your first conversation with a dead man, because there he is over there!”

  He pointed out the window, and I looked out toward a barracks across the street. A tall, lanky guy was bending over slightly, in conversation with a shorter man. He had a very low number, which meant he was one of the first lucky ones to get to Dzhezkazgan. I was terribly excited. I excused myself to Effroimson and dashed out into the street.

  Now this was Sunday. Most Sundays in camps were workdays like any other workday. But from time to time there was a free Sunday. It was usually interrupted by harassment from the MVD administration, with barracks emptied for searching, and line-ups of prisoners in the streets outside for haranguing and intimidation. But I was lucky to hit a free Sunday, and one, as far as I can recall, free not only of work but of interruption from the administration. If it had not been for this Sunday of getting acquainted with people and with routines, it might have taken me a lot longer to get to know my way around, because on normal workdays the prisoners would be exhausted by bedtime and much too cranky at 5 A.M. to explain this strange new world to a new arrival. Only on a free Sunday could I have had time to make an important contact with a man like Victor S.