An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  For a brief period during this sudden bloom, the death rate would fall off.

  Sometimes more than a day would pass without a death in our little town of a several thousand slaves. Fantasies of the American invasion, presaged by airlifts to drop arms to us, bloomed along with the desert flowers, and my spirits were as high as anyone’s, although I did not really share that particular fantasy. Some people kept themselves alive with hatred. I saw this particularly among former high party officials who had been purged and who now nourished themselves on political rage. They were bitter men who tended to stick together. I never spent time with them because I found them unpleasant, and yet I understood how their anger helped them survive and I was sympathetic from a distance. Some, of course, turned religious, and prayer manifestly saved many lives.

  My own belief in God, which is real, is more like a given than an active faith. Although I routinely went to Mass as a child, I was never a church person, or a ritual person. I believed it was up to me to make the best of what God had given me, and what kept me alive always was a determination to do just that. To survive at least, and at best to survive and find some pleasure.

  I saw many cases of people who lost hope or let go of their convictions and then, without any apparent cause, died. For some reason this seemed to happen more often with people from the Baltic states, I don’t know why. It was especially strange, since they more than anyone else in camp seemed to be the recipients of food parcels from home, and often it was the arrival of the food parcel that seemed to bring on an attack of despair that would turn a man’s eyes into a haunted stare so that he became a kind of walking ghost who never spoke. Then one morning, often around three o’clock, we would hear the sigh that comes at the end.

  No physical cause.

  Suicide was common. There was a man of twenty-six or twenty-seven who worked, at the DOZ. His name was Vilunskas. I did not know him well, although he did live in our barracks. One spring day, before the bloom, I was walking with a friend to the mail room. The friend had been told there was a food parcel for him and he wanted company so that there would be a witness if the guards stole from his parcel when they searched it and so that he would have protection in case any semicoloreds in camp tried to steal it from him on his way back to the barracks.

  Vilunskas was coming out of the mail room as we went in. He was reading a letter and his face looked as though he had been struck: horrified and stunned at the same time.

  When we came out he was sitting on the steps of the building. The letter was still in his hand but he was slumped over and his right hand was hidden inside his jacket. I bent over to ask him if he was all right, and he just slumped down and fell off the steps onto the ground, unconscious. I yelled for help. Several prisoners came over and helped carry Vilunskas to the hospital. I could not help it, I had to see what was in that deadly letter, which had fallen to the ground. It was from his wife, telling him she had divorced him. I was swept with a wave of grief for this guy I hardly knew, almost my age. I thought of Mary, and even though I knew she had to be released from her promise to me I felt sadder still. My eyes were blurry. I wiped them and stared at the ground, hoping no one would see how I felt. Something bright on the ground caught my eye and I bent over and picked it up. It was a tiny handmade knife, a folding knife like a pen knife, but only about one inch long in the blade. The end of the blade was red with fresh blood.

  I said to myself,. The damn fool! He shouldn’t try to kill himself over this woman in the first place, and in the second place if he really wants to do it he should choose a weapon that will do the trick. This thing couldn’t penetrate anything. I ran to the hospital to show the doctors what I had found. I met Adarich. He said, “That young man is dead.”

  I said, “That’s impossible,” and showed Adarich the hopeless little weapon. “Well,” he said, “he’s dead, and I don’t know why. The wound is almost invisible.”

  Later he told me that he had done an autopsy; the tiny blade had cut the pericardium, penetrated a ventricle, and the heart had bled into the chest until he died.

  Vilunskas was from Kaunas in Latvia. He had been a member of a Baltic underground guerrilla group called the Forest Brothers. There were many of them in camp. They were a gloomy, brooding lot, and there were many suicides among them.

  There was a Latvian blacksmith named Zelensh in our barracks. I had first met him when I worked with Arnold breaking chisels. Zelensh worked hard and seemed all right at the DOZ, but at night he almost never spoke. He seemed to be in another world. One Sunday when we were allowed to stay in camp, and work was shut down for a day, Zelensh seemed to brood worse than ever. In midmorning they came to take the bedding out for boiling, to get rid of the bedbugs. We sat around on the bare floor just talking or smoking or making tea on the little stoves at each end of the barracks. In the afternoon Major Gusak, the camp commandant, came personally with some guards and a couple of officers and ordered everyone out of our barracks so the guards could go in for a search. This was one of Gusak’s entertainments: spoiling our rare Sunday off with this kind of harassment. They would confiscate books of poetry or religion, take down numbers for subsequent punishment in the hard punishment cells or by loss of rations, and keep us standing outside for an hour or more just to amuse themselves. Gusak would swagger about and swear a great deal and parade his authority. He loved to insult former high-ranking army officers, or distinguished professors, or anyone else who had fallen from glory, over whom he could smirk and strut and enjoy the reversal of rank.

  Most of us bitched and made jokes under our breath during this ritual. On this day Zelensh simply stood silent, staring ahead, not speaking to anyone.

  When it was all over we went back in and sat on the bare bunks and someone put on a pot of tea. Zelensh lay down on his bunk, with his head on his hands, staring at the ceiling. Someone brought him a cup of tea after a while, but Zelensh did not respond. His eyes were still wide open but his neighbor peered closely and said quietly, “Otdal kontsy”—he’s given up the ghost.

  A lot of his mates came and tried to shake him awake, because he looked fine and had been healthy; he had worked well and had good rations. But he was dead all the same. He was about thirty-five years old.

  Many of the prisoners spent their entire free time talking politics and cursing the Soviet system. I occasionally got caught up in this, but I really had no taste for such negativism. I kept pleading with Zyuzin to show me more chords on the guitar, and finally, to stop me from bothering him, he somehow found me a beat-up old guitar which I could buy for a couple of loaves of bread. Now when the singing started in the evenings I would try to accompany the singers with my few dog waltz chords, and I began to learn a little bit more about the instrument by closely watching Zyuzin’s graceful fingers, and asking him and another friend, Volodya Stepanov, who specialized in Russian songs, to show me how to play each chord they used.

  Somewhere Volodya (it is a nickname for Vladimir) got hold of a song about our camp, and the whole barracks would join in, once they learned the words, singing in a soft, mournful voice.

  Dzhezkazgan, Dzhezkazgan

  Across your steppes that never end

  No one rides with you as friend

  But storms of dust and sand.

  Winter blizzards blanket you with white,

  Wailing through your vastness day and night.

  I am alone in this land of fear.

  My song laments in a cruel year.

  Not all the songs were so mournful. We had a Russian version of “The Great Ship Titanic,” full of ironies, and all kinds of gay tunes from different regions of the Union. But the song that brought everyone together in an agony of yearning was Volodya’s “Song of Dzhezkazgan.”

  I started a notebook showing the fingering of the chords, and I tried to memorize all the sequences. But at the same time what I really aspired to was learning to play notes and classical compositions, just like Zyuzin. He had transcribed music for himself from some acco
rdion music he found in camp, and I became infatuated with the supple movement of his fingers over the strings, and the intricate liquid flow of the soft notes that were so much more beautiful than simple strumming.

  I resolved that I would have to have a classical Russian guitar, which has seven strings instead of six, and after a while I found an old woodworker at the DOZ who said he could make one. I watched him make it over a period of months, and in the meantime asked all my friends to think of ways to find me some real guitar music. Zyuzin was very, enthusiastic about this: he wanted some new music as well. When my guitar was finished Pavel Voronkin painted an elegant figure of a mythical faun among the trees on the back. And some music turned up. Just one piece, but it was real guitar music: Rachmaninov’s “Italian Polka,” transcribed for the Russian guitar. Zyuzin started to teach me how to read it.

  It was a painstaking business. I still cannot imagine how the rest of the men in the barracks were so patient with my fumbling attempts and the endless repetition of a single bar or two as I figured out the polka note by note and finger by finger.

  Marching to work I kept my fingers inside my jacket whenever I could get away with it, and practiced trilling thirty-second notes against my chest. I found it immensely difficult, but totally absorbing, which was what I needed. I practiced every night until it was time for bed, seldom even interrupting for tea or to chat with Edik or the others. I became almost obsessed for a while with my beautiful seven-stringed instrument and Rachmaninov’s beautiful polka, and after what must have been weeks or maybe months on that single piece, I reached the point where I could haltingly play it through from start to finish, following the printed music, even though my thirty-second notes left something to be desired.

  Then someone got me some Chopin waltzes, and that was the next challenge.

  Working away at that intricate music I could forget the howling winds outside on winter nights, ignore the bedbugs for a while, encapsulate myself from the smell of death. Music was a world of its own, beautifully structured, demanding the most intense concentration from me. I would turn to my guitar after witnessing a terrible death or an act of brutal violence and wipe the intolerable scenes from my mind.

  Struggling home at night through snowdrifts or choking dust, I would fix in my mind the image of the gleaming white pine sounding board of my beloved instrument, and slip my hand inside my jacket and play and play all the way home, so that the march became shorter and the curses of the guards and the barking of their dogs were quite remote to me.

  I bought the guitar with money. Sometimes I would trade extra bread or oil to a prisoner who had managed to hold on to a few rubles, and sometimes the free workers who bought my hardware manufacture would pay in money. Using the same free workers as contraband runners, I, could bring in a few simple luxuries after a while. One of the most important was tea: I found that real tea gave me an energy boost in the morning, and once I found I could have it brought in I was never without it as long as I was able to afford it.

  I missed coffee. Sometimes I could actually smell it, I wanted it so much. One day Pavel Voronkin came up to me in the street outside the barracks and said, “I think there are changes coming. I think things are going to get better. They have brought us real coffee!”

  I could hardly believe it. “How do we get it?”

  “It’s in sacks by the boiler room,” Pavel said. “And the funny thing is, no one seems to be picking it up!”

  I grabbed a pillowcase and ran to the boiler room. He had been telling the truth. There were three or four sacks of coffee beans. The smell was so good my stomach began to churn. Out of the three thousand people in camp there were not a hundred who knew what real coffee was, so the coffee enthusiasts like Pavel Voronkin and myself were able to stuff our mattresses and pillows with a supply of beans that lasted for months. We smuggled some flat stones back from the DOZ to grind it with, and for a while had fresher coffee than you get in most American homes. God knows how real coffee had ended up in Dzhezkazgan, but it was another contact with reality, with my American roots, and I got a lot more out of it than just a good morning jolt of caffeine. Pavel explained the arrival of the coffee by saying that they were so used to ersatz burnt-grain coffee coming in for the MVD, that when sacks came marked coffee, and turned out to contain brown beans with a funny smell, the administration assumed it was some inferior product meant for the prisoners,—and just dumped it out for us to make what we could of it. He was probably right. The Baltics and the intellectuals and a few others scrambled for it and it went quickly enough, but into a relatively small number of hands.

  I suppose one of the reasons that the music was so important to me at this period in my life was that, although I knew a lot of people and was on good terms with many of them, I had not formed any deep friendship like that with Arvid Atsinch, who was, if he was still alive, far away in another camp in the area. Edik was a good pal and we had common political views and a very amiable companionship.

  Pavel Voronkin was bright and sensitive, and we liked each other and I think trusted each other. Zyuzin was kind and protective and a good music teacher, but not close. I did not have anyone with whom I was really close, and so I buried myself in pages of Chopin and Rachmaninov and in the constant exercising and training of my fingers, which were brutalized each day by heavy steel and welders’ gloves and were not as trainable as I wanted them to be.

  Walking to work and drumming thirty-second notes against my chest, or staring at the beautiful pine grain of my guitar while I rested my hands, I would daydream escape plans. I wanted desperately to escape, but the more I heard about the failure rate the less I believed in the possibility. Almost nobody ever came to me with a credible plan. And while attempts were made every few weeks, they almost all failed.

  That very winter of 1952, when the snow was blowing so hard the MVD had to string ropes from the barracks to the mess hall and from the mess hall to the toilets so that we would not wander in circles and freeze to death, a Georgian army officer named Georghadze somehow retrieved his uniform from the storeroom where they kept our personal property, made up some insignia to replace what had been ripped off, and one blinding night when nobody in his right mind would be outside he simply climbed up the barbed wire in the fire zone and went over the wall. They found him when the spring thaw came and the drift he had frozen to death in melted away and revealed his body. The soldiers brought him back and slung the body over some wire outside the gates and left it there for two weeks until it was thoroughly rotten.

  I had a friend named Vasya who had worked in the automotive works in Moscow with my father. That was the only real basis for our friendship, but often in the evenings before the mess hall finally shut up and the barracks were then closed, I would go over to his barracks and chat for a while. He told me about a fourteen-year-old boy he had met who had tried two escapes. This boy had been in a band of Ukrainian guerrillas and at the age of ten had been trained as an assassin. Because he was so small and so young, he could easily escape detection, and he had been sent into the village when there was a visiting MGB or other Soviet official the guerrillas wanted to eliminate; he had managed to “execute” ten men and escape without detection before he was caught. He had been assigned to Vasya’s motor repair unit, in which there were several junior brigades of free workers, teenagers who came in every day to work in the unit and take mechanical training. This juvenile terrorist, Vasya told me, got his civilian clothing from the storeroom and wore it under his black prison garb to the work site one day. Then he slipped into a toilet or a tool shed and got rid of his outer clothes with the numbers on it, and simply walked out the gate. The guards knew there were free young kids around and assumed he was one of them.

  Later, one of these same young kids saw him walking into town and reported him. The MVD found him watching a movie and eating ice cream in the town of Dzhezkazgan. The same kid tried it again concealed in a shipment of stone on a railway car, wearing girl’s clothes. He had been p
ut in the ZUR camp for escapees and hardened criminals, and sent to extreme hard labor in the quarries. I guess he knew that would kill him. He was very slight and frail. He was probably not terribly blight either, because they spotted him the next morning sitting on top of a pile of rocks as the train went through Kingir about twenty-seven kilometers north, still wearing his dress and looking quite unconcerned, and they threw him in the cooler.

  Two Estonian kids tried a bold plan that did not work. They went to the toilets, climbed through the holes, and buried themselves to the nose in the filth beneath. It was a futile try. They had expected that the guards would. leave the watchtowers as usual once a search of the mine zone where they worked had failed to turn them up; then they would just climb the wire in the night and walk away. In fact, as long as prisoners are missing in the head count at the work site, the watchtowers are left manned, even if it takes a week. The boys were found hours later. They weren’t even beaten up, just washed with cold-water hoses and given twenty-five years, including three months in the BUR, the hard punishment barracks.

  Two brilliant escapes caused a tremendous amount of excitement. Another Georgian named Grigori Ashvili became a legend in Dzhezkazgan. He worked in the rail depot, unloading coal, and, like all the workers on that site, came into the camp at night blackened from head to foot, nothing but a pair of eyes staring out of his mask of a face. There were several free workers handling clerical and dispatching jobs at the coal depot, and Ashvili went to work on one young woman with the total and unwavering objective of making her fall in love with him. He succeeded. She was dying for him to be free, to live with her, and was persuaded to take any risk. Over a period of weeks and months (and obviously much of this was pieced together later by inference) he trained her with diagrams and so on to know the layout of the camp and of his barracks as well as he knew them himself. Then one day she brought him civilian clothes and they slipped away somewhere and she put on his prison uniform and blacked her face and cut her hair. She was similar in height and build to him—he had chosen her for that reason. Free workers were not counted at night. She took his place for the head count. Since she must have had some collaboration from other prisoners, it was a wonder that no stool pigeon spotted her and gave her away. She marched back to the barracks with the column. Since the head count came out all right all the guards left the site with the column, and Grigori Ashvili just climbed under a coal train and rode out with it., The woman seems to have stayed with his brigade for several days, and then changed back into her own clothes at the work site and washed up and walked out in a normal way. So far as I know they were never caught, and this exploit was the talk of Dzhezkazgan for years afterward.