An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  I said, “Well, what do you have to say now’?” There was a long pause.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. He could not look at me. “I was in Lefortovo. They nearly killed me. I had to sign it. I couldn’t stand the beatings. I’m sorry, Mr. Dolgun. I’m really sorry.”

  It was a long time since I had heard myself addressed like that in English, and deferentially. My violent intentions simmered down somewhat. I thought, Yes, you poor little bastard, I can believe you signed under pressure .1 did too, but nothing that could ever hurt another soul.

  I slapped him twice.

  He did not react, just stared at the ground. I walked away without looking back. Later we became friends, but not close friends. I knew I could never get into his soul, and although it was a treat to speak English and he was eager for my friendship, I never spent that much time with him. He was an unhappy little man. He was almost on his knees to me for attention and that put me off. I got over hating him for what he had done to me, but I had no interest in getting to know him intimately.

  I was getting harder and more cynical about life. The loss of Atsinch, even though I might never have seen him again anyway, had scarred my outlook. I was still optimistic about my survival and eventual release, but I was much more sour on the world. Arkadi’s death had had the same effect. I was dedicated now to doing everything I could, exploiting every decent opportunity I could find, such as Marusich’s friendship, to deny my labor to the inhuman, diabolical system that had taken the lives of my friends.

  The fourth day at Zheldor Poselok I found an unfinished boiler room in the basement of a building at the project. It seemed to me from the way material was stacked around and covered with dust that work had been suspended in it and that no one ever went there. It would be a restful place to spend the day, I thought. There was a barrel of cleaning rags, still clean, to make a bed with, and enough boards and stone to build a sort of shield so that even if anyone did come into the basement I would not be seen. I set about fixing the place up to suit me, and by the end of the day had it quite comfortable. Now all I needed was companionship. I roamed around and found the Muscovites and chatted with them until I felt that one of them might be interested in taking some chances, and I took him aside and asked him if he’d like to spend his days in a relaxed way. He refused absolutely he had nobody like Marusich to look after him with the brigadier. It took me a long time to find anyone who would be able to disappear just like that, but I finally found a couple of guys and they helped me fix up the place so that it was practically invisible, and for several days we slept and smoked and gossiped and got pretty bored.

  At noon I would go over to Marusich’s stove. I could hear him singing long before I got to him. People would say, “There goes the nightingale again.” I would eat my porridge and talk with Marusich a while and then drift back to my companions in the boiler room.

  One day we heard footsteps on the floor above, and then voices and the sounds of people coming down the ladder. Before we could douse our cigarettes the boards over our hideaway were flung aside and two colonels—one MVD, one MGB—had swept into the room. The MGB was Voloshin, the godfather of this camp. He was steely cold and furious. “What are you prisoners doing in here!”

  But I had had a marvelous inspiration even as the boards were coming off, and instead of skulking and looking guilty I leapt to my feet with my cigarette and held it up in the air as if I were tracing in smoke the air currents in the room.

  I said, “Citizen Colonel, you have made me lose track of my engineering calculations here, I’m afraid. You see, we’re evaluating the proper alignment of transfer girdles to equilibrate the oxygenometric status, and the calculations are quite delicate. If you can wait one minute until I get this stretch done I will be glad to go over our engineering conclusions with you.”

  It was pure double-talk, of course. My health and my morale were so good at that time I was able to carry something like that off with real panache, just as I had confronted Ivanov on my refusal to work. I knew the MGB and the army were impressed with scientific language, and that pseudo-scientific would do just as well as the real thing. I counted on their being much too proud to challenge me because they could never risk losing face by appearing not to understand. It worked. Voloshin said respectfully, “No, no, we won’t interrupt. Please get on with your important work. We are just making a general inspection.”

  They left. I noticed with relief that nobody had written down our numbers. I knew that the MVD colonel would make some inquiries later on, in an oblique way, and eventually discover that in fact he did not have any engineers working in that subterranean boiler room. Our hiding place had lost its usefulness, but it had been very pleasant while it lasted. Now I had to find something else to do or somewhere else to hide, and I began again to prowl the length and breadth of Zheldor Poselok to see what I could find.

  At one end of the project there were half a dozen two-and three-story apartment buildings going up. Construction and engineering shacks were scattered around the area. I walked among them, peering in windows and moving in and out of buildings. I had no particular objective. Just snooping. Suddenly I came around the corner of a building and bumped right into a tall man who was walking very fast. The blow nearly knocked me over. I was about to yell “Why don’t you watch where you’re going!” when I realized who it was: Victor S.! My friend from the first six months in Dzhezkazgan. We just stood there gaping at each other for a moment and then both started shouting at once.

  “What are you doing here! My God, isn’t this marvelous!” And so on.

  Victor told me his story. After I left him in that first camp when I was taken back to Moscow for interrogation by Ryumin, Victor had got himself a pridurki job in the administration office. But at the end of six months, when he found out that he would be sent off to hard labor again, he heard of an ingenious form of mastyrka and decided to try it as a way of getting out of hard labor. It was a little-known technique for faking silicosis.

  In his sack of personal belongings in the storeroom, Victor had a small silver ring. Following the instructions he had heard about, and never knowing whether it would make him seriously ill or not, he filed a small quantity of silver dust from the ring and mixed it with tobacco into a number of cigarettes. He smoked the cigarettes, inhaling as deeply as he could. The theory was that a microscopic film of silver dust would build up in the lungs in a way that would show a strong shadow in an X-ray without seriously impairing the lungs. Victor smoked the cigarettes wondering all the time whether he was committing suicide, but there was absolutely no noticeable physical result. Then he went to the hospital coughing in the way he had seen silicosis victims cough, and demanded an X-ray. Sure enough, there was a terrible shadow on the lungs, and he was disqualified from hard labor. He was sent to Spassk, the camp for incurables. That is how serious his “silicosis” looked on the plates. Then, not long before I ran into him, as part of the post-Stalin thaw, the government granted amnesty to all incurables, and Victor was freed. These invalids, who were written off the records as political prisoners and released, were all expected to die soon and were not given travel rights, so they all stayed on in Dzhezkazgan, and Victor applied for an engineering job at Zheldor Poselok. They took him on in the planning and design office. It was a soft job with modest but adequate pay. Victor was sure he could get me assigned to it. He had a lot of friends among the engineers, he said, and the engineers worked closely with the camp administration on the labor assignments, so it would be no trick to have me reassigned.

  It seemed too good to be true, but Victor was as good as his word, and within a few days I was reassigned. They gave me pots of paint and stacks of brushes and told me I was the project safety and propaganda artist. I protested that I could not even draw a house with two windows and a door and smoke curling out of the chimney. They said that did not matter; I was simply to print up big posters that said,

  ONLY THROUGH HARD LABOR CAN YOU BECOME FREE.
r />   Or

  WEAR PROTECTIVE HEADGEAR ON THIS PROJECT.

  I was no good at it at all. I would start a line with letters eight centimeters high and very skinny so they would not run off the end of the poster. Victor was my supervisor and he didn’t care. The engineers were not interested at all. The guards were mostly illiterate and all they had to do was ensure that the prisoners at least seemed to be working, so my days were relaxed and the company was very agreeable. Victor and I had plenty of time to talk politics and sports and speculate about the future together. After a few weeks of hopeless sign painting, somebody from the godfather’s office complained about the lousy posters, so Victor had me moved into the office with him as a blueprint planner, which was pure tufta and meant nothing at all except that we were able to spend most of the day together, and T was officially designated an engineer.

  Curiously, with the relaxation in regulations and hours of work and the softening of the harshness between guards and prisoners, I became less disciplined about keeping track of time and maintaining any kind of regimen to my life. It was a confused period anyway. A number of amnesties were granted. I think the first one was freedom for children under the age of fourteen. There were only about six in the whole area and even though the mere presence of six juveniles in such a dreadful prison is a monstrous indictment of the system itself, their going did not change things for the rest of us, except to cheer us up somewhat because it was a sign of change. Similarly, all prisoners with sentences of five years were released and pardoned. That accounted for maybe three men out of three thousand, but it was another sign.

  There were two army generals, former members of Zhukov’s general staff, in the KTR at that time. In the convoy to Zheldor Poselok the guards used to find every opportunity to lord it over these two old men and humiliate them. They would call them out of line for imaginary offenses, and swear at them and spit on them, using the title general in mocking tones all the time. One convoy leader used to make one of the generals lead the convoy in a position of mock eminence. He would say, “My sergeant will lead the general, and the general will lead the whole convoy!”

  Now, one day the two generals were excused from work and the story went around that a tailor had come to measure them. Not long after that they were brought new uniforms with full regalia, told they had been pardoned and fully rehabilitated, and put on the train to Moscow. According to the prison grapevine, Belyakov, the camp commandant, went with them to the train and offered to shake hands with them before they went on board. They both spat in his face.

  The barracks in KTR had prison status when I first went there, and we were locked in after the evening meal. Now this prison status was removed and the locks were taken off the doors. We had a celebration and tore all the bars out of the windows and threw them on the ground.

  The gates between the KTR and the adjoining camp were opened, and while the perimeter wall was still guarded with machine guns and the gates locked at night, the inmates were free to move between the camps and visit each other until lights out. It was rumored that reliable prisoners were to be given passes to come and go between camp and their work assignment without having to march in convoy: no barking dogs and cursing guards for them. Everyone dreamed of having a pass. Soon a list was posted of the numbers of those prisoners who would be issued passes, and every day we saw a few new smiles on the faces of those men who had this thrilling experience of imitation freedom.

  The numbers were finally taken away. I came out into the Zone one morning to find hundreds of prisoners yelling and laughing and ripping the linen patches off their sleeves and breasts and backs and caps and trouser legs. The air was filled with a snowstorm of number patches. No official order had been received in camp, but the prison telegraph had brought the news that it was about to happen and so we all just went ahead without the order, and Belyakov, the commandant, let it happen without any reprisals or even threats of reprisals. The next day the official order was promulgated. This seems like a small matter, but for all the prisoners of Dzhezkazgan the number was the prime symbol of our slavery, of our demotion from human being to object. Its disappearance was like the beginning of a fresh new day.

  There were rumors of labor camp mutinies in Siberia, and guards and administration and even the godfather became noticeably more friendly, in a sickening way, every day.

  A “culture brigade” was formed to give camp entertainments. I signed up as a musician. I found my old bunkmate Volodya Stepanov, the guitar player, and worked out a couple of duets under his guidance. I also practiced and re-practiced my Rachmaninov and my Chopin, for solo numbers. The brigade was allowed to assemble in the mess hall in the evening and practice. We hung blankets in the windows so the other prisoners would not be able to see us until the night of the performance, and we worked hard until lights out. Sundays were now work-free days all the time, and the culture brigade practiced all day.

  One of the acts was an acrobat named Grigori Levko. I showed off for his benefit one night and walked the length of the mess hall and back on my hands. He suggested that I do a partner act with him, and began to train me to hold him up on my hands while he stood on his own, and a number of other routines. There was a fine, trained Ukrainian baritone, and an accordion and a mandolin, and we rehearsed an orchestral number together. There was a sort of announcer and comedian who acted as master of ceremonies.

  After several weeks of practice we staged our first concert on a Sunday afternoon. The mess hall was packed. There was only room for about five hundred out of the total. population, in the two adjoining camps, of over four thousand; so we gave the same performance every week for several weeks. It was probably pretty ragged stuff, but we thought we were just fine, and so did the starved audience. The applause was deafening and the calls for encores so insistent that we usually ended up playing the whole concert all over again.

  Then a wonderful thing happened: a movie projector was brought in and Saturday night, once a month, we had a movie. They were terrible propaganda movies, about heroic tractor drivers, but we loved them. Two brothers named Boyko, who were professional electronics technicians, were put in charge of the operation and maintenance of the projector and its sound system, and they requisitioned tubes and other parts and began to build radios. The godfather found out about this, but instead of punishing anyone he brought over his own radio for repairs. Soon other radios came in for repairs, and the Boyko brothers were able to requisition extra parts and to copy circuits. They built some excellent radios which they tied into a sound system with a loudspeaker in each barracks so that the whole camp could have music. There were often fights at night. “Turn that goddamn thing off!”

  “No, damn you, leave it on; that’s my favorite symphony.”

  It was the early spring of 1954. The weather was beginning to moderate, but the ground was still covered with deep snowdrifts. The ache in my jaw where Ryumin had kicked my teeth out had been a minor chronic annoyance that was usually negligible but sometimes flared up. Finally I decided it was time to do something about it and persuaded the dentist at the KTR clinic to have a look. He found some root fragments and proceeded to remove them immediately, with a local anesthetic. In the process he damaged a blood vessel and nothing would stop the bleeding. Finally he packed some cotton in the pit in my gum and told me to clamp down hard on it for as long as I could. I went back to the barracks, full of painkillers, and determined to keep the pressure on all night if I had to. Of course, with all the drugs the dentist had given me, I went off to sleep early and slept all night, probably with my mouth open. When I woke up in the morning there was a huge clot on the bed beside me: I must have bled all night. I felt terrible. The bleeding had stopped but I had lost almost a quart of blood. I was feverish and light-headed. I stumbled to the clinic through the snowdrifts and got a clearance to stay in the camp for the day, so I went back to bed and slept for a few hours. When I woke up I felt better but still light-headed. I ate a little bread I had stored under my pillow
, and then went for a slow walk around camp. There was a bulletin board on the wall of the administration office. I seldom read it because almost everything posted on it had been heard through the parasha before it got into print. But it was a lazy day and, like everyone who has nothing to do, I was loafing around and looking at things I would never have bothered to look at before. I stopped to read all the old news on the bulletin board. In the lazy frame of mind I was in, I would have read the back of a cereal box.

  Your eye can pass over a great mass of words without really seeing them but a word with a strong psychological impact for you will leap off the page. The strongest is your own name. Suddenly my name hit me in the eye from the middle of a long list I had not even absorbed the sense of. I looked at the top of the list. “Prisoners Eligible for Passes: Apply at Administration Office.”

  I forgot about the pain in my jaw and the fever and the faintness. I ran to the office, certain that I would be told it was a mistake. It was no mistake. I was expected to go out of camp with the culture brigade to perform for other camps, and as a result a pass had been issued that would allow me to move about without convoy. This might have seemed an invitation to escape, but of course there was no way to cross the desert without being spotted by the little plane or dying of exposure, and the issuing of these passes had generated very few escape attempts. Security at the railway station and on the roads had been kept up and maybe even increased.

  My pass was issued in the guardroom in the wall by the gates. The guard on duty pulled my file and checked my photograph and my prayer and issued the pass. It seemed a maddeningly long process although it was probably less than one minute. I kept expecting the door to open at any moment and the kum to come in and yell, Cancel that pass! This man is dangerous! But nothing happened. The guard opened the door leading from the guardroom to the outside of the gates and suddenly there I was, for the first time in five and a half years, standing in the open air without a wall around me, with no guard standing over me, with no dogs barking! It was pure euphoria. I had an urge to run and roll in the snowbanks and laugh and cry and sing and yell. I knew that I had to be back inside the camp by eight o’clock that night, but it did not matter a damn. For the moment I was as good as a free man and I did not allow the slightest sense of reality to interfere with my savoring of the feeling.