An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  When I wrote to Zoya I opened with “My dear love Zoya.” To Gertrude it was always, “My very, very dear Gertrude.”

  They put me back in the DOZ. I was much more competent and careful now, and I soon was running a five-speed lathe, making machine parts of some precision. The work was not so bad, but once again I had to march in a forced convoy with guards and dogs, and I had to work hard mentally to keep reminding myself that I had some optimism about the future.

  A pay system had been introduced by then. It was the fall of 1954. We had a little money. If you saved carefully, a couple of rubles a month, you could treat yourself to some candy or packaged cigarettes or toothpaste and other small but, tb us, rare luxuries like that. We could get margarine and other foods from outside, and for the most part my health was excellent.

  A Lithuanian friend who had a pass had made friends with three schoolteachers in Dzhezkazgan, one of whom taught English. He encouraged me to start writing to her to help her English and my morale. So now I was corresponding with three different women. My Lithuanian friend had won their good will by taking them firewood; every day he had tied up scraps of wood with steel wire and left the bundle hanging on the door of their apartment, and after a while they. got over their fear of talking to a prisoner and became quite friendly with him. My letters to the teacher of English, whose name was Yelena, were half in Russian and half in simple schoolbook English, which was all she could manage. But simple as they were, they added to my stock of devices for getting through the time which I hoped and prayed was getting shorter now.

  There were so many indications of change. Prisoners were paying attention to dress. Men cut wedges out of the bottoms of their trouser legs and inserted gussets, and so, fifteen years before it was a big thing back home in America, we were cheering ourselves up in Dzhezkazgan with flared pants. Fancy boots were becoming a big thing. Prisoners had time and energy now to make things for themselves, and elaborate high felt boots with rubber soles and colored patterns up the sides began to appear all over camp.

  After a while Lavrenov asked for me back in the hospital, and although Voloshin had not cooled off enough to give me a pass outside the camp, I went back to my old job as feldsher. It was pleasant in the hospital again. Now the incidence of severe infections and other illnesses related to extreme fatigue and malnutrition was way down, and so was the mortality rate. We still had plenty of cardiac patients, and the agony of their deaths was, somehow, harder than ever for me to watch. In a way I was becoming more impatient, more cynical, and more selfish. I heard that a transaction called zachyoty was to be instituted. Under this system, for every day of hard labor you put in, two days were deducted from your sentence. And if you had the nerve to go to the copper mines, you got three days off for every day you worked. I was beginning to be obsessive about getting out. For some reason I was sure that Gertrude would get out before me, and that if I were long behind her I would never see her again. I thought it over for a long time, and then put in an application to work in the copper mines. Adarich said I was crazy, but I knew that if anyone could devise a lu/la that would produce tolerable days in the mines, it was me; I had seen it all, I thought. And even if I could not, I wanted out so badly I was prepared to tackle real hard labor this time. It was not a memorable period. I drugged myself with work. I just shut my eyes and bulldozed my way through it. I was assigned to an assembly group, putting together the electric dragging machines. Part of the work was on the surface and part down below. On the surface we uncrated the parts and checked them. Then we loaded them onto the elevator. Down in the mine we had to unload them again and start to put them together. I found the work tolerable until one day my two partners were crushed by falling rock. One died and the other lost both his legs. That left me with a deep fear of being underground that I had never had before. I was close to those boys when it happened, and I remember how the whole area of crushed rock was dark red with their blood. I decided then that I had better find a way to goof off again as soon as I could, and that if I could not I would ask Lavrenov to get me back in the hospital, and just forget about the remission of extra days.

  A lot of women began turning up in Dzhezkazgan. Some were looking for their husbands. Sometimes in convoy we would pass a few women in the streets at Zheldor Poselok, or even outside the mines. They would look us all over very anxiously, and we stared at them with great curiosity. Once in a rare while there would be a yell: “Alexei! Alexei!” Someone had recognized her husband. And then people arranged to send notes, and if the man was working in a slack place like Zheldor Poselok, ex-prisoners would help her to go there and find a place to hide and they would meet and begin to plan for the future that we were all sure was coming now. It was rumored that a special commission would be coming from Moscow to review all our cases, and that perhaps many of us would be released.

  Now another amnesty was announced. The thousands and thousands of prisoners of war, Russians who had been captured by the Germans and then imprisoned for treason when they returned home, were released and forgiven. Presumably my friend Dr. Irene went out with this group. The camps began to look distinctly underpopulated. I was afraid that Gertrude had somehow been let out with this group, because her letters suddenly stopped coming. But friends reported that she had gone into a depression and was speaking to nobody, and this was why she didn’t write.

  Parasha, the usually reliable prison telegraph, brought news that the long-awaited commission from Moscow had begun its work. No one could yet say when the commission would get to Dzhezkazgan, but the news was this: thousands of prisoners were being released every day. Since there were about seventeen million political prisoners in the Soviet Union in the early fifties, it would take some time before the wave of releases would get to us, we assumed, but that was not the bad part. The bad part was that the only ones who were not released were those who had not had a trial but had been sentenced by committee or tribunal or special procedure. Gertrude had been sentenced by committee; she had not had a trial. Now, friends reported, she assumed she was going to be in camp tor the rest of her twenty-five-year sentence. That was why she was so depressed. I tried writing her to cheer her up. But I had a hard time knowing what to say. I had been sentenced by special procedure myself.

  * * *

  2Felix Zaporozhets’ father, Ivan, had been deputy chief of the Leningrad secret police (NKVD) and had been implicated in the assassination of the Leningrad party chief, Sergei Kirov, in 1934. Zaporozhets Sr. and his wife were later shot. Felix being a juvenile, his life was spared and he was sent to the labor camps.

  Chapter 27

  From the beginning I had been forbidden to send or receive mail. Suddenly, without explanation, on August 20, 1955, I got a letter from my mother. It was very simple. Her handwriting was weak and irregular, which made me think she must be sick. But she said that she was all right, that the MVD had given her my address, and that she wanted news of my state of health. That was about all. I quickly got hold of Epstein the photographer and got another copy of my pass photograph and sent it off to Mother with a short note that could not possibly excite the censor, saying that my health was good, that I was thrilled to hear from her, and that if there was any chance of a food parcel, I would enjoy a few treats. Like any other boy in camp.

  Before long a parcel came. Obviously Stella must have sent it from America, and my mother forwarded it to me. It contained Maxwell House coffee! In a vacuum-packed tin. I had tasted no real coffee since the bonanza we’d found outside the barracks several years back and this flavor and aroma were nostalgic and intoxicating. There were canned butter and canned bacon, also real treats, because fats were still hard to come by. And there was a whole carton of Chesterfield cigarettes. I lost most of those to the guard who inspected the parcel for contraband and I came close to losing everything else because I got into such a fight with him over the cigarettes, but I cooled off in time and realized that everything has its price. He let me keep two packs out of the ten.

&n
bsp; I shared the cigarettes with Pavel Voronkin, who had moved into my barracks and was becoming a very close friend. During one of the mixed culture brigade concerts I had briefly met an attractive young woman from Harbin, where Pavel had lived as a child. She was the child of Russian specialists in China, as Pavel was. They started to correspond through my introduction, and without ever setting eyes on each other fell in love. Then, after a few months, they managed to meet each other and found that a real and tangible affection had grown. They agreed to marry if they ever got out alive. Pavel was to see Yulya only twice before she was released in an early amnesty. But they kept up a vigorous correspondence. Yulya stayed in the area and vowed to wait for him. Her letters were long and warm and frequent. Many of them were brought to Pavel bootleg by free workers at Zheldor Poselok. They really kept Pavel alive at this period, because he had begun to feel, like my beloved Gertrude, that he might never be released. Pavel too had been sentenced by committee.

  I managed to get myself transferred to Zheldor Poselok. The work assignment was ostensibly hard labor, so the two days’ zachyoty was allowed. In fact I found it easy to set up the same kind of totally tufta life I had arranged before, and because there were so many exciting rumors of freedom I found the idleness tolerable.

  I had convinced myself that the refusal to release those sentenced by committee made no sense at all and would soon be corrected. Although, of course, there was a deep fear, which I suppressed as well as I could, that I might be wrong.

  The fall and early winter of 1955 were dull and routine, except for some spectacular ice storms and very heavy snow. We were able to arrange a small Christmas celebration for the first time. Voloshin, although he still refused to relent and give me a pass, was civil and even friendly in a greasy sort of way when I met him in the Zone. He went through the Zone often now, trying to rehabilitate his image with the prisoners.

  There were many stories of suicide among the camp administrators all over the Soviet Union, and particularly among KGB officers. The hard, cynical exterior they had always shown us during interrogation could not really have shielded them from some awareness that their lives were made of daily obscene outrages against their fellow men and women. Now the prospect of millions of these violated bodies roaming the streets of the Soviet Union brought home to them some sense of the reality of all this. Probably most killed themselves out of fear. But I hope and I think I believe that there were some who did it out of self-loathing.

  There was a rash of suicides in our area in January of 1956: the commission— the commission had arrived in Kingir. Within twenty-four hours we heard that they reviewed a case every two or three minutes in an almost purely pro forma way, and that more than one hundred releases were declared the first day.

  Now we understood what the construction of Nikolsky Project had been all about. For many of the released there was no home to go back to. Their wives or husbands, children, parents had died in prison or been shot or disappeared. Many, of the released still had terms of exile to serve. There was an acute need to keep the mines of Dzhezkazgan functioning, and the work force would largely be made up of ex-prisoners. Nikolsky was to be their home.

  Soon details began to run through the parasha telling us how the commission operated in Kingir. There were four members. One was a representative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; one was an official of the Office of the Chief Prosecutor, General Rudenko, who had signed my arrest order in the first place; one was a top-level KGB; and one was a representative of the political prisoners.

  Every day the spectacular news came that hundreds more had been released from Kingir. The excitement in our camp was almost unbearable. Discipline became very lax, even in the mines. Even the dumbest, coarsest, toughest guards started trying to behave like human beings. Many of them could not manage it without seeming childish and silly; they had never learned adult ways of being decent. By late February the air was electric. First one camp and then another in Kingir had been emptied and declared closed. The few prisoners not released from a camp would be moved to a neighboring camp while the commission went on with its work. Then the really dramatic news was released: the commission would arrive in Dzhezkazgan on March 1.

  The lists were posted. On the first day the agitated, anxious faces lining up to be taken to the administration building were surrounded by almost all the rest of the camp, some joking, some wishing their friends luck, some staring silent.

  The stories came back within the hour as the first free men returned to camp. A man would go up the steps to the room where the commission met. The door would close. Within minutes he would be back out, stumbling like a drunk, grinning, maybe jumping up and down, maybe just pale and stunned.

  Some lay on their bunks. Some sat in a trance. A few got busy in a practical methodical way, packed up their stuff, went around and shook hands with their friends, and then marched to the gates and were free, just like that. The first groups of free men had to wait several days before their passports, train tickets, and release certificates were arranged.

  By the third day it was clear that many of them had no sense at all of how to manage on the outside. There were many deaths from drunkenness, and from accidents arising out of drunkenness, or because people just stepped in front of trucks, without, seeming to see them, when they had not been drinking at all. Careful warnings were made to all the men walking out free, but many of them were totally unable to hear anything at all.

  It was the suddenness of it, combined with the anxiety. One moment you were a prisoner. The next moment you might be free but you dared not count on it because life had dealt so many blows you were conditioned by disappointment. Then, when you walked in and they asked your prayer and asked if there were any special circumstances and the prosecutor’s man said no there were not, and you were told you were free and pardoned, you were absolutely unprepared. You hadn’t had to lie or argue in your own behalf, or do anything but stand there and hear a ritual which by now was reduced to less than a minute if there were no special circumstances. It was too much to absorb.

  The committee would work for fifty minutes and then go out for a stretch and a smoke, and then get back at it. They took an hour for lunch, and then went on. One day they released a record three hundred prisoners.

  The first camp was emptied and closed; a hundred or so who had not been interviewed were moved from the KTR next door, and the gates between, which had been open for over a year now, were sealed shut again.

  Pavel Voronkin’s name came up very early. V is the third letter in the Russian alphabet, and is printed exactly the same as the English B. Voronkin came out looking shattered. He had known it might be so, but we all had encouraged him to think optimistically, and he wept openly and brokenly and told us that because he had been sentenced by special committee, he was to have his case reviewed again at some unstated future date. My stomach knotted at the news. I was almost sure I was in for the same thing. And I was right. I went to the administration building. I stood in front of the commission with my heart beating so loud it would break windows. The four men looked very tired. One of them was in full uniform. His name was General Todorov and he represented the political prisoners. He had served eleven years and been completely rehabilitated.

  Todorov said in a tired voice, when he heard my prayer, “We can’t review your case, Doldzhin. We have nothing but a slip of paper with your charges. We have to send to Moscow for your full file from the KGB. It will take between—one and two months, and we will call you back. That’s all. You have to go now. Bring in the next case.”

  That was it.

  In a few weeks they moved away to do the women of Dzhezkazgan. I consoled myself somehow, I don’t remember how. I think there was a lot of music at night. Pavel and I played a lot of chess and wandered about the half-empty camp, looking at the names and dates and verses and pictures scrawled or scratched or painted on the walls of empty barracks, and picking up the odd spoon or notepaper or books or other things l
eft behind by the thousands who had simply rushed to leave as soon as their release was granted. We had to go back to work. I saw a number of old and familiar faces at Zheldor Poselok, only now they were free men and women. I got a short warm note from Zoya: “Good-by. I will think of you. I embrace you. Zoya.” Well, that was all right. I felt good for her. There was no news from Gertrude.

  Adarich was gone, gone on the first day. Kask was gone and the dear, great-hearted non-Russian devil, Nye Russki, who came to me simply and openly and embraced me without a word and then straightened his moustache and his back and walked out of the gates with his sack over his shoulder, tall and quick and happy.

  Zyuzin was gone, with his fine guitar and his practical good sense. Epstein was gone, no more photographs. Kublanov and Feldman. Kuznetsov, who worried about spoons. Dear Edik, who would never again be welded into a safe. Aksyonov, whose face I had slapped.

  Grigori the acrobat was gone, and so was Stepanov the musician. All the old friends were gone but Pavel Voronkin, and we became closer and closer and vowed we would be friends the rest of our lives. Letters came often for Pavel from Yulya. Often I brought them home with me from Zheldor Poselok.

  I got another letter from my mother. Her handwriting was so shaky it was hard to read, and the sentences did not all make sense.

  For a while some prisoners were kept in camp until they had arranged new accommodations. The administration moved to head off more accidental deaths by imposing some order on the newly released. But by and by everyone was placed in work and accommodations in Dzhezkazgan or Nikolsky, or put on a train back to his home, and soon there were only a few hundred prisoners left, all in our camp. We heard that the towns of Nikolsky and Dzhezkazgan were overrun with professional criminals taking advantage of the horde of unworldly and innocent new arrivals who knew so little of the world. I wondered if any of my old urki acquaintances or other members of Valentin Intellighent’s tribe from Kuibyshev were plying their trade there.