Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  Fiodorov, whose name was repeated on dozens of lips, burned and cracked by the wind and by starvation, was the district NKVD officer at the mine. He was approaching the pit face where our brigade was working.

  •

  There are few spectacles so telling as the juxtaposition of the camp bosses with the goners: the former figures are well-fed, portly, weighed down by their own fat, wearing smelly new sheepskin jackets that shine like the sun, ornate Yakut reindeer-fur boots, and brightly patterned long gauntlets, while the latter are skeletal and ragged, with “steaming” clots of cotton wool sticking out of their quilted jackets, all with the same dirty, bony faces and sunken eyes shining with hunger. Such composite spectacles could be seen every day, every hour in the Moscow-to-Vladivostok prison wagons and in the torn, plain tarpaulin camp tents in which prisoners lived at the Cold Pole, never taking their outer clothes off, never washing, where their hair froze and stuck to the tent walls and where there was no way to get warm. The tent roofs were torn; during the recent dynamiting at the pit face, rocks had hit the tents. One tent was hit by a rock so big that it remained in the tent forever—people used it as a place to sit, eat, and share their bread.

  Fiodorov moved at a leisurely pace along the pit face. Other men in fur jackets accompanied him. I wasn’t to know who they were.

  It was spring, an unpleasant time, when icy water came to the surface everywhere, but you still hadn’t been issued your summer rubber boots. We were all wearing winter footwear: coarse soft boots made of old quilted trousers with soles of the same material, which became soaking wet in our first ten minutes at work. Our toes, which were frostbitten and bleeding, were unbearably cold. Wearing rubber boots was no better for the first few weeks, since the rubber let in the coldness of the permafrost, and there was no escape from the throbbing pain.

  Fiodorov walked the length of the pit face, asked a question, and our foreman, with a respectful deep bow, reported something. Fiodorov yawned, and his gold teeth, the result of good dentistry, reflected the sun’s rays. The sun was now at its zenith. One’s only conclusion was that Fiodorov had undertaken this trip after his “night work.” He asked another question.

  The foreman called me over. I’d just wheeled up an empty barrow with the skill of an experienced barrow man, holding the handles vertical so as to rest my arms, and the barrow tipped so that its wheel was in front. I went up to the boss.

  “So you’re Shalamov, are you?” asked Fiodorov.

  That evening I was arrested.

  •

  Our summer clothes were being issued: a tunic, cotton trousers, foot bindings, rubber boots. This was one of the important days of the year in a prisoner’s life. On another even more important day, winter clothing was issued. They handed out whatever they laid hands on; trying to sort out sizes for shoes and clothes took place later, in the barracks.

  When my turn came, the quartermaster said, “Fiodorov wants to see you. When you get back, then you’ll get them. . . .”

  At the time I didn’t grasp the real meaning of what the quartermaster had said.

  Some official, a stranger to me, led me to the edge of the settlement where the district NKVD man had a tiny cabin.

  I was sitting in the twilight outside the dark windows of Fiodorov’s cabin, chewing a piece of last year’s straw, not thinking about anything. There was a solid bench on the mound of earth outside the cabin, but prisoners were not allowed to sit on the bosses’ benches. I stroked and scratched my parchment-dry, cracked, dirty skin under my quilted jacket and I smiled. Whatever was ahead was bound to be something good. I was seized by an amazing feeling of relief, almost of happiness. Tomorrow and the next day I wouldn’t have to go to work. I wouldn’t have to swing my pickax to hit that accursed rock that makes your muscles, as thin as rope, quiver with each blow.

  I knew that I was always at risk of getting a new sentence. I was very much aware of the camp traditions in that respect. In 1938, the year of dread in Kolyma, the first people to be framed with new charges were those who had short sentences, or whose sentences were coming to an end. That was what they always did. I had arrived here, however, in the Jelgala special zone, as an “overstayer.” My sentence had ended in January 1942, but instead of being released, I was “detained in the camps until the end of the war,” like thousands, tens of thousands of others. Until the end of the war! It was hard enough to get through a day, let alone a year. All the overstayers became the subject of the investigating authorities’ intensive surveillance. They had made great efforts to frame me with a new case at Arkagala, too, where I was before I came to Jelgala. But they didn’t succeed. All they achieved was to transfer me to a punishment zone, which was, of course, by its very nature an ominous sign. But why torture myself by thinking about something I could do nothing about?

  I knew, of course, that I had to be doubly cautious about what I said, how I behaved. I wasn’t a fatalist. And yet, what difference did knowing everything, foreseeing everything make? All my life I have been unable to make myself call a swine a decent human being. And I believe it’s better not to be alive at all if you can’t say a word to anyone, or if you can only say the opposite of what you think.

  “What’s the point of human experience?” I was asking myself, as I sat on the ground under Fiodorov’s dark window. What was the point of knowing, feeling, guessing, that one man was an informer, a snitch, and another a swine, and yet another a vindictive coward? I would be better off, safer, if I treated him as a friend rather than as an enemy. Or at least, if I kept my mouth shut. All you had to do was lie, to them and to yourself, and that was unbearably difficult, far harder than telling the truth. What was the point if I couldn’t change my nature, my behavior? What did I need that accursed “experience” for?

  A light came on in the room, the curtain was suddenly drawn back, the door of the cabin opened wide, and the orderly stood on the threshold, gesturing for me to come in.

  An enormous office desk with lots of drawers, piled high with folders, pencils, notebooks, filled the tiny, low-ceilinged room. Apart from the desk two homemade chairs had somehow been squeezed into this room. One of them was painted; Fiodorov was sitting on it. The other was unpainted; it was polished by hundreds of prisoners’ behinds, and it was reserved for me.

  Fiodorov pointed to the chair, started rustling papers, and the “case” began. . . .

  There are three ways in which a prisoner in a camp can have his fate “broken,” that is, changed: serious illness, a new sentence, and something extraordinary. There were quite a few extraordinary chance happenings in our lives.

  As I grew weaker with every day at the Jelgala pit face, I hoped that I would end up in the hospital and die there, or recover, or be sent off somewhere. I was falling over with tiredness and weakness; when I walked, I shuffled my feet over the ground. Any unevenness, a pebble, a thin piece of wood were insuperable obstacles in my path. But every time I went to the outpatient clinic, the doctor would pour me a tin ladle full of potassium permanganate solution and croak out, without looking me in the eye, “Next!” They gave you potassium permanganate to drink as treatment for dysentery; they used it to anoint frostbitten digits, wounds, and burns. Permanganate was the camp’s universal and unique medication. They never once gave me time off from work—the simpleminded male nurse explained that “the limit had been reached.” In fact, every camp medical point and clinic had its target figures for category T: “temporarily let off work.” Nobody wanted to exceed the limit: any doctors or paramedics who were also prisoners ran the risk of being sent to do manual labor if they were too softhearted. The “plan” was a Moloch that demanded human sacrifices.

  In winter Jelgala had been visited by the top authorities. Drabkin, the head of the Kolyma camps, had come.

  “Do you know who I am? I’m the one who is everyone’s superior.” Drabkin was a young man, who had only recently been appointed.

  Surrounded by a mob of bodyguards and local bosses, he inspected the bar
racks. There were people in our barracks who still hadn’t lost interest in having a conversation with the top bosses. Drabkin was asked, “Why are there dozens of people without sentences being kept here, when they finished serving their sentence a long time ago?”

  Drabkin was fully prepared for this question. “Don’t you know you do have a sentence? Weren’t you read out a document saying you would be detained until the end of the war? That was your sentence. That means that you have to stay in the camp.”

  “Indeterminately?”

  “Don’t interrupt when someone in authority is speaking to you. Your release depends on the references you’re given by the local camp authorities. Do you know the character references you’re getting?” Drabkin made a vague gesture with his arm.

  •

  What an anxious silence ensued behind my back, how many conversations were broken off when I, a doomed man, approached, how many looks of sympathy—no smiles, of course, no mockery, for men in our brigade had long forgotten how to smile. Quite a few men in the brigade knew that Krivitsky and Zaslavsky had ratted me out. Quite a few sympathized with me but were afraid to show it in case I got them involved. I later found out that Fertiuk, an ex-schoolteacher whom Zaslavsky had called on as a witness, had refused outright, so that Zaslavsky had to perform with his usual partner, Krivitsky. Two witness statements were the minimum required by the law.

  •

  When I’d lost my strength, when I’d become utterly feeble, I had an irresistible desire to fight. This feeling was an enfeebled man’s perverse obsession, familiar to any prisoner who has ever been starved. Hungry people don’t fight like other people. They take a run-up in order to deliver a punch, they try to hit with their shoulders, to bite, to trip their opponent up, to squeeze his throat. There are countless pretexts for a quarrel. Everything irritates a prisoner: the bosses, the work that lies ahead, the cold, the heavy tools, and his fellow prisoner next to him. A prisoner picks a fight with the sky, with his spade, with a rock, with any living creature nearby. The most petty argument can expand into a bloodletting battle. But prisoners don’t write denunciations. Denunciations are written by the Krivitskys and Zaslavskys. That, too, was in the spirit of 1937.

  “He called me a fool, so I wrote that he wanted to poison the government. We’re quits! He quotes something at me, I get him exiled.” But not just exile: prison or a bullet in his neck.

  The experts at this sort of business, the Krivitskys and Zaslavskys, quite often end up in prison themselves, which means that someone else has been turning their own weapon against them.

  In the past Krivitsky was a deputy minister of the defense industry, and Zaslavsky was a sketch writer for the newspaper Izvestiya. I had beaten up Zaslavsky several times. What for? For being underhanded, for picking up a beam by the top end instead of the heavy bottom end, for telling the foreman or the deputy foreman, Krivitsky, everything that the working team talked about. I never had a chance to beat up Krivitsky: we worked on different teams—but I loathed him for the special part he played as deputy foreman, for his constant inactivity at work, for the invariable “Japanese” smile on his face.

  •

  “How does the foreman treat you?”

  “Well.”

  “Who are you on bad terms with in your brigade?”

  “Krivitsky and Zaslavsky.”

  “Why?”

  I did my best to explain.

  “Well, none of that matters. Let’s write: Krivitsky and Zaslavsky are on bad terms with me because I’ve quarreled with them while working.”

  I signed.

  Late at night the escort guard and I were walking back to the camp, not to the barracks but to a squat building just outside the zone: the camp solitary confinement area.

  “Have you got anything in the barracks?”

  “No. It’s all on me.”

  “So much the better.”

  •

  It’s said that interrogation is a battle between two persons: the interrogator and the accused. Probably that’s true. Only you can hardly talk about willpower when a man has been worn out by many years of unremitting starvation, cold, and hard labor, when his brain cells are desiccated and have lost their properties. The effects of many years of prolonged hunger on the human will and soul is quite different from those of any prison hunger strike or torture by starvation that reaches the point when force-feeding is required. In the latter cases a man’s brain still remains intact and his spirit is still strong. His spirit can still dominate his body. If Dimitrov [30] had been prepared for his trial by Kolyma interrogators, the world would not have known any Leipzig trial.

  •

  “Well, how are we going to proceed?”

  •

  The main thing is to gather what’s left of your reason, to try to guess, understand, find out: only Zaslavsky and Krivitsky could have written statements against you. (At whose insistence? According to whose plan, to meet what target figures?) Look at how wary the interrogator became, how he made his chair creak as soon as you mentioned those names. Stand firm: announce that you challenge the witnesses. Challenge Krivitsky and Zaslavsky! If you win, you’re “free.” You’re back in the barracks, in “freedom.” This fairy tale, this joyful solitude, this cozy dark isolation cell where the only light and air you get comes through a gap in the door, will immediately stop, and the rest will start again: the barracks, the lining up to go to work, pickax, wheelbarrow, gray rock, icy water. Which is the right road? Where is salvation to be found? Where is luck?

  •

  “Well, how are we to proceed? If you like I can summon ten witnesses of your choosing from your brigade. Give me any names you like. I’ll see them in my office and they’ll all give evidence against you. I’m right, aren’t I? I guarantee that’s what will happen. You and I are grown-ups, aren’t we?”

  •

  The punishment zones are distinguished by the musicality of their names: Jelgala, Golden. . . . Places for punishment zones are selected cleverly. Jelgala is on a high mountain: the mine pit faces are down below, in a ravine. That means that after many hours of exhausting work people have to climb ice-covered steps, carved out of the snow, and grab stumps of frozen willow; they have to climb, using up their last reserves of strength, carrying firewood with them, a daily portion of firewood to heat the barracks. The little boss who chose this place as a punishment zone was, of course, well aware of all this. He understood something else, too: that anyone who resisted, who refused or was unable to go to work, could be rolled or thrown down the camp’s mountain, and they did this at the morning roll calls in Jelgala. Anyone who wasn’t walking was grabbed by the arms and legs by big guards, swung in the air, and thrown downhill. At the bottom there was a horse waiting; it was harnessed to a sled. Resisters were tied by their feet to the sled and dragged to their workplace.

  Man may have become man because he was physically stronger, tougher than any other animal. And this is still true. People didn’t die because they were made to bang their heads over the Jelgala roads for two kilometers: horses pulling sleds don’t gallop, after all.

  Thanks to the topographical features, it was easy at Jelgala to have what they called “roll calls minus one,” when prisoners try to dash down by themselves, to roll down before the guards can throw them into the abyss. Roll calls minus one in other places were usually done with the help of dogs. The Jelgala dogs took no part in roll calls.

  •

  It was spring, and solitary confinement was not so bad. By then I had gotten to know the Kadykchan solitary confinement, with cells hacked out of the rock in the permafrost, and the Partisan isolation unit, where the guards had deliberately ripped out all the moss that filled the gaps between the beams. I was also familiar with the Spokoinoye mine’s ice-covered, solitary confinement prison, made from logs of winter larch, surrounded by frozen fog, as well as the Black Lake solitary confinement unit, where icy water served as a floor and a narrow bench as a bunk. My prison experience was extensiv
e: I could sleep on a narrow bench, dream, and yet not fall into the icy water.

  Camp ethics allow you to deceive your bosses, to “stuff rubbish” in your measurements and calculations, so it appears as if you have fulfilled your norm. In any carpentry job you can cut corners and fake things. There is only one job where you are meant to be conscientious: when you build the camp solitary confinement prison. You can be careless when you assemble logs to make the bosses’ barracks, but any prison for the prisoners must be warm and solid. “We’re going to be the ones in it.” Even though this is a tradition observed mainly by the gangsters, rationality is still at the core of this attitude. But it is all theory. In practice, wedges and moss are the main materials everywhere, and a camp solitary confinement prison is no exception.

  The Jelgala solitary confinement prison had a special design: there was no window, so it brought back memories of the Butyrki “trunks.” A gap in the door to the corridor was the nearest thing to a window. I spent a month here on solitary rations: three hundred grams of bread and a mug of water a day. Twice that month the solitary confinement orderly shoved a bowl of soup into my hands.

  •

  Covering his face with a perfumed handkerchief, interrogator Fiodorov deigned to have a conversation with me.

  “Would you like to see the paper? Look, Comintern has been dissolved. That should interest you.”

  No, it didn’t interest me. But I would like a cigarette.

  “You’ll have to pardon me. I don’t smoke. You see, you’re being accused of praising Hitler’s armaments.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, that you reacted with approval to the German invasion.”

  “I know practically nothing about it. I haven’t seen the papers for many years. Six years.”

  “Well, that’s beside the point. Now, you once said that in the camps the Stakhanovite movement was fake and a lie.”