Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  Who was lying under Kiseliov’s boots today, who was sitting in the snow? Zelfugarov: my neighbor in the bunk above me in the train that was going direct to hell, an eighteen-year-old boy with a weak constitution and worn-out muscles, prematurely worn-out. Zelfugarov’s facial features were drowned in blood and it was only his thick bushy eyebrows that enabled me to recognize my neighbor. He was a Turk, a forger. The fact that someone had forged money, an offense under article 58, paragraph 12, and was still alive, was something that no prosecutor and no interrogator could believe. The state had only one response to forging money—death. But Zelfugarov was a boy of sixteen when this happened.

  “We were making quality money, you couldn’t tell it from real money,” Zelfugarov, worked up by his memories, whispered to me in the barracks (an insulated tent with a plywood carcass inside the tarpaulin). “There are ways of doing that.” His father and mother and two of his uncles had been executed, but the boy survived. Not that he’d live long, as Kiseliov’s boots and fists would guarantee.

  I bent over Zelfugarov; he spat out his broken teeth onto the snow. His face was swelling before my eyes.

  “Go away, go away. If Kiseliov sees you he’ll lose his temper,” said the engineer Vronsky, pushing me in the back. Vronsky was a Tula miner, born in Tver, and he was the latest specimen from the trials of coal miners. He was an informer and a swine.

  We used to climb up narrow steps, hacked into the mountain, to get to our workplace. These were “cross-cut” shafts. There was a gallery tunneled through the mountainside. A lot of rock had already been hauled out by cable—the rails went deep inside. Inside they were drilling, hacking away, and exposing the ore.

  Vronsky and I, along with Savchenko,a postal worker from Harbin, and Kriukov, a locomotive driver, were all too weak to be getters, even to be allowed the honor of access to a pickax, a spade, and the “intensified” rations that apparently differed from our ordinary worker’s rations by an additional portion of porridge. I knew very well what the camp nutrition scale meant, what horrors were latent in this inducement by food rations, and I wasn’t complaining. The others, the novices, heatedly discussed the crucial question: Which category of nutrition would they be given in the next ten days (rations and vouchers changed every ten days). Which one indeed? We were too weak to get the intensified ration, our arm and leg muscles had long ago turned into rope, even string. But we still had muscles in our backs, in our chests, and we still had skin and bones, so we acquired calluses on our chests by carrying out engineer Kiseliov’s wishes. All four of us had chest calluses and white patches on our dirty, torn quilted jackets; the calluses on our chests made us look as if we were all wearing the same prison uniform.

  Rails had been laid down the gallery, and we would roll a wagon over the rails, using an ordinary rope or hemp cable. At the bottom it would be loaded and we would haul it back up. Naturally, we couldn’t haul the wagon up by hand, even if all four of us pulled together, as troikas of draft horses do in Moscow. In the camps every man hauls with all his strength, or with 50 percent more than full strength. Nobody knows how to haul together in the camps. But we had a mechanism, the same one that existed in ancient Egypt and made the construction of the pyramids possible. Pyramids, rather than some shaft, some lousy little shaft. That mechanism was a horse-drawn capstan, except that here we, humans, were harnessed to it instead of horses, and each one of us would press his chest against his own beam, pressing hard until the wagon slowly crawled out of the gallery. Then we left the capstan and rolled the wagon to the dump, unloaded it, hauled it back, put it on the rails, and pushed it down the black maw of the gallery.

  The bleeding calluses on our chests, the patches on everyone’s breasts were the marks of the horse capstan—or rather Egyptian capstan—beam.

  Here we found engineer Kiseliov, hands on hips, waiting for us. He was checking that we took our places in the harness. After finishing his cigarette and stubbing it out thoroughly with his boot, rubbing away any remaining tobacco, Kiseliov would leave. Although we knew that Kiseliov was being deliberately petty by scrubbing away the remains of his cigarette so we wouldn’t get a single flake of tobacco, for the clerk of works could see our inflamed, hungry eyes, our prisoners’ nostrils, breathing in from afar the smoke of his cigarette, we still couldn’t control ourselves as all four of us ran to the stubbed-out, destroyed cigarette, trying to gather at least a flake, a crumb of tobacco. Of course, it was impossible to find even a wisp or a speck. There were tears in our eyes as we went back to our working positions, to the worn beams of the horse capstan, to that revolving winch.

  It was Kiseliov, Pavel Dmitriyevich Kiseliov,[6] who resurrected at Arkagala the icy solitary cell of 1938, a cell hacked out of a rock in permafrost, an icy solitary confinement cell. In summer people were stripped to their underwear—following the Gulag instructions for the summer season—and were put in this cell barefooted, hatless, without gloves. In winter you kept your clothes when you were put there—those were the winter-season instructions. Many prisoners had their health permanently destroyed after just one night in this cell.

  Kiseliov was discussed a lot in the barracks and tents. His methodical lethal daily beatings seemed to many, who had not been schooled in 1938, too horrible, too unbearable.

  Everyone was struck or amazed or even hurt to the quick by a boss who personally took part in the daily reprisals. Prisoners could easily forgive being struck or pushed by the escort guards, the senior guards, and they even forgave their own foremen, but they felt that the area boss, this non-party engineer, was behaving shamefully. Kiseliov’s activity outraged even those whose feelings were blunted after many years of imprisonment, who had seen everything, who had learned to be profoundly indifferent, a quality that the camp brings out in people.

  The sight of the camps is horrible, and nobody in the world should have to know the camps. Camp experience is entirely negative, every single minute of it. A human being becomes only worse. And it cannot be otherwise. There is a lot in the camps that no man should see, but to see the lower depths of life is not the most terrible thing. The most terrible is when a man begins to feel, forever, that lower depth in his own life, when his moral criteria are borrowed from his camp experience, when the morality of professional criminals is applied to life in the outside world. When a man’s mind is not only employed in justifying these camp feelings, but serves the feelings. I know many educated people, and not only educated people, who made the criminal’s limits the secret limits of their own behavior when they were freed. In the battle between these people and the camp, the camp won. This meant that they adopted the morals of “better to steal than to ask”; this meant making a false criminal distinction between a person’s rations and government rations; this meant too liberal an attitude to anything belonging to or coming from the state. There are many examples of depravity. The moral boundary, the line that one must not cross, is very important for a prisoner. The crucial question in his life is whether he has remained human or not.

  The distinction is very subtle, and what you should be ashamed of is not memories of having been a goner, a “malingerer,” of having run around like “a whore with a cooking pot,” rummaging in rubbish heaps. You should be ashamed of having acquired a gangster’s morals, even if they allowed you a chance of surviving as the gangsters did, ashamed of pretending to be a nonpolitical and behaving so that God forbid that either the boss or your fellow prisoners find out that you had a conviction under article 58 or article 162, or some employment crime, such as embezzlement or negligence. In a word, the intellectual tries to be a Zoya Kosmodemianskaya,[7] to be a gangster with gangsters, a criminal with the criminals. He thieves, drinks, and is even pleased to get a sentence for a nonpolitical offense, because the stigma of being a “political” is finally erased. Not that there ever was anything political about him. There were no politicals in the camps. They were imaginary, invented enemies with whom the state was settling scores—shooting them, murdering them, st
arving them to death—as if they were genuine enemies. Stalin’s deadly scythe mowed down without distinction everyone, matching the allocations, the lists, the plan to be fulfilled. The percentage of scoundrels and cowards among those who perished in the camp was the same as in the free world. They were all people who happened to be there, indifferent people or cowards, philistines or even hangmen, who were by chance turned into victims.

  The camp was a powerful test of a human being’s moral strength, of everyday human morality, and 99 percent of the men failed that test. Those who passed it died alongside those who failed, although these men tried to be better and firmer than everyone else: what they were doing was purely for their own sake.

  In the middle of autumn there was a raging blizzard. A young duck that had put off migration too long, was losing its strength, unable to struggle with the snow. A floodlight was lit on the flat clearing and, deceived by its cold light, the duck rushed toward it, flapping its wings weighed down by the wet snow. It thought it was heading for the sun, for warmth. But the search lamp’s cold light was not the burning, life-giving sun: the duck gave up its battle with the snow. It landed on the clearing in front of the mine gallery, where we—skeletons dressed in ragged quilted jackets—were pressing our chests against the beam of the capstan, to the sound of the guard’s sarcastic whooping. Savchenko caught the duck with his hands. He kept it warm under his jacket, against his bony belly, drying its feathers with his cold, hungry body.

  “Shall we eat it?” I asked. Using the plural was utterly pointless. This was Savchenko’s game and booty, not mine.

  “No. I’ll give it away instead.”

  “Who to? The guard?”

  “To Kiseliov.”

  Savchenko took the duck to the building where the area chief lived. The chief’s wife brought out to Savchenko two pieces of bread, about three hundred grams, and poured a cooking pot full of liquid from a barrel of fermented cabbage. Kiseliov knew how to pay off prisoners and had taught his wife to do the same. Disappointed, we devoured the bread. Savchenko took the larger piece, I took the smaller one. We drank the soup and licked the pot clean.

  “We’d have done better to eat the duck ourselves,” Savchenko said sadly.

  “We shouldn’t have taken it to Kiseliov,” I concurred.

  It was by sheer luck that I was still alive after the exterminations of 1937. I had no intention of dooming myself to those familiar torments. To doom yourself to daily, hourly humiliations, to beatings, to taunts, to fights with the guard, the cook, the bathhouse attendant, the foreman, to anyone in power: an endless struggle for a piece of something edible, so as not to die of hunger, so as to live to see a tomorrow that would be just the same.

  You had to gather the last remnants of your shattered, exhausted, tormented will if you were to put an end to the taunts, possibly at the cost of your life. Life was not such a big stake in the camp gamble. I knew that everyone thought the same way, although they didn’t say so. I devised a way to get rid of Kiseliov.

  One and a half million tons of semi-soft coking coal, as high in calories as coal from the Don basin, was what Arkagala, the coal district of Kolyma, had in its reserves. Here it took non-coniferous trees, twisted by the cold in their crowns and the permafrost at their roots, three hundred years to reach maturity. Given forests of this kind, the importance of coal reserves was obvious to any boss in Kolyma. That was why the very top bosses were often seen at the Arkagala mine shafts.

  “The moment any top boss comes to Arkagala, punch Kiseliov in his ugly mug. In public. They’ll be touring the barracks and definitely the mine shaft. Step out of the line and give him a slap on the cheek.”

  “Suppose they shoot you the moment you step forward?”

  “They won’t. They won’t be expecting it. Kolyma bosses don’t have a lot of experience in getting their cheeks slapped. After all, you’ll be going up to your own clerk of works, not to a visiting boss.”

  “They’ll give us a sentence.”

  “They’ll give you two years or so. They won’t give you more for a son of a bitch like him. And you have to take your two years.”

  None of the old Kolyma hands anticipated coming back from the north alive, so a sentence had no significance for us. As long as we weren’t executed, weren’t murdered. And even that. . . .

  “What’s clear is that after he’s been slapped, Kiseliov will be removed, he’ll be transferred, dismissed. In top boss circles being slapped is considered a disgrace. We prisoners don’t think like that, nor, probably, does Kiseliov. A slap like that will echo all over Kolyma.”

  After daydreaming about the most important thing in our lives, as we sat around the stove, around the cooling hearth, I climbed up to my place on the top bunks, where it was warmer, and fell asleep.

  I slept without dreaming. The next morning we were taken to our workplace. The office door opened, and the area chief strode across the threshold. Kiseliov was no coward.

  “Hey, you,” he yelled. “Come here.”

  I approached.

  “So it will echo all over Kolyma, will it? Eh? Well, wait for it. . . .”

  He didn’t hit me, he didn’t even make a gesture of swinging a punch, which would have been in accordance with his dignity as a boss. He turned around and went away. I had to wait it out very cautiously. Kiseliov never approached me and never told me off again, he just shut me out of his life, but I realized that he wouldn’t forget a thing, and sometimes I felt piercing my back the hate-filled gaze of a man who hadn’t yet worked out how to take his revenge.

  I had thought a great deal about the great camp wonder: the wonder of grassing, of denunciation. When was I denounced to Kiseliov? It meant that the grass hadn’t slept that night, but had run off to the guardhouse or to the boss’s apartment. Worn out by his daytime work, this loyal grass had stolen his own nighttime rest, had gone through agonies, had suffered so that he could “report.” Who was it then? There were four of us present at that conversation. I myself hadn’t grassed, I was certain of that. There are situations in life when a man doesn’t know himself if he has grassed on his comrades, or not. Take for example the endless declarations of penitence from all the deviationists in the party. Were those denunciations, or not? I’m not talking about the mindless state in which statements are made after a hot soldering iron has been used. That also happened. Even today there is a professor in Moscow, a Buryat Mongol, who bears the scars on his face from a soldering iron used in 1937. Who else? Savchenko? Savchenko was sleeping next to me. Vronsky the engineer? Yes, it was Vronsky. Him. I had to move quickly, so I wrote a note.

  On the evening of the next day a doctor, a prisoner called Kunin, traveled the eleven kilometers from Arkagala. I knew him slightly; we’d met in a transit camp years before. After inspecting the sick and the healthy, Kunin winked at me and set off to see Kiseliov.

  “Well, how was the inspection? Everything in order?”

  “Yes, nearly, nearly. I have a request, Pavel Dmitriyevich.”

  “Happy to be of service.”

  “Let Andreyev go to Arkagala, will you? I’ll sign the transfer.”

  Kiseliov flared up.

  “Andreyev? No, Sergei Mikhailovich, anyone else, but not Andreyev.” He laughed. “How can I put it in printable words? He’s my personal enemy.”

  There are two schools among camp bosses. Some consider that any prisoner, and not just a prisoner, anyone who has personally annoyed a boss, should be sent as quickly as possible somewhere else, transferred, thrown off the site.

  The other school considers that all offenders, all personal enemies must be kept close to you, where you can see them and personally check up on the effectiveness of punitive measures that the boss has devised to satisfy his own ego, his own cruelty. Kiseliov subscribed to the second school’s principles.

  “I wouldn’t dare insist,” said Kunin. “To be frank, that’s not the reason I’m here. Here are some statements, and there are quite a lot of them.” Kunin undid the cla
sps of his battered canvas briefcase. “Statements about beatings. I haven’t signed them yet. You know, I hold the simple ‘popular’ view of such things. You can’t resurrect the dead, you can’t glue broken bones together. Not that there are any corpses in these statements. I’m just talking figuratively about the dead. I have nothing against you, Pavel Dmitriyevich, and I could tone down some of the medical conclusions. I can’t destroy them, I can just tone them down. I can set out what happened in an understated way. But now I see the state your nerves are in, I don’t want to bother you with a personal request.”

  “No, no, Sergei Mikhailovich,” said Kiseliov, putting restraining hands on the shoulders of Kunin, who had risen from his stool. “Why not? Couldn’t you just tear up these idiotic statements? Word of honor, I did it in the heat of the moment. And anyway, they’re such rogues. They’d drive anyone to hit them.”

  “If you’re saying that these rogues would drive anyone to hit them, I have my own opinion about that, Pavel Dmitriyevich. As for the statements. . . . Of course they can’t be torn up, but they can be toned down.”