Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  Of the many years I spent in Kolyma the best times were the months spent taking paramedical courses at the camp hospital near Magadan. All the prisoners who spent time, if only a month or two, at kilometer twenty-three on the Magadan highway will have the same opinion.

  The students had come there from every part of Kolyma, from the north and the south, from the west and the southwest. The most southerly point was far to the north of the settlement on the shore to which they had come.

  Students from distant areas tried to occupy the lower bunks, not because it was now spring, but because they couldn’t retain their urine, a condition that almost every prisoner who’d been in the mines suffered from. The dark patches on their cheeks, signs of old frostbite, were like some official branding, a seal which Kolyma had marked them with. The faces of these provincials all bore the same sullen, mistrustful smile of ill-concealed resentment. All the “miners” had a slight limp, for they had been near the Cold Pole and had reached the Hunger Pole. Being sent to take paramedical courses was an ominous adventure for them. Each one of them felt that he was a mouse, a half-dead mouse, which fate, the cat, had released from its claws so as to prolong the game a little. What of it? Mice don’t have anything against this game, either, and they don’t care if the cat knows it.

  The provincials greedily finished off the “city boys’ ” roll-up cigarettes: they still didn’t have the courage to let everyone see them rush to pick up a cigarette butt, even though the frank pursuit of them had been perfectly worthy behavior for a true camp inmate in the gold and lead mines. Only when he saw there was nobody about did a provincial quickly grab a cigarette end and stick it in his pocket, crushing it in his fist so as to roll a “separate” cigarette later, when he had the time. Many “city boys” had only just arrived from across the sea; they had come straight off the ship’s gangway and still had their civilian shirts, ties, and caps.

  Every other minute Zhenka Katz would take a tiny soldier’s mirror out of his pocket and carefully comb his thick curls with a broken comb. To the provincials, whose heads were shaven, Katz’s behavior seemed like dandyism, but nobody made any comments, they didn’t “tell him how to live,” such a thing being forbidden by the unwritten law of the camps.

  The students were housed in a fairly clean barracks like a sleeping car; it had two-story bunks with a separate place for each man. Apparently, these bunks were more hygienic and looked better in the authorities’ eyes—see, everybody has his own place. But the louse-ridden veterans who had come from the remote areas knew they didn’t have enough flesh on their bones to get warm on their own, while fighting the lice would be just as hard whether they slept on sleeping car bunks or communal ones. The provincials badly missed the communal bunks of the barracks in the distant taiga, just as they missed the stench and stifling comfort of the transit camps.

  The students were fed in the same refectory as the hospital staff. The dinners were much more nutritious than at the mines. The “miners” used to come up for seconds, and they were given them. If they came back yet again, the cook would calmly fill the bowl through the window he tended. Such things never happened at the mines. Thoughts slowly crossed their drained brains, and an ever more clear and categorical decision was formed: they had at all costs to keep taking these courses, to become “students,” to see to it that the next day was like this day. The next day meant exactly that. Nobody was thinking about working as a paramedic or getting a medical qualification. They were afraid to speculate about something so far ahead. No, just the next day with the same cabbage soup for dinner, with boiled plaice, with millet porridge for supper, as the pain of their osteomyelitis was dulled by sticking their toes into torn foot wrappings stuffed in soft, homemade, quilted boots.

  The students were fatigued by the rumors, each one more alarming than the previous, that came through the camp grapevine. Either they heard that prisoners older than thirty, or forty, would not be allowed to take their examinations. The barracks for aspiring students had men from nineteen to fifty years old. Or they heard that there would be no courses, that the authorities had changed their minds, or that there were no funds, and tomorrow the students would be sent to do manual labor. The most terrible rumor was that they would be sent back to their previous place of residence, to the gold mines and to the lead-ore mines.

  These fears were confirmed when the next day the students were awoken at six in the morning, lined up outside the guardhouse, and made to walk about ten kilometers to mend the road. A road worker’s job in the forest, which every prisoner in the mine dreamed of, now seemed to everybody to be extraordinarily heavy, humiliating, and unjust. The students did the job so badly that the next day they weren’t sent back again.

  There was a rumor that the boss had forbidden men and women to be taught together, that those with convictions under article 58, paragraph 10 (anti-Soviet agitation), which had previously been recognized as completely nonpolitical, would not be allowed to take their examinations. Examinations! That was the key word. There had to be entry examinations. The last entry examinations I had taken in my life were those for university. That had been a very, very long time ago. I couldn’t remember a thing. My brain cells hadn’t had any training for years on end, my brain cells had been starved, they had lost forever any capacity to take in and then reissue knowledge. Examination! My sleep was disturbed. I couldn’t come to any solution. An examination “at the level of the seventh class.” That was unbelievable. That had nothing to do with working outside prison or with life as a prisoner. Examination!

  Fortunately, the first examination was the Russian language. The dictation was a page from Turgenev, read out to us by the local connoisseur of Russian literature, a prisoner-paramedic called Borsky. My dictation was given the highest mark by Borsky, and I was exempted from the oral Russian language test. It was exactly twenty years since I had sat in the ceremonial hall of Moscow University and produced a written work, my entrance examination, which exempted me from taking oral tests. History was repeating itself: once as tragedy, the second time as farce. In my case, it couldn’t be called a farce.

  Slowly, feeling physical pain, I activated my memory cells: something important and interesting had to be revealed to me. Together with the joy of my first success came the joy of recollection; I had long forgotten my life, the university.

  The next examination was mathematics, a written examination. To my own surprise I quickly solved the problem posed in the examination. It was clear my nerves were now collected, what was left of my strength had been mobilized, and by some inexplicable, miraculous means they produced the required solution. An hour before and an hour after the examination I couldn’t have solved such a problem.

  In every conceivable educational establishment in this country there is one compulsory examination subject, “The Constitution of the USSR.” But considering the nature of their batch of examinees, the bosses of the Cultural-Educational Section in the camp administration completely removed this tricky subject, to everyone’s satisfaction.

  The third subject was chemistry. The examination was conducted by a doctor of chemistry, a former researcher of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, A. I. Boichenko, who was now the director of the hospital laboratory, a conceited wit and pedant. But Boichenko’s personal qualities were irrelevant. Chemistry had always been a subject I found personally insuperable. It was studied in secondary school. My secondary schooling happened during the Civil War. It so happened that our school chemistry teacher, a former officer, was executed when the Noulens [11] conspiracy in Vologda was being dismantled, so I was permanently deprived of chemistry. I didn’t know the composition of air, and I only remembered the formula for water from the old student song:

  My leather boots are far too old,

  They’re letting through the H2O.

  Subsequent years proved that you could live without chemistry, and I had begun to forget about all these events, and now suddenly in my fortieth year it turned out that a knowledge of
history was essential, and of chemistry according to the secondary school syllabus.

  How was I going to explain to Boichenko, when I had written in my application form that I had completed secondary education, but not tertiary education, that chemistry was one thing I hadn’t studied?

  I didn’t turn to anyone, fellow students or bosses, for help: my life in prison and in the camps had taught me to rely only on myself. “Chemistry” began. I still remember the whole examination.

  “What are oxides and acids?”

  I started a confused and incorrect explanation. I could have told him about Lomonosov’s escape to Moscow, about Lavoisier the tax farmer being executed,[12] but not about oxides.

  “Tell me the formula for lime. . . .”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And for soda?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why have you turned up to the examination? After all, I’m writing down the questions and answers for the record.”

  I said nothing. But Boichenko was not a young man; he had some understanding. He looked with displeasure at the list of my previous marks: two A’s. He shrugged.

  “Write the symbol for oxygen.”

  I wrote a capital H.

  “What do you know about Mendeleyev’s periodical table of elements?”

  I told him. My story had very little to do with the elements, but a lot to do with Mendeleyev. I knew a few things about him. After all, he was the father-in-law of the poet Blok!

  “You can go,” said Boichenko.

  The next day I found out that I had gotten a C for chemistry and that I was registered, registered for paramedical courses at the central hospital of the Northeastern Administration of the NKVD camps.

  I did nothing for the next two days. I just lay on my bunk, breathing in the barracks stench, looking at the soot-stained ceiling. A very important, extraordinarily important period was beginning in my life. I could sense that with my whole being. I now had to prepare for life, not for death. And I didn’t know which was harder.

  We were given paper—enormous sheets with burned edges, the trace of a fire last year, when an explosion had demolished the whole city of Nakhodka. We stitched exercise books out of this paper. We were issued pencils and pens.

  Sixteen men and eight women! The women sat on the left in the classroom, nearer the light, while the men sat on the right, which was darker. A meter-wide corridor divided the class. We had new, narrow desks with lower shelves—exactly the same desks I had when I was in secondary school.

  Later I happened to find myself in the fishing settlement of Ola. Outside the Ola Evenki school was a school desk. I spent a long time examining its enigmatic construction, until I finally realized that it was an Erismann [13] desk.

  We had no textbooks at all, and our only visual aids were a few anatomy posters.

  To learn, you had to be a hero, but to teach, you needed to be a saint.

  •

  Let’s start with the heroes. None of us, men or women, had thought of becoming paramedics just for the sake of a carefree life in the camps or in order to turn as quickly as we could into “quacks.”

  For some of us, including me, the courses were lifesaving. Although I was nearly forty, I drew on all my resources and studied as hard as my physical and mental strength would allow me. Moreover, I had hopes of being able to help certain people, and to settle ten-year-old scores with others. I hoped to become a human being again.

  For other people the courses were offering a lifelong profession, widening their horizons. The courses had substantial general educational value and they promised a firm social position in the camps.

  Min Garipovich Shabayev, the Tatar writer Min Shabai, a victim of 1937, sentenced on a charge of Anti-Soviet Agitation (ASA), sat at the first desk right by the hallway.

  Shabayev had a good command of Russian, he took lecture notes in Russian, although, as I found out many years later, he wrote his prose in Tatar. Many people concealed their past in the camps. That was logical and made sense, not just for former interrogators and prosecutors. A writer, as an intellectual, as a man who worked with his mind, was a “four-eyes,” which in places of imprisonment always aroused his fellow prisoners’ and his bosses’ hatred. Shabayev had realized that long ago, so he pretended he had been a petty trader, and never took part in conversations about literature: that was the best and the least troublesome way out, in his opinion. He smiled at everyone and was always chewing something. As one of the leading students he began to acquire a fatherly appearance, swelling up. The years in the mines had left their mark on Min. He was absolutely enthralled by the courses.

  “You realize, I’m forty, and I’ve just found out for the first time that a man has only one liver. And I thought he had two, two of everything.”

  The presence of a spleen in human beings aroused complete ecstasy in Min.

  When he was released, Min did not start working as a paramedic. He went back to a job close to his heart, as a supply agent. Becoming a supply agent offered even more dazzling prospects than a medical career did.

  Next to Shabayev sat Bokis, a Latvian of enormous dimensions, and the future Kolyma ping-pong champion. He had “landed” in the hospital several years earlier, first as a patient, then as a patient serving as a male nurse. The doctors had promised to ensure Bokis got a diploma. Once he had his paramedic’s diploma, Bokis went out to the taiga, and saw the gold mines. For him the taiga was a frightful hallucination, but what he most feared there was not what he should have feared: having his own soul become depraved. Being indifferent is not as bad as being a scoundrel.

  The third place was occupied by Buka, a soldier who had lost an eye in World War II and had been convicted of looting. It took the mine three months to throw Buka back into a hospital bunk. Buka’s combination of seven years of education, an easygoing nature, and a touch of Ukrainian slyness, ensured that he was accepted into the courses. Buka’s one eye had seen at the mine as much as many people’s two eyes, and he saw the main thing, that he could sort out his destiny by keeping well away from article 58 and all its many subsections. There was nobody in the courses more secretive than Buka.

  After a couple of months, Buka replaced his black eye-patch with an artificial eye. But the hospital assortment turned out to have no brown eyes, so he had to choose a blue one. That made a strong impression, but everyone soon got used to his differently colored eyes, sooner than Buka did.

  I tried to comfort him by telling him about Alexander the Great’s eyes. Buka politely heard me out—Alexander the Great’s eyes seemed to be somehow “political,” so he mumbled something noncommittal and moved away.

  The fourth man in the corner by the wall was Labutov, like Buka a World War II soldier. He was an outgoing radio man with a lot of self-esteem. He had built a miniature receiver on which he listened to fascist broadcasts, but he told a comrade and was found out. The tribunal gave him ten years for ASA. Labutov had a full ten years’ education, he loved drawing all sorts of schemes that looked like gigantic military staff maps, with arrows, signs, and the names of the subject, say, in anatomy: “Operation,” “Heart.” He didn’t know Kolyma. The spring day when we were herded out to work, Labutov decided to take a dip in the nearest drainage ditch, and we had some difficulty in stopping him. He became a good paramedic, especially later, when he mastered the secrets of physiotherapy, which for someone like him, an electrician and a radio expert, was not difficult. He finally found a permanent job in an electrotherapy clinic.

  The second row consisted of Chernikov, Katz, and Malinsky. Chernikov was a self-satisfied lad, always smiling; he too was a frontline soldier who had been convicted of some criminal act or other. Like Labutov, he had not had even a sniff of Kolyma; he had come to the courses straight from Maglag, the Magadan camp section. He was literate enough to study and he rightly supposed that he wouldn’t be chased out of the courses even if he broke the rules and quickly struck up a relationship with one of the women students.


  Zhenka Katz, Chernikov’s friend, was a lively nonpolitical who was inordinately fond of his luxurious curls. As the class monitor, he was without any spite and had no authority. When the courses were over and he worked at outpatient admissions, he heard a doctor who was examining a patient call out “Permanganate!” Zhenka, instead of putting gauze soaked in a weak solution of kalium hypermarganicum on the wound, sprinkled dark violet crystals of full-strength permanganate over it. The patient knew very well how burns should be treated, but didn’t move his arm away, didn’t protest, didn’t blink an eye.[14] The patient was an old Kolyma hand. Zhenka Katz’s carelessness got the patient exempted from work for almost a whole month. Luck comes seldom in Kolyma and has to be grabbed firmly and held onto for as long as you have the strength.

  Malinsky was the youngest in the class. Called up in the last year of the war, he was nineteen. He’d been brought up in wartime and had rather loose morals. Kostia Malinsky was convicted of looting. By chance he ended up in the hospital where his uncle, a Moscow general practitioner, was working. His uncle helped get him onto the courses, but they didn’t interest Kostia very much. His character defects, or perhaps just his youth, constantly led him into various shady camp enterprises: getting butter with a forged voucher, selling footwear, taking trips to Magadan. He was always being called in by the NKVD officers because of this (and perhaps for other things too?). Someone had to be an informer.

  Thanks to the courses, Kostia got a profession. A few years later I met him in the settlement of Ola. Kostia was presenting himself there as a paramedic who had completed the wartime two-year course. I might have been, unintentionally, the reason that his lies were exposed.