Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  My train was like a hostel. And I wouldn’t have believed that these carriages could take me to Moscow, but boarding was in progress.

  A battle, a terrible battle was being waged at the carriage entrance. It was as if work had suddenly stopped two hours earlier than it should have, and everyone had run home to the barracks, to a warm stove, and they were rushing through the doors.

  Where were the conductors? Everyone looked for their places, reserved them, and defended them. My reserved middle bunk was of course occupied by a drunken lieutenant who never stopped belching. I dragged the lieutenant onto the floor and showed him my ticket.

  “I’ve got a ticket for that place, too,” the lieutenant explained amicably, then hiccupped, slipped onto the floor, and fell asleep.

  The carriage continued being packed with people. Enormous bundles and suitcases kept being lifted up to vanish somewhere on top. There was a penetrating stench of sheepskin jackets, human sweat, filth, and carbolic acid.

  “Transit, transit,” I kept repeating as I lay on my back, squeezed into the narrow space between the middle and the upper bunks. The lieutenant climbed up past me; his collar was unbuttoned, his face was red and crumpled. The lieutenant clung to something above me, pulled himself up by his arms, and vanished. . . .

  In the chaos and the shouts of transit I didn’t hear the main thing that I wanted and needed to hear, what I had dreamed of for seventeen years, what had become for me a symbol of the mainland. I couldn’t hear a locomotive whistle. I hadn’t given it a thought while I was battling for my place in the carriage. I hadn’t heard any whistle. But the carriages shuddered and rocked, and our carriage, our transit, began to move somewhere, as if I was beginning to go to sleep and the barracks was drifting before my very eyes.

  I forced myself to understand that I was traveling—to Moscow.

  At a stretch where there was a railroad switch, right by Irkutsk, the carriage shook and the figure of the lieutenant rolled out above me and hung over me, even though he was clinging to the upper bunk that he was sleeping on. The lieutenant belched, and vomit spattered straight onto my bunk and onto my neighbor’s as well. My neighbor removed his fur coat—not a quilted jacket or a pea jacket, but a real coat, a Moscow-style one with a fur collar. Cursing furiously, he started cleaning off the vomit.

  My neighbor had an endless quantity of woven baskets, covered in matting, some stitched, some not. From time to time women would emerge from the depths of the carriage. They were wrapped in rural headscarves and short fur coats, and they had the same woven baskets on their shoulders. The women were shouting something at my neighbor, and he gave them a friendly wave of the hand.

  “My sister-in-law! She’s off to see her relatives in Tashkent,” he explained to me, although I hadn’t demanded any explanations.

  My neighbor was happy to open his nearest basket and show me what was in it. Apart from a battered two-piece suit and a few other things, there was nothing but a lot of photographs, family and group portraits on enormous framed boards. Some of the photographs were daguerreotypes. He would take one of the larger ones out of the basket and happily explain in detail who was standing where, who was killed in the war, who got a medal, who was training to be an engineer. “And that’s me,” he would never fail to put a finger somewhere on the middle of a photograph. Everyone he showed these photographs to nodded meekly, politely, and sympathetically.

  On the third day of our communal life, shaken about in the carriage, my neighbor, who had formed a full, clear, and utterly correct idea of who I was, even though I’d told him nothing about myself, said to me rapidly, while the attention of our other neighbors was distracted by something:“I’m changing trains in Moscow. Will you help me to drag one of the baskets through the exit? Past the scales?”

  “But someone’s meeting me in Moscow.”

  “Ah, yes. I’d forgotten you were being met.”

  “What are you carrying?”

  “What? Sunflower seeds. And we’ll take galoshes from Moscow. . . .”

  I didn’t get out at any of the stops. I had food. I was afraid that the train would be sure to move off without me, that something bad would happen. My luck couldn’t go on forever.

  On the middle bunk opposite me there was a man in a fur coat, hopelessly drunk, without hat or gloves. He’d been put in the carriage by his drunken friends, who had given his ticket to the conductor. He stayed on the train for a day and a night, then got off somewhere and came back with a bottle of some dark-colored wine, drank it from the bottle, and threw the bottle on the floor. The conductor deftly grabbed it and carried it off to her conductor’s lair, which was piled up with blankets that nobody took in a mixed carriage, and sheets, which nobody needed. Behind a barricade of blankets in the conductor’s compartment, there was a prostitute who had established herself on the top bunk. She had come all the way from Kolyma. Perhaps she wasn’t a prostitute, but had been turned into one by Kolyma. . . . This lady was sitting not far from me on the lowest bunk, and the dim carriage candle’s rocking light every now and again would fall on her infinitely weary face and her lips, which were painted with something that was not lipstick. Later, someone would come up to her and say something; then she would disappear to the conductor’s compartment. “Fifty rubles,” said the lieutenant, who had now sobered up and turned out to be a very pleasant young man.

  The lieutenant and I played a very interesting game. Whenever a new passenger got on, each of us tried to guess his profession, age, and occupation. We exchanged observations, then he would sit next to the new passenger, start a conversation, and come back to me with the answer.

  That was how we decided that the lady with the painted lips, but the unvarnished fingernails, must be a medical worker, while the leopard-patterned coat she was wearing, which was obviously artificial fur, told us that its wearer was more likely to be a nurse or a paramedic than a doctor. No doctor would have worn fake fur. Nobody had yet heard of nylon or other synthetics then. Our conclusion turned out to be true.

  From time to time a two-year-old child would run past our compartment. His legs were crooked, he was dirty, dressed in rags, and blue-eyed. His pale cheeks were covered with sores of some sort. A minute or two later his young father would come striding along, confident and firm. The father was wearing a quilted jacket and his fingers were heavy and strong, like a workman’s. He would try and catch the boy. The infant laughed and smiled at his father, the father smiled at the boy and, happy and delighted, took him back to his place in another compartment of our carriage. I found out their story. A usual Kolyma story. The father was a nonpolitical convict who had just been released and was going back to the mainland. The child’s mother refused to return, so the father was traveling with his son, having firmly decided to tear the child, and perhaps himself, away from Kolyma’s sticky embrace. Why wouldn’t the mother come? Perhaps that was the usual story, too.

  She had found another man, and had grown to love living free in Kolyma: she was a free woman now and didn’t want to return to the mainland as a second-class citizen. . . . Or perhaps she had lost her youth. Or love, Kolyma love, was over. Anything could have happened. Perhaps it was something even more terrible. The mother had served a sentence under article 58, the most nonpolitical of nonpoliticals, and she knew the dangers of returning to the mainland: a new sentence, new torments. Even in Kolyma there was no guarantee that you wouldn’t get a new sentence, but she wouldn’t be hounded there the way everyone on the mainland was hounded.

  I never found out anything, and I didn’t want to. I saw the father’s nobility, decency, and love of his child, whom he had probably seen very little of, for the child would have been in a nursery or a kindergarten.

  The father’s clumsy hands, undoing the child’s trousers, the enormous buttons of different colors sewn on by rough, unskilled, but kind hands. The father’s happiness and the boy’s. This two-year-old didn’t know the word “mama”; he shouted, “Papa, papa!” The child and a dark-skinn
ed metalworker played with each other, though it was hard to find room among the drunks, the card players, and the speculators’ baskets and sacks. At least these two people in our carriage were, clearly, happy.

  The passenger who slept for two days and nights from Irkutsk and woke up only to drink, to down yet another bottle of vodka or brandy or liqueur, was not to sleep any more. The train was being shaken about. The sleeping, drunken passenger thudded to the floor and groaned and groaned. When the conductor summoned medical help, it was discovered that the passenger had a fractured shoulder. He was put on a stretcher, and he vanished from my life.

  Suddenly the figure of the man who had rescued me turned up in the carriage (to call him my savior would be going too far, since after all things had not got to the serious and bloody stage). My acquaintance was still sitting there but didn’t recognize me and seemed not to want to. Nevertheless, we exchanged glances, and I approached him. “I want to get home at least and have a look at my family,” were the last words I heard from that gangster.

  All that: the sharp light of the Irkutsk station lamp, the speculator carrying other people’s photographs to disguise his real purposes, the vomit that erupted onto my bunk from the young lieutenant’s throat, the sad prostitute on the top bunk of the conductor’s compartment, and the dirty two-year-old happily shouting “Papa, papa!”—all that has stuck in my memory as my first happiness, the constant happiness of freedom.

  Moscow’s Yaroslavl station. Noise, the urban tide of Moscow, a city that was dearer to me than all the cities of the world. The carriage coming to a halt. The dear face of my wife, who came to meet me, as she had done before, when I came back from my frequent journeys. This time my absence was extensive, almost seventeen years. But the main thing was that I hadn’t come back from a working journey. I had come back from hell.

  1964

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  [1] “The Gold Medal” appears in Volume Two.

  [2] “Permafrost” appears in Volume Two.

  [3] For example, torture.

  [4] The date of Shalamov’s request for rehabilitation.

  [5] See the story “The Green Prosecutor.”

  [6] These contingents were special groups singled out for particular treatment.

  [7] See the story “Berries.”

  [8] Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013.

  BOOK ONE: KOLYMA STORIES

  [1] Osip Mandelstam.

  [2] Pine-needle extract is still used in Russian and Chinese medicine (as a source of vitamin C) to combat scurvy.

  [3] Kuznetsov means “blacksmith.”

  [4] This term (as sherri-brendi) hitherto only occurred in a poem by Osip Mandelstam, so the story must be read as a re-creation of the death of Mandelstam, who died on December 27, 1938, in a transit camp near Vladivostok.

  [5] The name given to an informal Russian association of fraudsters, operating in the early 1870s and the subject of several accounts, true and embroidered.

  [6] A thick cotton material, a substitute for leather.

  [7] A nineteenth-century poem about a railway laid over the bones of the laborers who built it.

  [8] A fashionable shopping street in central Moscow.

  [9] In 1947 Stalin personally awarded a prize for this novel, even though the prize committee had rejected it.

  [10] Russian ravioli, made with two sorts of meat, eaten in broth.

  [11] Soviet prisoners of war who agreed to fight under General Vlasov alongside the German army; they were mostly repatriated to the USSR in 1945 and 1946 and shot or sent to the camps.

  [12] In 1922 Herriot, a French senator with Soviet sympathies, had his gold watch stolen on a visit to the Hermitage; underworld figures recovered it. The story was told by the NKVD investigator and writer Lev Sheinin.

  [13] Sir Williams (pseudonym of Andrea de Felipone) is the ill-fated villain in novels, such as The Exploits of Rocambole, by the nineteenth-century French writer Ponson du Terrail.

  [14] Berzin, who by then had been shot, was the founder of the Kolyma forced-labor mining camps.

  BOOK TWO: THE LEFT BANK

  [1] Leonid Ramzin, a professor of engineering and a star false witness, who was accused at a 1930 show trial, was rewarded for his testimony by being allowed to continue engineering work in prison, whereafter he was granted amnesty.

  [2] An anarchist terrorist who later became an ardent Stalinist.

  [3] Nestor Makhno, an anarchist leader in the Civil War in Ukraine.

  [4] Trotsky called Stalin’s concocted political trials of an unlikely assortment of opponents “amalgams.”

  [5] Latin for “let us rejoice.”

  [6] In fact, the Moscow Art Theater had existed since 1898.

  [7] Vitovt Putna (1893–1937) was a brilliant military commander during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920; he then became a military attaché and was shot on June 12, 1937, during Stalin’s purge of senior army officers.

  [8] Stalin’s most trusted, longest-serving general and minister.

  [9] A hypnotist, reputed to have worked for the NKVD after 1929.

  [10] An agronomist and the vice president of the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wallace in June 1944 spent weeks in Magadan and Kolyma as a guest of the NKVD. He was fooled by the guards dressed in prison uniforms pretending to be well-fed, happy prisoners. Not until the 1950s did Wallace admit his gullibility.

  [11] Boris Savinkov, a leading Socialist Revolutionary, killed by the Soviet secret police in 1925.

  [12] In February 1905, Ivan Kaliayev, a Socialist Revolutionary, killed Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich with a bomb; he had aborted a previous attempt to avoid killing the Grand Duke’s wife and nephews.

  [13] Right SRs, unlike left SRs, had disavowed violent revolution.

  [14] Maria Spiridonova, a leading left SR, was shot on Stalin’s orders in 1941.

  [15] Prosh Proshian, a leading left SR, People’s Commissariat for Post and Telegraph, died of typhus in 1918.

  [16] Grigori Gershuni, a Russian terrorist, died in 1908 of cancer, two years after escaping from prison by hiding in a barrel.

  [17] Four members of People’s Will who were hung in 1881 for assassinating Tsar Alexander II.

  [18] Egor Sozonov committed suicide in prison in 1910 to avoid being flogged.

  [19] Lev Zilberberg, hanged in 1907 for assassinating the Petersburg mayor.

  [20] Vera Figner (1852–1942) and Nikolai Morozov (1854–1946), the two People’s Will terrorists who died of natural causes.

  [21] Agasi Khandjian, the secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, was shot in 1936 by Beria without a trial, after a quarrel.

  [22] Mikhail Gots, a founder of the SR Party, died in 1906 after an operation to remove a spinal tumor.

  [23] No such book exists. Shalamov may be recalling Gustav Jaeckh’s History of 1906.

  [24] Charles Masson, Mémoires secrets sur la Russie of 1802.

  [25] A mine winch rotated by several men pushing a wooden beam; called Egyptian because of the slave labor required.

  [26] Reminiscent of Don Quixote: “Beauty in a modest woman is like fire at a distance or a sharp sword; the one does not burn, the other does not cut, those who do not come too near.”

  [27] In 1826 Mikhail Bestuzhev, a naval officer, before his arrest devised a system of tapping the alphabet, anticipating Morse code. It has remained in use in Russian prisons.

  [28] That is, informs on you.

  [29] Dmitri Pletniov, Russia’s leading cardiologist, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for allegedly murdering Maxim Gorky; Pletniov was shot in 1941.

  [30] Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian communist accused by the Nazis of burning down the Reichstag, who was acquitted after his trial.

  [31] Monastery islands in the White Sea used as prison camps in the 1920s.

  [32] A famous nineteenth-century painting of Aleksandr Menshikov, a favorite of Peter the Great, later exiled to west
ern Siberia.

  [33] A real figure, his surname was Daktor, and he was generally known as Dr. Doctor.

  [34] Numbered camps were the harshest, reserved for political prisoners who were not expected to survive.

  [35] The Special Tribunal (OSO) of the secret police, a three-man committee that sentenced political prisoners without trial.

  [36] Leonid Zakovsky, the brutal chief of the secret police in Leningrad, was shot in 1938.

  [37] A German writer notorious for declaring the Soviet show trials of 1937 to be fair.

  [38] Professor Leonid Ramzin became a witness for the prosecution at the Industrial Party show trial of 1930 and was then reprieved.

  [39] Andrei Vyshinsky was Stalin’s henchman, chief prosecutor in the 1930s, and eventually the minister of foreign affairs. Mikhail Ryumin, deputy head of State Security, was executed in 1954.

  [40] Nikolai Svishchev-Paolo (1874–1964) was a leading Soviet photographer.

  [41] Two lines from Nikolai Gumiliov’s famous poem “Captains.” He was shot in 1921 on fabricated charges of taking part in the Tagantsev conspiracy.

  [42] Aleksei Ignatiev, a count and major general, who as an émigré handed the Bolsheviks the tsarist government’s gold reserves; he then worked for Soviet intelligence. He returned to the USSR in 1937, kept his rank, published his memoirs in 1941, and died of natural causes in 1954.

  [43] This popular prerevolutionary song, in fact, ends with Shalamov’s preceding words “raised him to great heights / before unashamedly dropping him into the abyss.”

  [44] Boris Savinkov was a Socialist Revolutionary politician, then an émigré agent, killed in 1925, probably on Stalin’s orders. His family perished ten years later.

  [45] A novelist and philosopher of the 1870s whose career really did begin in the army and end in a monastery.

  [46] Elizaveta Drabkina, convicted of Trotskyism, spent much of her life in the camps but remained a fervent communist. Her memoirs include Black Rusks.