‘You are like a Buddhist,’ Punin remarked.
‘Not in everything,’ Karsavin answered. ‘However, I definitely sympathize a little with the Buddhists’ attitude to small living things.’
‘If you love mosquitoes, you should have driven that one off before it got too fat,’ Punin replied.
At that moment, a second mosquito landed on Punin. ‘You’ll never make a Buddhist out of me,’ he said, and killed it.
Back at the museum, the director’s secretary was once more coldly obstructive to my attempts to gain access to her boss. Eventually, enough time passed and she relented, though if I thought my troubles were over, I was wrong. The director – Yevgeniya Ivanovna Kulygina – greeted me with all the warmth of a border guard. I had expected her to be friendly, to be glad someone was taking an interest in the gulag, so it came as a shock when she demanded my passport and my press accreditation, insisting that I explain myself and the nature of my journey. I told her I was trying to trace the movements of Father Dmitry, at which point she asked me what I already knew.
Cross with my reception, I then described what I knew of his life in ludicrous detail, from his birth in Berezina to his father’s imprisonment, to his service in the army, his education in Moscow and finally his arrival here.
‘Well then, you know more than us,’ she said coldly, and told me there was nothing more she could do to help. I was spoiling for an argument, and she was swelling like a thundercloud, when the door opened and a second woman walked in, middle aged and short haired. She greeted the director as Zhenya, the diminutive of her first name, and introduced herself to me as Tanya Podrabinek.
Surprised by being greeted warmly for the first time since my arrival in Inta, I told her that I knew a man called Alexander Podrabinek in Moscow. Were they by any chance related?
He was her brother-in-law. And it was as if a switch had flicked. Yevgeniya Ivanovna’s frown vanished. She sank back in her chair and smiled. Tanya put the kettle on, and suddenly it was decided that we should all go to Abez the next day together, because – apparently – Father Dmitry had spent time in the camp there. The table filled with pie and coffee, and the room with buzz. At times, there seemed to be more conversations than people, especially with the arrival of Nikolai Andreyevich, a greying man summoned for my benefit. He was renowned for his knowledge of the gulag camps and lectured everyone with good-natured persistence.
Yevgeniya Ivanovna had delighted earlier in telling me I would never make it back to Moscow, that train tickets would be unobtainable and that I was mad to have come all this way without a return berth. Now, she was on the phone reserving me a ticket.
After a couple of cups of tea, she tried to talk me out of leaving at all. I should marry a local girl, she said, and suggested a few candidates. I shrugged apologetically. I was married already.
‘Ah, no problem, she can move here too and you can live like political exiles. Phone her up now and invite her,’ she said, holding out the phone.
An hour earlier I had been sitting on a hard bench in the gloomy lobby failing to gain access to this very room. Three-quarters of an hour earlier, we had been on the brink of a full-scale row. Now it was like we had been friends for ever.
I had read many times about how, in the Soviet Union, access to almost anything was a function of who you knew, but I had never witnessed such a dramatic example of it. If Tanya had walked in ten minutes later, or had failed to mention her surname, I would never have achieved anything. As it was, I was having a great time. I reached for another piece of pie. It was made with berries that grew on the tundra and was delicious.
Nikolai Andreyevich was all the while piling relevant books and magazines in front of me. It became rather overwhelming. When I mentioned that I would like to talk to someone who had known Inta in the years when Father Dmitry was here, he grabbed the phone and began to make calls.
That was why an hour or two later, he and I were sat at a small table in a sixth-floor flat. David Badaryan had had little warning of our arrival, but our welcome was warm: stew, rice, cutlets, cheese, ham, tomatoes, bread and shot glasses for the vodka we had brought with us.
He was an Armenian from Tbilisi, and had been arrested in August 1942 aged seventeen and sentenced to a decade in the gulag for some non-specific anti-Soviet activity (‘They accused me of being in anti-Soviet groups. I was a teenager. What groups could I have been in?’). He was in the Urals for six years before arriving in the town in the same year as Father Dmitry.
‘A lot of people said it was bad and of course it was. But when they brought us here, we thought it was heaven. There were barracks to live in, and a bathhouse. When we came to the Urals we lived in a tent, in winter. Some mornings you would wake up with your hair frozen to the bed,’ he said.
He wore a blue shirt and dark-blue jacket. He had a neat moustache and almost no hair on his head at all.
‘My first impression of Inta was the cold, but then I saw the northern lights. You cannot imagine. They went round round round, up up up up then down. You never see them like this now, it is rare. It was so beautiful, but so cold. It was minus 50, minus 52 sometimes.’
He worked in a deep mine, 300 metres down, for four years. He showed me a photo of himself in 1949. He had been a handsome man, with thick dark hair pushed back from his brow.
He said they lived in barracks in groups of fifty or sixty, and one to a shelf. They played backgammon a lot, and clustered near their one big stove in winter. If you worked near your barracks, you could come back for lunch, but often you did not have time and only got fed at the end of your fourteen-hour day.
‘Sometimes though I am thankful I came to the camps. I survived. My friends from Tbilisi who went into the army all died. They were conscripting people born in 1924 when I was arrested. I was born in 1924 as it happens, but my parents registered me in March 1925. I don’t know why they did that, but that’s why I didn’t go to the front. But you know the camp was hard. All we got was just 600 grams of black bread, soup and porridge. In Inta, they started giving us potatoes.’
The phone rang at this point and he held a long conversation about medicine for his legs, which would cost him 3,500 roubles unless he could find someone to buy it in Moscow, where it was cheaper. His pension is 19,000 roubles a month, so the potential saving was a major issue and he took his time about discussing it.
Nikolai Andreyevich and I drank some vodka. He held out his hands to show me. They were pitted with strange marks where the flesh was sucked in between the bones. He too, it transpires, had been a miner.
‘Who would go to their death in the mine for pennies?’ he asked.
Badaryan nodded: ‘Look at me, I have grey hair. Look at my hands. These are not from a good life. I survived by a miracle myself. If you were a miner, it meant you were somebody. This nation now is completely ruined. The future of the town is under threat even. If there was a good boss it wouldn’t die, but . . .’ He tailed off.
The two of them talked about the one coal mine that is left in Inta, and which provides fuel for the power station and the central heating plant. When that mine closes, the heating plant must close too, since it is built to burn only local coal, with its high clay content. Coal from Ukraine would burn too hot and ruin it. Without a heating plant, without a mine, the town would have to close. Without a town, the villages near by would vanish, and the tundra would return to how it was before the gulag, with just the graveyards and the humps of rotted buildings to show for the decades of human endeavour.
Nikolai Andreyevich and I walked back between the towers of the apartment blocks and he showed me where a stadium had been planned, but never built. Three stray dogs watched us as we walked past.
That evening, I sat with Father Dmitry’s writings and looked up more references to his time here and how he got on in the camps. His camp’s hospital became – as for Karsavin – a meeting place for the religious believers, and Father Dmitry went there often.
‘The priest whom I m
et was a real treasure for me. He was attentive by nature and soon he got a job for another priest in the hospital. After a hard day’s work, I would go to him, after roll call, and we would talk about everything.’
They celebrated Easter in the infirmary, with the service led by the priest who worked there.
‘We took communion, and I sensed an extraordinary joy. We separated then, when it was already getting light, and the camp was plunged into a strong, twilight dream.’
One time he described how he and a Ukrainian nursed a Lithuanian back to life. Another time he described how a Spaniard – it is not clear what he was doing in the camp – said all Russians love slavery, and then escaped.
‘They caught him, shot him and left him there on the watchtower so all the prisoners could see.’
Father Dmitry was always a compulsive writer. Despite having been imprisoned for writing poems, he kept writing them. He hid his poems in an old suitcase, but no hiding place was safe in the camps. Guards found the stash of poems during a search.
‘We are arresting you,’ he was told.
‘What? Have I not already been under arrest for six years?’
‘That’s nothing, we’re arresting you anyway.’
He was kept in a prison cell where a harsh light shone into his eyes at all times. Most of his fellow prisoners were there for murder or attempted murder.
‘A Lithuanian who killed informers was young, eighteen years old, tall, thin, spoke with a bass voice. He knew he was not long for this world, he had tuberculosis, and he wanted to kill as many evil people as he could before he died. He was kind, he was a believer, he missed his Lithuania, and was not as evil as a murderer should be.’
The prisoners were not allowed to go out or to lie down during the day so they took turns telling each other everything they knew. They loved to talk about murder and rape, using the ferociously obscene and all-but-incomprehensible jargon of Russian prisons. Father Dmitry asked to be put in solitary confinement to escape them, but nothing came of it.
Every now and then he would be summoned for interrogation, when his investigator would also swear at him. But these insults about his poems, some of which criticized Stalin, came as a relief after the conversation of his comrades.
‘How could you allow yourself to commit such slander? The name of Stalin is spoken with gratitude in China, across the whole world, he is the leader of humanity, and you call him a butcher,’ his investigator shouted, according to Father Dmitry’s later account. ‘Just think what you look like. You’re like Christ when he was on the cross. You have no blood in your face, you’re a skeleton, and you will die here if you don’t repent. Admit everything. Tell me you’re guilty.’
Father Dmitry admitted nothing, even when they brought in new investigators to increase the pressure on him, or when they brought in friends who had been twisted into accusing him of organizing a revolt in the camp.
‘What do I have to fear? I am not some criminal, these are my beliefs,’ he told them.
When the court case came he expected the worst: execution or a new term of twenty-five years as a minimum. When he received a mere ten years on top of his existing sentence, he was surprised. He had already been inside for six years, now he would have another decade to learn how a Soviet citizen should behave.
Tanya, the sister-in-law of my friend in Moscow, had instructed me to bring a packed lunch for our trip to Abez the next day. So, in the minutes before they came to collect me, I made egg mayonnaise sandwiches. Lacking a kitchen I fell back on one of the cooking techniques I had learned as a student. I took the lid off the electric kettle and hoped the fuse would hold out long enough to boil some eggs.
Tanya was a pianist, and an Inta native. We sat on the train, if you can call a single carriage pulled by an engine a train, and she told me about her teacher: Olga Achkasova. Achkasova’s parents moved to Germany when she was a child, and she married a German before World War Two. She survived the Nazi period without being arrested, but fell foul of Berlin’s communist liberators. When she saw the first Soviet soldiers, she welcomed them in Russian. They arrested her, tried her and sent her off to the north.
We sat around a table: Tanya, Nikolai Andreyevich, a local hunter and me. Nikolai Andreyevich fetched out his map and used the opportunity to ask the hunter if he knew any gulag burial sites that were not marked. Since retiring, he has studied the gulag system and tried to create a database of the prisoners’ final resting places. Most of the camps were closed after Stalin’s death and their buildings have vanished into the swamps, which makes finding them now all but impossible. In a way, an alternative future for Russia is buried with them out there in the tundra. Almost all the brightest people from every industry and every town served time in the gulag, and many of them died. Those who survived learned habits of obedience the country has never shaken off, while those who were not imprisoned – and who were thus complicit either in locking them up or in profiting from their labour – prefer not to talk about it. Amnesia and sullen obedience are two of the crucial characteristics of modern Russian politics, and who can say how the country would have developed had these camps never existed?
Nikolai Andreyevich is one of a tiny number of Russians who want to reveal that shameful past, and hunters are a crucial source for him. They have often seen these old graveyards, and this man traced the line of the rivers with his finger, suggesting sites for him to check.
By 1948, the year of Father Dmitry’s arrival, the railway headquarters was at Abez, where the central hospital stood and where the weaker prisoners like Karsavin were concentrated. The first prisoners to build the railway voyaged up the rivers by barge, along with the rails and sleepers. The main camps therefore sat where the line crossed a river.
Nikolai Andreyevich was one of those rare people in Inta who had not sprung from the gulag. He had come here voluntarily from Ukraine. Perhaps because the gulag’s history was not personal to him, he had become fascinated by it.
‘I love history. I read all the time. I worked in the Young Communist League, the party. In the army I was the political worker. And then I came to the north in 1978. Then in the 1980s, the papers started to print memoirs, there was new openness. We knew there had been camps, but you could not talk about it,’ he said. ‘I collected these writings like a book lover.’
His interest had become all-consuming. He now takes children on trips to hunt for graveyards, and erects crosses on the graves he finds.
‘We put a cross as a memorial mark. We take two birch trees, take the bark off them, and then we chop down all other trees for 20 metres around so it is visible. In this sense the cross is a symbol. It is a symbol of the suffering these people went through. They all suffered, whether they were criminals or political prisoners,’ he said.
Tanya was on a similar mission. Karsavin had inspired her to such an extent that she had decided to organize for a monument to stand on his grave. For her, this trip was both a pilgrimage and a reconnaissance.
As our train crawled through the tundra, Nikolai Andreyevich pointed out the sites of the vanished gulag world. ‘There was a hospital, and where the trees are is a graveyard, you see. There was a woman’s camp there, and they lived up on that rise. See there that river, there was a camp there as well.’
The tundra opened as we approached the bridge, affording us our first view since we had left Inta. Grass and weeds lined the banks. The Ural Mountains, humped and smooth and white-flecked like killer whales, rose in the distance.
‘There, wait, wait, wait, there in that pier of the bridge, there’s a body. The criminals cemented in a comrade of theirs, just there,’ Nikolai Andreyevich said.
The trees closed around us once more. They were scrubby birches, with the spiky silhouettes of conifers on the horizon.
‘Abez’, Nikolai Andreyevich told me, ‘is within seven kilometres of the Arctic Circle, so you can pretty much say we’re now in the Arctic.’
We crossed the River Usa on a long clanking steel-fra
med bridge, and halted on the far side. A dozen people alighted: hunters, railway workers and us, carrying our packed lunches. A bearded man in thick glasses and camouflage greeted us. This was Alexander Merzlikin, a local with a piercing, thoughtful air, who keeps a watch over the graveyards when he is not out hunting in the wilds.
We walked over the stagnant pools of the marsh along a raised path of planks. Heather rose around us, and green scum rimmed the pools. Hundreds of mosquitoes swarmed up, nosing on to our arms and ankles, nestling in our hair.
‘Wait until you get to the graveyard,’ said Alexander, sardonically. He was smoking. ‘This is nothing.’
We dropped off our bags of lunch at the school, and donned hats he gave us. Made of nylon with a wide brim, they were screened to keep the mosquitoes off our faces. I put on my cagoule, buttoned the sleeves tight and tucked my trousers into my socks. My only bare flesh was my hands, and I could police them with ease. I was safe from the swarm, I thought.
Abez was a neat collection of houses around the two-storey buildings of an apartment block and the school. A gaggle of children cycled between the houses, clad only in shorts and T-shirts. I felt rather overdressed in my mosquito armour, but the insects’ hum as they hunted a weak point was constant and I was grateful for the protection.
‘There were 1,500 people living here before,’ said Merzlikin. I was hearing that word ‘before’ a lot. It means ‘before the end of the Soviet Union’. ‘Now there are 400. The dairy closed eight or nine years ago. You could get milk cheaper from the south.’
He pointed to the derelict barns, empty-windowed, that had once protected the village’s dairy herd from the weather. The Soviet Union had created a collective farm up here, despite the near-impossibility of carving food out of this poor soil in the three months of summer. It gave employment to the locals until the early 1990s, but could not survive the transition to a market economy.
The Last Man in Russia Page 8
