A perfect crescent moon shone over Abez, close enough to touch but a million miles away. It was paired like in a Muslim flag with a single bright star, which swam in a pure black sky. A herd of snowmobiles had gathered at the station to welcome the two dozen passengers that alighted into the moonlight. Among them, his beard dusted with ice, and his eyes smiling behind his thick glasses, was Alexander Merzlikin, my guide of the summer.
He had a trailer behind his snowmobile, which he ushered me on to, sitting me on a reindeer skin and insisting that I wrap a fur-lined blanket around my legs. He asked if I was warm in my red down-filled jacket. I told him about my mountaineer friend and the Andes. This coat, I said, was the best Britain had to offer. He looked sceptical and muttered something about me needing to borrow a real coat. And we set off.
The single headlight cut into the dark, illuminating the cloud of powder snow thrown up by the two or three snowmobiles that had roared off before us. Alexander twisted the throttle and the wind cut into my face and tore at my arms. I began to wonder if he might be right about the jacket. The cold was intense – down to minus 40 and due to fall still further in the clear conditions – and physically painful.
The wooden houses of the village flicked past as I tried to shield my cheeks from the wind. By the time we arrived at Alexander’s single-storey home, I was rubbing my face to get a bit of warmth back into it. Alexander looked at me in confusion.
‘Why didn’t you just face backwards?’ he asked. I felt like an idiot, since that had not even occurred to me, and tried to create a convincing lie for my stupidity.
‘I wanted to see where we were going,’ I tried, hesitatingly. That did not even convince me, and Alexander laughed. He pointed me at the door and went to put away the snowmobile.
I entered a porch filled with firewood. The doors were lined with blankets, both for insulation and to ensure a good fit in their frames. I pulled off my boots, which were tight against my three pairs of socks. I wondered, when I realized how cold my toes were, if my boots might not be inadequate for these conditions as well. When I passed into the warmth of the house, a smiling handsome woman was waiting for me, Alexander’s wife.
‘I’m Natasha, but call me Auntie, everyone else does,’ she said, and we walked into the kitchen and she put the kettle on. The main feature of the room was a huge brick oven, as large as Alexander’s snowmobile, which gave off a pleasant heat. Three cats and a kitten were perched on top of it, among assorted pots and pans. They watched me with unblinking eyes as I sat at the corner of the table and drank my tea.
Alexander finally bustled in, his glasses iced over. He sat on a stool by the stove and lit one of his rough cigarettes. He scooped up a couple of shovels full of dusty coal and threw them into the fire. Then he sat back and looked at me. Why, he asked, had I come?
I explained that I wanted to experience the conditions that Father Dmitry had lived in. I wanted to feel, if only for a short time, the kind of conditions that he had endured and the kind of torments suffered by prisoners who refused to offer due homage to the Soviet state. We talked about that for a while, our conversation then wandering on to the conditions Alexander and his family lived in. His youngest daughter Dasha had now joined us. He told me about hunting and fishing, and the two women chipped in with comments and suggestions.
‘I used to hunt bears, but what do you kill them for? I don’t see the need to do this any more, it’s for young men,’ he said.
The next morning dawned pale. Lying in the warmth of the blankets, I could hear the wind moaning around the house, and I pulled on my two pairs of long underpants, three pairs of socks, vest, two T-shirts and trousers before getting out of bed. A pale orange stain on the sky was the sun poking its head over the horizon to see if the Arctic was warm enough for it. Before my window was a rolling unbroken, unscarred sweep of snow. To the right was a small stand of birch trees. Beyond was a tractor, its contours smoothed by a drift that made it almost unrecognizable as a man-made object. A little outhouse was off to the left, with snow pushed up its walls in an elegant sweep. When the sun finally persuaded itself to get out of bed, it was so weak I could watch it with the naked eye, and the bright patches it left on the snow seemed to emphasize the cold rather than alleviate it.
Alexander, when I walked into the kitchen, welcomed me with a cup of tea. He was sitting on his stool by the stove, smoking.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this but it’s warm, it’s only minus 27. But the wind is 15 metres a second and it bites,’ he said. The little black kitten was scratching in the coal by his feet, and I saw that the coal doubled as their litter tray. It seemed an elegant solution to burn the cats’ toilet waste, since they could hardly go outside.
Before we ventured out, Alexander examined the mountaineering jacket, and pronounced it inadequate. I would have bridled at the slur but, to be honest, after the cold of the previous evening, I had my doubts about it. He handed me a stiff blue coat as used by the railway workers, then, on seeing my boots, silently handed me a fur-lined pair. Before I put them on, he made me wear padded dungarees too. Fully dressed – with a jumper, scarf and hat as well as the collection of undergarments I’d donned in bed – I could barely bend in the middle. I felt like a knight in squishy armour.
Outside in the bright morning, the cold was still startling. My cheeks tingled, and I tucked my fingers into the palms of my gloves.
Boretsky, the old man in Inta, had said that the prisoners in the gulag wore two pairs of quilted trousers to work outside, with a daily ration of just 600 grams of bread. Here I was, full of a substantial breakfast, in two pairs of long underpants, trousers and padded dungarees, and I was already cold. It suddenly seemed a miracle any of them survived at all.
In a memoir published in 2011, Fyodor Mochulsky, a Soviet diplomat, recorded the early part of his career when he oversaw a convict-labour railway-building camp near Abez. This was before the railway was finished, so they had to take a steamer from Arkhangelsk on the White Sea to Naryan-Mar, then a smaller ship up the River Pechora, then a smaller ship still up the Usa. The boat, with its cargo of building materials and food and prisoners, froze into the ice before they reached Abez, and they had to walk the rest of the way, sixteen days, over the icy crust that had formed upon the freezing mud. Mochulsky’s horse plunged through the crust.
‘The horse was thrashing around, and sinking even deeper into the marsh,’ he wrote. ‘We all shared a very worrisome thought: how will we explain that our horse disappeared when we arrive at the Gulag Camp Administration? . . . This crime, we all knew, had a corresponding legal statute: ten years’ imprisonment in the camps. By now, we had worked so hard to get that horse out of the quagmire that we were losing our strength. We were in total despair.’
That thought seems to encapsulate the bureaucratic insanity of the gulag. The horse was not pitied as a terrified living thing, but protected only to avoid punishment. Perhaps more terrible is that he, a free man, should accept a ten-year prison term as an appropriate punishment for losing a horse through no fault of his own. The guards were hardly more at liberty than the prisoners. The habit of giving and receiving orders was so engrained in both that it formed an internal prison they struggled to escape from.
When Mochulsky reached his final destination, a logging camp far in the wilds, the convicts had no houses or shelter of any kind. ‘They had scraped the snow off of several metres of frozen ground in the shape of squares, and had placed crudely cut branches down as makeshift beds. On top of these branches lay the prisoners, dressed in their greatcoats and army boots, “resting” after their twelve-hour workday.’
Mochulsky, who appears to have written the memoir to excuse his own role as a cog in the world’s largest-ever killing machine, recounted how he had mobilized the prisoners to build barracks for themselves and made them warm over the winter, and that they were grateful to him. That was the winter of 1940–1, when hundreds of thousands of prisoners died.
Perhaps more tel
ling is an encounter he had later in Abez, with a teenage girl. A cashier, she had received a three-year sentence for an accounting irregularity, and had been raped for the first time before she even reached prison. In her first night in prison she was gang-raped, and was repeatedly assaulted by fellow inmates in transit camps and the camp barracks.
‘How could I help her? In the context of the camp, other than feeling bad for her, I could do nothing.’
The prisoners here were units to be worked to death. They died in their thousands, and were not remembered. That morning, as Alexander folded the fur blanket over me on the snowmobile’s trailer, he told me we would go to see the remains of such unfortunates: graves we had not seen in the summer, which had not won even the slight recognition of those in what is called the ‘memorial cemetery’, where Karsavin and the others were remembered as individuals, rather than ignored as random lumps in the tundra.
We set off along the bluff above the river, stopping to admire a recently finished church, which was built in memory of a young man who had died on a fishing trip. A little further on, towards the railway and the great bridge that had tamed the River Usa, we stopped and Alexander pointed to our right. He said something, but I could not hear, my ears being tightly swaddled in my woolly hat and my coat’s great hood.
I looked in the direction of his outstretched index finger and could see an obelisk against a clump of birches. It looked like a grave, so I stepped off the trailer to get a better look. I instantly vanished into the snow up to the tops of my thighs. I pushed back with my left foot, but just sank deeper. My heavy clothing blocked me from turning round, and I was forced to lie full length on the snow’s crust, heave myself round, then pull myself back on to the trailer with my gloved hands.
‘What did I tell you?’ Alexander shouted, and I realized that the unheard words had been a warning to stay on the trailer.
The obelisk, he told me, marked the grave of a boss’s daughter. I asked why it was all on its own, away from the main graveyard. He laughed, and coughed on the smoke of his cigarette.
‘It’s not all on its own, there are dozens of graves over there but the rest are for prisoners so they’re unmarked. They’re disappearing back into the ground. In a few years, you’d never know they were there.’
We swooped down the bluff, past the site where the North Stream gas pipeline will ford the river, and out on to the ice. In my attempt to reach the obelisk, snow had pushed down into my boots and was beginning to melt. We zoomed under the bridge, and Alexander pointed out the sticks that mark where fishermen have set their nets under the ice. He himself preferred a site 15 kilometres upstream, he said. It might be further away but the fish were better, and there was less competition. Fortunately, the cold winter water preserved any fish he caught, he said, and he only had to check the nets every three or four days.
I wiggled my toes. My feet were cold and stiff, and my camera was beginning to misbehave as well. The little screen that tells me the aperture and shutter speed, as well as all the various focus points and ISO information, was fading out. I turned it on and off again, but it did not return to life. I tucked it inside my coat in the hope that the warmth would revive it, but to no effect.
While we watched, a passenger train of nine carriages passed over the bridge. It was the first train I had heard since being here.
‘They used to pass every fifteen minutes, but that was before,’ said Alexander. ‘Now, you’re lucky if you get one an hour.’
We turned back for home and into the wind. The air hit me in the face like sandpaper. I had not realized that previously my back had been against the wind, and my face had been protected. I tugged my hat down as far as possible, and pulled my scarf up over my face. Just my eyes were exposed now, but the cold cut at my eyebrow ridge. It was sharp and inescapable. We were driving into both sun and wind, and it was weird to feel such cold and no heat at all from the sunlight.
By the time we were back inside, my face was extremely sore. I checked the thermometer on the way in; it was indeed just minus 27. Father Dmitry had experienced temperatures colder by 20 degrees or more, for longer, with a fraction of the clothing and far less food. Still, I was not prepared to stay out any longer no matter how much I wanted to know what he had lived through.
In the days of Mochulsky, the gulag boss, Abez was the centre of this part of the camp system. From here, the security chiefs co-ordinated construction at dozens of small camps up and down the railway, communicating by a primitive telephone and setting nearly impossible targets.
Mochulsky was told to build an embankment for a bridge over the River Pechora. ‘If you pull this off, you will get an award; if you don’t, we will shoot you,’ his supervisor told him bluntly. With such management techniques, it is hardly surprising that the bosses worked their labourers to death.
Alexander, however, came here much later. He was born in 1953 in the town of Uzlovaya, in the Tula region, which is just south of Moscow and is now close to being ground zero in Russia’s demographic catastrophe.
‘I left my homeland thirty years ago,’ he said. ‘I went back five years ago and it was like nothing had changed, nothing had improved: the same holes in the road, the same destruction; no one does anything to make it better. Our rulers say the correct words about democracy, about the market, about creating the right conditions but nothing gets done. We are the richest country in the world by natural resources, but look at us. This snowmobile we went out on this morning costs the same as a car – 160,000 roubles – but people were using machines just like this fifty years ago, there is nothing new here. All the technology you see is Western now, nothing gets made in Russia any more.’
For a hunter, of course, a badly made snowmobile or a poor-quality outboard motor can be lethal. Get stranded in the tundra without transport and you die, summer or winter. He had a brochure for snowmobiles from Germany and Japan, which he had picked up on a recent visit to town. We pored over it together, gazing at the shiny smooth bellies of these gorgeous machines. He lamented the shoddy quality of what he could afford.
‘This is the problem of Russia itself,’ Natasha said.
She was an Abez girl, born and brought up here. Her mother had worked as a teacher in a village on the far side of the river and, during the thaw, would walk across the river on the moving ice. It was that kind of self-reliance and edge that Alexander had fallen in love with when he first came north.
‘This was like a zoo, mushrooms, berries, everything,’ he said. ‘You could see the Urals on a clear day and I went out in the boat, sometimes for fish, but normally just for an adventure.’ His trips had made him an expert in the geography of the gulag. ‘It is not like what is said in the books. They say there was a camp here or a camp there, but it is not like that. There were camps everywhere. Last year I went up the River Lemva for 200 kilometres. There is a swamp there where the prisoners cut the trees and sent them down the river. There was prisoner labour everywhere and it was used for everything.’
After he has set his nets, he said, there is not much to do, so he explores the tundra a little, looks at what is around him.
‘In this place on the Lemva there’s only marsh, but we looked about and found the camp. Time hides everything but the first years I lived here I often saw barbed wire in the tundra, which must have been guarding something.’
Now we – or rather I – were warmed up, we saddled up the snowmobile again. I wanted to see again the memorial cemetery that we had visited in the summer, and to photograph the village. My camera had revived in the warmth, and this time I took the spare battery too. With a battery keeping warm in my pocket, to replace the one in the camera as soon as it died of cold, I hoped I could keep it on life support long enough to get the shots I wanted.
As we set off down the hill once more, Alexander’s two dogs tentatively followed us. They were thick-furred mongrels, shaggy as wolves, and were clearly not sure if they could accompany us on our trip. When Alexander did not stop them, however,
they gained confidence and trotted up alongside the trailer. When we roared out on to the ice, they gambolled and danced like dolphins round a ship. They leaped and bounded with joy, sometimes running their noses along in the snow to cool down. They were mother and son, and the male – still puppyish though full grown – shoulder-barged his mother again and again, urging her to play. Sometimes, he would crash through the crust on the snow and come bouncing up again, grinning foolishly. Their tongues lolled, and they were the image of joy.
In reading books on the gulag, I always imagined the guard dogs as grim, oppressive beasts, but perhaps they were like these two, and their play would have been a comfort in the surroundings. It is hard to imagine how grins like these, or a nudge on the hand like the one I felt as we slowed to drive back up into the village, would not have cheered even the most downhearted of men. We headed off to the right, through the ruined farm buildings, to the cemetery. The path was impassable, however. No snowmobile had gone up there this winter, and without a compacted track to follow we ran the risk of crashing through the crust ourselves, and facing a struggle to extricate the heavy machine.
Frustrated in that plan, therefore, I turned to look at the village graves, hoping to see headstones with the names of gulag bosses and their families. The cemetery was too recent for that, however, so I idly scanned the names that were there. These graves were far more recent than I had imagined, most if not all of them post-Soviet. But there seemed an impossible number for such a small village. It was then that it dawned on me, as I looked from name to name, that here was the death of Russia, in hard dates, in front of my eyes. These graves were not of pensioners, but of young men and young women, dying before their prime. What chance did a village have to support itself, or to reproduce itself, if its new adults die before they can achieve anything? And if the villages are dying, then the country is too.
This was the alcoholic apocalypse that Father Dmitry saw starting in the 1960s, and fought against with his sermons. I wrote down the birth and death dates in a column in my notebook: 1988–93, 1990–2007, 1983–2007, 1962–1994, 1972–1992, 1986–2008, 1985–2005, 1975–2001. I saw a man born in 1949 who had lived to 1997, and smiled briefly. At least here was someone who had lived a full life, I thought, until I worked out that he had died aged forty-eight. His life was cut short by any standards I was used to, but it looked age-long compared to his young neighbours: 1971–2006, 1986–2006, 1970–2004, 1980–2005. That is not all the graves. Some I could not reach through the snow, and on others the drifts obscured the dates and names of the people buried beneath, but it was enough to show why Abez has shrunk like a slug sprinkled with salt.
The Last Man in Russia Page 19
