Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  If the doctor had a strong enough character, he could insist on people being exempted from work. Not a single camp chief would send people out to work without the doctor’s say-so.

  A doctor could save a prisoner from heavy manual labor. All the prisoners were classified, like horses, into work categories. These categories—there were three, four, even five—were known as labor categories, although that sounds more like an expression from a dictionary of philosophy. That was one of life’s little jokes, or rather grimaces.

  Putting someone in the category of light labor often meant saving a man from death. The saddest fact was that people who desperately wanted to be in the light labor category and tried to deceive the doctor were in fact far more seriously ill than they themselves knew.

  A doctor could give a prisoner a rest, could send him to the hospital, could even “document” him, that is, draw up a document certifying an invalid state, which meant that the prisoner might be sent back to the mainland. True, a hospital bed and documentation by the medical commission did not depend on the doctor who issued the permit, but the important thing was to begin this process.

  All this, and many other things, subsidiary, everyday things, were perfectly well understood and assessed by the gangsters. Special consideration for the doctor was an integral part of the thieves’ moral code. Along with the prison bread allowance and the gentleman thief, the prison world believed firmly in the legend of the Red Cross.

  “The Red Cross” was criminal slang, and every time I hear the term, I go on the alert.

  The criminals made their respect for medical workers very clear by promising them every support and by not including doctors in their unlimited category of freiers, meaning “pushovers” and “suckers.”

  A legend was created, and it is still current in the camps, that some petty thieves (“muggers”) once robbed a doctor and the big thieves investigated and returned the stolen goods with an apology. Just like the story of Édouard Herriot’s gold watch.[12]

  In fact, doctors were never robbed; the thieves made an effort. Doctors were given presents—in goods and money—if they were free workers. They received begging requests and threats of murder if they were prisoners themselves. Doctors who treated the gangsters were rewarded with praise.

  The dream of every gang of thieves was to have “hooked” a doctor. A criminal could be coarse and rude to any boss (this was a style, a sign of spirit that a gangster was under certain circumstances obliged to demonstrate to the full), but the same gangster would fawn on the doctor and would not think of referring to the doctor in coarse language, unless he saw that the doctor didn’t trust him or had no intention of giving in to his brazen demands.

  It was said that no medical worker ever had to worry about his fate in the camp, that the criminals would help him, materially and morally. Material help would be stolen—a suit (“glad rags”) or just trousers (“squares”); moral help meant that the criminal would be willing to chat with the doctor, visit him, and treat him like a friend.

  It didn’t take much for a sick “sucker,” reduced to skin and bones by exhausting labor, lack of sleep, and beatings, to be turned out of his hospital bed and replaced by a burly pederast, murderer, and extortionist, who would be kept there until he deigned to discharge himself.

  It didn’t take much for criminals to be regularly released from work so that they could play a profitable game of cards, “hold the king by the beard.” Or to send criminals to distant hospitals on medical grounds, if they needed this for their higher criminal purposes. Or to cover up for criminal malingerers. All the criminals were malingerers or at least exaggerated their symptoms, constantly presenting self-inflicted sores and ulcers on their calves and thighs, or slashing their bellies lightly but impressively, etc. Or to treat criminals to a few “powders,” a nice dose of codeine or caffeine, diverting your entire stock of narcotics to make flavored alcohol for your benefactors to enjoy.

  For a period of many years I was in charge of admissions for new arrivals in a big camp hospital; 100 percent of the malingerers who came carrying medical certificates were thieves. Thieves either bribed or intimidated their local doctor into creating a false medical document.

  It often happened that the local doctor or local camp chief wanted to get rid of a troublesome or dangerous element in his organization and would therefore send gangsters to the hospital in the hope that their organization would get some relief, even if the gangsters didn’t disappear forever.

  If the doctor had been bribed, that was bad, very bad. But if he had been intimidated, that could be excused, since the criminals’ threats were by no means empty. At the Spokoiny medical center, where there were a lot of criminal convicts, Surovy, a young doctor and recent graduate of the Moscow Medical Institute, who was, and this is the point, also a prisoner, was sent by the hospital to work at a remote camp. His friends tried to persuade him not to go. He could have refused and done ordinary manual labor, but it was not wise to go somewhere where his work would clearly be dangerous. Surovy had come to the hospital from manual labor and was afraid of going back to it, so he agreed to go to the mine to work as a doctor. The authorities gave Surovy instructions but no advice on how to behave. He was categorically forbidden to send healthy thieves from the mine to the hospital. A month later he was murdered in his surgery; they counted fifty-two knife wounds on his body.

  In the women’s zone of another mine, Shitsel, an elderly woman doctor, was hacked to death with an ax by her own nurse, the criminal convict Kroshka, who was carrying out a sentence dictated by the criminals.

  That was what the “Red Cross” looked like in reality, when the doctors were not sufficiently obliging and refused bribes.

  The more naïve doctors tried to find explanations for these contradictions from the ideologues of the gangsters’ world. One of these philosopher-gangsters happened to be a patient in the hospital’s surgical department. Two months previously, wanting to get out of solitary confinement, he had tried the usual, infallible, but quite dangerous means: he ground an indelible pencil to powder and, to be sure, put the powder in both eyes. Medical assistance happened to arrive too late, and the criminal went blind. In the hospital he was an invalid, preparing to travel back to the mainland. But like the infamous Sir Williams from Rocambole,[13] even when blind he took part in planning crimes and was considered an unquestionable authority in courts of honor. When a doctor asked about the “Red Cross” and doctors being murdered by thieves at the mines, this Sir Williams replied, with the criminal’s typical soft vowels after his sh and ch sounds: “There are various situations in life when the law must not be applied.” This Sir Williams knew his dialectics.

  In his Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky was moved to wonderment when he noted the actions of wretches: behaving like overgrown children, carried away by the theater, quarreling like a child, when they weren’t really angry. Dostoyevsky never met or knew people from the real criminal world. Dostoyevsky would never have let himself utter a word of sympathy with that world.

  The evil acts committed by the thieves in the camps are beyond counting. The wretches were the people doing hard labor, from whom the thieves took their last rags, their last bit of money, while the worker was too afraid to complain, for he saw that the thief was stronger than the authorities. The worker was beaten by the thief and forced to work; tens of thousands were beaten to death by the thieves. Hundreds of thousands of people, once they were imprisoned, were corrupted by the thieves’ ideology and ceased to be human beings. Something gangsterish got into their souls and stayed there. Thieves and their morality could leave an indelible trace in anyone’s soul.

  The bosses were coarse and cruel, the propagandist was a liar, the doctor had no conscience, but all that was trivial compared to the power of the criminal world to deprave others. The bosses, propagandist, and doctor were still human and there were very occasionally glimpses of something human in them. But the criminals were not human.

 
Their influence on camp life knew no bounds and was ubiquitous. The camps are a negative school of life in every possible way. Nobody can get anything useful or necessary out of the camps, neither prisoner nor chief, neither the guards nor the casual witnesses, such as engineers, geologists, and doctors, neither the bosses nor their subordinates.

  Every minute of camp life is poisoned.

  There is a lot in the camps that a man must not know or see, and if he does see it, he is better off dead.

  Prisoners in the camps learn to hate labor. That is all they can learn there.

  They are taught flattery, lying, vileness, petty and serious, and they become egotists.

  When they are released, they see that not only have they failed to grow while in the camps but that their interests have narrowed and become wretched and coarse.

  Moral barriers have been pushed aside.

  You find out that you can do something vile and still live.

  You can lie and still live.

  You can make promises and fail to keep them and still live.

  You can spend a friend’s money on drink.

  You can beg for charity and still live! You can live as a beggar.

  It turns out that a man who has done something vile doesn’t then die.

  He learns to live a life of idleness, deceit, and resentment against everyone and everything.

  He overvalues his own sufferings and forgets that everyone has their own grief. He has forgotten how to sympathize with someone else’s grief; he just can’t understand it and doesn’t want to.

  Skepticism is all very well, and that is the best you can take away from the camp.

  The prisoner learns to hate people.

  He is afraid that he is a coward. He is afraid that he will suffer the same fate again. He is afraid of denunciations, of his neighbors, of everything a human being should not be afraid of.

  He is morally crushed. His ideas of morality have changed and he hasn’t noticed.

  In the camp, a boss gets used to almost infinite power over convicts, gets used to seeing himself as a god, as the only plenipotentiary representative of power, as a member of a superior race.

  As for the escort guard who has many times held human lives in his hands and has often killed prisoners who stepped outside the closed zone, what is he going to tell the girl he marries about his work in the Far North? Will he tell her about using his rifle butt to hit starving old men who could no longer walk?

  A young peasant who finds himself a prisoner sees that only the professional criminals have a relatively good life in this hell, and that they are respected, and that the almighty authorities are frightened of them. The criminals are well-dressed, well-fed, and support one another.

  The young peasant takes all this in. He begins to suspect that in camp life the gangsters are on the right side, that just by imitating their behavior he will find the right way to save his own life. It now appears that there are people who can live even in the lowest depths. So the peasant begins to imitate the gangsters and to act like them. He goes along with everything they say, is ready to carry out anything they ask him to do, and speaks about them with fear and veneration. He cannot wait to color his speech with their jargon. Nobody, male or female, prisoner or free, who spent any time in Kolyma, ever came back without criminal slang in their vocabulary.

  These slang words are a poison, a venom that gets into a man’s soul. The moment you master the criminal dialect is the moment a “sucker” begins to join the criminal world.

  An intellectual, once imprisoned, is crushed by the camp. Everything that used to be dear to him is trampled into the dust, and he sheds his civilization and culture in the shortest imaginable time, a matter of weeks.

  In any discussion the main argument is a fist or a stick. The means of compulsion is a rifle butt or a punch in the mouth.

  An intellectual turns into a coward, and his own brain suggests a justification for his actions. He can persuade himself of anything, he can take any side in an argument. The criminal world calls intellectuals “life teachers,” fighters “for the people’s rights.”

  A “slapping,” a punch, is enough to turn an intellectual into the obedient servant of some thieving Senia or Kostia.

  Physical influence becomes moral influence.

  The intellectual becomes a permanently scared creature. His spirit is broken. Even when he gets back to life in freedom, he will still have this intimidated and broken spirit.

  Engineers, geologists, and doctors who come to Kolyma on Far East Development contracts are very quickly debauched. The extra rubles, the law of the taiga, slave labor that is so easy and profitable to use, a reduction of cultural interests—all this corrupts and depraves. A man who has spent some time working in the camps doesn’t go back to the mainland, he is worthless trash there, but he has gotten used to a rich life with all the facilities. It’s this depravity that is referred to in literature as “the call of the north.”

  The blame for this debauchery of the human soul falls to a significant extent on the world of the gangsters, the recidivists whose tastes and habits are interlinked with all of Kolyma’s life.

  1959

  THE LAWYERS’ CONSPIRACY

  SHMELIOV’S brigade was a dumping ground for human slag, the waste people from the gold-mine pit face. There were three ways out of the seam from where sand was extracted and peat was removed: “down the hill”—which meant into mass graves—to the hospital, or to Shmeliov’s brigade. These were the three paths open to goners. This brigade worked at the same pit face, but it was given less important tasks. The slogans “Fulfilling the plan is the law” and “Let’s take the plan to the pit-face workers” weren’t idle words. They were interpreted as “If you don’t fulfill the norm, you’ve broken the law, deceived the state, and must pay for it with a prison sentence, if not your life.”

  The Shmeliov men were fed worse and less. But I remembered well the local saying: “What kills you in the camps is the big ration, not the small one.” I wasn’t making any effort to get the big ration that the core pit-face brigades got.

  I had only recently, three weeks previously, been transferred to Shmeliov’s brigade, and I didn’t know the foreman Shmeliov by face. It was the depths of winter and the foreman’s head was ingeniously wrapped in a torn scarf, while in the evenings it was dark in the barracks, where the improvised kerosene lamp barely lit up the door. And so I don’t remember his face, only his voice, which was hoarse from the freezing cold.

  We were working a December night shift and every night seemed like torture—minus fifty is no joke. Even so, the night shift was better, calmer, with fewer bosses at the pit face and less cursing and beating.

  The brigade was lining up to leave. In winter we lined up inside the barracks, and even now it is agonizing to recall those last minutes before you left for an icy twelve-hour night shift. Here, wanly jostling by the half-open doors, from which came an icy mist, human beings showed their real nature. One man would overcome his shivering and stride straight out into the darkness; another man would hastily finish sucking a cigarette end he had gotten from God knows where, since there wasn’t a whiff or even a trace of tobacco here; a third man would shield his face from the cold wind; a fourth would stand over the stove, holding out his gloves to gather the warmth.

  The last men were pushed out of the barracks by the orderly. That was what happened to the weakest everywhere, in every brigade.

  I was not yet being dragged out in that brigade. There were people weaker than me there, which gave me a certain comfort, an unexpected joy. Here I was still human. I had left the orderly’s shoves and punches behind in the “golden” brigade from which I had been moved to Shmeliov’s.

  The brigade was standing by the barracks door, ready to go outside. Shmeliov came up to me.

  “You’re staying behind,” he rasped.

  “Have I been moved to the morning shift, then?” I asked mistrustfully.

  Any transfer from one shift t
o another always happened just before the beginning of the first hour, so that no working day was lost and so that the prisoner would not have any extra rest hours. I knew how it worked.

  “No, Romanov is summoning you.”

  “Romanov? Who’s Romanov?”

  “What a jerk! Doesn’t know who Romanov is,” the orderly intervened.

  “He’s the NKVD officer, got it? His office is just before the main office. You’re to be there at eight.”

  “At eight!”

  I was overwhelmed by a feeling of relief. If the NKVD man kept me until midnight, to night-shift dinner, or even longer, I would have the right to take all night off work. My body immediately felt its fatigue. But this was a joyful fatigue, it was my muscles complaining.

  I undid my trouser belt, unbuttoned my pea jacket, and sat down by the stove. I immediately felt warm, and the lice under my tunic started moving about. I scratched my neck and chest with my sorely bitten fingernails. And I dozed off.

  “It’s time, it’s time.” The orderly was shaking me by the shoulder. “Off you go, and bring back something to smoke, don’t forget.”

  I knocked at the door of the building where the NKVD officer lived. Bolts were noisily drawn back, locks undone, a great number of bolts and locks, and someone invisible yelled from the other side of the door, “Who are you?”

  “Prisoner Andreyev, told to come.”

  The clanging of bolts and clinking of locks sounded out, then there was silence.

  The cold was getting under my jacket, my legs were getting numb. I started banging one soft boot against the other; we weren’t wearing felt boots, we had quilted ones made from old trousers and jackets.