Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  There was another railwayman, a representative of the Moscow center of joke-tellers (I swear I’m not kidding). His friends and their families used to get together on Saturdays to exchange jokes. He got five years, Kolyma, death.

  Misha Vygon was a student at the Communications Institute. “I wrote to Comrade Stalin about everything I’d witnessed in prison.” Three years. Misha Vygon survived by an insane process of renouncing and reneging on all his former fellow students; he was present at executions by shooting and became the chief of a shift at the Partisan mine where all his comrades perished, were annihilated.

  Siniukov, the personnel manager of the Moscow party committee, has today written a declaration: “I flatter myself with the hope that Soviet power has laws.” Flatters himself!

  Kostia and Nika, fifteen-year-old Moscow schoolboys who in the cell played soccer with a ball made from rags, were terrorists who had killed Khandjian.[21] Much later I learned that Khandjian had been shot by Beria in the latter’s own office. The children who were accused of this murder, Kostia and Nika, perished in Kolyma in 1938. They perished even though they weren’t actually forced to work—they just died of the cold.

  Captain Schneider of Comintern: an inveterate orator, always cheerful, performs magician’s acts at our cell concerts.

  Lionka “The Malefactor,” who unscrewed the bolts on the railway tracks: a resident of the Tuma district in Moscow Province.

  Falkovsky, whose crime has been classified as article 58, paragraph 10: agitation. The material evidence is his letters to his fiancée and her letters to him. Correspondence implies two or more persons, so it’s article 58, paragraph 11: organization—and that makes the case much more serious.

  Aleksandr Georgievich said quietly, “There are only men here; there are no heroes.

  “On one of my files there’s a decision by Tsar Nicolas II. The minister of war reported to the tsar that there’d been a robbery on a destroyer at Sevastopol. We needed arms, so we took them off a naval ship. The tsar wrote in the margins of the report, ‘A nasty business.’

  “I began when I was a schoolboy in Odessa. My first mission was to throw a bomb in a theater. It was a stink bomb, quite harmless. You could say I was taking an exam. Then things got serious, bigger. I didn’t go in for propaganda. All those circles, chats: it was very hard to see or feel any final outcome. I went in for terror. At least you get instant results!

  “I was the general secretary of the society of prerevolutionary political prisoners, until the society was dissolved.”

  An enormous black figure dashed toward the window, grabbed hold of the prison bars, and howled. Alekseyev, a bearlike, blue-eyed epileptic, who had once been a chekist, was shaking the bars and shouting wildly, “Let me out, let me out!” before he slid off the bars in a fit. People bent over the epileptic. Some took hold of his hands, some his head, some his legs.

  Aleksandr Georgievich, pointing at the epileptic, merely said, “The first chekist.

  “My interrogator is just a boy, that’s the trouble. He doesn’t know a thing about revolutionaries, and SRs are dinosaurs, as far as he’s concerned. All he does is yell, ‘Confess! Think about it!’

  “I tell him, ‘You know what SRs are like?’ ‘Well?’ ‘If I tell you that I didn’t do something, it means I didn’t. And if I decide to lie to you, there’s no threat that will alter my decision. You ought to know just a little bit of history. . . .’ ”

  The conversation had taken place after the interrogation, but judging by what Andreyev said, there was no sign of his being at all worried.

  “No, he doesn’t shout at me. I’m too old. All he says is ‘Think about it!’ So we sit there. For hours. Then I sign the statement and we say goodbye until the next day.”

  I had thought of a way of avoiding boredom during interrogations. I counted the patterns on the wall. The wall was covered in wallpaper: 1,462 identical drawings. That was my examination of the wall on that particular day. I switched off my attention. There always have been repressions and there always will be. As long as the state exists.

  It seemed that you didn’t need experience, not the heroic experience of prerevolutionary political prisoners, for this new life that was following a new path. Then suddenly you realized that the path wasn’t at all new, and that you needed every bit of your experience: memories about Gershuni, knowing how to behave under interrogation, the art of counting patterns on the wallpaper while under interrogation. Then the heroic shades of your comrades, who had died long ago under the tsars, doing hard labor or on the gallows.

  Andreyev was animated and excited, but his wasn’t the nervous tension that afflicts almost anyone who finds themselves in prison. Prisoners in pretrial detention do in fact laugh more often than they need to and on the most trivial pretexts. This boisterous laughter is a prisoner’s defensive reaction, especially when he is in company.

  Andreyev’s animation was of a different kind. It was, as it were, an inner satisfaction at finding himself once more in the same position that he had been in all his life, and which was his path, a path he had held dear, and it was receding into history. And yet it turned out that the times still needed him.

  Andreyev was not interested in whether charges were true or false. He knew what mass repression was, and nothing could astonish him.

  Lionka, the seventeen-year-old youth from a remote village in the Tuma district of Moscow Province, was in the cell. He was illiterate and considered that Butyrki prison was a great piece of luck for him. He was getting all the food he could eat, and what nice people were there! In six months of pretrial detention Lionka learned more than he had during all his previous life. Every day there were lectures in the cell and, although prison memory is bad at taking in what it hears or reads, nevertheless a lot of new and important things were drummed into Lionka’s brain. Lionka was not bothered by his own “case.” He was accused of doing what the Chekhov hero did in the story “The Malefactor”: in 1937 he had unscrewed the bolts from the railway track to make weights for fishing. This was clearly article 58, paragraph 7: sabotage. But Lionka had another paragraph under article 58: paragraph 8, terror!

  “What’s this about?” Lionka was asked when people were chatting with him.

  “A judge chased after me with a revolver.”

  A lot of people laughed when they heard that reply. But Andreyev said to me in a quiet, serious voice, “Politics doesn’t know the concept of guilt. Of course, Lionka’s just Lionka, but then, Mikhail Gots [22] was paraplegic.”

  This was the blissful spring of 1937, when there were still no beatings under interrogation, when “five years” was what was usually stamped on your sentence from the Special Tribunals. “Five years in distant camps,” as the Ukrainian NKVD men put it. The people who worked in that institution were by now no longer called chekists.

  People were overjoyed to get a “fiver”: it is typical of a Russian to be overjoyed that he didn’t get ten, or twenty-five, or death by shooting. The joy had real reasons: everything now lay ahead. Everyone was now eager to be free, to get some “pure air,” to get credit against their sentence for days worked.

  “How about you?”

  “All of us old politicals get sent to Dudinka: exile, for life. I’m pretty old, after all.”

  Nevertheless, the interrogators were already using the “endurance test,” where prisoners weren’t allowed to sleep for several days and nights on end, and the “conveyor,” where one interrogator after doing his shift would be followed immediately by another, and the prisoner under interrogation had to stay sitting on the chair until he lost consciousness.

  “Method number three,” however, was still to come.

  I realized that the old political convict liked what I was doing in prison. I was no novice; I knew what methods to use to revive people’s fallen spirits. . . . I was the elected cell elder; Andreyev saw me as a version of his younger self. He enjoyed my constant interest in and respect for his past and my understanding of his fate.<
br />
  A day in prison was never wasted. The internal self-government of Butyrki pretrial prison had its own laws, and obeying those laws improved your character, reassured the newcomers, and was generally beneficial.

  Lectures were given every day. Everyone who came into the prison was able to say something interesting about his work or life. I can still remember to this day a simple metalworker and electrician talking about his work on the Dnepr hydroelectric station.

  Kogan, a lecturer from the Air Force Academy, gave several talks: “How Man Measured the Earth,” “The World of the Stars.”

  Georgie Kosparov, the son of Stalin’s first female secretary (who was sent into exile and to the camps and thus died at the hands of her Great Pilot and Chief), told us the story of Napoleon.

  A guide from the Tretiakov art gallery talked to us about the Barbizon school of art.

  The lecture schedule was endless. It was kept in the memory of the cell elder, our “culture organizer.”

  Every new arrival, every newcomer could usually be persuaded to tell us what had been in the newspapers that evening and what people in Moscow were talking about. Once a detainee had settled down, he would find the strength to give a lecture as well.

  What’s more, there were always a lot of books in the cell from the famous Butyrki prison library, which had not been purged yet. There were a lot of books here that you couldn’t find in outside libraries. Iles’s History of the International,[23] Masson’s Notes,[24] books by Kropotkin. The holdings were made up of gifts by prisoners: that was an age-old tradition. After my time there, at the end of the 1930s, this library too underwent a purge.

  Men in pretrial detention studied foreign languages and read foreign authors aloud—O. Henry, Jack London—while lecturers gave introductory talks about these writers’ lives and works.

  From time to time—once a week—we had concerts; the ocean-going Captain Schneider did magic tricks, and the German Khokhlov, a literary critic on the newspaper Izvestiya, read verses by Tsvetayeva and Khodasevich.

  Khokhlov was an émigré, a graduate of the Russian University in Prague, and he had asked to be allowed back to his homeland. The homeland greeted him with arrest, interrogation, and a sentence to the camps. I never heard of Khokhlov again. He had tortoiseshell glasses, myopic blue eyes, and dirty fair hair.

  Apart from general educational study, the cell was frequently the scene of arguments, discussions of very serious topics.

  I remember Aron Kogan, an outgoing young man, asserting that the intelligentsia provided examples of revolutionary behavior, of revolutionary valor, and was capable of the greatest heroism, more so than the workers or the capitalists, even though the intelligentsia was a “wobbly” layer that didn’t belong to any particular class.

  Given that at the time I had a limited experience of the camps, I had a different idea about the behavior of the intelligentsia in times of difficulty. Religious people, sectarians were, according to my observations, the people who had fire and moral firmness.

  In 1938 it was fully confirmed that I was right; by then Aron Kogan was no longer alive.

  “False witness! My comrade! What have we come to?”

  “We haven’t come to anything yet. I assure you that if you meet such a bastard, you’ll talk to him as if nothing were wrong.”

  And so it happened. During one of our “dry baths,” which is what we called a search in Butyrki, several people pushed their way into the cell, among them Kogan’s acquaintance, the false witness. Kogan didn’t hit him, he talked to him. After the “dry bath” Kogan told me all about it.

  Aleksandr Georgievich gave no lectures and took no part in arguments, but he listened very attentively to these debates.

  Once, after I had my say and lay down on my bunk, Andreyev sat down nearby; we slept next to each other.

  “I expect you’re right, but let me tell you an old story.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve been arrested. In 1921 I was deported to Narym for three years. I’ll tell you a good story about exile in Narym.

  “All exiles are arranged the same way, as Moscow dictates. Exiles are not entitled to communicate with the locals, they have to stew in their own juices. This destroys the weak morally, but it fortifies the strong; sometimes, though, you come across things that are very peculiar.

  “I was assigned a place to live that was very remote, farther into the backwoods than anyone else. It was a long journey by sled and I had to spend a night in a little village where there was a whole colony of exiles, seven of them. Life was tolerable. But I was too big a fish, so I couldn’t stay there: my village was another two hundred kilometers away. There was a touch of winter, then a burst of spring, then a wet snow blizzard, and no passage for a sled. So to my joy and the joy of my escort guards, I spent a whole week in the colony. Seven exiles were there. Two anarchists who were in the Komsomol, a married couple who were followers of Prince Kropotkin; two Zionists, husband and wife; two Socialist Revolutionaries, husband and wife. The seventh was an Orthodox theologian, a bishop and a professor of the Theological College, who had once given lectures in Oxford. So it was a very varied company. Everyone was at daggers drawn with everybody else. Endless discussions, ill-mannered ideological fanaticism. A terrible way to live. Petty quarrels that exploded into mad rows, mutual malevolence. Too much time on their hands.

  “And all of them, each in their own way, were decent, good people who thought and read a lot.

  “During the week I was there I thought about each one and tried to understand each of them.

  “Finally, the blizzard died down. I left for two years in the depths of the taiga. Two years later I was allowed—before the end of my sentence—to go back to Moscow. I went back the same way I’d come. Over that long distance there was only one place where I knew anybody: where I had been held up by the blizzard.

  “I spent the night in the same village. All the exiles were there, all seven, none of them had been released. But what I saw there was more than release.

  “There had, after all, been three couples: Zionists, Komsomol, Socialist Revolutionaries. And one theology professor. Now listen: all six of the married people had converted to Orthodoxy. The bishop, that learned professor, had talked them into it. They were all praying to God together, living as an evangelical commune.”

  “That really is a strange story.”

  “I’ve thought a great deal about it. It speaks for itself. All these people, SRs, Zionists, Komsomol, all six had one thing in common. They were all absolutely convinced of the power of the intellect, they believed in reason and the word.

  “People should make decisions on the basis of intuition and not trust reason too much. You don’t need logic to make a decision. Logic is justification, shaping, explaining. . . .”

  We found parting difficult. Aleksandr Georgievich was called out “with his things” before I was. We paused for a minute at the open cell door and were caught in a ray of the sun, which made us screw up our eyes. The guard, quietly jangling his key against the brass buckle of his belt, waited. We embraced.

  “I wish you,” said Aleksandr Georgievich in a muffled but cheerful voice, “I wish you happiness and good luck. Look after your health. Well,” he gave me a particular smile, a kindly smile. “Well,” he said, gently tugging at my shirt collar. “You are able to do time, you can do it. I mean every word of what I say.”

  Andreyev’s praise was the highest, the most significant and authoritative praise I ever had in my life. It was prophetic praise.

  A note from the magazine Hard Labor and Exile: “Andreyev, Aleksandr Georgievich, born 1882. Joined the revolutionary movement in 1905 in the Odessa student branch of the SR Party and in the general party; in Minsk in the city party. In 1905–6 in Chernigov and Odessa SR Party committees; in the Sevastopol SR Party committee; in 1907 in the southern provincial committee of the SR Party; in 1908 in the Tashkent active service squad attached to the central committee of the SR Party. Tried by military tri
bunal in Odessa in 1910, sentenced to one year imprisonment; 1913 tried by Tashkent military district court on article 102 charges and sentenced to six years hard labor. Served sentence in Pskov and Vladimir temporary hard-labor prisons. Spent ten years, three months in prison (Crimean section). Andreyev had a daughter, Nina.”

  1964

  THE DESCENDANT OF A DECEMBRIST

  A LOT OF books have been written about the first hussar, the famous Decembrist. In the chapter he destroyed of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote: “A friend of Mars, of Bacchus, and of Venus. . . .”

  A knight, a great mind, a man of boundless knowledge, whose deeds always matched his words. And what a great cause there was.

  As for the second hussar, the descendant, I’ll tell all I know.

  At Kadykchan, we went to work, hungry and weak, rubbing our chests into bloody blisters, turning the Egyptian circular winch [25] and dragging wagonloads of ore out of the slop—we were “carving out” a gallery, a gallery now famous throughout Kolyma. As for Egyptian slave labor, I happen to have seen and experienced it personally.

  The winter of 1940–41 was approaching, a snowless, vicious Kolyma winter. Cold contracted your muscles and squeezed your temples like an iron hoop. Iron stoves were set up in the torn canvas tents where we lived in summer, but it was the free air that was heated by these stoves.

  Our ingenious bosses were getting the men ready for winter. A second, smaller tent was built inside the first, allowing a layer of air about ten centimeters thick. This inner carcass was lined, except for the ceiling, with tarred paper and roofing felt, so that the result was a double tent slightly warmer than the canvas one.

  The very first nights we spent in this tent showed that it meant certain death, and soon, too. We had to get away. But how? Who would help? Eleven kilometers away was a big camp, Arkagala, where there were miners working. Our team was part of this camp. That’s where we had to go, to Arkagala!