Semion was both perturbed and happy.
“But why me? What right do I have?” he mumbled in his extreme anxiety. “No, no, I can’t. . . .”
But I managed to persuade him and, full of joy, he ran off to fetch hot water.
That very moment I was felled to the ground by a terrible blow to the head.
When I got back on my feet, the bags with the butter and bread were gone. A meter-long larch log, which I had been hit with, was lying by my bunk. Everyone around me was laughing. Sheinin came running with the hot water. For many years afterward I couldn’t recall this theft without a terrible, almost traumatic anxiety.
Semion, however, died.
Ivan Yakovlevich Fediakhin died. We’d come here on the same train and the same ship. We ended up at the same mine, on the same brigade. He was a philosopher, a peasant from Volokolamsk, the organizer of the first collective farm in Russia. As many will know, it was the Socialist Revolutionaries who set up the first collective farms in the 1920s, and the Chayanov-Kondratiev [1] group lobbied the “people on top” about the advantages of collective farms. . . . Ivan Fediakhin was another rural Social Revolutionary, one of the million who voted for that party in 1917. He was sentenced to five years in prison for organizing the first collective farm.
In our very first Kolyma autumn of 1938 we found ourselves working together on the ore barrows by the notorious mine conveyor. There were two of these ore barrows, which had couplings. In the time it took the horse man to take one barrow to the ore-washing machine, it was all that two men could do to fill the other barrow up. There was no time for a cigarette, not that the guards would have let us smoke. But the horse man did smoke—an enormous roll-up made with almost half a packet of tobacco (tobacco was still available then)—and he left us enough at the edge of the pit face for us to take a puff or two.
The horse man was Mishka Vavilov, who used to be the deputy chairman of the Industrial Import Trust; Fediakhin and I just worked at the pit face.
While we threw the soil and stones into the barrow, we didn’t hurry. We talked. I told Fediakhin about the norm the Decembrists were given at Nerchinsk, according to Maria Volkonskaya’s Notes, fifty kilos of ore per man.
“And how much does our norm weigh, Vasili?” Fediakhin asked.
I calculated it as about six and a half tons.
“Well, the norms really have gone up, Vasili. . . .”
Later, when it was winter and we were starving, I got hold of some tobacco, begged, hoarded, or bought, and exchanged it for bread. Fediakhin disapproved of my “business dealings.”
“It’s not like you, Vasili. You shouldn’t be doing it. . . .”
The last time I saw him was in winter by the refectory. I gave him six dinner coupons I had gotten that day for copying out documents in the office at night. I had good handwriting and that was a help sometimes. The coupons would only have been wasted; they were already date-stamped. Fediakhin got the dinners. He sat at table, pouring dumpling soup from bowl to bowl. The soup was extremely watery and didn’t have a single piece of fat floating in it. Six coupons’ worth of “shrapnel” porridge didn’t amount to enough to fill a half-liter bowl. . . . Fediakhin didn’t have a spoon; he licked the porridge with his tongue. And he wept.
Derfel died. Derfel was a French communist who had served time in the quarries of Cayenne. He was tormented not just physically, by the cold and by hunger, but morally. He refused to believe that he, a member of the Comintern, could have ended up here doing hard labor in the Soviet Union. His horror would have been lessened if he had seen that he was not the only one. Everyone he’d arrived with, and with whom he was living and dying, was in the same situation. He was a feeble little man, and beatings were now the fashion. . . . Once he was struck—just punched—by his foreman to keep him in his place, as it were, but Derfel fell down and didn’t get up. He was one of the first to die, one of the lucky ones. In Moscow he had worked as an editor for TASS, the news agency. He spoke good Russian.
“Things were bad in Cayenne, too,” he once told me. “But here they’re very bad.”
Fritz David died. He was a Dutch communist, working for the Comintern, and had been accused of espionage. He had beautiful wavy locks, deep-set blue eyes, and a child’s lips. He knew virtually no Russian. I met him in a barracks that was so overcrowded that you could sleep standing up. We stood next to each other. Fritz smiled at me and closed his eyes.
The space between the bunks was packed tight with people. You had to wait if you wanted to sit down or squat, then you had to lean against some bit of the bunks, such as a pillar, or against someone else’s body, to get some sleep. I was waiting, with my eyes shut. Suddenly something next to me collapsed. It was my neighbor Fritz David. He got up, embarrassed.
“I fell asleep,” he said. He was frightened.
This Fritz was the first man in our party of prisoners to receive a parcel. It had come from his wife in Moscow. It contained a velvet suit, a nightshirt, and a big photograph of a beautiful woman. When he was squatting next to me he wore the velvet suit.
“I’m hungry,” he said, smiling and blushing. “I’m very hungry. Bring me something to eat.”
Fritz David went mad and he was taken away somewhere.
His nightshirt and his photograph were stolen on the very first night. Later, whenever I told people about him, I was always puzzled and indignant: who would want someone else’s photograph, and why?
“Even you don’t know everything,” some knowing person I was talking to remarked. “That’s an easy question to answer. The gangsters stole it for what they call a ‘session.’ For masturbating, my naïve friend. . . .”
Seriozha Klivansky died. He was a fellow student during our first year at university, and we met again ten years later in the Butyrki prison cell where prisoners were assembled for deportation. He was expelled from the Komsomol in 1927 for his lecture to a current politics circle on the Chinese revolution. He managed to graduate, and then worked as an economist for the State Planning Department, until circumstances changed there and he was forced to leave. He later won a place as a second violinist in the orchestra of the Stanislavsky Theater, until he was arrested in 1937. He was a sanguine person, a wit who never stopped being ironic. And he never stopped taking an interest in life and in events.
In the cell for deportees everyone walked around almost naked, pouring water over themselves, sleeping on the floor. Only a hero could have put up with sleeping on the bunks. Klivansky used to joke, “This is torture by steaming. Afterward, in the north, we’ll be tortured by freezing.”
The prediction was accurate, but Klivansky was no moaning coward. He was cheerful and outgoing at the mine. He enthusiastically tried to master the gangsters’ vocabulary and was as happy as a child when he could use their expressions with the right intonation.
“Any moment now I’ll blow my top,” Seriozha would say as he climbed onto the top bunks.
He loved poetry and in prison often recited poems by memory. Once he was in the camps he stopped doing that.
He would share his last piece of bread, or rather, he was still sharing. . . . Which means that he didn’t survive to the times when nobody had a last piece and nobody shared anything with anyone.
Diukov the foreman died. I never knew his first name. He was a nonpolitical: his crime had nothing to do with article 58. In the camps on the mainland he was a so-called collective chairman, fond of “playing his part,” even if he was no romantic. He had arrived in winter and made an amazing speech at a meeting. The nonpoliticals used to have meetings—after all, men who had committed ordinary crimes or misdemeanors at work, just like professional thieves, were considered “friends of the people” who deserved rehabilitation, not castigation. They were unlike us “enemies of the people” who were condemned under article 58. Later, when the recidivists started to be sentenced under paragraph 14 of article 58, “sabotage (for refusing to work),” all of paragraph 14 was removed from article 58 and exempted fro
m various punitive measures, inevitably leading to lengthy sentences. Professional criminals were always considered friends of the people, right up to and including the famous Beria amnesty of 1953. Many hundreds of thousands of unfortunates were sacrificed in order to justify Krylenko’s “rubber-band” theory and the notorious “reforging” idea.[2]
At that first meeting Diukov suggested that he should take charge of article 58 prisoners, at a time when political prisoners usually had a foreman who was also political. Diukov was a good man. He knew that peasants were the best workers in the camp, excellent in fact, and he remembered that there were many peasants convicted under article 58. This is a reason to consider both Yezhov and Beria as especially wise, for they understood that intellectuals had a very low value as a workforce, and that the productive aims, unlike the political aims, of the camps couldn’t be realized by the intellectuals. Diukov didn’t go in for such arcane speculations: he was unlikely ever to have thought of anything except people’s working capacities. The brigade he selected was composed solely of peasants, and he set them to work. This was in spring 1938. Diukov’s peasants managed to get through the hungry winter of 1937–38. He never accompanied them to the bathhouse, otherwise he would immediately have realized what was actually going on.
They worked quite well; they just had to get the food they needed. But when Diukov asked for the food, the authorities refused outright. By extreme exertions, the starving brigade heroically fulfilled its norm. Then the surveyors, the bookkeepers, the guards, and the work clerks began cheating Diukov. He started to complain and protest more and more sharply, as the brigade’s official production figures fell further and further and their food got worse and worse. Diukov tried to appeal to the top bosses, but they advised the appropriate employees to put Diukov’s brigade and Diukov himself on the notorious “lists.” This was done and they were all executed by shooting at the famous Serpantinnaya.[3]
Pavel Mikhailovich Khvostov died. The most terrifying thing about men who are starving is their behavior. They seem to be entirely healthy, but they are nevertheless half insane. The starving are always furious defenders of justice, as long as they are not too hungry and not excessively emaciated. They argue constantly, they brawl desperately. Normally, only one in a thousand quarrelers, even when extremely provoked, ends up in an actual fight. The starving, however, are always fighting. Quarrels arise for the most absurd and surprising reasons: “Why have you taken my pickax, why have you taken my turn?” A man who is shorter uses his feet to try and trip up his opponent. The taller man will fall on his enemy and fell him with his physical weight, then scratch, punch and bite. . . . All this is too minor to hurt anyone. It isn’t lethal and far too often it happens in order to draw the attention of those around them. Nobody tries to break up a fight.
Khvostov was one such man. Every day he would brawl with somebody in the barracks and in the deep drainage trench that our brigade was digging. I’d gotten to know him in winter, so I had never seen his hair. His hat had earflaps and it was made of torn white fur. His eyes were dark, the shining eyes of a starving man. I would sometimes recite poetry and he would look at me as if I were an idiot.
Suddenly he began desperately to hit the trench rock with his pickax. The pickax was heavy, and Khvostov was swinging it from over his head, hardly stopping between blows. I was astounded by his strength. We had been together, both starving, for a long time. Then the pickax fell with a ringing sound to the ground. I turned around and looked. Khvostov was standing there swaying, his legs apart. His knees were bending. He rocked once and then fell facedown. His arms were stretched out before him; he was wearing gloves he darned every evening. His arms were now bared and both upper arms turned out to be tattooed. Pavel Khvostov had been an oceangoing captain.
I watched Roman Romanovich Romanov die. At one time he had been a sort of squad commander for us. He was the one who’d issued parcels and enforced cleanliness in the camp. Simply put, he had a privileged position that none of us, article 58 and “acronym” politicals (the common criminals called us “letter men,” the senior camp officials’ version was “literals”), could even dream about. The most we ever dreamed of was a job doing the laundry in the bathhouse or making repairs in the nighttime tailor shop. Moscow’s “special instructions” forbade us everything but stone. Every one of us had a file with a special paper to say so. And yet Roman Romanov had this unattainable job. And, what’s more, he had quickly learned all the ins and outs: how to open a box so that the sugar spilled onto the floor, how to smash a jar of jam, how to roll rusks and dried fruit under the trestle table. Roman Romanov learned all this very quickly and avoided any acquaintance with us. He was strictly official and behaved like a polite representative of a higher authority with which we could have no contact. He never gave us advice. He would only specify that one letter a month could be sent, that parcels were issued from eight to ten in the evening in the camp commandant’s office, and so on. Roman Romanov aroused astonishment, not envy, in us. Obviously, he owed his position to some lucky personal connection. In any case, he wasn’t squad commander for long: a couple of months at most. Whether there had been one of the periodic checks on employees (these checks took place from time to time, and always on the eve of the New Year), or whether somebody had grassed him up, to use the picturesque camp expression, one day Roman Romanov vanished. He had served in the military, as a colonel, apparently. Then four years later I found myself on a vitamin expedition, where we were collecting dwarf pine needles, dwarf pines being the only evergreen tree in the region. The needles were taken hundreds of kilometers away to a vitamin factory, where they were boiled down and the needles turned into an astringent brown mixture that smelled and tasted awful. It was poured into barrels and distributed to the camps. At the time, the local medical authorities considered it to be the most easily available and indispensable means of preventing scurvy. There was an epidemic of scurvy, as well as pellagra and other vitamin-deficiency diseases. But anyone who happened to swallow even a drop of this horrible preparation would prefer to die rather than follow a course of such hellish medication. Orders were orders, however, and food was not issued in the camps until a portion of this medicine had been swallowed. The duty server would stand there with a special tiny ladle. You couldn’t get into the refectory without passing the dwarf pine distributor: so what the prisoner most treasured—dinner, food—was irreparably ruined by this compulsory preliminary dose. This went on for more than ten years. . . . The better informed doctors had their doubts: how could this sticky ointment preserve vitamin C, which is extremely sensitive to any changes in temperature? This treatment was utterly useless, but the extract was distributed all the same. In the same area, near all the settlements, there were a lot of briar roses. But the authorities were reluctant to collect rose hips: they hadn’t been mentioned in orders. Only much later, in 1952 I believe, was a document received from the local medical authorities, containing a categorical prohibition on issuing the extract of dwarf pine needles, because of the damage it did to the kidneys. The vitamin factory was closed down. But at the time I met Romanov, collecting dwarf pine needles was all the rage. They were collected by the goners—the slag from the mine, the rubbish from the gold-mine pit face—chronically starving semi-invalids. The gold-mine pit face took three weeks to turn healthy men into invalids: hunger, sleeplessness, hard labor for many hours on end, beatings. . . . New people were taken into the brigade, and Moloch chewed them up. . . . By the end of the season, Ivanov was the only man left on the brigade of which he was the foreman. The rest had ended up in the hospital, under the “mound,” that is, buried, or sent on vitamin expeditions where they were fed once a day and couldn’t get more than 600 grams of bread. That autumn Romanov and I weren’t gathering dwarf pine needles. We were doing “construction” work. We were building ourselves a winter house (in summer we lived in torn tents).
The area was marked out by pegs driven into the ground, and we drove in two rows of spaced-out
fence poles. The gaps between the poles were filled with clumps of frozen moss and peat. Inside, we made single-story bunks out of laths. There was an iron stove in the middle. We were given a daily ration of firewood, calculated by guesswork to last the night. Yet we didn’t have a saw or an ax. Such sharp tools were kept by the soldiers guarding us, who lived in a separate tent that was heated and insulated with plywood. Saws and axes were given out only in the morning when we were lined up to go off to work. The reason was that the foreman of a neighboring vitamin expedition had been attacked by a group of common criminals. Such men were very prone to theatrical gestures, which they acted out so well that they would have made the director Yevreinov jealous. They had decided to murder the foreman and a suggestion by one of the criminals that they should saw his head off was greeted with delight. The foreman’s head was sawed off with an ordinary cross-saw. That was why an order was issued forbidding prisoners to keep saws and axes overnight. Why just overnight? Nobody, however, expected to find any logic in orders.
How could you cut firewood up to fit the logs into the stove? The thinner pieces could be smashed with your feet, while the thicker pieces were just fed, starting with the thinner end, through the stove door as a whole bundle and burned up gradually. Someone would use their foot to push them in further; there was always someone keeping a lookout. The light from the open stove door was the only illumination in our house. Until the first snow fell the house was full of drafts, but then we raked the snow up against the walls and poured water over it to make proper winter quarters. We hung a piece of tarpaulin over the doorway.
Kolyma Tales Page 49
