Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Each day we had to go further to fetch firewood, the stacks of dwarf pine covered with snow. We didn’t grumble, for riding out to fetch wood was something like the banging of the iron rail or the sound of the siren: a signal that food and sleep were coming.

  We unloaded the wood and joyfully began forming rank.

  “A-bout turn!”

  Nobody turned round. I saw mortal anguish in everybody’s eyes, the uncertainty of people who don’t believe they can come out on top, for they would always be cheated, deceived, and given less than their due. But at least firewood was better than stones, and sleds better than wheelbarrows. . . .

  “A-bout turn!”

  Nobody turned around. Prisoners are extremely sensitive to breaches of promise, although you wouldn’t think that fairness could possibly be expected.

  Two men, the camp chief (a lieutenant no longer young) and the head of the guards unit (a younger lieutenant), came out onto the guards’ barracks porch. There is nothing worse than what two bosses of roughly equal rank do when they are standing next to each other, in sight of one another. Anything human in them dies; each one wants to demonstrate his “vigilance,” not to “betray any weakness,” to carry out the state’s orders.

  “Get harnessed to the sleds.”

  Nobody turned around.

  “This is an organized demonstration!”

  “It’s sabotage!”

  “Let’s do it the nice way: will you go?”

  “We don’t care if you’re nice, or not.”

  “Who said that? Step forward!”

  Nobody stepped forward.

  A command was given and several escort guards came running out of the barracks, their rifle bolts clicking. They surrounded us, although they found the snow heavy going. They gasped with anger at men who were depriving guards of rest time, interfering with their shifts and work timetable.

  “Lie down!”

  We all lay down in the snow.

  “Get up!”

  We got up.

  “Lie down!”

  We lay down.

  “Get up!”

  We got up.

  “Lie down!”

  We lay down.

  I had no trouble getting into this simple rhythm. And I remember well that I didn’t care one way or the other. As if all this was being done to somebody else.

  There were a few shots and bolt clicks, warning shots.

  “Get up!”

  We got up.

  “Those who are willing to go, move to the left.”

  Nobody moved.

  The camp chief came up close, eyeball to eyeball with the anguish in those crazed eyes. He went up to the nearest man and banged his chest.

  “Are you going?”

  “Yes.”

  “Move to the left!”

  “Are you going?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get harnessed! Guard, take over and count the men.”

  The wooden sled runners moved off, squeaking.

  “Off you go!”

  “That’s how to do it,” said the older lieutenant.

  But not everyone left. Two men stayed behind: Seriozha Usoltsev and I. Seriozha was a gangster. All the young nonpoliticals had for some time been running their sleds along the same track as the 58ers. But Seriozha could not stand seeing some scabby freier holding out while he himself, a hereditary criminal, retreated.

  “Any moment they’ll send us back to barracks. . . . We’ll just stand here for a while,” Usoltsev said, smiling grimly. “Then it’s the barracks, and we’ll get warm.”

  But we weren’t allowed back to barracks.

  “A dog!” ordered the older lieutenant.

  “Take this,” said Usoltsev without turning his head. The criminal’s fingers put something very thin and almost weightless into my hand. “Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  I was holding a piece of a razor blade, which I showed to the dog without the guards noticing. The dog saw it and understood. The dog growled, yelped and pulled at the lead, but it didn’t try to tear either me or Seriozha to bits. Usoltsev was clutching another piece of a razor blade.

  “That dog’s just a puppy!” said the camp chief, the older lieutenant, a very experienced know-it-all.

  “To the barracks.”

  The door was unlocked, the heavy iron bolt was moved back. Any moment we’d be warm, warm.

  But the older lieutenant said something to the duty guard, who then threw the glowing coals out of the iron stove into the snow. The coals hissed, then were covered with blue smoke, and the duty guard then threw snow over them, raking it up with his feet.

  “Get into the barracks.”

  We sat on the framework of the bunks. We felt nothing but the cold, the sudden onset of the cold. We stuck our hands in our sleeves, and bent double.

  “Never mind,” said Usoltsev. “Any moment the lads will come back with some firewood. Until they do, let’s dance.” And we started dancing.

  The sound of voices, the joyful sound of voices getting nearer, was interrupted by someone’s brusque command. Our door opened, but there was no light outside, just the same barracks darkness.

  “Come on out!”

  “Bat” torches could be seen flashing in the guards’ hands.

  “Form ranks!”

  It took a little time for us to see that the ranks of those who’d come back from work were right there. Why was everyone standing in line waiting? Who were they waiting for?

  Dogs were howling in the white haze of the darkness; torches were moving, as they lit up the path of people who were quickly getting nearer. The movement of the light told us that these were no prisoners.

  The man who was quickly striding ahead of them, ahead of his bodyguards, was the potbellied but agile colonel. I recognized him straightaway. He had often inspected the gold-mine pit faces where our brigade worked. It was Colonel Garanin. Breathing heavily, unbuttoning his tunic collar, Garanin stopped in front of the ranks and, poking a soft, manicured finger into the dirty chest of the nearest prisoner, said, “What are you inside for?”

  “I’ve got a conviction.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you were convicted of. Why are you in the RUR?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Hey, chief!”

  “Here’s the book of orders, Colonel.”

  “What the hell do I want your book for? Ugh, you reptiles.”

  Garanin moved on, looking each man in the face.

  “And you, old man, how did you end up in the RUR?”

  “I’m still under investigation. We ate a fallen horse. We’re night watchmen.”

  Garanin spat.

  “Listen to orders! All of you, back to barracks! To your own brigades! And tomorrow you go to the pit face.”

  The ranks broke and everyone ran down the path that led over the snow to the barracks, to their brigades. Usoltsev and I also meandered off.

  1965

  BOGDANOV

  BOGDANOV was a dandy. He was always close-shaven and well-scrubbed, and smelled of perfume—God knows what the perfume was—and he wore a luxurious deerskin hat with earflaps, which he tied to his chin with an elaborate system of black moiré ribbons. He also wore a Yakut embroidered jacket and soft, decorative, Siberian deerskin boots. His nails were polished, his collar was starched and a brilliant white. Bogdanov worked as an NKVD officer in one of the Kolyma administrations. Bogdanov had been hidden away by his friends at a coal prospecting expedition at Black Lake when the Ministry of the Interior thrones were overturned and the bosses’ heads rolled, as they were replaced one after the other. This new boss with his polished nails turned up in the remotest taiga where there had never been any dirt since the world was created. He appeared with his family, a wife and three little children, none of them much more than babies. The children and the wife were forbidden to leave the house where Bogdanov lived, so that I saw his family only twice: the day they arrived and the day they left.

>   The store man would bring groceries to the boss’s house every day, and workmen rolled a two-hundred-liter barrel of alcohol over a wooden road, laid across the taiga for such purposes. Alcohol, after all, is the main thing to be looked after, as Bogdanov had been taught in Kolyma. A dog? No, Bogdanov didn’t have a dog. No dog, and no cat.

  The prospecting expedition had an accommodation barracks and tents for the workmen. Everyone lived together, free contract workers and prisoner-workers. There was no difference between them as far as trestle beds or household goods were concerned: the free men were yesterday’s prisoners and hadn’t yet managed to get themselves suitcases, those homemade prisoners’ suitcases that every prisoner was familiar with.

  There was no difference in the “regime,” the order of the day, either. The previous boss, who had opened up a great number of mines that had been waiting there in Kolyma since the world was created, couldn’t for some reason stand hearing the words “Yes, sir” or “I wish to report.” When Paramonov, as the first boss was called, was in charge, we had no roll calls; in any case, we got up with the sun and we went to bed with the sun. Actually, the polar sun stopped setting in spring and early summer, so there was no question of a roll call. The taiga nights are short. And we weren’t trained to “greet” the boss. Anyone who had been trained was very happy to forget quickly that degrading training. That was why, when Bogdanov came into the barracks, nobody shouted “Attention!” One of the new workmen, Rybin, went on mending his torn tarpaulin cape.

  Bogdanov was outraged. He yelled that he would bring these fascists to order; that there were two sides to Soviet authority, the corrective and the punitive; that he, Bogdanov, promised to try out the second side in full; that having no guards wouldn’t help us. The prisoners living in the barracks, whom Bogdanov was addressing, were five or six men—five would be more accurate, since two night watchmen took turns to be the sixth.

  As he left, Bogdanov grabbed hold of the wooden door of the tent. He meant to slam it, but the submissive tarpaulin merely rippled noiselessly. The next day we five prisoners, plus the absent night watchman, were read an order: the new boss’s first order.

  The boss’s secretary read in a loud, measured voice the new boss’s first literary composition, “Order number one.” It turned out that Paramonov hadn’t even possessed a book of orders, so Bogdanov’s schoolgirl daughter’s new exercise book was turned into a book of orders for the coal district.

  “I have noticed that prisoners in this district have become slack. They’ve forgotten camp discipline, a fact expressed by their failure to get to their feet for roll call and their failure to greet their chief.

  “In view of the fact that this is a violation of Soviet law, I categorically propose. . . .”

  The rest was an “order of the day,” which Bogdanov’s memory had preserved from his previous work.

  This same order instituted the post of barracks elder and appointed an orderly who had to take on this responsibility in addition to his basic job. The tents were partitioned with a tarpaulin curtain to separate the clean from the unclean. The unclean weren’t bothered by this, but the clean (yesterday’s unclean) would never ever forgive Bogdanov for his action. The order sowed enmity between free workers and the boss.

  Bogdanov didn’t understand anything about the work. He handed over everything to the clerk of works, and all the administrative enthusiasm of this bored forty-year-old boss was directed against six prisoners. Every day some misdemeanor or other was noticed, infringements of camp rules that almost amounted to crimes. A solitary confinement prison was hastily erected in the taiga, and an iron bolt for this prison was ordered from the blacksmith Moisei Moiseyevich Kuznetsov, while the boss’s wife contributed her own personal padlock. The padlock came in handy. Every day one of the prisoners was locked up. Rumors began to circulate that a squad of guards would soon be brought in to watch over us.

  We were no longer issued vodka as part of our polar rations. Norms now restricted the sugar and tobacco.

  Every evening one of the prisoners was summoned to the office to begin an interview with the district boss. I too was summoned. Leafing through my swollen case file, Bogdanov read out extracts from numerous memorandums, and showed exaggerated delight in their tone and style. Sometimes it just seemed that Bogdanov was afraid of forgetting how to read and write. Apart from a few battered children’s books, there was not a single book in the boss’s quarters.

  Suddenly I was amazed to see that Bogdanov was simply very drunk. The smell of cheap perfume was mingled with the smell of alcohol on his breath. His eyes were clouded and dim, although his speech was clear. Everything he said, however, was so ordinary.

  The next day I asked the free worker Kartashov, the boss’s secretary, if this could be so.

  “What’s wrong with you—have you only just noticed? He’s always drunk. By morning. He doesn’t drink a lot at a time, but whenever he feels he’s beginning to sober up he takes another half glass. If he starts sobering up, then another half glass. He beats his wife, the bastard,” said Kartashov. “That’s why she never lets herself be seen. She’s too ashamed of her bruises.”

  It wasn’t only his wife that Bogdanov beat. He struck Shatalin, he struck Klimovich. He hadn’t gotten around to me yet. But one evening I was invited again to the office.

  “Why?” I asked Kartashov.

  “I don’t know,” replied Kartashov, who served not just as secretary, but as messenger and manager of solitary confinement.

  I knocked at the door and entered the office.

  Bogdanov was combing his hair and trying to look handsome in a big dark mirror that had been hauled into the office. He was sitting at his desk.

  “Ah, the fascist,” he said as he turned to look at me. I didn’t have time to pronounce the regulation response.

  “Are you going to work, or not? You’re a real deadbeat.” “Deadbeat” was a gangster expression. The usual approach and way of talking.

  “I do work, sir.” And that was the usual response.

  “Some letters have arrived for you, see?” I hadn’t been in touch with my wife for two years, I had no way of contacting her, I knew nothing of her fate or of the fate of my eighteen-month-old daughter. And suddenly here was her writing, her hand, her letters. Not one, but several letters. I stretched out my trembling hand to take them.

  Bogdanov did not let go of the letters. He raised the envelopes toward my dry eyes.

  “Here are your letters, you fascist scum!” Bogdanov tore them into shreds and threw the letters from my wife into the burning stove. I had waited over two years for these letters, gone through blood, executions, and beatings at the Kolyma gold mines while I waited.

  I turned around and left without uttering the customary formula “Permission to leave, sir.” Bogdanov’s loud drunken laughter is still, even now after many years, ringing in my ears.

  The plan was not being fulfilled. Bogdanov was no engineer. The free workers loathed him. The drop that made the cup overflow was a drop of alcohol, as the main source of conflict between boss and workers was that the barrel of alcohol had migrated to the boss’s apartment and was quickly being emptied. Bogdanov could have been forgiven anything—his ridiculously cruel treatment of the prisoners, his hopelessness at his job, his lordly manners. But once the fair sharing of alcohol was abolished, the inhabitants of the settlement began to make war, both openly and covertly, on their boss.

  One moonlit winter night a man dressed in civilian clothes turned up in the district: he was wearing a modest hat with earflaps and an old winter coat with a black lambskin collar. The district was twenty kilometers from the main highway, and he had walked that distance along a frozen river. Taking his coat off in the office, the stranger asked for Bogdanov to be woken up. Bogdanov sent an answer: he would get up tomorrow. But the stranger was insistent and asked him to get up, get dressed and come into the office. He explained that a new chief of the coal district had arrived and that Bogdanov had to ha
nd over everything within twenty-four hours. He asked Bogdanov to read the order. Bogdanov got dressed, came out, and invited the stranger to his quarters. The visitor refused and said he would begin the handover of the district immediately.

  The news spread instantaneously. The office began to fill with men in a state of undress.

  “Where have you put the alcohol?”

  “In my apartment.”

  “Have it brought here.”

  Kartashov the secretary and the orderly brought a jerry can.

  “What about the barrel?”

  Bogdanov mumbled something that made no sense.

  “Fine. Put lead seals on the jerry can.” The visitor sealed the jerry can. “Give me some paper to draw up a statement.”

  On the evening of the following day Bogdanov, freshly shaved, perfumed, merrily waving his decorated fur gloves, left for the “center.” He was completely sober.

  “Isn’t that the Bogdanov who used to be in the river administration?”

  “Probably not. Don’t forget, in this job they change their surnames.”

  1965

  THE ENGINEER KISELIOV

  I COULDN’T understand what was going on inside the mind of engineer Kiseliov, a young thirty-year-old engineer, an energetic worker, who had just graduated and arrived in the Far North to do his compulsory three-year practical stint. He was one of the few bosses who had read Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, or so his library card suggested. Above all, he was not a party member, so he couldn’t have come to the Far North on higher orders to check up on anything. Before he came to the Far North Kiseliov had never met a prisoner in his life, yet he outdid all the hangmen in his devotion to the trade.

  Kiseliov used to beat up prisoners personally, thus setting an example for all his guards, foremen, and the escort guards. After work, Kiseliov went from barracks to barracks and couldn’t rest until he’d found someone he could humiliate, hit, beat up with impunity. He had two hundred men at his mercy to choose from. This murky sadistic thirst for murder lay deep inside Kiseliov. The Far North’s despotism and lawlessness let him release, develop, and increase it. It wasn’t just a question of knocking men to the ground: there were a lot of major and minor bosses in Kolyma who were fond of doing that. They had itchy hands, which, after they had let off steam, would forget a minute later about a tooth they had knocked out, or a prisoner whose face was covered in blood, a prisoner who would remember all his life a blow that the boss had forgotten. Kiseliov didn’t just hit you, he knocked you to the ground then stamped his steel-tipped boots again and again on your semi-corpse. Quite a few prisoners had seen the steel tips on the soles and heels of Kiseliov’s boots next to their faces.