Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  In 1957 Kostia and I were riding the same bus in Moscow. He was wearing a velour hat and a soft overcoat.

  “What are you up to?”

  “I’ve taken up medicine, medicine,” Kostia shouted as we parted.

  The other students were people from the mine areas, people with very different fates.

  Orlov was a “letter man,” convicted of a crime with an acronym, thus convicted by a troika or a special tribunal. Orlov was a Moscow mechanical engineer and on three occasions he came near his end at the mines. The Kolyma machine discarded him, as if he were slag, into the local hospital, and it was from there that he got into the courses. His life was at stake. Orlov knew nothing except studying, no matter how hard he found it to understand medicine. Gradually, he got the hang of his studies and began to believe in the future.

  The secondary-school teacher, the geographer Sukhovenchenko, being over forty, was older than Orlov. He had served eight years of his ten-year sentence and had little more to serve. He too was one of those who came through, who hung on. He now had an undemanding job and could survive. He had gone through the stage of being a goner, and had stayed alive. He was working as a geologist, a sample collector, as an assistant to the party chief. But all these good things might suddenly vanish like smoke; all it took was a change of boss. Sukhovenchenko had no degree, while the memory of his years in the mines was only too fresh. He had a chance of getting a permit to attend the courses. They were supposed to be eight-month courses, and he had only a short term left to serve. He could have acquired a good profession for the camps. Sukhovenchenko abandoned his geological group and got a paramedic’s education. But he never became a medic. The times weren’t right, or his personal qualities were the wrong ones. After he finished the courses, Sukhovenchenko sensed that he couldn’t treat people, that he didn’t have the willpower to make a decision. After working for a short time as a paramedic, he returned to his profession as a geologist. So he was one of the people on whom the teaching was wasted. His decency and good nature were beyond doubt. He feared “politics” like fire, but would never have gone and denounced anyone.

  Silaikin hadn’t had seven years of education: he was getting on in years, and he found learning very hard. While Kundush, Orlov, and I felt more and more confident with every day, Silaikin found things harder and harder. But he went on studying, relying on his memory, which was excellent, on his ability to outwit other people, and not only to outwit but to understand them. Silaikin’s observations told him that there were no criminals here except for the professional ones. All the other prisoners had behaved in the outside world like anyone else, they’d stolen no more from the state, they’d made no more mistakes, they’d broken the law no more often than those who had not been convicted under various articles of the Criminal Code and who were carrying on with their work. The year 1937 had especially emphasized that fact by eliminating every legal right a Russian had. Prison became something nobody could in any way avoid.

  The only criminals inside or outside the camps were the gangsters. Silaikin was clever, he knew what people felt and thought, and, although convicted of fraud, he was in his own way an honest man. There is honesty that is sentimental, sincere. And there is honesty that is rational. What Silaikin lacked were not honest convictions, but honest habits. He was truthful, because he realized that this was now to his advantage. He never did anything that breached the rules, because he knew that he mustn’t. He had no faith in people and considered that the main motive force of social progress was personal advantage. He was witty. In our general surgery classes, when the very experienced teacher Meyerson was quite unable to get the students to understand “supination” and “pronation,” Silaikin stood up and asked if he might speak. Then he stretched out his hand, palm upward and said, “Soup, please,” then turned his palm over and said, “No, mate.” Everyone, including Meyerson, remembered, probably for the rest of their lives, Silaikin’s grim mnemonic and appreciated his Kolyma wit.

  Silaikin passed his final examinations with no difficulty and worked as a paramedic—at the mine. He probably did a good job, because he was clever and “understood life.” “Understanding life” was, in his opinion, the most important thing.

  His desk partner, Iliusha Logvinov, was just as sophisticated. Logvinov had been convicted of robbery and, although he wasn’t a gangster, he fell deeper and deeper under the influence of the criminal recidivists. He saw clearly how strong the gangsters were in the camps, strong in both moral and material senses. The bosses kowtowed to the gangsters, they were afraid of them. For the gangsters the camps meant “home.” They hardly ever worked, they enjoyed all sorts of privileges and although lists of prisoners for deportation were secretly compiled behind the criminals’ backs and, from time to time, a Black Maria full of guards would turn up and take away the gangsters who had gone too far, that was life—and the gangsters were just as well off in their new place of residence. Even in punishment zones they were in charge.

  Logvinov came from a hardworking family; his crime was committed during the war, when he saw he had no alternative. The camp boss who read Logvinov’s file persuaded him to enroll in the courses. Somehow he managed to pass the entrance examination and began studying passionately, but hopelessly. Medical subjects were just too complex for Iliusha. But he found the inner strength to hold on, to finish the courses, and for several years he worked as a senior paramedic in a big therapeutic department. He was released, got married, and had a family. For him the courses had opened up a path in life.

  Once there was an introductory lecture on general surgery. The teacher listed the names of those most prominent in world medicine.

  “. . . And in our time one scientist made a discovery that revolutionized surgery and all medicine. . . .”

  “Fleming.”

  “Who said that? Stand up.”

  “I did.”

  “Surname?”

  “Kundush.”

  “Sit down.”

  I felt strongly offended. I myself had no idea who Fleming was. I’d spent almost ten years, since 1937, in prison or the camps, without newspapers or books, and I knew nothing except that there had been a war and that it was over, that penicillin or something existed, and so did streptocide. Fleming!

  “Who are you?” I asked Kundush, speaking to him for the first time. The two of us both came from the Western Administration at the same time on the same list, we were both sent on these courses by our common savior Andrei Maksimovich Pantiukhov. We had starved together—he less, I more—but we both knew what the mines were. We knew nothing about each other.

  Kundush told me an astounding story.

  In 1941 he was appointed the commander of a fortified district. The builders were putting up, in a leisurely way, concrete pillboxes and timber gun emplacements, until one July morning the mist in the bay lifted and the garrison saw the German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer facing them at the roadstead. The cruiser approached as close as it could and fired point-blank at the unfinished fortifications, turning them all into ashes and piles of stones. Kundush got ten years. The story was interesting and instructive, except for one thing, Kundush’s article of conviction, ASA. That could not be applied to cases of negligence, such as the one that the Admiral Scheer took advantage of. When we got to know each other better, I found out that Kundush had been convicted under a notorious NKVD case, one of the mass open or closed trials in Lavrenti Beria’s time, such as the Leningrad case or the NKVD case, or the Rykov and Bukharin trials, or the Kirov case—these were all stages in the “great path.” Kundush was an excitable, impulsive person, not always able to control his flare-ups, even in the camps. He was an absolutely straightforward person, especially after he witnessed for himself the “practices” in the prisons and camps. He now had a true, proper understanding of his own work in the recent past as a deputy NKVD chief under Zakovsky [15] in Leningrad. Having kept his interest in books, knowledge, and the news, able to appreciate a joke, Kundush was one of the
most appealing of the students. He did work as a paramedic for a few years, but after his release he became a supply worker, then worked as a stevedore in Magadan port, until he was rehabilitated and could return to Leningrad.

  Being a booklover who was especially fond of footnotes and commentaries and never skipped over anything set in small print, Kundush had a wide, if dissipated, knowledge of the world, enjoyed chatting about all sorts of abstract topics, and had his own views on all questions. His entire nature protested against the camp regime and against violence. He would prove his personal courage later when he made a daring trip to see an imprisoned Spanish girl, the daughter of one of the members of the Madrid government.

  Kundush was a rather pudgy man. All of us, naturally, ate cats, dogs, squirrels, crows, and dead horses, too, if we could get hold of them. But once we were paramedics, we stopped doing that. When Kundush was working in the neurological department, he cooked a cat in the sterilizer and ate it on his own. It was very difficult to hush up the scandal. Kundush had met Mr. Hunger at the mines and knew his face.

  Was Kundush revealing everything about himself? Who knows? And why should we? “If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale.” In the camps you don’t ask about people’s past or their future.

  On my left sat Barateli, a Georgian, convicted of some crime committed as an employee. He had a poor command of Russian. He found a compatriot in the courses, the pharmacology teacher, and he received both moral and practical support from him. Coming late in the evening to the “hut” next to the hospital department, where it was as dry and warm as a conifer forest in summer, to drink sugared tea or have a leisurely meal of pearl-barley porridge with big blobs of sunflower oil, to feel a throbbing, relaxing joy in all his revived muscles: wasn’t that the ultimate miracle for a man who’d come from the mines? And Barateli had been at the mines.

  Kundush, Barateli, and I sat at the fourth desk. The third desk was shorter than the others, since room had to be made for the tiled stove, and it had only two occupants, Sergeyev and Petrashkevich. Sergeyev was a nonpolitical who had worked as a supply agent while a prisoner, so that he had no great need to become a paramedic. He studied in an offhand way. At the first practical classes in anatomy at the morgue—whatever else was lacking, there was no shortage of corpses for the students—Sergeyev fainted and was removed from the course.

  Petrashkevich would never have fainted. He’d come from the mines and he had a political conviction with an acronym, KR, a counter-revolutionary one. This acronym was quite common in 1937: “convicted as a member of the family,” which was how children, fathers, mothers, sisters, and other relatives of the convicted got their sentences. Petrashkevich’s grandfather (his grandfather, not his father!) was a prominent Ukrainian nationalist. That was enough reason in 1937 to shoot Petrashkevich’s father, a teacher of Ukrainian, while Petrashkevich himself, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, got “ten years as a member of the family.”

  I had often noticed that imprisonment, especially in the north, somehow arrests people’s moral growth, so that their abilities don’t develop any further than the level at which they were arrested. This state of anabiosis lasts until they are released. A man who has spent twenty years in a prison or a camp misses out on the experience of normal life: the schoolboy remains a schoolboy; the wise man remains just a wise man, but does not become a sage.

  Petrashkevich was now twenty-four. He ran around the classroom, he shouted, he would stick pieces of paper to Shabayev’s or Silaikin’s back, he would release pigeons, he would laugh. His answers to teachers had all the qualities of a schoolboy’s, but he wasn’t a bad kid and he made a good paramedic. He avoided “politics” like the plague and was afraid of reading newspapers.

  The boy’s constitution was not strong enough for Kolyma. Petrashkevich died of tuberculosis a few years later before he could get away to the mainland.

  There were eight women. The class monitor was Muza Dmitriyevna, who used to be a party or, rather, a trade union worker; that sort of work leaves an indelible mark on a person’s habits, manners, and interests. She was about forty-five, and she was always trying to win the trust of the authorities. She wore a sort of velvet jacket and a good-quality woolen dress. During the war American charities sent an enormous amount of woolen goods for the people of Kolyma. Naturally, these gifts never got as far as the depths of the taiga or the mines, and even on the seashore the local bosses did their best to grab them, by either asking or forcing prisoners to hand over the sweaters and jerseys. But a few Magadan inhabitants managed to hang on to these “rags.” Muza had kept hers.

  She didn’t get involved in anything to do with the courses, limiting her authority to the other women in the group. Muza was friends with the youngest female student, Nadia Yegorova, and protected her from the temptations of the camps. Nadia didn’t find this protection much of an obstacle, and Muza couldn’t hinder the stormy progress of Nadia’s affair with a camp cook.

  “The way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach,” Silaikin repeated with amusement. Nadia and her desk partner Muza found themselves being given special-diet dishes: all sorts of meatballs, breaded rump steak, pancakes. They got double, even triple portions. The barrage didn’t last long: Nadia surrendered. A grateful Muza went on protecting Nadia, not from the cook, but from the camp authorities.

  Nadia was a poor student. But she found an outlet in the amateur dramatics club. It was the only place in the camp where men and women were allowed to meet one another. But the beady eye of camp supervision made sure that relations between men and women never overstepped the permitted boundary—the local custom was that adultery had to be proved as solidly as it was by the police commissioner in Maupassant’s Bel Ami. Guards observed and tried to catch people out. Their patience was not always enough, for, as Stendhal remarked, a prisoner thinks more about his bars than a warden thinks about his keys. The surveillance slackens.

  Even if members of the amateur dramatics club couldn’t count on love in its most ancient and eternal form, rehearsals nevertheless seemed to a prisoner to be another world, more like the world they used to live in. This was quite an important consideration, even though camp cynicism didn’t allow people to admit to such feelings. There were palpable gains, if only petty advantages, for participants in amateur dramatics: an unexpected issue of tobacco and sugar. Permission not to have one’s hair cut was no small matter in the camps. Haircuts caused real brawls and arguments in which the people who took part were neither actors nor thieves.

  The fifty-year-old Yakov Zavodnik, once a Civil War commissar on the Siberian front against Admiral Kolchak (and a close comrade of Zelensky, the secretary of Moscow Communist Youth, who was executed after the Rykov trial) used to fend off the camp barbers with a poker: thanks to his hair, he ended up at a punishment mine. What was that all about? Surely, the story of Samson’s hair was only a legend, wasn’t it? Why get so worked up about it? Obviously, the mind is damaged by the desire to assert oneself, if only in a small, petty matter: yet another example of the great displacement in scales of value.

  The distortions of prison life—the separate lives of men and women—were somehow smoothed over in the amateur dramatics club. In the final analysis, this too was an illusion, but it was still preferable to “low truths.”[16] Anyone who could squeak or sing, anyone who recited poems or who had performed in shows at home, anyone who could twang a mandolin or do a tap dance had “their chance” of getting into the club.

  Nadia Yegorova used to sing in a choir. She couldn’t dance, she was clumsy onstage, but she went to rehearsals. Her stormy personal life took up a lot of her time.

  Elena Melodze, a Georgian, was another “member of the family”: her husband had been executed. Deeply disturbed by his arrest, she naïvely thought that he must have been guilty of something, and only calmed down when she herself ended up in prison. It all became clear, logical and simple: there were tens of thousands in her position.

  The difference betwe
en a scoundrel and a decent person is this: when a scoundrel ends up in prison for no good reason, he considers that he is the only innocent one, and all the others are enemies of the state and the people. A decent person, once in prison, considers that if he, an innocent man, could be put behind bars, then the same thing could have happened to the persons on the neighboring bunks.

  This is the Hegelian philosophy

  This is the deepest sense of books![17]

  . . . as far as the events of 1937 are concerned.

  Melodze recovered her mental balance, her placid, cheerful moods. When she was at Elgen, the women’s outpost in the taiga, she had escaped heavy manual labor. And here she was in the paramedical courses. She didn’t become a medic. After her release—her term ended at the beginning of the 1950s—she was, like everyone released at that time, “attached,” and had to become a lifelong resident of Kolyma. She got married.

  Next to Melodze sat a vivacious, fun-loving young girl, Galochka Bazarova, who had been convicted for some offenses during the war. She was always laughing, even guffawing, which did not suit her, for she had enormous teeth with big gaps between them. But this did not deter her. Thanks to the courses, she became an operating theater nurse, and after her release she worked for a number of years in the Magadan hospital, where she spent her first earnings on stainless steel crowns for her teeth, which immediately improved her looks.

  Behind Bazarova was a white-toothed Finnish girl called Aino. Her sentence had begun in the war winter of 1939–40. As a prisoner she learned Russian and, as a hardworking girl, with her Finnish conscientiousness, she attracted the attention of one of the doctors and ended up taking the courses. She found the studying hard, but she managed and became a qualified nurse. . . . She liked the life of a paramedical student.

  Next to Aino sat a small woman, whose name and surname both escape me. She may have been a spy of some sort, or she may really have been the shadow of a human being.