Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Sergei Kulikov looked gray and decrepit, and he was decidedly deaf, but he was lively in body and soul. He considered this subject to be of primary importance and was angry if he was contradicted. He tended to keep silent but, if he heard of any major news item in the papers, he would give a curt laugh and his eyes would blaze.

  Dr. Kulikov was serving ten years under some paragraph of article 58. When he was released, he was prohibited for life from moving away. His family, an elderly wife and a daughter, who was also a tuberculosis doctor, came to be with him.

  The chemistry teacher Boichenko was in charge of the students’ laboratory practicals. He remembered me well and treated me, as a person who knew no chemistry, with utter contempt.

  The neurological illness lectures were given by Anna Izrailevna Ponizovskaya. By then she was a free woman, allowed even to take her doctorate. For some years, while still a prisoner, she happened to work with a major neurologist, Professor Skoblo, who helped her a great deal in formulating her topic, or so they said in the hospital. She met Professor Skoblo some time after I got to know him. In the spring of 1939 we had washed floors together in Magadan transit camp. It was a small world. Anna Izrailevna was a lady who took herself extremely seriously. She kindly agreed to give a few lectures to the paramedic students. The actual lectures were given in such a solemn way that all I remembered of them was the rustling black silk dress she wore and the sharp tang of her perfume, a perfume that none of our women students had. True, the cook did give Nadia Yegorova a tiny little bottle, but Nadia sniffed it so cautiously and meanly during our classes, that no smell spread even two rows behind her. Perhaps that was because of the constant cold I had caught in Kolyma.

  I remember some posters being brought into class. They must have been diagrams of conditioned reflexes, but I don’t know if they made any sense to anyone.

  It was decided not to give us any lectures at all on mental illness, thus curtailing further a program that was short enough as it was. But the teachers did exist: the chairman of the admissions committee for the courses, Dr. Sidkin, was the hospital psychiatrist.

  Lectures on diseases of the ear, nose, and throat were given by Dr. Zader, a pure-blooded Hungarian. A real oil-painting of a man, with sheep’s eyes, Zader’s Russian was very bad, so that he was almost unable to get anything across to his students. He volunteered to lecture so he could practice his Russian. His classes were a sheer waste of time.

  We kept pestering Meerzon, who by then had been appointed chief doctor in the hospital: “How on earth are we going to know what Zader is lecturing about?”

  “Well, if that’s the only subject you’re not going to know, then it doesn’t matter,” Meerzon replied in his usual manner.

  Zader had only just been sent to Kolyma. In 1956 he was rehabilitated, but this came at the end of the year, so he decided not to return to Hungary, but, having received a large sum of money in his settlement with Far East Construction, he ended up somewhere in the South. Shortly after taking all the students’ tests, Dr. Zader was involved in an incident.

  Dr. Janos Zader, the ear, nose, and throat specialist, was a Hungarian prisoner of war and, consequently, must have been a follower of the fascist Ferenc Szálasi. His term was fifteen years. He quickly learned Russian,[25] he was a doctor, and the time when doctors were made to do manual labor had passed (in any case, this instruction affected only those with T for Trotskyist in their file). Moreover, there was a particular shortage in his specialization. He was successful at operating on and treating patients. When abdominal surgery was required he usually assisted the chief of the surgical department, the surgeon Meerzon. In short, Dr. Zader was in luck: he had clients even among the free workers, he dressed in civilian clothes, he wore his hair long, he was well-fed and he could have gotten drunk, except that he never touched a drop of alcohol. His fame kept spreading, until the incident happened that deprived our hospital of otolaryngology for a long period.

  The point is that an erythrocyte, that is, a red blood cell, survives for twenty-one days. A living human’s blood is constantly being renewed. But once blood is taken out of the human being, it cannot survive longer than twenty-one days. The surgical department, as it was meant to, had its own transfusion station, which received donors’ blood from free workers and from prisoners—the free workers received a ruble per cubic centimeter, the prisoners just ten kopecks. For anyone with high blood pressure this was a source of basic income, and they gave 300–400 ccs a month. You were encouraged to give blood, it was good for your treatment, and you also got extra rations as well as money. The prisoner-donors were the nonmedical staff of the hospital (porters and so on), who were kept on the premises because they provided blood for the patients. There was a greater demand for transfusions here than on the mainland, but transfusions were prescribed not by general medical criteria, emaciation for instance, but only in cases when a transfusion was needed in preparation for an operation, or because of a particularly serious condition in the therapeutic departments.

  There was always a supply of already donated blood in the transfusion station. The presence of this supply was a matter our hospital took pride in. In all the other hospitals, if blood was transfused, it was done directly from one person to another. Donor and recipient lay on adjacent tables during this procedure.

  Blood whose shelf life had expired was thrown away.

  Not far from the hospital was a pig farm, where, when a pig was slaughtered, the blood was collected and brought to the hospital. Here a solution of trisodium citrate was added to the blood to stop it curdling, and it was then given to the patients to drink, as a sort of homemade hematogen. It was very nutritious and the patients, whose nourishment consisted of various dumpling soups and pearl-barley porridges, loved it. Issuing hematogen to patients was nothing new. Once, when Meerzon, the head of the surgical department, went off on a mission, the management of the department was taken over by Dr. Zader.

  As he did the rounds of the department, he deemed himself obliged to visit the transfusion station, too. Here he found that a substantial amount of the blood supply was past its expiration date, and he listened to the nurse telling him she intended to throw this blood away. Dr. Zader was astounded. “Does this blood really have to be thrown away?” he asked. She replied that this was what they always did.

  “Pour the blood into kettles and give it to the seriously ill patients per os (by mouth),” ordered Zader. The nurse did so, and the patients were very pleased. “In future,” said the Hungarian, “any blood that is too old is to be dealt with the same way.”

  So began the practice of issuing donors’ blood to the wards. When the department chief returned he raised as loud an outcry as he could that the fascist Zader was doing no more or less than feeding patients on human blood. The patients immediately found out about this, for rumors spread even faster in hospitals than in prisons, and those who had at any time drunk this blood started to feel nauseated. Zader was suspended without any explanation, and a detailed report, accusing him of all kinds of crimes, winged its way to the health administration. Zader was bewildered. He tried to explain that there was no difference in principle between intravenous transfusion and ingestion by mouth, that this blood was a good supplementary food, but nobody would listen to him. Zader’s head was shaved, his free man’s jacket was removed, and, dressed in prisoner’s garb, he was sent to the Lurié brigade to do forestry work. Dr. Zader had managed to make it to the forest region’s Board of Honor as a shock worker, when a commission arrived from the health administration, worried not so much by the actual fact of such blood transfusion, but that the patients needing an ear and throat specialist had been left with no doctor. By a lucky coincidence, this commission was headed by a major in the medical service, who had just been demobilized from the army and who had spent the whole war working in surgical departments of the medical battalions. When he had familiarized himself with the material charges, he completely failed to understand what it was all about. Why was Za
der being persecuted? When it was explained that Zader had issued human blood to the patients, that “he gave them blood to drink,” the major shrugged and said, “I did that for four years at the front. Why, can’t you do it here? I wouldn’t know, I’ve only arrived recently.”

  Zader was brought back from the forests and reinstated in the surgical department, despite a written protest from the forestry foreman, who considered that he was being deprived of his best lumberjack on someone’s whim.

  But Zader had lost interest in his work and stopped making any proposals for rationalizing the use of blood.

  •

  Dr. Doctor was an utter swine. In Kolyma he was said to be a bribe-taker and to misappropriate state property, but that was normal for bosses in Kolyma. Even his vindictiveness and love of troublemaking were forgivable by Kolyma standards.

  Dr. Doctor hated prisoners. It wasn’t just that he treated them badly or distrusted them. He tyrannized them, he humiliated them at any time of day or night, he found fault with them, he insulted them and made extensive use of his unlimited power (within the hospital walls) to fill the solitary confinement cells of the punishment area. He did not consider former prisoners to be human, and several times he threatened, for example the surgeon Traut, that he wouldn’t hesitate to get them new sentences. Every day a fresh fish was delivered to Dr. Doctor’s apartment—a brigade of “patients” were sent out to fish with nets—or greenhouse vegetables were brought in or meat from the pig farm: all this in quantities sufficient to feed Gulliver. Dr. Doctor had a servant, an orderly who was a prisoner and who helped him turn all offerings into money. Parcels of tobacco, Kolyma’s hard currency, kept arriving from the mainland. He was in charge of the hospital for a great many years until he was finally felled by another gangster. Dr. Doctor’s boss found that his “rake-off” was too small.

  But all that happened later. During the courses Dr. Doctor was king and god. Meetings were arranged every day, where Dr. Doctor made speeches with a strong bent toward the cult of personality.

  Dr. Doctor was also a very skilled fabricator of slanderous memorandums and could stitch up anyone.

  He was a vindictive chief, vindictive in a petty way.

  “You didn’t bow when you met me, so I’m going to write a denunciation, not just a denunciation, but an official memorandum. I’ll write that you’re ‘a regular Trotskyist and an enemy of the people’ and, you needn’t have any doubts, you’re guaranteed to get the punishment mines.”

  The courses, which were his own brainchild, dismayed Dr. Doctor. There were, it turned out, too many politicals with article 58 convictions, and this made him worried about his career. A typical bureaucrat of 1937, Dr. Doctor was briefly retired from Far East Construction at the end of the 1940s, but when he saw that everything was staying the same, and that if he went to the mainland, he’d have to work, he went back to his Kolyma job. Even though he now had to earn his percentage bonuses all over again, he at least found himself back in familiar surroundings.

  After inspecting the courses before the final examinations, Dr. Doctor amiably listened to a report about the students’ progress, then ran his bright blue, glassy eyes over all the students and asked, “And does everyone know how to do cupping?”

  He was answered by respectful laughter from the teachers and students. Unfortunately, cupping was the one thing we hadn’t learned to do, as none of us thought that there were any secrets to this elementary procedure.

  •

  Dr. Fiodor Yefimovich Loskutov taught eye diseases. I was fortunate enough to know and to work with him for a number of years. He was one of the most remarkable people in Kolyma. He was a commissar in charge of a battalion during the Civil War, and a bullet from Admiral Kolchak’s side had lodged permanently in his left eye. He received his medical education in the early 1920s and worked as a military doctor in the army. A casual joke about Stalin ended with him facing a military tribunal. He came to Kolyma to serve a sentence of three years and spent the first year as a metalworker at the Partisan mine. Then he was allowed to practice medicine. His three-year sentence was coming to an end. This was a period that Kolyma and all Russia knew as the Garanin times, although it would have been more accurate to call it the Pavlov times, after the then head of Far East Construction. Colonel Garanin was only the deputy to Pavlov, who was head of the camps, although Garanin chaired the troika that issued death sentences and signed the endless lists of those to be shot throughout 1938. For someone convicted under article 58, it was terrifying to be released in 1938. Everyone who was completing their sentence was threatened with the creation, the stitching and organization of a new case. You would feel more at ease with a sentence of ten or fifteen years than with one of three or five. You could breathe easier.

  Loskutov was condemned all over again by the Kolyma troika under Garanin—to ten years. A capable doctor, he specialized in eye diseases, performed operations, and was a highly valued specialist. The health administration kept him near Magadan at the twenty-third kilometer, and, when he was needed, he would be brought under guard to Magadan for consultations and operations. One of the last country doctors in Russia, Loskutov could turn his hands to anything: he could do simple abdominal operations, and he knew gynecology, as well as being an eye specialist.

  In 1947, when Loskutov’s second sentence was ending, the NKVD officer Simonov fabricated a new case. Several paramedics and nurses at the hospital were arrested and sentenced to various terms. Loskutov got another ten years. This time the authorities tried to insist that he be removed from Magadan and transferred to Berlag, a new strict-regime camp for political recidivists in the interior of Kolyma. For a few years the hospital bosses succeeded in keeping Loskutov out of Berlag, but eventually he ended up there for his third sentence! After credit for working days he was released in 1954, and in 1955 was completely rehabilitated on all three counts.

  When he was released he owned just one set of spare underclothes, a tunic, and a pair of trousers.

  A man of the highest moral qualities, Dr. Loskutov devoted his entire medical practice, all his life as a camp doctor, to one task: actively and constantly helping people, mainly prisoners. This help was far from restricted to medicine. He was always helping someone settle down, recommending someone for a job after they were discharged from the hospital. He was always feeding somebody, taking parcels for somebody—a pinch of tobacco for one, a piece of bread for another.

  Patients thanked their lucky stars if they ended up in his department (he worked as a general practitioner).

  He spent all his time interceding, going to see people, writing.

  And this was every day not just for a month or a year, but for twenty full years, while all the authorities gave him were additional terms of punishment.

  History tells us of a similar figure: the prison doctor Fiodor Petrovich Gaaz,[24] about whom A. F. Koni wrote a book. But Gaaz’s times were different: those were the 1860s, a time when Russian society was experiencing a moral resurgence. The 1930s had no such resurgence. In an atmosphere of denunciations, slander, punishments, arbitrariness, when you received prison sentences one after the other for charges based on provocations, it was far harder to do good deeds than in Gaaz’s times.

  Loskutov would arrange for one man to be allowed to travel to the mainland as an invalid, and he would find easy work for another man. Without asking anything of his patient, he would arrange his future wisely and for the best.

  Fiodor Yefimovich Loskutov was not particularly literate, in the schoolboy sense of the word, and had entered the medical institute with only an elementary education. But he read a lot, he had observed life carefully and had thought a lot, he had his own judgment on the most varied subjects, so that he was a widely educated person.

  An extremely modest man, never rushing to judgment, he was a remarkable figure. He had one fault: his help was, in my view, far too indiscriminate, which was why the gangsters tried to “saddle” him, once they sensed his notorious weakness. But
as time went on he became well aware of this, too.

  Three sentences to the camps, an anxiety-ridden Kolyma life, with threats from the bosses, with humiliations, and no certainty as to what the next day would bring, had failed to make Loskutov either a skeptic or a cynic.

  When he emerged as a wholly free man, after being rehabilitated and paid a lot of money, he went on as before, handing out money to anyone who needed it. As a result of helping people, he still didn’t have a spare set of underwear, even though he now received several thousand rubles a month.

  This was our teacher of eye diseases. When I finished the courses it was under Loskutov that I had to work for a few weeks—my first weeks as a paramedic. The first evening ended in the treatment room. A patient with a throat abscess was brought in.

  “What is it?” Loskutov asked me.

  “A throat abscess.”

  “Treatment?”

  “To release the pus, making sure the patient doesn’t choke on the fluid.”

  “Put the instruments in the sterilizer.”

  I put the instruments in the sterilizer, boiled them, and summoned Loskutov.

  “Ready.”

  “Bring in the patient.”

  The patient sat on a stool with his mouth open. A lamp lit up his throat.

  “Wash your hands, Fiodor Yefimych.”

  “No, you wash yours,” said Loskutov. “You’re the one who’s going to do this operation.”

  My back broke out in a cold sweat. But I knew, I knew very well, that until you did something with your own hands, you couldn’t say that you knew how to do it. Something easy suddenly seems to be beyond you, while the complicated seems unbelievably simple.

  I washed my hands and with a firm step approached the patient. His wide-open eyes were looking at me reproachfully and fearfully.

  I took aim, and lanced the ripe abscess with the blunt end of the knife.

  “His head, his head!” Fiodor Yefimych shrieked.