It was dark when I reached that hut, opened the door, and, stepping through the frozen mist, entered a barracks. A man got up from behind a Russian stove to meet me: it was the lumberjack foreman Stepan Zhdanov, whom I knew. He had been a prisoner, of course.
“Take your jacket off, sit down.”
I immediately took off my jacket and boots, and hung them around the stove.
Stepan opened the stove door and, putting on a glove, pulled out a pot.
“Sit down and eat.” He gave me bread and soup.
I lay down to sleep on the floor, but it took time to fall asleep. My feet and hands ached.
Stepan didn’t ask where I was going or where I’d come from. I would appreciate his tact for the rest of my life. I never saw him again. But even now I can remember the hot millet soup, the smell of porridge that had burned a little, a smell that reminded one of chocolate, the taste of a clay pipe that Stepan offered me, after wiping it on his sleeve, when we were saying goodbye, so that I could have a puff for the road.
On a turbid winter evening I reached the camp and sat down in the snow not far from the gates.
Any moment I would go in and it would all be over. Those wonderful two days of freedom, after many years of prison—and now again there would be lice, icy stone, white haze, hunger, beatings. Just then an actor from the Culture Brigade—a man trusted to go around on his own, unescorted—walked past through the guardhouse into the camp. I knew him. Now the workers came back from the timber works, stamping their feet so as not to freeze, while the escort guard went up the steps to the guardhouse, into the warmth. He wasn’t in a hurry. Now the camp boss, Lieutenant Kozychev, went in, dropping a Kazbek cigarette end in the snow, and the woodcutters standing by the guardhouse immediately made a dash for it. It was time. I couldn’t sit there all night. I had to try to see my plan through to the end. I pushed the door and went into the entrance. I was holding a statement for the camp boss about all the procedures on an expedition with no guards. Kozychev read my statement and sent me off to solitary. There I slept, until I was summoned to see the interrogator, but, as I had foreseen, they didn’t charge me with anything. My sentence was enough. “You’ll be going to a punishment mine,” said the interrogator. A few days later that’s where they sent me. They didn’t hold people very long at the central transit point.
1959
THE GREEN PROSECUTOR
HERE THE scale of values was completely reversed, and any human concept, while still keeping its spelling, its pronunciation, and its usual set of letters and sounds, now meant something quite different, for which the mainland had no name. Here there were different measures, particular customs, and habits, and the sense of any word was altered.
Whenever a new event, feeling, or concept can’t be expressed by the usual human words, a new word is born, borrowed from the language of the professional criminals who legislate the fashions and tastes of the Far North.
These metamorphoses of meaning affect more than just concepts like Love, Honor, Work, Virtue, Vice, Crime. They also affect words that are almost exclusive to this world, that have their origin in it, for example: “Escape”. . . .
In my early youth I happened to read about Kropotkin’s escape from Petropavlovsk fortress: a fast cab drawing up at the prison gates, a woman wearing a disguise in a light carriage, carrying a revolver, working out the number of paces to the guards’ door, the prisoner fleeing while the guards fired at him, the clattering of the trotting horse’s hooves over the cobbles. . . . That was, without a doubt, a classic escape.
Later I read the recollections by exiles of escapes from Yakutia, from Verkhoyansk, and I was bitterly disappointed: no disguises, no pursuit! Riding a horse-drawn sled (the horses harnessed in single file) in winter, just as in Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter, arriving at a railway station, buying a ticket at the ticket office. . . . I just could not understand why this was called an escape. That sort of escape used to be classified as “willful absence from place of residence” and, in my view, such a formula is a more accurate definition of what was happening than the romantic word “escape.”
Even the escape by the Social Revolutionary Zenzinov [28] from Providence Bay, when an American yacht approached the rowboat in which Zenzinov was fishing and took the refugee on board, doesn’t look like a real escape, not like Kropotkin’s.
There were always many attempted escapes in Kolyma, and none of them were successful.
The reason was the peculiar nature of the harsh polar region, where the tsar’s government decided not to settle prisoners, as they had settled them in Sakhalin in order to populate and colonize the region.
The distances to the mainland were thousands of kilometers. The narrowest place, the taiga vacuum, the distance between Aldan and the inhabited areas, where Far East Construction had its mines, was about a thousand kilometers of uninhabited taiga.
True, if you headed for America, the distances were far shorter: the Bering Strait at its narrowest point is only just over a hundred kilometers, but the guards in this area are reinforced by border troops, and it is absolutely impenetrable.
The very first route took you to Yakutsk, and from there you progressed either by horse or by river. There was no airplane service at the time, and, in any case, there is nothing easier than to keep airplanes safely locked up.
It’s understandable why no escapes took place in winter: to get through the winter anywhere with a roof and an iron stove is the passionate dream of every prisoner, and not just prisoners.
Captivity becomes unbearable in spring: that is a universal fact. Here, apart from the meteorological factor, which has an imperative effect on a man’s feelings, there was also the consideration that came from cold intellectual logic. Traveling across the taiga is possible only in summer when, if your food runs out, you can eat herbs, mushrooms, berries, roots, and bake cakes of reindeer moss ground into flour, catch mice and voles, chipmunks, squirrels, nutcrackers, hares. . . .
However cold the northern summer nights are, in a country of permafrost, an experienced man will avoid catching a chill if he spends the night on a rock. He will turn over from side to side in good time, he won’t sleep on his back, he’ll put grass or branches under his side. . . .
It’s impossible to run away from Kolyma. Whoever chose the sites for the camps was a genius. Nevertheless, the power of illusions, for which people pay with terrible days in solitary confinement, extra sentences, beatings, starvation and, very often, death, is just as strong here as anywhere else at any time.
A lot of escape attempts are made. The moment the larch tree buds turn emerald, fugitives are on the move.
Almost always the fugitives are novices in their first year. They still have some willpower and pride left in their hearts, and their reason has not yet taken in the conditions of the Far North, which are nothing like the mainland world they knew hitherto. The novices are offended to the bottom of their hearts by what they have seen: beatings, tortures, taunts, human depravity. . . . The novices make a run for it: some do it better, some worse, but they all end up the same way. Some are caught in a couple of days, others in a week, others in two weeks. There are fairly light sentences for fugitives who wander off with a “directive” (a term we will explain later).
The enormous resources of the camp guards and special troops with thousands of German shepherds, combined with border detachments and army groups stationed in Kolyma, concealed under the name of “the Kolyma Regiment,” are more than enough to catch all potential escapees.
But how is an escape attempt possible, and would it not be simpler for the special troop forces to focus on guarding people in the first place, on guarding instead of trying to catch them?
Economic considerations show that keeping a large detachment of “skull hunters” costs the country less than having an intensive guard system as in prisons. It is extraordinarily difficult to stop the actual escape attempt. Even the gigantic network of informers among the prisoners, who are paid by th
e bosses with cigarettes and bowls of soup, is of no use.
This is a matter of human psychology, its nooks and crannies, and it is impossible to predict who will decide to escape, and when or how. What actually happens is not at all as you might suppose.
Of course, there are prophylactic measures meant to counter escape: arrests, imprisonment in punishment zones, which are prisons within prisons, transfers of suspicious persons to new places. A lot of measures have been devised that may have some effect in reducing escape attempts. Possibly there would be more escapes were it not for the punishment zones, sited in the remotest areas, with their reliable and numerous guards.
But there are escape attempts from punishment zones, too, whereas nobody tries to get away from expeditions where there are no guards. Anything can happen in the camps. Stendhal’s subtle observation in The Charterhouse of Parma that “the warden thinks less about his keys than the prisoner about his bars” is fair and true, and it applies here:
Kolyma, o Kolyma,
Wonderful planet.
Nine whole months of winter,
All the rest is summer.
That is why special preparations are made for spring. The guards and special troops increase their numbers and the numbers of their dogs. Men are dragged in, dogs are trained. Prisoners also prepare, by hiding canned food and rusks and recruiting partners. . . .
There is just one case of a classic escape from Kolyma, carefully thought out and prepared, and carried out with ingenuity and without haste. This is the exception that proves the rule. But even this escape left a loose end that looked insignificant, and at first sight trivial, but the loose end was a blunder that made it possible to trace the fugitive in exactly two years. Clearly, the pride of the Vidocqs and Lecoqs [29] was badly hurt, and the case was given far more attention than was usual for such events.
It is curious that the man who “went on escape” and brought it off with fabulous energy and cleverness was not a political prisoner at all and certainly not a gangster (specialists in such matters), either. He had been sentenced to ten years for fraud.
That’s understandable. A political prisoner’s escape is always a reflection of mood and willpower and, like a prison hunger strike, its strength lies in the willpower used. You need to know, and know well and beforehand, why you’re escaping, and where to. What political prisoner could in 1937 answer such a question? People who got caught up in politics by chance don’t try to run away from prison. They could escape back to their families, their friends, but in 1938 that meant subjecting anyone whom such an escapee even looked at in the street to severe repressive measures.
This was not just a matter of getting away with fifteen, twenty years in prison. To jeopardize the lives of your nearest and dearest was the only possible outcome of such an escape by a political. After all, someone would have to shelter, hide, and help the fugitive. There were no such people among the politicals in 1938.
The very few men who returned after serving their sentences found that their own wives were the first to check up on the correctness and the legality of a husband’s documents when he got back from the camps and, in order to inform the authorities of his arrival, they would run to the police station as fast as they could together with the apartment’s responsible householder.
The punishment meted out to people who got innocently involved by chance was very simple. Instead of being given a reprimand, or a warning, they were tortured and after the torture were given ten or twenty years in “distant camps,” or hard labor, or prison. Death was what they now faced. And they died, not thinking about escape, they died, showing yet again the national characteristic of endurance, which was celebrated long ago by Tiutchev and which has been brazenly remarked on by politicians at all levels.
Gangsters didn’t try to escape, because they didn’t believe they could succeed, they didn’t believe they would make it to the mainland. In any case, investigators and camp staff were highly experienced at recognizing gangsters. They had a sixth sense, and would assure you that gangsters bore a mark of Cain that could not be concealed. The most striking “exegesis” of this sixth sense was the case of a hunt for an armed robber and murderer along the Kolyma roads, when an order was issued to shoot him as soon as he was identified.
A special forces man, Sevastianov, stopped a stranger wearing a sheepskin jacket near a gas pump at one of the gas stations on the highway. When the man turned around, Sevastianov shot him straight through the forehead. Even though Sevastianov had never seen this robber’s face before, even though it was winter and the fugitive was wearing winter clothes, even though the distinguishing features that the special forces man had been told of were as vague as they could be (you are not going to examine everyone you meet for tattoos, and the bandit’s photograph was very bad and blurred), nevertheless Sevastianov’s intuition had not let him down.
A sawed-off shotgun fell out of the dead man’s coat, and a Browning revolver was found in his pockets.
That was more than enough documentation.
How should one assess such a decisive deduction, suggested by somebody’s sixth sense? Another minute, and Sevastianov would himself have been shot.
But suppose he had shot an innocent man?
The gangsters had neither the strength nor the desire to attempt to escape to the mainland. After weighing all the pros and cons, the criminal world decided not to take the risk, but to limit themselves to settling down nicely in the new places fate had brought them to. That, of course, was sensible. To the criminal world, running away from here seemed too bold an adventure, an unnecessary risk.
Then who was going to escape? A peasant? A priest? I’ve only happened to meet one priest who tried to escape, and this escape happened before the famous meeting between Patriarch Sergius and Ambassador Bullitt, when the first American ambassador was handed a list of all the Orthodox priests serving sentences of imprisonment and exile throughout the Soviet Union. When he was a metropolitan bishop, Patriarch Sergii had personally become familiar with the cells of Butyrki prison. After Roosevelt’s intercession every single one of the clerics was released from imprisonment and exile. A concordat with the church, which was vital in view of the approach of war, was being anticipated.
It would never make sense for a person sentenced for a nonpolitical crime—a child rapist, someone who stole state funds, a bribe-taker, a murderer—to try to escape. Their sentence, their “term,” to use Dostoevsky’s word, was usually not very long, and while imprisoned they enjoyed all sorts of advantages, and worked as camp support staff, in the camp administration, and in any one of the “privileged” jobs. They had good credits for days worked, and above all, when they got home, whether to the country or the city, they were met with the most friendly reception. Not because this friendliness was a quality of the Russian people, who used to pity “the unlucky wretch”: such pity for unlucky wretches had long vanished into the world of legends, and had become a nice literary fairy tale. Times had changed. The highly disciplined nature of society told “ordinary people” to look and see how the authorities viewed the subject. The view was very benevolent, for the authorities were not bothered by this contingent of criminal. Only Trotskyists and enemies of the people were singled out to be hated.
There was a second and equally important reason for ordinary people not to be worried about those who’d come back from prison. So many people had spent time in prisons that there was probably not a family in the whole country whose relatives or friends had not been subjected to persecution and repressions. After the “wreckers” it was the turn of the “kulaks,” the rich peasants; after the kulaks, the Trotskyists; after them, people with German surnames. The declaration of a crusade against the Jews was just over the horizon.
All this led to people not caring in the least. It instilled in the people a complete indifference to those who’d been singled out by any part of the Criminal Code.
In the past, a man who had been in prison and then come back to his native vil
lage aroused either caution or hostility, or contempt, or sympathy (open or secret). Now, however, no attention was paid to such people. The moral isolation of the “branded,” of convicts who had served hard labor, had long ago fallen into oblivion.
Provided that their return was sanctioned by the authorities, people coming from prison were met with the greatest hospitality. In any case, any gang rapist like Chubarov,[30] who raped his child victim and infected her with syphilis, could, after he had served his sentence, count on having complete “spiritual” freedom in the same circle in which he had overstepped the limits of the Criminal Code.
The way literary figures treated legal categories has had a part in all this. For some reason, writers and playwrights put themselves forward as theoreticians of the law. But the prison and camp realities are still a book with seven seals, and no serious, fundamental deductions have been made from all the reports that come from those who have served in the criminal world. . . .
But why should nonpoliticals try to escape from the camps? They didn’t. They fully entrusted themselves to the care of the authorities.
All of which makes the escape attempt by Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshei all the more amazing.
He was a squat man, with short legs and a thick scarlet neck. His name, appropriately, means “crooked neck.”
He was a chemical engineer at a Kharkov plant and had a perfect command of several foreign languages. He read a lot and also had a good knowledge of art and sculpture, and he had a big collection of antiques.
A prominent figure among Ukrainian collectors, Krivoshei, as a non-party member and engineer, utterly despised politicians of all hues. Being a clever and cunning man, he had ever since his youth been brought up with a passion for enjoying life, as far as he understood it, but not for accumulating possessions, which would have been too coarse and stupid for Krivoshei. All this meant relaxation, vices, art. . . .
Kolyma Tales Page 70
