Cilka's Journey

by Heather Morris

  By the 1940s, Vorkuta had been connected to the rest of Russia by a prisoner-built railway. There is still no road to Vorkuta, even today. A brand-new city had been built on the unstable permafrost—the deep-lying soil that never thaws, even in the height of summer. The city boasted a geological institute and a university, theaters, puppet theaters, swimming pools and nurseries. The guards and administrators lived lives of comparative luxury. “Life was better than anywhere else in the Soviet Union,” remembered Andrei Cheburkin, a foreman in the neighboring nickel-mining Gulag of Norilsk. “All the bosses had maids, prisoner maids. Then the food was amazing. There were all sorts of fish. You could go and catch it in the lakes. And if in the rest of the Union there were ration cards, here we lived virtually without cards. Meat. Butter. If you wanted champagne you had to take a crab as well, there were so many. Caviar … barrels of the stuff lay around.”

  For the prisoners, however, the living conditions were shockingly different. Most lived in flimsy wooden barracks with unplastered walls, the cracks stopped up with mud. The inside space was filled with rows of knocked-together bunk beds, a few crude tables and benches, with a single sheet-metal stove. One photo of a women’s hut does show single beds, and embroidery strung around the hut, as in this narrative. In photographs of Vorkuta taken in the winter of 1945 the barracks are almost invisible—their steeply sloping roofs come almost to the ground so that the snow accumulating around them would insulate them from the bitter Arctic cold.

  Almost all survivors speak of the “terrible heavy smell” that pervaded the barracks. Few Gulags had any kind of laundry facilities, so filthy and mildewed clothes would lie drying along the edges of the bunks, the tables and on every available surface. At night, prisoners used a parasha—a communal bucket—in place of a toilet. One prisoner wrote that in the morning the parasha was “impossible to carry, so it was dragged along across the slippery floor. The contents invariably spilled out.” The stench made it “almost impossible to breathe.”

  In the center of most of Vorkutlag’s hundred-plus camps was a large open parade ground where the prisoners stood to attention twice a day to be counted. Nearby was a mess hall, where prisoners were fed a daily soup made of “spoiled cabbage and potatoes, sometimes with pieces of pig fat, sometimes with herring heads” or “fish or animal lungs and a few potatoes.” The convicts’ area was usually surrounded by double rings of barbed wire, patrolled by Alsatian guard dogs, and surrounded by guard towers. Beyond the wire were the guards’ barracks and administrators’ houses.

  Who were the guardians of this nightmare world? “Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?” Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked. “Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.” Some of the guards in the Gulag were themselves former prisoners. Many more convicts served as druzhinniki—the prisoner trusties who were given extra food for their role in keeping order in the camp and informing on potential troublemakers.

  Most guards, though, were professional secret policemen who volunteered for the service. The men drawn to serve in the Soviet secret police, in the famous phrase of its founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, could be either “saints or scoundrels.” Clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths, as witnessed by the memoirs of camp guard officer Ivan Chistyakov, who described “the bunch of misfits” who were his drunken subordinates. He called the Gulag a “madhouse shambles” and often dreamed of exposing his fellow officers’ “illiteracy” and “misdeeds.” Perhaps the most chilling psychological insight offered by Chistyakov’s diary is the portrait of a humane man conforming to an inhumane system. “I’m beginning to have that mark on my face, the stamp of stupidity, narrowness, a kind of moronic expression,” he wrote. “My heart is desolate, it alarms me.” And the diary is also a chronicle of the essential selfishness of human suffering: Chistyakov often lamented for himself but rarely for the inmates, whom he described as lazy and dishonest. “Today … I had to imprison one woman, there’s some muddle about an escape, a conflict with a phalanx leader, a knife fight,” wrote Chistyakov. “To hell with the lot of them!” But it was they, not he, who were being starved and worked to death.

  “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good,” wrote Solzhenitsyn. “Or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.” Chistyakov offered no justification for the slave-labor system that he was helping to run—only insight into the banality of evil. He, and hundreds of thousands of other officers, were only following orders, and the inhuman system of which he was a part seemed to Chistyakov as inexorable and invincible as the crushing frosts and the buzzing summer flies.

  In the frozen hell of Vorkuta, male prisoners were expected to work ten-hour days—reduced in March 1944 from twelve hours after too many work accidents began to impair productivity—down jerry-built and desperately unsafe coal mines. Records for the year 1945 list 7,124 serious accidents in the Vorkuta coal mines alone. Inspectors laid the blame on the shortage of miners’ lamps, on electrical failures, and on the inexperience of workers.

  Camp life was no less harsh for the tens of thousands of women imprisoned in Vorkuta. Though spared the mines, female prisoners were nonetheless expected to perform heavy physical labor, hauling coal and water, digging ditches, working in brickworks, carrying supplies and building barracks. The women’s quarters were separated from the men’s by walls of barbed wire—but prisoners mixed freely during the day. Many camp guards, and also the more powerful trusties, kept women prisoners as servants and mistresses. They were often referred to as camp “husbands” and “wives.” Rape by fellow inmates and guards was prevalent. A 1955 report noted that “venereal disease, abortions and pregnancies were commonplace … pregnant women were sent to a special camp where work was lighter. A mother was allowed to stay with her child for two years, after which it was placed in a special nursery and the mother returned to her original camp. She received photographs and reports of the child’s development and was occasionally permitted to see it.” But in practice, not all were this fortunate. The same report noted that out of 1,000 female inmates at Vorkuta’s Brickworks No 2., 200 were suffering from tuberculosis.

  In the harsh conditions of the camps, prisoners formed tribes in order to survive. Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians and Chechens all formed their own national brigades, slept separately in national barracks and organized celebrations of national holidays. Adam Galinski, a Pole who had fought with the anti-Soviet Polish Home Army, wrote that: “We took special care of the youth … and kept up its morale, the highest in the degrading atmosphere of moral decline that prevailed among the different national groups imprisoned in Vorkuta.” Jews, however, were a special case—they lacked the common language and common national identity to form a coherent tribe. Many Jews—such as the influential Yiddish writer Der Nister, who died at Vorkuta in 1950, had been imprisoned for celebrating their Jewish identity. Yet they found themselves taunted and persecuted for their ethnic association with the Jewish Bolsheviks, such as Genrikh Yagoda, who had created the Gulag system.

  For ten months a year, the intense cold was a constant, lethal companion of Vorkuta life. “Touching a metal tool with a bare hand could tear off the skin,” recalled one prisoner. “Going to the bathroom was extremely dangerous. A bout of diarrhoea could land you in the snow forever.” And prisoners were woefully equipped to deal with the brutal climate. In Vorkuta, according to camp records, only 25 to 30 percent of prisoners had underclothes, while only 48 percent had warm boots. The rest had to make do with makeshift footwear made from rubber tires and rags.

  The Arctic summer of Vorkuta, when the scrubland bloomed with scarlet fireweed and the low-lying landscape turned into a vast bog, was scarcely more bearable. Mosquitoes and gnats appeared in huge gray clouds, making so much noise it was impossible to hear anything else. “The mosquitoes crawled up our sleeves, under our trousers. One’s face would blow up from the bite
s,” recalled a Vorkuta inmate. “At the work site, we were brought lunch, and it happened that as you were eating your soup, the mosquitoes would fill up the bowl like buckwheat porridge. They filled up your eyes, your nose and throat, and the taste of them was sweet, like blood.”

  Escape was unthinkable. Some of the remoter camps had no barbed wire, so unlikely was the possibility of prisoners ever making it across hundreds of kilometers of wilderness to freedom. Those that did attempt to escape did so in threes—the third prisoner coming along as a “cow”—food for the other two in case they didn’t find any other nourishment.

  Former prisoners frequently recall their time in the Gulag as a season in another world, one with its own climate, rules, values and even language. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the “Gulag was a universe” with its own speech and codes. For camp administrators, pregnant women were “books,” women with children were “receipts,” men were “accounts,” released convicts who remained in exile were “rubbish,” prisoners under investigation were “envelopes,” a camp division was a “factory.” Tufta was the art of pretending to work, mastyrka, the art of malingering. There was a rich underground culture of tattoo designs for politicals, addicts, rapists, homosexuals, murderers. The slang of the Gulag soon spilled back into mainstream culture and became the slang of the entire Soviet Union; the rich vocabulary of Russian obscenity developed mainly in the camps.

  Occasionally, the tormented slave laborers of the Gulag rose against their masters. The Vorkuta Uprising of July–August 1953 was one of the bravest, and most tragic, of such uprisings. Stalin died in March 1953, and his chief policeman, Lavrentiy Beria, was arrested shortly afterward after a Politburo power struggle. On a warm July day, the prisoners of one Vorkuta camp downed tools, demanding that inmates have access to a state attorney and due justice. Convicts in neighboring camps, seeing that the mine-head wheels in the rebel camp had stopped spinning, joined the strike. Top brass from Moscow were sent in—the State Attorney of the USSR and the commander of the Internal Troops tried to reason with the strikers. On July 26 prisoners stormed the maximum-security punitive compound, releasing seventy-seven of its inmates who had been kept in solitary cells that spelled death in wintertime. Days later, the authorities finally acted, massing armed troops to open fire on the rebels, killing sixty-six and wounding 135.

  The Vorkuta Uprising changed nothing—but in Moscow, the political climate was shifting. The winner of the struggle to succeed Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the release of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. Later, he would denounce Stalin’s crimes at a secret session of the Communist Party, and decree the re-examination of most of the political cases of the Great Terror. By the end of 1956, over 600,000 victims of the Terror would be officially—posthumously—pardoned.

  Released prisoners were given a small sum of money and travel orders to other parts of the USSR. The vast majority remained limitchiki—forbidden to live within 101 kilometers of any major city, largely to limit the political fallout of their stories on the Communist faith or urban citizens. The remaining foreign prisoners, mostly German prisoners of war, were finally allowed home. A few found their way to the U.S. and testified to Congress about the horrors of the Gulag.

  Today, around 40,000 people still live in Vorkuta—many the descendants of convicts or camp guards, plus a few hardy nonagenarian women who were imprisoned there and never left. In Soviet times, Vorkuta miners and residents enjoyed a generous state subsidy for enduring the harsh conditions. Those subsidies disappeared with the end of Communism, but nonetheless most of the population stayed. In the 2000s a new gas pipeline was built, bringing new prosperity and a new generation of workers. Every year on October 31st residents meet at a monument to the victims—a small space filled with a mass of rusty barbed wire on the spot where investigative geologist Georgy Chernov pitched his tent in 1931, effectively founding the city.

  But the most enduring monument to the victims of the Gulag remains in the printed words of the survivors—the stories of their lives and their battle not just to live but to retain their humanity. Reading a simple litany of horrors quickly ceases to be meaningful. As Boris Pasternak wrote of the man-made famine that killed millions in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, “There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.” Reading about the Gulag begins to seem like a story of another planet, too distant for comprehension.

  But listen to how Varlaam Shalamov, a writer who survived seventeen years in Kolyma in the Soviet Far East, defined what it meant to feel fully human in the Gulag. “I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself,” a character says in one of Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales.” “It was this awareness that provided the will to live. I checked myself—frequently—and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.” Both he, and Cilka, lived. And that was their victory.

  The last word must go to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it,” he wrote in the foreword to his classic study, The Gulag Archipelago. “And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all, nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it.”

  Acknowledgments

  Lale Sokolov—you gave me your beautiful story and shared with me what you knew of Cilka Klein. Sending you my heartfelt thanks for inspiring me to write Cilka’s Journey.

  Angela Meyer, on a visit to Lale’s hometown of Krompachy you sat with me on a window ledge into the small hours of the morning, solving the world’s problems and drinking Slivovitz. You encouraged me to make Cilka’s story my next project. You have been with me every step of the way as my friend and editor in telling this story. You are simply brilliant, funny, dedicated to telling stories well. From the bottom of my heart—thank you.

  Kate Parkin, Managing Director of Adult Trade Publishing, Bonnier Books UK. How many authors get to call their publisher a friend? I do. Your guidance, wisdom and support—past, present and future—is with me always. Thank you so much.

  St. Martin’s Press in the U.S.—let’s start at the top: Sally Richardson, Chairman. You met me for the first time as I stepped out of an elevator at your New York office with the biggest smile and arms ready for an embrace. This welcome was soon followed by an introduction to Publisher extraordinaire Jennifer Enderlin. Thank you so much for a warm, embracing welcome which was then extended by others gathered with glasses of champagne in hand. To Creative Director Michael Storrings, thank you for the truly beautiful cover design. Further thanks to Tom Thompson, Director of Creative Services; Mary Beth Roche and Robert Allen in the audio department; Rebecca Lang and Tracey Guest in publicity; Lisa Senz, Associate Publisher for fiction; Jeff Dodes, Marketing Director, and his team that includes Brant Janeway, Erica Martirano and Jordan Hanley; Elizabeth Catalano, Managing Editor; Susan Joseph, Director of Production; and James Sinclair, Design Director.

  At Zaffre, Bonnier Books UK: Margaret Stead (Maverick), fellow Kiwi, fellow traveler, Publishing Director: Mauruuru. What a talent, what a person to have on my team. Ruth Logan, Rights Director, thank you for making Cilka’s story fly to all four corners of the globe, ably assisted by the amazing Ilaria Tarasconi. Jennie Rothwell, Assistant Editor, your eagle eye in producing the highest-quality content makes my writing better than it would/should be. Indebted. Francesca Russell, Publicity Director, Clare Kelly, Publicity Manager; Nick Stearn; Stephen Dumughn and his team; and Nico Poilblanc and his team. The Slivovitz is on me.

  Benny Agius (Thelma), General Manager, Echo Publishing, you are a shining, bubbling beacon, holding me together on many occasions. Someone I can laugh with, share concerns with when my life is pulled in many directions. Thank you for being there.

  Thank you so much, Owen Matthews, for your brilliant essay on the Soviet Gulag system. You have condensed academic knowledge into a readable, easily understood description of this time a
nd place.

  Dakujem (thank you), Lenak Pustay. You got caught up in the spell of learning all you could about Cilka. Your time, effort and stubbornness to not leave any stone unturned in the pursuit of this information has been a joy to be on the receiving end of.

  Anna Pustay—Dakujem. You started me on my journey to Krompachy. You embraced Lale’s story and became attached to Cilka’s story in the same way. You are a beautiful lady.

  The people of Košice who knew Cilka, invited me into their homes and shared stories of Cilka and her husband: Mr. and Mrs. Samuely, Valeria Feketova, Michael Klein—Dakujem.

  My friends in Krompachy to whom I have become so attached who have assisted me in many ways with Cilka’s Journey—Lady Mayor Iveta Rusinova, Darius Dubinak, Stanislav Barbus and the always smiling driver who delivered me safe and sound to so many destinations around the countryside, Peter Lacko—Dakujem.

  For her outstanding research uncovering life in the Gulags, in particular, Vorkuta, professional researcher Svetlana Chervonnaya in Moscow—Thank you.

  Friends and family who supported me on my journey writing Cilka’s Journey who I am so happy to have in my life. I love them all dearly. My big brother John Williamson who sadly died before the book was released, but whom I consider a far superior writer to me, and for whose support to write I am eternally grateful. Ian Williamson, Peggi Shea, Bruce Williamson, Stuart Williamson, Kathie Fong Yoneda, Pamela Wallace, Denny Yoneda, Gloria Winstone, Ian Winstone.

  Alyth and Alan Townsend, thank you for providing me with accomodation in my soul city—Christchurch, New Zealand—to write Cilka’s Journey.

  To the people who matter the most to me who sometimes lose out as I devote time to research, writing and traveling—my children and partners. Ahren and Bronwyn, Jared and Rebecca, Azure-Dea and Evan, and the beautiful little people to whom I am just “Grandma”—Henry, Nathan, Jack, Rachel and Ashton. You are my life, my world.