Since Dmitri hadn’t yet regained full command of his limbs, gripping the prisoner’s hand in his own, Solovyov helped him to sign his “voluntary confession.” His case closed, now Dmitri had to wait for the court hearing. He had no illusions about the outcome of the trial. Having signed an admission of guilt, he knew there were only two options for sentencing him: a long prison term or the death penalty. Considering the weight of his crimes—espionage, terrorism, conspiracy—and the fact that all of his cell mates accused of similar crimes were sentenced to capital punishment, he was convinced that he was also marked for death.
To occupy himself, Dmitri tallied all the bodily traumas he had endured during his interrogation. His toes fully recovered from the damage, but a dull pain persisted in the area of the seventh and eighth ribs. Sometimes when he attempted to turn his torso the pain sharpened, meaning that the ribs were either cracked or broken altogether. This was where they had beaten him using a steel cable with a ball bearing attached to the end of it. His brain function was also impaired by the beatings. From time to time, it was difficult for him to recognize his cell mates or even the cell he was in. He also found that when he became agitated he started stuttering.
His incoherent speech and loss of words especially worried him. It meant that the speech center of his brain hadn’t fully restored itself. He tried talking to himself in some of the foreign languages he knew and discovered that his speech defects were even more profound. His vision was also harmed. He had episodes of blurring and flashes, which he took as signs of high blood pressure.
His physical suffering was exacerbated by excruciating loneliness. Most of the time he remained alone in his cell, having no one to share his feelings with. Prisoners had to clean their cells themselves, and one day, while washing the floor, he discovered a small cavity in it. He poured some tea and crumbs of bread into it and planted a small chunk of an onion with roots in the little pit. Soon the onion yielded its first green sprouts, and Dmitri felt as if he owned a little garden with a living thing, which became his companion. Now he could talk with it as much as he wanted. He recalls this with humor: walking around the cell, he felt proud of his onion sprouts as if he were a plantation owner.
After months of tormenting wait, it was finally Dmitri’s turn to be taken from the cell for his court hearing. He was hardly given a chance to utter a word. His last thoughts before sentencing were full of indifference to his fate: “Life? Death? How ridiculously everything ended. Self-sacrifice . . . Heroism . . . Cruelty . . . Everything comes to nothing . . . Life for me was struggle and hard work, a desperate striving toward a heroic feat. And here nothing is left of it. Everything’s befouled.” On May 8, 1939, nearly eight months after his arrest, he was found guilty of committing crimes that came under the most often invoked statute at that time, Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. He was sentenced under three different items of the article: item 6 (espionage), item 8 (terrorism), and item 11 (taking part in a conspiracy to commit those acts).
Nowhere in his voluminous memoirs does Bystrolyotov address the possibility that in the long run, unbeknown to him, his decision to refuse to sign self-incriminating testimony right away and to submit to torture might have saved his life. On November 25, 1938, when Dmitri had already spent two months in prison, Beria replaced Yezhov as the head of the NKVD, and death sentences became much less frequent. Thus, while during 1937 and 1938, 681,692 prisoners (353,074 and 328,618, respectively) received death sentences (nearly 1,000 per day), there were only 2,552 death sentences in 1939. During his interrogation, after prolonged torture when Dmitri had finally agreed to cooperate with the investigator, he was ready to incriminate himself in whatever he felt they wanted from him. But, when he began to tell how he had wormed his way into “the holiest place of the Soviet state, Soviet intelligence,” Solovyov jumped at him and clapped his hand over Dmitri’s mouth, saying that he should revise his story. He should say that he was recruited as a student and had conducted anti-Soviet activities in Czechoslovakia only within the Union of Student Citizens of the USSR Living in Czechoslovakia. Thus Dmitri realized that the decision was not to execute him but to banish him to the camps for a long time. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison and five years of deprivation of civil rights, which, among other things, meant internal exile.3
Listening to his sentence, Dmitri was disheartened that he wasn’t able to feel like a hero in the way that Soviet propaganda portrayed political prisoners of tsarist times. The difference was staggering. Proud of their defiance of the tsarist government, those prisoners “firmly and calmly said farewell to and comforted those close to them. Their heads raised high, they were bound for immortality. Death was a worthy crown for their lives. It was their victory. But that was under the tsar . . . Under Soviet power, I was afraid to think about those close to me. I chased away thoughts of them, because I was ashamed of my doom!” He recalled the inscription “for fearlessness and mercilessness” engraved on the gun presented to him for his successful handling of Oldham. Now it sounded like a mockery. Now he felt that the weapon was presented to a “fearless and merciless man for his stupidity.” “Am I a hero or a fool?” This question would torment him for the rest of his life.
After sentencing, he was returned to the Butyrka prison, the starting point of his sad journey in captivity. In comparison with what he had been through, now Butyrka seemed like a paradise on earth. The joy of living overwhelmed him. Taken into the inner courtyard for a walk, he marveled at seemingly ordinary things—the greenery of trees, the chirping of sparrows, and the blue sky. “What a pleasure! Mummy, what a pleasure!” he exclaimed.
Soon he was transferred to the special Sukhanovka Prisoner Pretransport Post. A month and a half later, in early July 1939, along with other prisoners he boarded a heavily guarded train of fifty freight cars, each carrying seventy-five men. A long journey was ahead for all of them. The train’s destination, Krasnoyarsk Raspred (Prisoner Distribution Center), was located in the depths of the vast country, in western Siberia.
As might be expected in his situation, on the road Dmitri’s mood vacillated. He tried to maintain an appearance of calm, but like the other prisoners, “a raging, sometimes sobbing howl stayed inside [him].” At times, he began thinking of himself again as a hero holding on to his battle post: “The key to immortality is in my chest. I must become worthy of my destiny.” As the train moved across the country, passing through large cities and little towns, peeking through the tiny grated window of the railroad car and noticing men frowning and women crying furtively, he came to realize that he and his fellow prisoners weren’t alone in their terrible predicament. The whole country was in trouble. “By mid-1939,” he sums up, “there was no cultured family left in the country that hadn’t had at least one of its members arrested.”
On thin pieces of cardboard from his cigarette packs, he wrote three short messages to his mother, along with her address, and dropped them from the car wagon in the hope that someone would pick up and mail at least one of them. (He learned later that all three letters reached his mother. This fact alone restored his belief in people’s goodness and sense of justice: if they were caught with a letter from a prisoner, the senders risked their freedom and the well-being of their families.)
After a long cross-country journey the train finally arrived in Krasnoyarsk. Soon after the prisoners had disembarked, been sorted out, and placed in barracks, Dmitri suddenly found himself on the verge of death. Wandering around the courtyard, he spotted an enamel cup on the ground. Rejoicing that now he would drink not from a tin prison cup but from a decent vessel, he reached for it, but instantly a gunshot resounded, and a bullet snatched the cap from his head. The cup happened to be in the “firing zone”—where sentries had the right to shoot without warning anyone who entered. He found it ironic and symbolic that his “fashionable cap from London took a Krasnoyarsk bullet.” Like many other new arrivals from prisons, Dmitri was still dressed in the
street clothes he was wearing when he was arrested. With his khaki shirt, purchased in Touggourt on the border of the Sahara, he also had an Amsterdam suit, a Swiss jacket, and a Scottish lap robe.
Waiting to be transported farther to the north, he wrote another letter to his mother. He informed her of his sentence and tried to console her with assurances that it was the result of a court error and that his case would be reexamined very shortly. He also wrote to his wife urging her to divorce him and remarry as soon as possible. That was her only chance to survive. First of all, only through marriage, by changing her surname and place of residence, could she avoid being arrested as a “member of the family of the Enemy of the Revolution,” according to the NKVD decree of 1937. In addition, after his arrest Iolanta was left with no means of support, and her chances of employment were next to nil, and on top of that, hunger could exacerbate her dormant tuberculosis. Deep in his heart, sentenced to twenty years behind barbed wire, Dmitri believed that he wouldn’t come out of the camps alive. But he wanted his wife to survive.4
He soon discovered that imprisoned doctors worked in their profession in the camps. His medical doctor diploma from Zurich University had been issued not in his real name but in one of his aliases, most likely that of Enverov (the name his ex–fellow convict Ivanov remembers seeing in his file next to his real surname). However, to function as a medical assistant in the camps he hardly needed a diploma. The acute shortage of medical personnel often forced the authorities to assign any convict who could, after brief training, work in that position under a doctor’s supervision. Although no documents in Bystrolyotov’s KGB file survived to prove his medical qualifications (which likely existed at the time of his imprisonment; in his memoirs, he indicates that the documents were confiscated), interviewed many years later, his fellow prisoners had only good things to say about him as a medic.5
Dmitri was late in applying for a position as medical assistant; there were no more openings. But since prison life was unpredictable and medical personnel often in short supply, he was offered a transfer from the general barracks to the medical unit quarters to stay in reserve. While helping the medics distribute pills in the barracks, Dmitri soon ran into trouble on account of being ignorant of the dramatic difference in relationships between prisoners in the camps and those in jail, where they most often regarded each other as comrades-in-misfortune. In contrast to political prisoners, officially branded as “enemies of the people” (in camp slang, kontriki, the shortened form of kontrrevoliutsionnaia deiatel’nost’, “counterrevolutionary activity”), the camp authorities regarded common criminals (in slang, urki) serving their terms for theft, robbery, rape, or murder, as a “socially close element,” that is, as coming from the working class and therefore trustworthy. Thus, the camp administration delegated to these hard-core criminals key positions and assignments. This arrangement gave them a free hand in shortchanging, robbing, and looting other prisoners: “It was a nightmare . . . Encouraged by the camp authorities, harassment, malicious insults, and crimes created the basic background of camp life that op pressed all of us on a par with our awareness of [the] injustice of our incarceration.”6
He would learn about that in full measure later. But now, awaiting the next leg of his journey in the prisoner distribution center in Krasnoyarsk, his ignorance of the rules of his new life suddenly brought him again to the brink of being murdered. As he was making his rounds with the medicine, one of the urki liked the fancy, foreign-made neck scarf that Dmitri’s wife had given him shortly before he was taken away from his home. Without hesitation, the criminal snatched it from him. Dmitri attempted to recover it, but the robber threatened him with a knife that he suddenly retrieved from somewhere under his clothes. This encounter awakened Dmitri to the realization that, in the camps, he had entered a new world whose mores were different from those of the prison world.
Finally, counted and documented, all the prisoners of the Krasnoyarsk Raspred (Prisoner Distribution Center) were loaded on a lighter. Pulled by a tugboat, it headed downstream on the Yenisei River toward Port Dudinka, twelve hundred miles north of Krasnoyarsk and a short railroad run from Norilsk. It was a long, tiring journey. On his way to one of the harshest camp sites in the country, Dmitri, as well as many other prisoners, ran the full gamut of feelings. Most of the time, he felt desperate, falling back into a state of shock similar to the kind he had experienced right after his arrest. It was the time of his “first transformation from an active man into an unthinking zombie . . . I considered myself a worthy son of my times. And suddenly, I was removed, crumpled, banished, and thrown out into a wastebasket. [On the day of my arrest] I wasn’t just doomed to die slowly. I was also humiliated and morally degraded, which is worse than any physical death. Why? What for? For whose need?”
Sometimes he was able to share his feelings with his travel companion, Stepan Medvedev, a railroad worker and devoted Party member. Since the most difficult thing for them to swallow was an overwhelming sense of injustice, the reasons for which they couldn’t comprehend, they had to come up with some explanation that would help to alleviate their pain, at least a little.
Echoing Dmitri’s conversation with the Jewish fellow prisoner he had met back in his Butyrka days, now on board the lighter taking them to where they would serve their sentences, Dmitri and Stepan acknowledged to themselves and to each other that they shouldn’t consider themselves totally innocent. They too had a hand in what was going on in the country. Due to various circumstances of his life abroad Dmitri hadn’t joined the Party, but he considered himself a “non-Party Bolshevik” (bespartiinyi bol’shevik), a widely used term to denote a highly conscientious Soviet citizen, especially popular in the 1930s. After all, didn’t they close their eyes to arrests and other lawlessness in the country? Along with many other political prisoners, they came up with different explanations for the disaster that shattered their personal lives and life in the country in general. At this point, like a great many other Soviet citizens, they both still believed that Stalin was unaware of the horrific injustices and mass arrests. They were convinced that those acts were the handiwork of “scoundrels and crooks, bureaucrats and fools” who had crawled their way into the Party ranks.7
Dmitri also felt that, although he wasn’t accused of it by his interrogators, he was now being punished for his own numerous trespasses of moral boundaries while spying for his country in the West. He justified these trespasses with his fight for the grand human ideal he thought he was helping to bring to life: “The main things that accompany struggle of all kinds are filth, cruelty, and heroism . . . If I expose my chest to bullets, I also have the right to shoot somebody else in the chest. For the sake of the great idea of [humanity’s] future happiness nothing is to be begrudged. . . . For this future perfection of tomorrow and somebody else’s life, I [was] ready to sacrifice myself, joyfully and proudly.”
But these conversations and acknowledgments relieved Dmitri’s anguish only for a while. Looking around the lighter packed with hundreds of other convicts, he realized that the beloved slogan “Forward only,” under which he had operated in his past life, meant nothing now. In fact, as Stepan pointed out, he should have modified it to “forward to the Soviet prison, to a slow death in the Siberian camps.” Stepan said, “You [Soviet spies] did mean and cruel things, and life cruelly laughed at you: you’re being punished with the realization that your evil acts were useless. There can be no worse punishment: heroes turned into fools.”
Stepan’s comments on the inefficiency of Soviet foreign intelligence reflected Dmitri’s having confided in him that by the end of his spy career, working behind a desk in one of the Lubyanka offices, he had come to realize that so much of what he had obtained, often at great risk, was mismanaged and utterly wasted. To be fair, it must be pointed out that this was not unique in the history of world espionage, but still, an important element objectively explains Dmitri’s frustration. Stalin forbade any analysis of intelligence data, thus rendering the informati
on merely raw material for his own deliberate interpretations. As a result, he was fed only the data deemed in accordance with the dictator’s world outlook, usually full of mistrust of the West and suspicions of conspiracy against the USSR from every corner of the world.8
On August 20, 1939, at last the lighter reached Port Dudinka. All of the convicts were taken ashore and loaded onto a train, which, along the narrow-gauge railroad line, took them to the place where they would begin serving their terms—the Norilsk camp, Norillag for short. The camp had been organized just a few years earlier, on June 25, 1935, near Norilsk, then a settlement, situated on the Taimyr Peninsula between the Yenisei Bay of the Kara Sea and Khatang Bay of the Laptev Sea, nearly two hundred miles beyond the Arctic Circle. The Norillag, along with two other northern camps in Vorkuta and Kolyma, was one of the harshest places of service. The Taimyr Peninsula, over six hundred miles long, was a place of solid permafrost and fossilized ice. The northern part of the peninsula consisted of Arctic deserts and tundra, an empty space overgrown with moss and lichen. In the south, tundra was interspersed with forests, and mountains were intermingled with stone deserts. The subarctic and sharply continental climate with freezing temperatures held for up to eight months; the short summers of only two months brought clouds of relentless mosquitoes. The wintertime was especially hard to endure: extremely low temperatures, at times reaching minus fifty-six degrees Celsius (minus sixty-nine degrees Fahrenheit), often combined with strong, gusty winds. Snow remained on the ground up to nine months out of the year. Added to this were two months of total darkness during the polar nights and twilight most of the rest of the time, except for the brief summer.
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