Similar to other harsh places where prisoners served time, this uninviting place wasn’t chosen for the sake of punishment alone. The Norilsk camp was organized to provide a workforce to construct and operate facilities for mining and processing the area’s copper and nickel deposits, as well as deposits of mica on the Taimyr Peninsula (the Birulinsk deposits). And slave labor was indispensable. Since its creation the Norilsk camp population had grown tenfold, and during Dmitri’s term, it had reached nearly twelve thousand.9
Upon arrival in the camp Dmitri was assigned work as a medical assistant in the camp dispensary. The position gave him considerable privileges, the most important being excused from the backbreaking outdoor work and having the benefit of sleeping in his own bed in the medical personnel house instead of on plank beds in the barracks.10
But soon, highly disturbed at witnessing the death of a mental patient who had run into the “firing zone” and was shot by the guards, Dmitri committed an act of madness himself. At least no one around him—neither his immediate superiors, nor the other prisoners, nor the camp guards—could comprehend why, instead of holding on to his cushy job as medical assistant, he had volunteered to work outdoors in the tundra in freezing temperatures and fierce winds. At the time he reasoned that the impetus for his actions was that he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to work at the Norilsk nickel-processing plant construction site because, in the Soviet political parlance of the time, it was designated as the “front line of building Socialism.”
Clearly, his impulsive move was a desperate attempt to reconcile the horrific reality of his existence with his long-held ideological beliefs; otherwise, his life would have lost its meaning altogether: “A human being cannot go on in life without feeling the load of duties and ideals to which he’s accustomed. But somebody emptied my backpack . . . [It became] immeasurably more difficult for me to go on: my beloved word ‘Forward!’ [has come to] mean nothing.” He had to reconstruct the reality of his life on his own terms. Yes, he told himself, some scoundrels in the state apparatus had snatched him out from active life and thrown him behind barbed wire. But he was still a citizen of his country, wasn’t he? And he must see his situation not as a punishment but as an opportunity to serve his country differently than he had served it before. He must remain a Soviet man no matter what. Other considerations were “only for people who lived on this [Soviet] land as strangers.” To be anyone else but a “conscious fighter for building Socialism” disheartened him. It meant to be a “philistine oblivious to the grand designs of the Soviet state.” In the vocabulary of the time, to be called a philistine was the harshest moral judgment, short of being an “enemy of the people.” Anyone looking first and foremost for personal gain in life was dismissed as an individualist, self-seeker, and careerist (shkurnik).
This doesn’t exclude any possible ulterior motive Dmitri might have had for joining the workforce in the field. As camp rumors had it, there was a downside to working in the camps as a medic. Those who remained in the rear (which included all medical workers) were to serve their full prison terms, unlike those assigned to manual labor, who had a chance for shortened terms for doing good work. He, Stepan, and another prisoner they had befriended on the way from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk decided that, as soon as they reached Norilsk, they would choose manual work, their “passport to freedom.” It is not clear, however, whether the prisoners knew that at about this time, in the late 1930s, Stalin had abolished reduced sentences for good work performance. In his view, it “reduced the profitability of the camps.”11
There was another, deeply personal, psychological dimension of Dmitri’s actions at the time. With his early experience of parental neglect and abandonment, the humiliation of imprisonment crushed his fragile ego, which was an even harsher aspect of his Gulag existence than the physical demands of his new life. “Vermin,” “filth,” and “weeds” that had to be pulled from the healthy Soviet soil, complete with their nasty roots—that was how Stalin referred in official speeches to “enemies of the people,” to whom Dmitri now belonged. To lessen the painful effect of this stigma, he had to do something truly outstanding, nothing short of an act of self-sacrifice and heroism.
He wasn’t alone in his painful reaction to the excommunication of political prisoners from the body Soviet. After 1937, the guards and other camp personnel no longer referred to the prisoners as “comrades,” as they had before, but exclusively as zeks, an abbreviation of zasekrechennye kadry, “classified cadres.” In response to a prisoner addressing his investigator or a guard with the word “comrade,” a dismissive proverbial repartee was born: “A Tambov wolf [read: a wild beast] is your comrade” (Tambovskii volk tebe tovarishch). During his spy years, Dmitri called all of his colleagues “comrades-in-struggle.”12
Much later, when a fellow imprisoned doctor asked him why he had volunteered for such backbreaking work, paraphrasing the Butyrka prisoner’s judgment, he explained to her that he felt himself “master of [his Soviet] house” who “had helped to build it and [was] responsible for it before [his] conscience.” He added that he also felt responsible for the camp system itself: “I’m not a coward and scoundrel, but an honest citizen. I’m one of those who raised his hand in voting [to punish the ‘enemies of the people’]. The fact that I was mistaken doesn’t change a thing. Now I am paying the bill.”
But, he was attempting to pay another bill at the same time. Sometime later, another prisoner asked him about volunteering for work in the field: “Did you want to atone for your mistakes with suffering?” He replied, “No. I wanted to know everything, take it all on myself, and throw the responsibility from my shoulders. To free myself internally from the burden. This is the only path to self-cleansing.”
Although he said no, it was, in fact, yes. What was this other burden in his life? What else did he feel he had to cleanse himself of if not the trespasses of normal human morality, no matter that Soviet ideology demanded to reject it for the sake of the new, class-based morality? According to that new morality, any vile act that benefits the toiling classes had to be considered good. Yet in all of his writing, Dmitri returns again and again to the immorality of his actions as a Soviet spy. He tries to reconcile these actions with the Soviet moral canon—as perfectly justified by the sublime goal of fighting for the future happiness of humanity. But it turned out not to work for him in the long run. On his own admission, in the camps, he told himself daily, “It serves me right!” (Tak mne i nado!).
Many years later, recalling this episode, he attributed his volunteering to do backbreaking work in freezing temperatures to a much more prosaic reason—a severe mental breakdown. “Suffering is the shortest path to loneliness . . . A suffering man is always lonely and self-absorbed; I was such a man.” Apparently referring to the bouts of severe depression he had suffered first in Constantinople, then in Prague, and later again, in Berlin, at the end of his spy career, he writes: “After all, in the past I had already suffered a severe mental illness with a clearly expressed inclination to withdrawal; in fact, I never felt mentally healthy.” His personality was split at the time: while his “body [remained] behind barbed wire, [his] head [was] immersed in sweet dreams”; that is, by his own judgment, his mind was in a “schizoid state.” (One can only wonder how, writing such things, he still hoped to publish his memoirs during his lifetime, that is, during Soviet times.) Dmitri was not alone in holding on to his Communist beliefs as a way of coping with the nightmarish reality of imprisonment. Anna Larina, the spouse of prominent Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin, arrested shortly after her husband, also didn’t immediately denounce the revolution. Incarcerated, she preserved her allegiance to it and even wrote a poem on the occasion of its anniversary. She later also referred to it as an “act of a lunatic.”13
But, on the very first day of volunteer work, something unexpected happened. The harsh conditions on the ground triggered his self-preservation instinct and sobered him up for a moment. What was considered the “forefront of building
Socialism” turned out to be a desolate and barren terrain with thickets of bushes and puddles of water into which wet snow was falling. He and the other prisoners wound up in icy slush up to their knees. Naturally, everyone, including him, became despondent. Then the construction site chiefs atop their horses came over and announced that they would handpick brigadiers who would not have to do manual work themselves but would select a group of thirty men whose work effort they would direct and whose productivity they would be responsible for. The chiefs handed out pieces of paper and pencils to the newly appointed brigadiers, which they were to use to maintain work records.
Dmitri’s first impulse was to find a way to become a brigadier. Luckily, since he had early developed a passion for sketching, wherever he went he always took along pieces of paper and a pencil. Not relying on sheer luck, he inconspicuously took his pencil and paper from his pocket, walked around the mounted bosses, and joined the group of men chosen as brigadiers. “What could be done!” he explains. “After all, for so many years I had been an intelligence operative.”14
But soon his self-destructive impulse returned. As a brigadier, although he didn’t have to toil himself but only direct the efforts of others, he threw his own muscles into the work. He decided to make his brigade one of the most productive on the construction site. The job at hand consisted of using crowbars to pick deep holes in the permafrost where explosives would be placed to move large amounts of ground to make space for the foundation of the future plant. It was an enormously difficult task. After much effort, if you ran into a stone in the ground, you had to start all over again in another place. He worked himself without mercy. During his long, ten-hour shift he would break three or four crowbars. (In his self-denial, he seems to be emulating the highly publicized fictional superhero of Soviet propaganda—Pavel Korchagin—the protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s much popularized novel, How the Steel Was Tempered. In the novel, Korchagin, sick with typhus and running a high fever, volunteers to build a railroad line for a local town. Some other man who, after working two weeks in harsh conditions, is quitting and going back to his family evokes contempt and is called a traitor. That was the spirit of the times.)15
Now Dmitri stayed in the general barracks with the other prisoners. His bed was located too far from the heating stove, so he had to sleep in his padded jacket and cover himself with his undersized sheepskin coat. Before lying down, he wrapped his head with gauze so his hair wouldn’t freeze to the headboard of the bed. Yet, it was still the best place in this barrack: the beds closer to the stove were also closer to the poorly sealed doors. During the frequent snowstorms, snow streamed through them and piled high on those beds. His life impressions shrank to a handful of images and sounds:
Dispassionate play of the northern lights, and the muffled coughing of hundreds of people, and the dull striking of crowbars against the permafrost, and the hoarse swearing and orders through the raging roar of the blizzard, and marching on ice into pitch darkness, and shouts of “Mama!” from under the masks, which resemble the whining of a hare, when somebody next to you is slipping and falling heavily under the feet of others, and shots of the guards, and moans, and turbid drowsiness, standing next to a bonfire kindled on the snow, and snowdrifts, which look like mountains, and cave-ins, deep as abysses, and then a tiny trail [back to the barracks].16
Winter beyond the Arctic Circle was depressing not only because of its subzero temperatures and snowstorms but also because of its long, seemingly eternal nights. The absence of sunlight gradually depleted human strength. Exhaustion of both his body and spirit made Dmitri listless and totally indifferent to anything. He felt he had turned from a human being into an animal with only primitive drives:
I remembered that I had a mother and a wife. I remembered their names and surnames, but these people had receded into an immeasurably faraway place and melted into it—they became small, superfluous, barely comprehensible, and above all, totally estranged. I rarely thought of them, but when they did come to mind, I thought of them as if they were literary characters to whom I related with total indifference. That was natural. After all, I had to work, eat, and sleep, and there was no strength for anything else.17
Every month both his mother and his wife sent parcels and letters, which he scanned without a thought. He knew that their monthly parcels were “proof of their sacred and ardent love.” He knew that because of his imprisonment, his wife couldn’t find work, and that because she lacked nutrition, her consumption had reactivated. He knew that they were both enduring hunger but sent him the most expensive cigarettes and the best canned food money could buy, spending their last kopecks. But he remained dead inside; both his mother and his wife “remained dead notions, apparitions of the other world.”
Before they reached him, most of the contents of his twenty-pound parcels were stolen. Yet, he was forced to sign papers saying he had received them intact. Sometimes, he was lucky to get a can of condensed milk or a pack of cigarettes. But even this was a perishable gift. If he didn’t slurp up the milk right then and there, either the guards at the camp entrance would snatch it during a routine body search or the man on duty at his barrack would find it and consume it himself. Dmitri would punch two holes in the can with a nail sticking out from his plank bed and suck the milk out. Often, tired after a long day’s work, he would fall asleep while he was doing this and the “precious liquid would leak out onto [his] dirty mattress stuffed with moss.”
He admits that during this stage of camp life, he underwent a second transformation—that of a suffering man into a “suffering animal.” His whole life turned into “a little piece of bread of his ration, a cracked cup, and a small darned bag dangling on his rope belt.”
Eventually, outdoor work under the harsh conditions of the Far North took a toll on him. Having been a sailor in the past, he had good muscle tone, but his heart, weakened by scarlet fever he had as a teenager, soon began to malfunction. His swollen feet made it difficult to take off his felt boots before going to bed; often, he slept without removing them. Yet, he was lucky to have these boots at all: one out of four prisoners didn’t.18
His face also swelled so much that it interfered with his vision. He barely moved. Helpless and desperate, he felt that he was dying a slow death. He was commissioned to a hospital and given invalid status. The episode of his volunteering to work outdoors made him realize that his attempt at heroism was delusional. He was just a disposable instrument of the authorities who “worked him to the bone.” On his own admission, he didn’t feel morally bad for failing in his attempt to be at the “front line of building Socialism.” He didn’t regret leaving the fieldwork, because he was disappointed in the cause. While he had expected that at the “front line” he would join ranks with other highly conscientious political prisoners of Communist persuasion who, like him, had decided to disregard their situation and keep building Socialism, instead he found himself next to common criminals who were oblivious to politics. And they did better work. This group of prisoners consisted mostly of young peasants or blue-collar workers who were accustomed to physical labor and thus much more productive than the intellectuals, mostly aging, who were accustomed to working with their brains, not their muscles.19
After recuperating in the camp hospital, Dmitri was returned to his job as a medical assistant. Now he found it much more satisfying. He carried the wounded, frostbitten, and sick prisoners from the construction site to the camp infirmary and felt as if he were a medic on the battlefield. He tried to be where he was most needed, in remote camp units where the shortage of medical help was especially acute.20
Still, something was missing that would serve as ultimate proof to him that he should remain fully devoted to the cause of building Socialism. Soon an opportunity to prove it to himself came his way. One day he was returning from one of those remote camp units, several miles away from the base hospital. Escorted by a young and inexperienced guard, he was carrying a sack of canned food. On their way, they had to cross w
hat seemed to be a shallow lake. Dmitri, with his load, easily swam to the other side, but the guard didn’t know how to swim and attempted to cross the lake on foot. Soon his feet got stuck in the thick sludge at the bottom of the lake, and he began to drown. Dmitri tried to rescue him by throwing him the end of his belt. The guard grabbed it, but after Dmitri made many attempts to pull him out of the lake, the belt snapped. Frightened, a gun in his hand, the guard shot at Dmitri a few times but only lightly wounded his shoulder.
Soon the guard drowned, and Dmitri found himself in the tundra unescorted and, as far as he could tell, out of anyone’s sight. He knew his way back to the hospital. But having been an experienced intelligence operative in the past, he quickly summed up the situation and decided he could make his way to freedom. At nightfall, he would circumvent the city of Norilsk and the railroad station, where they could hide secret guard posts in the surrounding bushes. Then, he would move across the deserted terrain northwest, toward Ust’-Port, at the mouth of the Yenisei River, where he knew he would find foreign ships unloading cargo in the harbor. He estimated that the journey would take him a week or so. He had enough canned food to sustain him for that long. Once he reached the harbor, he would make his way at nightfall to one of the boats flying a foreign flag. The next thing to do was to shout a few words in English, Dutch, or Norwegian to the watchman on board. Something like, “I got drunk, dizzy, and fell overboard. I’m freezing. Get me out!” Once on board, he would demand to see the ship’s captain and tell him in confidence that he was a British agent escaping the Soviet police. As a reward for his rescue, he would offer the captain one thousand British pounds at the first foreign port. He was confident that the plan would work. He believed that captains of those foreign cargo ships were poor and often not too bright. He already had visions of himself back in the café Rotunda in Paris or dancing at the Algonquin in New York, which he remembered from his trip to the United States on Bazarov’s orders.
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