Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  It is hard to say to what extent his plan was realistic. It was most likely just a case of wishful thinking. The journey on foot over the vast and uninviting terrain of the Far North could take much more than a week, and he could run out of food long before crossing such a distance. Besides that, although he thought he could elude his pursuers by taking a route different from that of other escapees, they would have plenty of time to redirect their search. After all, it wasn’t so hard to spot a person walking across the open terrain. As for the money, it’s not quite clear how he planned to get hold of such a substantial sum of hard currency to pay off the captain who took him on board. Nonetheless, in Norilsk at the time, he seemed to believe that his escape plan was viable.

  Then something happened that made him change his mind. As he reached one of the hills overlooking the new construction site of the Norilsk plant, he stopped in awe. The majestic picture of the industrial site growing in such a remote part of his country overwhelmed him. He felt proud of his Motherland’s enormous efforts. If he left Russia, he would never be able to take part in his country’s “peaceful construction and multiplication of its riches.” All those working at that site would forever be part of this achievement. In his mind, staying put where he was at the place of such a heroic deed meant getting back on the “path to immortality.” And he scrapped all thoughts of escape.

  Because this part of his memoirs was written in the Suslovo camp unit of the Siberian Camp Management (Siblag) in 1945 and continued in the special camp at Omsk in 1954, it is tempting to explain them the easy way by saying that his writing about his conscious rejection of an opportunity to escape from a hard labor camp and his accolades to the glory of Soviet man were no more than a ploy, a way to avoid harsh punishment if the camp authorities found his writing, otherwise filled with condemnation of the inhuman treatment of innocent victims of the Soviet penitentiary system. However, from today’s historical perspective, it is known that he was hardly alone in his admiration for the scope and achievements of the Socialist constructions of his time. Recalling a visit to the gigantic construction site in Magnitogorsk back in 1931 as a young man, well-known writer Veniamin Kaverin remembered experiencing feelings similar to those of Bystrolyotov. He also felt moral inspiration from “witnessing history in the making that filled him with hope and a powerful sense of progress—his progress, the country’s progress.” Kaverin, too, overwhelmed by the majesty of the grand scale of the work effort, tried not to see the connection between the human cost of such effort—the suffering of forced labor, the peasant women deported to Magnitogorsk and living in horrifying conditions, often starving and dying.21

  Like yet another non-Party Bolshevik, one Prokhorov-Pustover, Dmitri also considered work in the camps not “slave labor but labor to the advantage of the Socialist state.” The slogan about labor in the USSR being “a matter of honor, of glory, of valor and heroism” was ubiquitous not only in the Soviet cities but also in labor camps. Yet, it wasn’t any labor that was so highly valued, it was manual labor: after all, on the books the Soviet state was a “state of blue-collar workers and toiling peasants.” Therefore, in the Soviet Union, the biblical notion of “earning one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow” was not a symbolic expression of honest work but a literal one. Like other “loyalists,” as Solzhenitsyn categorizes prisoners of Dmitri’s type at that stage of his life, Dmitri also equated Communism with Soviet patriotism, for he felt that, “despite what had happened, . . . Siberia is our Soviet land, on which we are building our Soviet plant. Only you [as a prisoner] do not have to give orders but to work with your own hands. It’s hard? Yes. But it’s necessary. You shouldn’t escape from the camp . . . but remain on the Soviet land as its master.”22

  Bystrolyotov admits that such thoughts may “sound strange and ridiculous coming from a political prisoner, but it’s necessary . . . to continue doing the only thing worthy—being master of your own land, to build and adorn your native land, your fatherly home. I voluntarily stay in the camp, voluntarily report to work. I don’t care about the guards, I don’t need them. I’m a citizen. That’s why I’m alive and will remain alive.” Elsewhere he repeats the last point: “We are given our Communist ideology. It’s our compass; it will bring us out. It is [our] core that will save us from going astray and falling.”23

  In all fairness, Dmitri also wasn’t alone in his eagerness to be part of the grand cause of building Socialism, even having experienced—in his case, literally on his own skin—the injustice of the Soviet system. Another ex-prisoner of the Gulag, released after many years of captivity, wanted to join the Communist Party. He insisted that his “unflinching, ineradicable belief in [the] Leninist Party, in its humanist principles” helped him to survive in the camps. In Dmitri’s case, his need to belong was exacerbated by the circumstances of his early life. Still under the spell of the Communist ideology, which fit with his early harsh experiences as a hungry and homeless youth, he felt a strong need to belong, which had already served as a powerful factor in his decision to return to Russia. And now, looking out over the plant construction site, he felt that excitement of coming home again: “What happiness to regain your Motherland again! What a joy to feel yourself a citizen again!” And turning back, he headed toward the camp dispensary.24

  However, he was destined to remain at the Norillag only a few more months. At the beginning of summer, after spending a whole day removing snow and chopping away ice from the roof of the dispensary hut, he fell ill. He was running a high fever, which refused to abate, and he was taken to the camp hospital. There they diagnosed an advanced stage of festering pleurisy, the long-term impact of injuries he had sustained during interrogation. When they had beaten him using the steel cable with a ball bearing attached to the end of it, his two lower ribs were smashed and had traumatized his pleura. Now he would require surgery.

  After he recovered from the operation, the doctor proposed that he stay in the main camp hospital as his medical assistant. Dmitri refused and made another attempt at heroism. He asked to be transferred to another camp in Port Dudinka or any other one located farther to the north toward Dixon Island, because as he explains it, “among zeks, those places were considered more troublesome and dangerous.” But his state of health was hardly adequate for such an ordeal. First, they assigned him to a lighter job as a housepainter. Then he worked for a while as a medical assistant again. Finally, the chief doctor had mercy on him and decided to save him from his own self-destructive impulses. He included him in an invalid group of prisoners to be transported via Krasnoyarsk to Mariinsk Recovery Camp. It was a “lucky transport” that every prisoner dreamed of joining by any means possible, including self-mutilation or by faking insanity.

  On August 21, 1940, a year after his arrival in the Far North, the invalid prisoner contingent of Norillag was loaded onto a lighter heading south, upstream on the Yenisei River. At the last moment before boarding, Dmitri made another self-destructive attempt to stay behind. He approached an officer of the guards who was on horseback and told him he wanted to remain in Norilsk to build the plant. It took the officer a whole minute to look him over, head to toe, before whispering into his ear, “Are you out of your mind? They give you life, warmth, and light! Rejoice that you got into this lucky prisoner transport.” Then he spurred his horse on and galloped away.

  With five hundred other crippled, wounded, and terminally ill prisoners, Dmitri had no choice but to continue his journey through the Gulag Archipelago.

  SIXTEEN

  The Invalid Camp

  The notion “human being” has a proud ring to it.

  —MAXIM GORKY

  On September 22, 1940, a special invalid transport, a barge pulled by a tugboat, cast off the pier of Port Dudinka. All five hundred prisoners on board were written off in the accompanying documents as “not responding to treatment in the conditions of the Far North.” Most of the patients were blind, legless, dying of tuberculosis, or swollen with edema. A separate cell in the ho
ld contained thirty-two mental patients with their own doctor and his medical orderly.1

  The invalid prisoner barge was the most coveted transport, for it promised the end of a miserable existence in the harshest climate on earth, but at the same time, it was the most dreaded transport. Many of those on board these invalid transport boats thought of it as a “journey into the abyss, sailing across the Styx away from the known world.” In many ways, the prisoners’ conditions on the boat were even worse than those in the jails or the camps. The transportation of prisoners was a matter of strict secrecy and carried the potential risk that some would attempt to escape by diving from the barge, so they were kept in the hold where they had restricted space and only limited access to fresh air. The hatch between the deck and the hold was locked and sealed, leaving only a small opening for ventilation. The hold was equipped with multistoried plank beds, and tuberculosis patients who couldn’t breathe lying down crawled onto the floor, upholstered with steel sheets and flooded with sewage from the three barrels that served as prisoners’ close stools.2

  The food situation was equally dismal, even lower in quality than the camp food, and water was in shorter supply than in the camps. “Imagine the faces and hands of people who couldn’t wash for the duration of the trip under such conditions,” Dmitri recalls. The prisoners looked like “gray worms swarming about on the dark background of stinking entrails.”

  The chief doctor and two other female doctors, prisoners themselves, ran the transport dispensary located on the deck, leaving only three doctors to serve the whole contingent of five hundred prisoners in the hold. These three medical workers were chosen not on the basis of their professional qualifications but because all three were considered troublesome; the camp authorities used the sending off of hopelessly sick and handicapped prisoners as an excuse to get rid of these doctors. One suffered from schizophrenia, and another wasn’t really a general medicine physician, but a psychiatrist who was addicted to morphine. As for Dmitri, since the time he had volunteered for manual work in the tundra, he had earned a reputation for being strange and restless.

  Now he was left practically alone to care for all five hundred patients. He had to climb from one row of plank beds to another, distributing medicine, examining wounds, and changing bandages. He often lifted patients’ spirits with a sympathetic word or a joke. Having no soap, he washed his hands with strong tea before making rounds, which lasted eight hours. He had to do his job accompanied by the sounds of the “splashing of fetid swill, hoarse breathing at the crack in the small openings of the frames above, and the incessant murmuring of a schizophrenic patient.”3

  The whole atmosphere prevailing in the hold reminded Dmitri of his trip through the African jungles: “Everybody crawls over the plank beds in the darkness, like monkeys in the wilds of a tropical forest . . . The same gray semidarkness. The same mortal danger, lurking every moment. Finally, the same necessity to move on, that is, to consciously expose myself to the inevitability of attack.”

  And one day while he was making his rounds, he was attacked, it seemed, out of nowhere. Somebody grabbed him by the throat with an iron grip. As he gasped for air, someone else struck the attacker over the head. The attacker turned out to be a mental patient, a small-postured, frail military engineer, who during a psychotic fit, mistook Dmitri for the interrogator who had tortured him to force his cooperation.

  In a half hour, the attack was repeated. Then it came again and again, every time from an unpredictable side. The situation made Dmitri’s already intense work extremely difficult. He asked the medical orderly in charge of the mental patients to keep an eye on the mad engineer.

  The next morning, Dmitri learned to his horror that the orderly, a common criminal, fixed the madman problem in his own way—by strangling him. The orderly told Dmitri that he had done it as a service to him. Nor did he forget about himself: he expropriated the deceased man’s army boots, leather coat, and cap.

  It was useless to report the murderer. The authorities didn’t trust any political prisoners, the “enemies of the people,” and the orderly, as a common criminal, was considered a much more trustworthy, “socially close element,” one of their gang.

  From time to time, Dmitri was allowed to bring patients upstairs to see the chief doctor on the deck. During one of these visits, the chief doctor’s assistant, former director of a military plant, one Zalman Amdur, recognized in Dmitri a cultured man and talked the doctor into allowing him to linger on the deck for a longer time. Needless to say, Dmitri was very appreciative: along with plenty of fresh air, the food was much better, too. Here’s how Amdur remembers Dmitri: “He was a very handsome man, with smart blue eyes and a soft smile that revealed dimples on his cheeks. An excellent storyteller with an unhurried quiet voice, clear diction, and the literary and rich vocabulary of a highly cultured person. His stories were full of humor and very subtle sarcasm. He was extremely reserved in showing his emotions.”4

  Now Dmitri could take a break, and as he spent some time on the deck he took stock of his life back in Norilsk. At that first stage of his Gulag experience, he had often suffered from loneliness. There was a dearth of friends in the camp. It was understandable: like him, many prisoners still hadn’t been able to overcome the shock of their displacement and the disruption of life as they knew it. As Dmitri notes, “A suffering man is always lonely and immersed in himself.” Lost and disoriented in his feelings, he had met a similar forlorn soul, a young woman with whom he unexpectedly had a short-lived but deeply emotional romance.

  She was a young Evenk woman, that is, she belonged to one of the indigenous Tungusic peoples of the Far North. Also a prisoner, a nurse at the camp hospital, she approached him first but couldn’t communicate with him: her Russian was barely comprehensible. He couldn’t even understand what her name was and nicknamed her “Sasha-Masha.” The young woman expressed her disposition toward him with smiles and gestures. He responded by jokingly touching her nose and producing a buzzing sound: the tiny nose reminded him of a doorbell button.

  Some time later, he saw her stealing and then eating, on the spot, fish from the camp kitchen. As an apparent gesture of gratitude for not reporting her to the authorities, the next day she gave Dmitri a small jar of tangerine preserves sold in the camp shop for prisoners. He responded by exchanging a pair of woolen socks he’d received in one of his parcels for a big fish and giving it to Sasha-Masha: she seemed to enjoy fish more than anything.

  They had a few dates in some nooks on the campgrounds where they could find privacy for at least a short while. On one of those dates, a polar snowstorm began. The two-month-long polar night had already started—they lost their way in the darkness and wound up in a woodshed. They began making love, but they inadvertently discovered that they were sitting on a stack of frozen corpses under a pile of snow already accumulated inside the shed. During the winter, the prisoner hospital used the shed as a local morgue.

  After Dmitri joined the brigade working in the tundra, he saw Sasha-Masha only sporadically. One day, when they ran into each other accidentally, she took him aside and put his hand on her belly, which was already showing. Dmitri was moved by this unexpected development in his life. He caressed her belly tenderly. After all, the young woman was carrying his baby, as it turned out, the one and only time in his life this was to happen.

  But he wasn’t destined to become a father. Soon, they found Sasha-Masha with a knife in her back: one of the common criminals confused her with another woman whom he was jealous of. When Dmitri was called in, the baby was still kicking for a short while in the dead woman’s body. But it was too late to save either mother or baby.

  Now on the deck of the barge, Dmitri was sad as he thought about the tragic fate of this young woman who had become very dear to him. He left behind a nameless grave that he would remember for the rest of his life.

  His musings were interrupted by wild shouting coming from the hold. The cause of the mayhem was a fight that erupted in a group of c
ommon criminals who, despite numerous body searches before boarding the barge, had managed to smuggle on a deck of cards. One avid card player accused another of cheating. Razor in hand, he chased after the suspect, cutting up several other prisoners who stood in his way.

  The wounded were pulled up onto the deck. Dmitri and a female doctor stationed upstairs were called in to take care of them. He and the doctor worked together until the job was done. Then they stepped aside for a break. Standing next to the relatively young and attractive woman, he felt torn between two conflicting feelings: erotic desire and an urge to grab her “graceful little legs” and throw her overboard, into the icy Yenisei water. In his view, this woman, Anna Anatolievna Rosenblum, had played a gruesome part in his life.

  He had met her in the camps a year earlier, when he first reported to work as a medical assistant. The minute he stepped into the dispensary office, he recognized her as the very same female doctor who had been present during some of his endless interrogations and torture sessions in Lefortovo prison. When he lost consciousness, she was called in to administer a shot. She did so several times, and every time he regained consciousness, she informed the interrogator that he could go ahead and renew his efforts.

  Now in the camp dispensary, she smiled at him, and he stood silently trying to assure himself that the woman was real, not an apparition of his horrific past. Obviously, she didn’t recognize him: she had attended to too many tortured men as part of her job at the NKVD. Barely keeping his rage in check, Dmitri didn’t show that he recognized her. At the very first opportunity, he told his boss at the dispensary, an imprisoned Dr. Nesterenko, about her. The doctor, an eccentric man, immediately agreed to conspire with Dmitri to murder her. One day when all three of them were in the office, Nesterenko engaged Rosenblum in conversation, while Dmitri stepped out into a little hall and got a thin crowbar used to crush chunks of coal before feeding the stove. His heart racing, his face sweating, he grabbed the crowbar, trying to decide quickly at what part of Rosenblum’s body he should direct his blow.