At that moment, through the slightly ajar office door, he overheard the doctor asking Rosenblum whether she had worked in Lefortovo prison. When she nodded, the doctor asked whether, if Bystrolyotov’s case were reopened for review, she would be willing to confirm that he had signed his testimony under torture. She replied, “Of course,” and Dmitri put aside his crowbar in relief. Now he had a good excuse not to blemish his soul with another sin—murdering this woman. She could be of help to him, at least theoretically: reopening cases of “enemies of the people” was extremely rare.
Unbeknown to her, Rosenblum had escaped an unjust punishment at the hands of one of the innocent victims of terror she had secretly helped. What Dmitri didn’t know was that in her capacity as head of the medical unit at Lefortovo prison, this military doctor of the third rank had saved many lives of prisoners who were tortured there. In fact, the prisoners even nicknamed her “the good fairy of Lefortovo.” In January 1939, soon after attending to an unconscious Bystrolyotov, she too was arrested and found guilty of keeping records of unlawful means of interrogation. She was accused of exactly those things that she was opposed to—“Fascist methods of interrogation and annihilation of Soviet cadres.” During her short, less than two-year (since April 1937) tenure at the prison, she had documented forty-nine cases of prisoners tortured to death. One of her best known testimonies told of severe bodily harm inflicted on one of the most distinguished Soviet generals, a hero of the civil war and Marshal of the Soviet Union, Vasily Blyukher, who was imprisoned in Lefortovo and died after Bystrolyotov had already been arrested. In turn, Rosenblum was also tortured and sentenced to fifteen years in the labor camps. Now on board the barge, on her way to Moscow for a new trial, she was worried that she could be sentenced to capital punishment.5
It took the prisoner transport a very long time, a month and a half, to reach Krasnoyarsk, an extremely slow pace: one could have covered the distance on foot. The fact that the barge was barely moving was a source of great worry to the prisoners. As if the unbearable conditions of being locked up in a hold with little fresh air and scarce water and food supply were not enough, it was already late autumn, and the snow had begun early. With this came fears that the river would become icebound anytime now and remain frozen for more than half of the year. If that happened, the authorities would have no choice but to disembark the prisoners and move them to Krasnoyarsk on foot. Considering that the contingent on board consisted exclusively of invalid convicts, this meant that hardly any of them would survive such a trip.
Nevertheless, the barge made many stops at the sheer whim of the guards’ wives, who hurried nowhere and couldn’t care less about the well-being of the prisoners. The many stops they demanded along the way were for frivolous reasons: now to pick berries, now cedar nuts. Meanwhile, all crew aboard, including the captain and the guards, indulged themselves in heavy drinking around the clock. The captain’s wife, also drunk, often took hold of the steering wheel as she necked with one of the intoxicated guards. The prisoners watched in horror as the barge moved from side to side, not forward. It could crash at any moment. The body of the old boat could crack open, and all of them would wind up in the icy water. Things like that weren’t unprecedented in the Gulag. With the constant shifting of prisoners from camp to camp, news traveled fast: through the grapevine, rumors spread about a similar accident that had taken place with a prisoner cargo boat that ran into the reefs in the Far East Sea.6
When the barge finally reached Krasnoyarsk, a pile of eighteen corpses was stacked on the deck. Because the head of the convoy and the rest of the guards were drunk, there was a danger that others would not know how to handle the rope and cables, causing the tug-boat and barge to collide at the pier. Here Dmitri was able to intervene: as a former sailor, he helped to secure both boats correctly.
First, the prisoners were taken on foot to a temporary camp. Soon, through a hole in the fence, enterprising wives of the guards smuggled vodka into the camp and sold it to the prisoners. They set exorbitant prices, robbing the prisoners blind. Sick and tired, worn out by their protracted journey, the prisoners became quickly intoxicated, and a drunken orgy began. They jumped all over the plank beds. It was a sad spectacle; it looked like “the feeble thrashing about of heavy rags hanging on a rope to dry.”
After everyone got tired and fell asleep, the common criminals set the barrack on fire.
Dmitri threw himself into saving those inside the barrack who couldn’t move. With dark humor, Bystrolyotov admits in his memoirs that, since he was also intoxicated when he rushed to carry out the patients from the fire, at the end of the ordeal, he discovered that he had mixed up the doors of the barracks and carried out eighteen corpses from the morgue, instead of live patients.
The authorities decided to move the prisoner transport farther. But, a series of prisoners’ deaths followed. Having held up during a month and a half of dangerous travel, decompressing when they reached Krasnoyarsk, they let their internal defense mechanisms go and began dying, one after another.
Finally, the whole prisoner contingent was loaded onto a train and taken via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Mariinsk, a town in Kemerovo oblast, some one hundred and twenty miles northeast of Kemerovo. Here, they set up the Siberian correctional labor camp of special designation, somewhat an anomaly: a recreational labor camp for invalids and the overexhausted—as Dmitri calls it, a “sanatorium-like camp.”7
The first few days at the new location were hardly happy for him. First, he was robbed by criminals posing as authorities. Then a gang of common criminals mistook him for somebody else and beat him up. Finally, he managed to go through the bathhouse and reach his plank bed. Falling asleep, he experienced unusual joy: “It seemed to me then that I was like a drowning swimmer who had discovered in himself the strength to find his way out of the ocean depths: he crawled out onto warm stones, closed his eyes, smiled gratefully, and pressed his face against the bosom of Mother Earth.”
“Doc, your wife has arrived from Moscow to see you.”
This news reached him on the morning of June 22, 1941, when they called him to the headquarters of the camp armed guard (vakhta). The camp was located near the village of Suslovo, one of ten camp units (lagpunkt) of the Mariinsk division of Siblag. The units were located from fifteen to twenty miles apart. Mariinsk division was its capital, a small provincial town with a prisoner distribution center and the camp headquarters. Five such divisions constituted the Siberian Camp Management (Siblag) with its center in Novosibirsk.8
He listened to the news with no emotion. It was too sudden and too confusing. He had already written to Iolanta several times, begging her to cut him out of her life so that she would have a chance to survive. She must dissociate herself from him for her own sake. But she kept sending him expensive parcels containing clothes and canned food. Left without means of sustenance after his arrest, she went hungry herself to send the packages, and he knew it. He begged, even demanded, that she stop wasting her money, at least for the reason that almost everything she sent was stolen by the common criminals employed along the route of parcel deliveries to prisoners. But she continued doing the same things over and over. In her letters, she never complained and wrote very little about herself. As to parcels, she wrote that she sent them not only for him but for her own sake as well. It gave meaning to her life: “I can’t live otherwise.”
And a few days before they had told him that his good work in the camp had earned him the award of five, three-hour-long dates with his wife. The visitation was to take place in the little back room equipped with a single long, wide bench, on which the guards usually rested between shifts. And now his wife, whom he was sure he would never see again, stood before him. He froze in horror:
Her cheeks sunken and her nose sharp as that of a corpse, her huge eyes glistening brightly on her skull. The feverish redness of her cheeks turned scarlet, and her disheveled hair stood on end. It was the ugly head of a dying woman . . . An unnaturally long neck and st
icklike hands stuck out from her worn jacket. For a moment, her embrace wide open, her arms spread, I saw a scarecrow, a regular garden variety scarecrow, but a horrific one, for it was alive, painted in various colors and smiling. Her huge eyes gleaming, through coughing and husky breathing, the scarecrow said: “Well, now we are together again . . . As we were before . . . in Paris and Prague . . . my dear.”9
She began hurriedly removing packs of expensive cigarettes and small bottles of perfume from her shopping bag, asking him to give them to the guards so that they would allow her to stay longer. He touched her forehead. It was hot and dry. She was running a high fever. She was coughing and wiping her mouth with a handkerchief, already stained with blood. It was clear that she was dying of an extreme flare-up of tuberculosis. She talked and talked nonstop, coughing and gasping for air.
When she intercepted his look of horror at her incredibly thin figure with sunken breasts, she misinterpreted it and smiled: “Do you recognize the dress? It’s the same one that I had made in Paris.” She named the fashionable atelier on Avenue Paix. “The same one I wore when I was ‘Countess Rona Esterhazy.’ Why are you silent?”
He sat next to her without daring even to move. The pain of seeing her suffering gradually turned into burning shame for being healthy. At the end of their meeting, at the gate of the camp, she said, “I’m dying, my dear, and I’ve come to say farewell to you. How wonderful that I could do it, isn’t it?”
He remembered that a year before, when he was serving his term in the Far North, he was informed that his wife had made an attempt to see him in the camps. She traveled as far as Krasnoyarsk, but at the last moment before beginning the last leg of the trip to see him in Norilsk, she was informed that her visit was canceled; no explanation was given.
Now when she had finally succeeded, before stepping outside the campsite, she did something strictly forbidden by the rules for visitations: she threw her hands around his neck, saying, “I’m leaving you . . . forever . . .”
The prison guard jumped at them and tore her from Dmitri. She fell on the ground. Blood began oozing from her mouth. Dmitri lost his self-control. Sick to his stomach with guilt and despair, he attacked the guard, beating him until he bled.
He expected severe punishment. In his memoirs, he registers his thoughts upon being called to the operchast’ (operational state security unit) of the camps: “What had all of those incredible sacrifices been endured for? For the sake of what did we go to battle so bravely? What is this, injustice or retribution? How much suffering we bore and inflicted on others! And now there is just emptiness. Everything is nonsense.”
(In the 1960s, looking back at his life in the camps, he resolved that dilemma. While what happened to him in the camps was injustice committed by those who had sent him to fight, he accepted his suffering there as the payoff for the distress caused to others on the other side of the Soviet border. It was why he titled the part of his memoirs devoted to his camp life “Retribution.”)
Luckily for him, on that day, June 22, 1941, war broke out with Germany, and in the ensuing commotion, instead of another trial that would undoubtedly add at least ten years to his term, he got away with fifteen days of incarceration in a dark, cold prison cell.
In late 1941, with the front line of the war approaching Moscow, extraordinary measures were taken to remove all especially dangerous political prisoners (those who had been sentenced under Article 58 for grave counterrevolutionary crimes) from any privileged positions in the camps and assign them to hard labor. Dmitri was relieved of his position as a doctor and sent off to another Mariinsk camp unit with orders to be assigned to manual work only. However, because of an acute shortage of qualified medical personnel, the local camp authorities gave him a less visible position—as a doctor assigned to the sick barrack.
A month later, he received a postcard informing him that his wife had died. Some time later, a young woman working in the censor’s unit secretly passed a letter to him. She risked punishment for violating strict rules requiring the destruction of letters of the kind she felt compelled to pass on to Dmitri.
The letter was from a stranger who had witnessed Iolanta’s last days. She wrote to Dmitri, fulfilling his wife’s last wish that he know the truth of what happened to her. On January 1, 1942, in Moscow, they had rounded up a group of “untrustworthy wives” of repressed husbands, Iolanta among them, loaded them onto open platforms, and taken them by rail to Kuibyshev (now Samara), a distance of over five hundred miles. Many became chilled to the bone along the way. They put the arrivals into an empty barrack that lacked even plank beds. As Iolanta lay on the cold floor, her throat bled continuously and copiously. She realized that she was a hindrance to everyone: there was no soap, no hot water. Somehow, she managed to get her hands on a kitchen knife, hid it in the sleeve of her overcoat, and holding on to the walls, crawled into the bathroom, where she cut her throat. They found her dead in the morning. The letter ended with words addressed to Dmitri that Iolanta had asked the woman to pass on: “You must survive. At least as a witness. For your own sake and for the sake of all of us.”
He read the letter again and again, walking outside of the barrack until his legs gave in. He fell on the snow, his eyes open, and lay there without moving, oblivious to the fact that if he didn’t get up soon he would freeze to death. After a while, by luck, one of the other prisoners passing by recognized him and, with help from others, dragged him to the barrack.
At yet a later date, he received a postcard from his mother’s neighbor informing him that, when Iolanta had left for Siberia to see him for the last time, his mother, who had lost her sight from grief, took advantage of her absence and, to stop being a burden to her sick daughter-in-law, ended her own life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.10
All of this hit Dmitri hard. The deaths of both his wife and his mother had a profound effect on him. Never before had he felt such excruciating loneliness. The only physical mementos left of Iolanta were several high-quality photographs taken soon after his return to Moscow from his work abroad. These pictures were his “most sacred personal treasures,” almost like icons, representing not only the memory of his perished wife but also his whole stormy life abroad. He kept these “holy little pictures” in the safest place he could think of, under the mattress of his bed. But soon after he learned of Iolanta’s death, the photos disappeared. Horrified that someone had torn this “thread that tangibly and visually” connected him with his past, with trembling hands, he frantically searched his cabin and the sick barrack in his charge. But to no avail.
Soon, pieces of the photographs were spotted in one of the camp lavatories. The gruesome symbolism of where his past life had wound up enraged him. It was clear that the pictures had no value for the thief (besides, they could also have become pieces of evidence against him). With the photographs, the thief also stole Dmitri’s manuscripts and a package of blank paper, which he had managed to obtain from a young woman working in the office, giving her in exchange a small jar of lipstick he produced by mixing some ambulance paint with a lanolin ointment. Paper was extremely hard to come by in the camps. The thief aimed to make a fortune selling (or bartering for goods) every scrap of these papers. The sheets containing Dmitri’s notes were still good for rolling cigarettes, and clean paper was in high demand for writing letters and, even more so, for making playing cards, one of the main entertainments among the hard-core criminals.11
Blinded with thirst for revenge, Dmitri lost his usual reserve, resolving to find and kill the perpetrator. There was only one way to do that in the camp: hire one of the “bitches,” turncoat thieves who violated even the thieves’ law; they were the cruelest of hard-core criminals.12
The thief turned out to be a young lad who owed quite a bit to Dmitri, who had recently done everything in his power to save this man’s life and health: he kept him in the sick barrack for three months and ensured that he received good nutrition. After Dmitri’s superiors demanded that the young man be
removed from that sick barrack, he placed him in another one for recuperating patients and kept him there as long as he could. After that, he made the young man, whom he liked for being “affectionate like a calf,” a hospital attendant and registration clerk. But after transfer to another place in the camp, the young man robbed his benefactor. The loot was found, revealing that every page of Dmitri’s papers had been cut into neat pieces. Everything dear to him had been ruined. For Dmitri, the destruction of Iolanta’s pictures, his “little icons,” as he called them, was an act of sacrilege. Not to mention the staggering loss of the product of many months of labor—the manuscripts of his notes written under extreme physical and emotional duress, in stolen bits of time at the risk of being caught at any moment, notes that were all but impossible to restore.
He could eventually forgive both crimes. But for him, who had always felt aversion for commerce—let us recall him starving but preferring manual labor rather than selling some goods on the streets of Constantinople during his miserable months as a raw youth—seeing everything sacred to him turned into merchandise stacked up in “neat piles,” recounted and carefully priced, specifying both wholesale and retail prices, and marked with precise handwriting was too much. It drove him crazy: he snapped and called on his hired hand to carry out the punishment. The “bitch” took the perpetrator of the crime into a separate room and, with a deliberate blow, permanently ruined his liver. To hide it from the camp authorities, they reported he had accidentally fallen into some pit in the zone. The thief died soon afterward in the camp hospital.
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