Stalin's Romeo Spy

by Emil Draitser

  He also came to a conclusion that dealt another blow to his long-held Communist belief that called for predominance of the common good over personal interest. He recalled some instances when prisoners had worked well and honestly and admitted to himself that they had done it “not for the idea of labor, not for the Motherland, not for the glory of [Vladimir] Ilyich [Lenin], but for extra food, for a place in a barracks with normal beds instead of plank beds, for better clothing—that is, for one’s own gain, for oneself.”

  He also came to realize that the hypocrisy of the Soviet system was akin to that of Nazi ideology: “No, no, and again no: education by way of labor with a machine gun in hand and a dog is a conscious and base lie! It was for a good reason that the sign ‘Labor makes you free!’ was displayed on the gates of Hitler’s camps.” Dmitri found the two systems similar in many other respects and believed that they themselves recognized their mutual kinship “by smell.”

  Anticipating similar conclusions that Solzhenitsyn would make in his book The Gulag Archipelago, Dmitri admitted that “ardent Stalin ‘patriots,’ ” such as the former division commander Pavlov, whom he had met during his time in Norilsk, “came to the camps with a willingness to labor for the glory of the dear Party and its leader, but none of them took a shovel and crowbar in their hands. All this is a vile lie.” As if laughing at himself for his naiveté, Dmitri now admitted to himself that, like Pavlov, he had also managed to get a brigadier’s position, for it gave him an opportunity to work as much as he wanted himself but to make others do the most work.

  His health slowly returning, Dmitri threw himself in many directions, including scientific research on the causes of leptospirosis (also known as Weil’s disease), a virus that affected prisoners’ brains and led to a quick death. With permission from his boss, Dmitri looked through some twenty thousand patient files and found that the cause of the disease was infection coming from the sewage of toilets located at the top of one of the hills where one group of prisoners worked. It was obvious that to avoid spread of the disease the authorities had to restructure the work zone. The head of medical personnel knew that the authorities would disapprove of such an idea and balked at Dmitri’s suggestion.

  Dmitri continued his research surreptitiously. He turned for help to one of the prisoners, an ex–field sergeant of the Waffen-SS, who in his prewar civilian life had worked in a Frankfurt laboratory. The man had managed to bring his German-made microscope with a dark camera to the camps. Dmitri found a way to get access to some laboratory dyes, had the German prisoner transferred to his charge, and began his experiments with dyeing specimens of spinal liquid following one of the methods he remembered from medical school. After a number of failures, he learned to find agents of leptospirosis. Dmitri also consulted with an Estonian prisoner from a neighboring lagpunkt, a microbiologist by training. Next, using watercolor paints he obtained from the camp Cultural and Educational Department, he made a number of color sketches of those agents. When this part of his research was done, he began statistical analysis of those twenty thousand patient files.

  At the last moment, when he found scientific proof of the causes of the disease, he experienced fear. If he approached his medical bosses, who were reluctant to change the ways they worked, as a prisoner he could get himself in trouble. But on that day, a new patient arrived, a cultured man, formerly editor in chief of a big publishing house. He had a brain form of leptospirosis. Dmitri imagined the brain of that thin, smiling man, a prisoner with a number on his chest, who would most likely die in a couple of days, his brain teeming with viruses from the disease, and decided that he couldn’t be silent.

  Circumventing his medical boss, he submitted his findings to the camp chief. As he expected, the chief disregarded the report, and on the heels of Dmitri’s other offense—his protest that prisoner patients under his watch were given rotten meat swarming with worms for dinner—he wound up among the prisoners selected for the next punishment prisoner transport to be dispatched from the camp to another location.

  They loaded the prisoners on a train. Dmitri felt indifferent to where fate would take him this time. “I didn’t know who would go where, but I did know that I would drift closer to my grave.”

  In October 1953, in a shipment of three thousand prisoners, he came to Zone 05 of Kamyshlag in the city of Omsk. The new camp was unusually clean, prisoners were well fed, and the camp chief was seriously concerned about their health. But these changes had come after many years of deprivation, and many prisoners had lost the will to live.

  Among prisoners passing through the camp temporarily, waiting to be shipped farther on with the next transport, Dmitri met an old acquaintance from his past camp life. He was in poor health, yet joyful. He explained to Dmitri the reason for his good mood: “Death is the only form of true liberation for a Soviet man. Soon I’ll say goodbye forever to Marxism-Leninism and Socialist realism and Soviet democracy.”

  Unlike his fervent rejection of anti-Soviet sentiments expressed by other prisoners during his first years of imprisonment, now Dmitri didn’t object to the man’s pessimism. He only called on the dying man to hang on, for there was no reason to hurry death.

  In postwar times, the conditions of prisoners’ lives in the camps improved somewhat, but other problems arose for people like Dmitri. After the end of the war, the contingent of prisoners dramatically changed. Now it also included prisoners of war from Germany and its allies, as well as Nazi collaborators from the territories occupied by Hitler’s troops. Often those who had only recently been adversaries (for instance, Jewish prisoners and former SS officers) were forced to work and rest side by side. For Dmitri, this change that now included sworn enemies of his country among the prisoner population brought about moral torture. Now he had to exist and work shoulder to shoulder with traitors of his Motherland—former Nazi collaborators, who expressed their moral superiority over him. Thus Dmitri felt pain that one such convict served only fifteen years for collaborating with the enemy, while he, Dmitri, guiltless, had been sentenced to twenty years.

  In time, his outrage subsided, being gradually replaced with indifference. The long years in prison began taking a toll on him: “How long should all this keep going on? I’m dead tired of all of it.”

  He understood that he was reaching a threshold when, having always been on his toes when it came to his immediate duties, he grew oblivious to them. Moreover, being in the privileged position of doctor made him feel “burning shame.” When entering the gloomy corridors of the camp prison, he knew that in the eyes of other prisoners he was playing the part of an assistant to the administration, which, for him, was a “denigrating and base part.” Thus, when he had to force-feed a prisoner on a hunger strike, he found himself in the shoes of those who had done it to him in Sukhanovka. Now doing what his duties as a camp doctor demanded of him, he felt “all wet from sweat and as if bathed in shit.” He scorned his fate: “Oh, what a lousy life!”

  But, in the topsy-turvy world of the Soviet labor camp, he didn’t have much room to choose his own position in life, because his very survival often depended on collaboration with prisoners whom he abhorred otherwise—an assortment of hoodlums and enemies of his Motherland. Since many prisoners demanded a doctor’s release from work, which would give them a day of rest, he was often threatened physically—not only with fists and sticks but also with knives or even axes. Therefore, he had to accept protection from three heads of hard-core criminal groups (pakhans, in camp slang), all of them ex-colonels fighting on the side of the Nazis during the recent war. One of them had served in the Bandera contingent of Ukrainian nationalists, another in Hitler’s Muslim Battalion, and the third had been attached to the headquarters of General Andrei Vlasov, a former Soviet Army general who collaborated with Germany during the war. In exchange for their protection, each of these group representatives expected the doctor to free a few prisoners on their list from work.

  Dmitri didn’t have a free hand in whom to include in this list:
the doctor’s diagnoses were subject to check. He was allowed to free from work only bedridden patients after surgery or prisoners with blood pressure higher than 185. (His own blood pressure was higher than that, which made him reel, but he couldn’t be relieved of his duties.) At the time, with three thousand prisoners in the zone, every day the line of patients at his office door seemed endless. But he knew that sometimes a truly sick patient’s life depended on his diagnosis. He would end his reception hours totally exhausted.

  One day, his usual protection arrangement failed. When he refused one of the prisoner’s demands for relief from work, he received a strong blow to the chest, so strong that it seemed to break his breast-bone. The second blow landed in the place where, back in Norilsk, they had to saw out his ribs to cure the trauma caused by his being beaten during interrogation. Although his protection squad finally intervened and killed the attacker, the next day Dmitri lost control of his speech, responding to questions with gibberish; he also began sweating profusely. Thus began the second paralysis of the right side of his body. Placed in the prison hospital, he asked for a mirror. He was horrified at what he saw: his eyes were those of a dying man, one of them contorted. When they brought him a newspaper, he couldn’t discern the words; he was mortified that he had lost the ability to read. He felt like crying: all his hopes of a future life with Anna were now crushed.

  What could he do? After many years of camp life, he knew that he shouldn’t expect charity or compassion from anyone. Being incapacitated in the camp meant having no hope of survival in a cutthroat situation. And right away, a saving thought came to him on how he could solve the problem: he had to end his life right then and there. Scanning mentally through the pages of his medical books dealing with suicide victims, he came up with a solution: since he was unable to walk, he would do it by making a noose out of his towel and tying it to the headboard of his bed.

  But the towel turned out to be too short. Then he thought of using the linen on which he lay. At night, slowly, inch by inch, with only his left hand fully functional, he began pulling out the linen from under his body. But, half paralyzed, the sheet tucked too tightly under the mattress, he made little progress during the night. He almost cried from grief. As a new day started, he rehearsed every move in his head all day long and waited impatiently for the next nightfall.

  When nighttime finally arrived, he renewed his efforts, eventually pulling the sheet from under himself. But no matter how hard he tried, after a long time lying on his side and working with only one hand, he still hadn’t been able to make the noose.

  The hospital personnel noticed his actions. Now they put him under around-the-clock watch. He decided on a new course of action: he would train himself to make the noose at night, and when he had mastered it, he would take the linen to the bathroom and hang himself mounting the noose on a water pipe close to the ceiling. He understood that it might take him a month to carry out his plan. Every time his medical assistant took a smoke break, Dmitri practiced making a noose out of his towel. Bit by bit, he also learned to walk, taking a firm step using one leg and training himself to depend momentarily on the other before taking another step.

  His resolve to end his life brought about unexpected results. He calmed down and developed a healthy appetite. To make his right-hand fingers better able to tie the knots on the linen, he frequently massaged them with his healthy hand. All this slowly but surely led to his recovery. One day he even found that his speech capabilities had returned. Yet, he didn’t abandon the decision to end his life. Moreover, he felt proud of his stubbornness, willpower, and resolve: “Of course, I am a crippled eagle,” he thought to himself. “But I am an eagle nonetheless.”

  Finally, he felt ready for the final act. At three in the morning, he slowly made his way to the bathroom and was about to slip his head through the noose when a surprising thought crossed his mind: if he had succeeded in making it to the bathroom after a few months of effort, then in a few more months he could reach his office desk. If that was the case, it meant that, contrary to his initial self-diagnosis, he hadn’t had a brain hemorrhage, which would have caused permanent brain damage, but only the spasm of a blood vessel in the brain. This is why he had been able to restore some of his faculties.

  Encouraged by this discovery, he began training himself to hear properly, then to speak, and eventually to write, which, in time, he could do at least to some extent. The only function that refused to return was the ability to count—he still suffered from acalculia.

  With the permission of the head of the medical department, he became the hospital courtyard caretaker. First, he picked up cigarette butts around the building, then he began taking care of the hospital’s little garden.

  By summertime, he was capable of doing what he had done when he had stepped into the prison medical world in Krasnoyarsk for the first time back in 1939, shortly before entering the gulag: making rounds to distribute pills to the hospital patients.

  At the beginning of spring 1954, he was informed that he was included on the list of prisoners considered for release from the camps before serving their full term for reasons of poor health. Before taking his picture, following the instructions, the camp photographer covered the number on the prisoner’s padded jacket. For an extra pack of cigarettes, for memory’s sake, Dmitri had another picture taken—with the number showing. No longer able to hold a pen firmly in his hand, he dictated a letter to Anna. Thinking about their possible future meeting, he wanted to prepare her for the fact that he was an invalid now. She shouldn’t imagine him the way he was in 1947 in Suslovo. Since then he had spent three years in solitary confinement, almost gone insane, and suffered paralysis twice here in the special camp. Now he was an old man, totally unemployable and incurably ill. He saw poorly, thought with difficulty, dragged his right leg, and his right hand hung like a broken branch.

  Then he advised her, without any sentimentality, to make a decisive and clean break with him, to stop writing letters and sending money and parcels: “My life is now hard and beastly, little Anna. It’s not settled. And therefore our liaison comes to a natural end.” He informed her that she shouldn’t worry. He had applied for a place in the Omsk Invalid Home as a homeless ex-prisoner, and he’d been accepted.

  He remained unmoved by the atmosphere of total joy among prisoners foretasting freedom. He knew all too well that not much joy was in store for him. Having nowhere else to go, he also knew that life at the invalid home would be like a branch of the camp hell where the cutthroats among the criminals would not be controlled by the guards. The jungle law of the survival of the fittest would reign there too.

  As he awaited his release indifferently, a letter arrived from Anna protesting his decision in the strongest possible language. She underscored that she had long ago committed herself to support him for as long as he lived and that she had never changed her mind. Since she was still tied to her job in Tambov, she gave her daughter’s Moscow address and instructed Dmitri to go straight there the moment he was released.

  Reading these lines, he was seized with joy. He felt like jumping and shouting.

  But little did he know of what truly awaited him on the other side of the barbed wire.

  NINETEEN

  Taking On Challenges of Freedom

  We’ll come out of the camps and mesh into the country’s life as smoothly as cogs of one gear mesh with the cogs of another.

  —PRISONER BYSTROLYOTOV TO ANOTHER PRISONER ON THE EVE OF RELEASE FROM THE CAMPS

  Freedom is not the camps. It’ll crush anyone.

  —AN EX-PRISONER TO PRISONER BYSTROLYOTOV

  In the most current official biography, the description of Bystrolyotov’s life after his release from the camps would have the uninitiated reader believe it was a life of glory and roses. However, what truly happened to him after he stepped outside the camp gates makes one cringe at the hypocrisy of these official pronouncements. In the prologue of his unpublished typescript devoted to that period, “The Har
d Road to Immortality,” after describing an enthusiastic crowd at a railroad station warmly welcoming ex-prisoners coming from Siberia, complete with congratulatory posters and bouquets of flowers, Bystrolyotov asks the reader to guess who these men were before being thrown into Siberian camps. And he answers with bitter sarcasm: not innocently persecuted Soviet patriots like himself, but ex-SS officers captured in the course of World War II.1

  Dmitri was freed from the Omsk camp on October 29, 1954, at 11:00 A.M. When, a month and a half later, he stepped onto the platform at Moscow’s Kazan station, dizzy from overwhelming emotions and the exhaustion of a long journey in a cargo car from Siberia to the country’s capital, he was anything but ready to begin his new life. His right hand still didn’t function well, and he hadn’t regained the full use of his right leg. His tongue barely moved, and he was able to open one of his eyes only partially. Especially troublesome was his sporadic loss of memory, including the inability to remember his own name, and episodes of disorientation in time and space. His prisoner’s number plucked out from both the front and back of his padded jacket, he exited the railroad car bareheaded, though it was cold outside: while he slept on the train, some other ex-prisoner had stolen his warm hat. Thus, the very first policeman at once recognized him as a former prisoner and ordered him to move quickly out of the railroad premises. The papers in his pocket stated that he had been serving a term as a spy, a terrorist, and a conspirator and was now freed because of poor health. And that he had no lice.

  The road to Moscow from Omsk had been long and tiring. At times, surrounded by other ex-prisoners in a car packed to capacity, he felt oblivious to what happened to him next. Only at desperate moments did his will to survive push him to action. Changing trains several times on the way to Moscow, he was forced to wait many hours with the others during each transfer. He was so infirm that he realized if he didn’t reach Moscow very soon, he would die. In a desperate upsurge of energy, together with one of his travel companions, he pulled off a scheme, a carbon copy of one of his most daring operations—when he had smuggled samples of new Italian weaponry across the Italian, Swiss, and German borders. Ironically, this time he had to resort to the same ingenuity to survive not on hostile territory but in his own country.