The face of Putin’s Russia: Police arrest another protester.
9
Cold and Punishment
Russia has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people a feeling of human dignity, lost for so many ages in mud and filth.
—Vissarion Belinsky on the Russian Orthodox Church, from a letter to Nikolai Gogol, 18471
Ihave no memory of my mother complaining about the cold when I was growing up in Connecticut except her saying that the worst moments of her childhood were when she was so cold she cried. I, too, approached tears more than once in Russia, including one memorable morning on the frozen Taimyr Peninsula at the top of Siberia. In the ramshackle village of Khatanga, four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, an assortment of corrugated metal barracks, wooden houses and a scattering of Soviet-era brick buildings are heated by steam pipes that would crack if they were buried above the permafrost. They originate at a coal generator in the settlement’s center that blackens the snow and fouls the pristine air with dark smoke. Beyond the village, stunted trees that form part of the world’s northernmost forest give way to an infinite expanse of tundra. From a helicopter, the only visible signs of life are occasional herds of reindeer: little specks making their way through the snow accompanied by dogsleds driven by the nomadic Dolgan tribesmen, a group of five thousand souls who live exclusively on Taimyr. From the ground on a crisp, sunny day, the beauty of the flat, endless white takes your breath away.
Although Cossacks seeking the fur of arctic fox, among other animals, founded Khatanga in the seventeenth century, its sedentary population remained negligible until the 1930s, when the Soviet authorities began sending prisoners into the forbidding far north of Siberia to build a chain of Gulag camps that would help establish the timber and mining industries. Enslaved laborers constructed much of the nearest city, Norilsk, near the world’s largest deposits of nickel, copper and palladium. The Norillag concentration camp held almost seventy thousand prisoners at its peak in the early 1950s.2 (Today, oligarch-owned Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest nickel producer, subsidizes life on the peninsula.) Driving on isolated roads in such regions in summer, I occasionally came across crude dugout shelters used by the prisoners who built the roads decades earlier.
The camps near Khatanga required no barbed wire because trying to travel alone on the tundra brought certain death. Therefore I was surprised to hear some residents claim that a life spent struggling against the crushing elements is liberating, even exhilarating. Boris Lebedev, a deeply weathered, gregarious native of Ivanovo, a city near Moscow, told me he had made his way to Khatanga in the 1970s to “escape” the Soviet regime. “I came here to be free,” he said of his life, which consists mainly of hunting and fishing. “Because only up here could someone truly belong to himself.”
In Khatanga’s canteen, dietary freedom extends to choosing between local reindeer meat and fish kept frozen in caves hacked out of the permafrost. Almost everything else is delivered by plane. For ten months of the year, Antonov An-24 twin turboprop planes carrying goods and produce arrive every two weeks or whenever weather permits them to land on the small airstrip that passes for a runway. It was there that I froze—on board one of the little planes in “only” minus-thirty-degree cold because it was just early October, not yet real winter. Lightly dressed passengers were kept violently shivering for almost two hours without heat because the crew members, who apparently had been celebrating the night before, had failed to show up. I was still cold hours later, when the plane, by then scorchingly overheated, finally landed in Norilsk.
But there’s no need to venture to the continent’s northernmost stretches to experience the kind of cold for which Russia is notorious. St. Petersburg’s winters, usually only a few degrees colder than Moscow’s bitter ones, feel much worse because they are very damp, thanks to the city’s location on former swampland bordering the Gulf of Finland. A thick layer of frost often gives the city’s magnificent buildings a sparkling white sheen. Marveling at their beauty made my struggle to comprehend the will and sacrifice necessary to maintain civilization there more complicated.
Illustrating both, the Marquis de Custine described the reconstruction of the monumental Winter Palace under Nicholas I after it had been damaged by fire in 1837:
In order to finish the work in the period specified by the Emperor, unprecedented efforts were required. The interior construction was continued during the bitterest cold of winter. Six thousand laborers were continually at work; a considerable number died each day, but, as the victims were replaced by other champions who filled their places, to perish in their turn in this inglorious gap, the losses were not apparent.
The practice of heating rooms to eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit to dry the walls more quickly during cold spells, when temperatures can plunge to minus twenty degrees, compounded the deaths. “Thus these wretches on entering and leaving this abode of death—now become, thanks to their sacrifice, the home of vanity, magnificence and pleasure—underwent a difference in temperature of 100 to 108 degrees.”3
As my father wrote in 1982, such trials helped shape the country’s history and character.
A hundred writers have said it before and a hundred will say it again, but it is no less true for being a commonplace that the way to an understanding of Russian life lies through the ordeal of a Russian winter. Russkaya zima, the great depressant of spirit and water of animation. It is not a season of the year like other seasons, not merely a longer, darker, crueler span of time than that which annually slows the countries of northern Europe and America. It is a life sentence to hardship that prowls near the center of the Russian consciousness, whatever the time of year. As a prime cause and a symbol of Russia’s fate, it molds a state of mind, an attitude toward life.4
Among those earlier writers, Chekhov lamented, “Cold to the utter limit… you go into a stupor, turn more malicious than the cold itself… [It] makes people mean, starts them slurping vodka.”
Russians are expert in the various kinds of cold. Muscovites who loudly complain when it’s twenty degrees say fifteen degrees is easier to take because it’s drier. Shivering in fifteen-degree weather, they recall visits to Siberia when it was minus fifty and lovely because, naturally, you’re bundled up properly there. There’s always somewhere colder and better in the imagination, perhaps because it helps people endure the misery of the present. Today’s Russians are far better prepared than they were even two decades ago for the type of winter that helped destroy the invading armies of Napoleon and Hitler. Gore-Tex, double-glazed windows and dependable foreign cars make life far easier. But climate and geography remain formative influences in a country where thousands of reindeer froze or starved to death in 1997 and the association of cold with punishment endures. Prisoners continue to be sent to Siberia, where the vast stretches of empty tundra, taiga and marsh contribute to Russia’s “ungovernability.” As an old Siberian lament has it, God is too high and the tsar is too far. The difficulty of policing the poorly controlled expanses also helps explain why punishment in Russia still appears draconian.
Unable to explain why such hardship was visited on them, Russians took to sanctifying it as a gift. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s proclamations about “intense suffering” helping Russia achieve a higher spirituality than the West are but some of the latest in a long line of Russian Orthodox champions of that argument for Russia’s special fate and virtue.
Exile to Siberia or the far north naturally began with a journey there, often a punishment that was as bad as or worse than what followed. Under tsarism, the passage on foot used to take six months from Moscow. Under Communist Party rule, it still took months by train for those who didn’t perish along the way. Among the tens of millions who endured the trip was Lev Mischenko, whom I first met in 2002, when veneration for Stalin was returning. I spoke to him in the kitchen of his small apartment in a sprawling concrete-slab Moscow suburb, whe
re he lived with his wife, Svetlana. Razor sharp despite his frail appearance, he described the minutest details of everyday life in Siberia with Chekhovian irony.
Nine months old when the Bolshevik Revolution took place, Mischenko fled Moscow during the Russian Civil War along with the rest of his family to what his engineer father believed would be the relative safety of Siberia. In vain: Bolshevik revolutionaries shot both his parents. Raised by his grandmother, Mischenko nevertheless graduated from Moscow State University and began working at its Institute of Nuclear Physics just before the Soviet Union entered World War II.
Sent to the front as a junior officer, he was captured and imprisoned in a series of German concentration camps before an escape attempt landed him in Buchenwald. When Allied forces were closing in on Germany in 1944, Mischenko escaped again, this time from a convoy of a thousand captives being evacuated elsewhere. Making his way across the front lines to an American tank platoon, he turned down an offer to remain in the West from an American officer who recognized his engineering skills. Unwilling to leave his sweetheart Svetlana behind in Moscow, he rejoined the Red Army.
Millions of Soviets taken prisoner by the Germans died in captivity. Mischenko didn’t suspect that more than a million of those who survived would be sent straight to the Gulag. Still in Germany, he soon found himself under arrest, accused by the Red Army’s ruthless SMERSH counterintelligence service of aiding the Nazis. When by chance the miraculous appearance of an alibi led to his acquittal, he was promptly charged a second time. After four months of nightly interrogations and a hearing that lasted less than fifteen minutes, he was sentenced to ten years in an isolated logging camp in the far northern region of Komi.
Crammed together with sixty others, Mischenko set off from Germany in a cattle car equipped with planks for beds. Such prisoners’ journeys were called etapy, or “stages,” because they stopped at many camps and so-called transit prisons for those en route to their final places of incarceration. Mischenko’s trip took three months. It was December of 1945, but many of the prisoners, who had been arrested in summer, had no winter clothes. Much of what little they did have was stolen along the way by soldiers or urki, criminal—as opposed to political—prisoners, who received better treatment than the others. Urki traded with soldiers, usually for cigarettes or food. “We had practically nothing left by the time we got to the Soviet Union,” Mischenko said. “The stealing continued anyway.”
Prisoners—or zeki, derived from the Russian term for inmate, zakliuchionnyi—were “freezing all the time.” German prisoners unused to Soviet suffering constituted a high percentage of those who died on Mischenko’s train. During a stop, he caught sight of a former cell mate, an elderly German engineer whom he had witnessed losing his mind during the interrogations. “He couldn’t speak, even to his fellow Germans,” Mischenko said. “Now he was shivering outside, wearing a thin jacket and no hat. It was January. He couldn’t have survived.” Mischenko, who, like many, had no shoes when he arrived at his camp near a town called Pechora, wrapped his feet in rags.
Despite his hardships, Mischenko believed he was incredibly lucky. His camp produced lumber for the railroad servicing Vorkuta, the center of a massive Gulag system that mined the Soviet Union’s second-largest coal basin, four hundred miles to the northeast. During the two years before his arrival in Pechora in March 1946, almost two thousand prisoners had died, a staggering number for a camp that held fewer than a thousand zeki at a time. The major killers were hunger, cold, dystrophy and diseases such as pellagra, which is caused by vitamin deficiency. A fellow inmate who had been a military pilot later told Mischenko how chance had saved him from the brutal logging brigades. At death’s door, the pilot was recognized by the camp’s “technical director,” a former prisoner from his hometown, who helped arrange his transfer to a different work brigade. Joining a burial crew that carted corpses into the forest—after guards had stuck each one through with bayonets just to be sure—the pilot slowly regained his health because his new detail was considered important enough to be fed survival rations.
The work regimen, worsened by guards’ cruelty and neglect, eased for others after the war years, when it was acknowledged that the casualties were hurting NKVD secret police chief Lavrenty Beria’s drive to squeeze as much productivity as possible from the inmates. But although the death rate dropped to about one per month shortly before Mischenko’s arrival, conditions remained brutal. Assigned to general logging duties, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, he often helped haul out logs that had been floated down the Pechora River. That task, among the camp’s most grueling, killed many zeki.
Keeping dry was impossible because the two sleeves from an old quilted jacket that had replaced his disintegrating foot rags got soaked through during work in the snow-covered forest and stayed damp even after nights in the “dryer”—a dugout whose very hot stove only made it drippingly humid. So Mischenko was hugely fortunate when his expertise earned him work maintaining the camp’s power generator. That was “heaven” because the premises were warm and the work was relatively easy. The plant even had its own shower.
Freed nine years later, Mischenko joined hundreds of thousands of prisoners streaming back from labor camps in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death. However, his sentence banned him from coming within a hundred kilometers of Moscow for another five years and he was unable to secure work as a physicist for another fourteen. Svetlana had waited for him during his thirteen-year absence, trekking thousands of miles to visit him in Pechora several times. Now reunited, they finally married and raised a family.
My question to Mischenko about how he interpreted the growing nostalgia for the Soviet Union prompted him to describe running into an old childhood friend several years after returning from the camps. “When I told him where I’d been, he began to shake with fear of being seen with me and quickly left,” he said. “That’s how much people were enslaved by the system.” Society’s failure to acknowledge the crimes of communist rule, Mischenko said, was perpetuating their catastrophic effect on the Russian psyche.
Incredible as they may seem, the twists and turns of Mischenko’s story reflect common experience because the Gulag played a central role in the Soviet economy while enabling Stalin to perpetrate terror by incarcerating tens of millions of innocent people. They included my grandmother’s husband, Zhora.
More than three months after his arrest at the height of the Great Terror in November of 1937, Serafima received a short letter from him. It had been sent from another logging camp, near a town called Ivdel in the Ural Mountains region of Sverdlovsk. Sentenced to ten years’ hard labor—with the “right” to correspond—he was one of Ivdellag’s first inmates, an especially difficult fate because most early arrivals had to build their own camps with rudimentary supplies in the middle of nowhere. Serafima immediately wrote back, then sent three more letters before finally receiving a reply:
May 10, 1938
My dear, dear, darling, wise one,
How joyous it is to get letters here, especially yours! I feel I’m not alone, that somewhere there’s a kindred heart. But my dear, kind little wife, why are you worried that I’m smoking makhorka [low-grade tobacco] under the influence of bad people? How little you know the real situation! Here are my friends: the rector of a Leningrad university, a senior scholar from the Belarusian agriculture academy, the assistant to the director of a perfume enterprise. They are the members of my work brigade and my friends, and we are not an island amid the general mass. These people give you an idea of the general contingent—and we all smoke makhorka… Makhorka is nothing! Much more serious is that I haven’t had a bite of protein for several months now. We get mainly water and dry cabbage and sometimes bread dumplings, but no trace of protein. Even lousy, old protein would be welcome.
My dear, kind Simusia, why were you crying when you were writing your first letter and maybe your second one, too? I could recognize the tear streaks I know so well. I remembered them from the letters
from Alupka [in Crimea where Serafima was treated after the death of their daughter Natasha] and I felt very bad and couldn’t hold myself back.
Zhora went on to answer Serafima’s questions about what had happened to him. There had been no trial, he said, only interrogations that repeated questions he’d already answered the previous summer, when he had been questioned at his aircraft design bureau.
“Why do you have a German name? When did you arrive from abroad? If it was your grandfather’s name, when did he arrive? Whom do you know abroad?” No one, I repeatedly replied. “Do you correspond with anyone? Who are your relatives here and what do they do? Where have you worked?”… Two days later, around the 27th or 28th of November, I was brought in again to hear information about me even I myself didn’t know. It turns out I was a spy recruited by the Gestapo to conduct counterrevolutionary Fascist activities… There was no word about who recruited me or which foreigners I met. No word about the name of the counterrevolutionary organization to which I belonged. I got the impression they didn’t really care about my activities, just that they wanted me to understand those things about myself I didn’t know.
It was all very polite. Not a single word was spoken in anger. I wasn’t even directly named an enemy or counterrevolutionary or a spy. It all took about forty minutes. Then on the night between November 30th and December 1st, I was sent to [a prison on Moscow’s central] Taganka [Square]. I was held there four days in an overcrowded basement because the cells were overflowing, until I was finally put in a cell on December 4th. On December 15th, I was ordered to sign a little piece of paper titled “Protocol,” then the results of a “hearing,” my name and a declaration that I was to be sentenced to ten years in correctional work camps for my counterrevolutionary activities. I was sent to the Urals on March 1st, along with a group of Germans and Latvians, and remain here today. That’s it, the answer to your question.
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