An old Turkmen is brought into our cell. As soon as the guards have left he shuffles into a corner, squats down and begins to sing endless plaintive dirges. As he sings he rocks back and forth on his heels, sometimes so violently that he keels over onto the floor. He seems to be a lunatic, but we begin to suspect that the old Turkmen babai is in fact as high as a kite. Everyone racks their brains trying to work out how he got hold of his drugs. He would have been carefully searched so he couldn’t have brought them in from the outside. We keep a close watch on the old man and notice that every so often he breaks off his lament, chews on the sleeves of his caftan, then rolls his eyes heavenwards and resumes his keening. After hours of questioning he confides in another Turkmen zek that he was forewarned of his arrest and so he prepared himself by boiling up opium and soaking his clothes in the solution.
When the rest of the cell discovers the secret of the babai they tear off his caftan, rip it to shreds and eat it. Everyone is off their heads for the next two days. I try a bit but it has little effect on me; I have not acquired a taste for opium.
“Death,” I remark, “it seems the Turkmen can sing for 24 hours a day and about anything at all. If he sees a camel train passing, he’ll sing,
The first camel goes by,
The second goes by,
The third goes by…
“When the whole train has passed he sings,
And at the back a little camel goes by,
And blood drips from his hooves.
Oh! If only someone could see him!
They would weep tears of pity!
“I have never heard one cheerful song. They’re all mournful.”
“Ah,” replies Death, “people say the Italians are the songbirds of the world, but they’re nothing compared to the Turkmen. They don’t speak much; their philosophy is all in their songs.”
***
Most of Ashkhabad’s inmates have been sentenced for drug-related crime. Almost every Central Asian adult smokes hashish but there are far fewer addicts among them than amongst the Russians and other Europeans. For centuries the locals used hashish and raw opium but widespread addiction only appeared with the Russians.
As most of Turkmenistan is desert, drugs are brought in from Kyrgyzia, which has a more favourable climate for hemp and poppies. Whole villages are devoted to their cultivation. Smugglers also bring in drugs from Iran and Afghanistan. The mafia who control the narcotics trade don’t usually take drugs themselves and mostly employ outsiders as couriers. Although the police are astonishingly inefficient, they have to catch a few smugglers, which makes it a dangerous business. You get five years for a small quantity and 15 for larger amounts. You might even be shot.
A man called Lazarev works on a machine near me. Although he comes from a family of Old Believers35 he’s been a tramp and an alcoholic for much of his life. Lazarev tells me how he ended up in camp. “One day a guy came up to me at a beer stall and bought me some drinks. We got talking and he asked if I wanted to make some money.
“‘Sure,’ I said, ‘how?’
“‘Take a suitcase to Frunze. We’ll give you your ticket and the key to a locker in the station. There’ll be 1,000 roubles inside.’
“Of course I had a pretty good idea what was in the case but I asked no questions. I hoped that the money would help me clean up and go back home to my wife. The man bought me a new suit of clothes and took me to the barbers. I reached Frunze without being stopped by the police. When I opened the locker I found only 200 roubles and a kilo of opium. I thought I could at least try to sell the opium, so I left the suitcase in the locker and walked out of the station. The police were waiting for me around the corner and I got eight years. The mafia have to throw them a fish now and again.
“It would’ve been worse for me if I’d held on to the suitcase. I didn’t know then that the courier is always tailed, like in a spy story. There’s a lot of money at stake. If a courier runs off he’s followed onto a train and when he goes out to the open platform for a smoke he’s pushed off. The blind Chechen in hut number four had his eyes gouged out. He tried to double-cross the mafia. After they’d finished with him they handed him over to the police.”
Listening to Lazarev I realise I could easily have been tricked in the same way. In Baku I agreed to carry walnuts onto the ship without looking inside the cases. I took tomatoes from Margilan to Tashkent for the price of a ticket. I’ll be less naive in future.
Inside the camp the unfortunate Lazarev became addicted to opium. He needs two balls each day, but he can never earn enough on the sewing-machines to buy them. In his spare time he makes syringes from small glass tubes taken from light-bulbs. The plunger is a wooden stick and the stopper made of rubber cut from the soles of his boots. He buys needles from craftsmen who make them from tin cans in the metal workshop. Syringes are scarce in the camp and Lazarev is in demand. Several times a day an addict comes up to him to prepare a fix. First they put a ball of opium in an empty penicillin container, fill it with water and boil the mixture over a burning wick. When the opium dissolves the needle is inserted and the solution sucked up into the syringe. As the drug is mixed with coffee, clay and all sorts of impurities it is filtered through a piece of cotton wool. Lazarev collects the cotton-wool filters, boils them up and injects himself, weeping in frustration as he stabs the needle into his ruined veins.
Conditions in the camp are so filthy that drug users drop like flies. Addicts share needles with syphilitics and TB sufferers. A night never passes without some deaths. In one night eighteen prisoners die from injecting adulterated drugs. The supplier is never discovered but we all know that the tragedy occurred because the dealer was in debt. Addicts know the risks they run but almost no one comes off the needle.
The most powerful zeks always find out in advance when the son of a Party family is coming in. They wait eagerly for the young innocent, ready to envelop him with care and attention. When he arrives they ply him with tobacco and tea and allow him to win at cards. They stage situations where he is threatened by thugs so that they can step in and save him. They fill him with drugs until he’s convinced of his invulnerability. Then everything comes crashing down around his ears. He loses heavily at cards and his comrades insist he pays up. He writes home pleading for money to be sent in. As long as he can pay he survives. When they have wrung all they can from their victim the criminals leave him without drugs or protection, and he’s lucky if they don’t rape him into the bargain.
The Ashkhabad Godfather needs neither the SVP nor stool-pigeons. When he wants information he puts two or three of the more powerful addicts in the isolator and keeps strict watch to make sure no drugs get in. In two days he knows everything. As long as the Godfather knows who’s dealing no one is touched. The authorities get their bribes and everything is under control. As soon as anyone steps out of line they are punished. This happens, for example, when someone tries to do a bit of dealing on the quiet and doesn’t give a percentage to the guards.
***
“I want nothing more to do with drug addicts,” I tell Death Number Two. “I’ve seen enough of them in here.”
The addicts act as though they’ve discovered some divine secret beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, as though drugs have opened their eyes and shown everything in its true light. Yet in fact they are even more degraded than us alcoholics. They are capable of any treachery to get hold of their ball of opium.
I am not trying to justify alcoholism. I know men who have drunk away their families, their homes and their jobs. I see one of them in the mirror every time I shave. But a drug addict would sell his mother and introduce his sister to the needle so that she has to prostitute herself to buy drugs. The difference between us is that an alkie who sells his last shirt for a bottle wouldn’t hesitate to give a glass to a friend; a drug addict would never do the same. Alkies can leave a bottle in someone’s care for a while, knowing it won’t be touched. No addict would let even his best friend look after his drugs. They hide th
eir stuff away and begrudge their friends even a tiny piece. In the camp they grow their nails long, hoping to get an extra scraping themselves, all the while eyeing their friends’ nails with suspicion. No, there can be no comradeship among addicts, whereas an alcoholic will always find someone at the beer-stall to tie his belt to his glass for him, to steady his hand, or tip the glass to his trembling lips.
If I’m honest I have to admit my first prison sentence was due to my pill habit, but I don’t consider myself a drug addict. My passion for alcohol is enough. I would have to take up crime to be able to afford drugs and I’m not capable of that. Vodka, on the other hand, is always around, it’s cheap, and if the worst comes to the worst I can go without it.
Many alcoholic zeks drink ‘chimirgess’ which is distilled in the joinery shop from enamel paint. They mix it with water and then strain it to obtain a clear liquid. Anyone who drinks it goes completely off his head but if he’s taken to hospital and breathalysed there’ll be no reaction at all. In fact there’s not a drop of alcohol in chimirgess, and so I’m not attracted to it.
There’s a Gypsy in our work brigade called Pashka Ogli. He’s so skinny we call him ‘Death Number One.’ Pashka is not like the other Gypsies who are proud and keep to themselves. Everyone laughs at Pashka for his strange ways. Hearing that once upon a time aristocrats used to drink champagne from ladies’ slippers, he fills one of his stinking boots with chimirgess and drinks it down. “As pure as tears,” he sighs and collapses in a corner.
Pashka stands by my machine, turning gloves inside out so I can sew them more quickly. He never meets his own quota but I pay him for helping me.
“Vanya,” he remarks one day. “You know they watch us all the time in here. They even check the books we borrow from the library.”
“Don’t be stupid. Maybe in some political prisons but not in ours. They’re not interested.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He shows me volume 18 of Lenin’s Collected Works, which he has tucked into his waistband. When an officer comes into view Pashka opens his Lenin. Taking a pencil from behind his ear he starts to underline and make exclamation marks in the margins. He buttonholes the officer and plies him with idiotic questions on Marxist-Leninism. Soon even the camp’s political instructor is giving Death Number One a wide berth. Everyone thinks Pashka an idiot, but I am not so sure.
***
“See him over there?” Death Number One points to a bull-necked man working in the next row from ours, muscles bulging as he pushes gloves through his machine. “He’s known as ‘Cannibal.’ He escaped from a Kolyma camp in the 1950s. He and his mate took a fatted calf with them. They fed up the young lad before their escape and then killed him when their supplies ran out. Can you imagine them, patting him on the shoulder in encouragement in order to feel the extra flesh on him. How can a man be so cynical?”
“That’s not cynicism, Pashka. Someone who criticises a cannibal for not washing his hands before eating would be a cynic. There are simply no words to describe what that man did.”
There is nothing special about cannibalism. People have been driven to it often enough, even in our century, during famines and the siege of Leningrad. But those were extreme situations. I’m curious to know how one human being could deliberately prepare another for the slaughter. I begin to chat to Cannibal after work, gradually broaching the subject that interests me.
Cannibal has spent most of his life in prison and is already in his sixth year at Ashkhabad. He doesn’t look like a typical zek. He still has the physique of a sturdy peasant – which is what he was before he received his first sentence for stealing wheat. Physical strength enabled him to survive the camp mincing machine, but the experience taught him to believe in nothing but the principle, ‘You die today and I tomorrow.’ A morose man, Cannibal goes about his business in silence and never initiates a conversation. He subscribes to many papers and journals but it’s useless to ask him to lend you something to read after work.
I never discover what I want to know. Cannibal tells me his only regret is ending up in jail; everything else he did was justified. To all my sly questioning he simply replies: “You’d have done the same in my place.”
Cannibal has been behind barbed wire for so long he has forgotten what the outside world looks like. When a modern streamlined bus drives into the zone he breaks his usual silence: “Fuck me! Would you look at that – a train without rails!”
Like Cannibal, there are many zeks who have been in camps for so long they have grown used to their loss of freedom. They feel at home behind barbed wire. Several times I see a prisoner reach the end of his sentence only to be driven through the gates by force. One epileptic Kalmyk has no one waiting for him on the outside. He faces a choice between an asylum or life on a miserable pension. After his release he went into town and threw stones at shop windows until he was arrested and sent back to the camp.
The Uzbeks say that beautiful dreams are half our wealth. Poor is the man who has lost his dreams or has never had any in the first place; the camps are full of such people. Many Soviet citizens, especially peasants, live in such terrible conditions that they could swap places with a zek without noticing any difference in their standard of living. Both prisoners and free people eat the same disgusting food; the pitiful rags they wear are identical.
People on the other side of the fence often commit petty theft while shrugging off the consequences. ‘They can’t send me anywhere worse than prison; they can’t give me less than a pound of bread,’ goes the eternal refrain. When a person reaches that stage he is past caring what stupid crime he commits. Judges label as ‘malicious’ crimes that are committed out of simple despair, by people without beautiful dreams.
Every camp inmate develops a shell around himself but few are as hardened as Cannibal. At the other end of the scale are those who could discard their shells quite easily if only they were given the chance to live as a human being. One such zek is my friend Igor Alexandrovich. With his long thin head covered in prickly stubble, Igor looks like some kind of exotic cactus. We call Igor Alexandrovich by his full name and patronymic instead of the customary nickname. He earned this exaggerated respect by his singular behaviour. Years in prison have hardly affected his speech. He rarely swears and usually blushes when he does. He calls everyone by the formal ‘you,’ and speaks in the old-fashioned language of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Igor Alexandrovich claims his father was an admiral who went over to the Bolsheviks after the revolution. Like all camp stories this is probably an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Igor Alexandrovich comes from a refined background. What he knows about literature, music and theatre you don’t pick up in camp libraries. He studied medicine in Leningrad but on graduating was arrested and sentenced to be shot under article 58. The sentence was later transmuted to ten years.
Igor Alexandrovich is ashamed of his record and will only say that he was imprisoned for practising illegal abortions. He has been in Kolyma and Norilsk. Because of his medical training he was put to work in camp hospitals. Thanks to that he survived.
Igor Alexandrovich was released after the 20th Party Congress but as a former zek his degree was no use. He went down to Central Asia where he found work in a Tashkent mortuary. After he lost his job through drinking he became a tramp and beggar.
Everyone likes to listen to Igor Alexandrovich’s stories and it seems that he has come to believe his own inventions. He tells us he always carried at least two guns of foreign make, and that he has lost horses, women and dachas at cards. Famous actresses were in love with him and he hired whole restaurants for his week-long parties.
Because of his short sight, Igor Alexandrovich finds sewing difficult and so he never meets his work quota. This means he can’t buy tobacco in the camp shop, and it leaves him squirming. Yet if I hold out my pack to him he declines with elaborate excuses. So I resort to a more devious method. Leaving a packet of Prima on my bench I go to the other end o
f the workshop. I return to find several crushed and broken cigarettes in my pack, where they have been too hastily replaced. From then on I resort to this method of giving Igor Alexandrovich a smoke. Sometimes he’s so overcome by shame that he drops his precious cigarette and has to scrabble around for it amid the grease and slime of the floor.
Igor Alexandrovich enjoys dispensing medical advice. When I cut my thumb he delivers a lengthy discourse on haemophilia. “On your release,” he tells me, “you should go to take the waters at a spa. Preferably Karlsbad.”
“I shall certainly follow your advice,” I assure him.
A radio loudspeaker hangs over our heads in the workshop but it is hard to hear and anyway we aren’t interested in the nonsense spewed out by Moscow. But when I catch the strains of an old romance, Grief is my star, I switch off my machine to listen. The noise of the workshop bothers me and I glance around in annoyance. No one else has stopped except Igor Alexandrovich who is standing with his head stretched up towards the loudspeaker. Tears as large as a child’s roll down his stubbly cheeks. I don’t know where he is at this moment but he sure as hell is not in prison. I turn away so that he won’t notice me looking at him.
But later Igor Alexandrovich comes up to me. “Do you remember the song Grief is my star?”
“Of course, but I forgot the words.”
“You don’t need to remember them. Words only give a song its shape. When you love something or someone very much its form has no significance. All lovers know this.”
Igor Alexandrovich is released several months before me and the camp is a sadder place without him.
Finally my own release comes. I intend to hang around in the town waiting for Death Number Two who gets out tomorrow. We plan to head for the Kuban where Death has some relations who might give us work. However the camp authorities have other ideas and they put me straight onto a train to Krasnovodsk, that most desolate of cities.
Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes Page 17