When Chistyakov writes about suicide he quite deliberately lowers the pathos and tragic nature of such a decision. Several times he chooses a slang term for it that was common during the Civil War: to ‘top yourself’.
For all that, although in places this seems almost the diary of a suicide, he did not kill himself. In a world which for Chistyakov had been reduced to the confines of the camp, he nevertheless still had supports which held him back. He drew strength from the countryside, the taiga forest, the hills he described, the landscapes he drew. These are the things that he had to set against the horror of life at BAMLag.
The main thing that held him back, however, which gave him strength and enabled him to survive in BAM, was his diary. Writing it was risky. He paints an unflinching picture. It is full of such despair and such descriptions of what was really going on there that almost every line could be said to reveal anti-Soviet attitudes and hence used as grounds for imprisoning him. He sometimes speaks openly about this: ‘What if the Third Section read these lines, or the Political Department? They will interpret them their way.’
But he cannot stop making the entries: ‘. . . my life is in this diary.’
Ivan Chistyakov was a minor figure, as he himself often says, but this awareness brings him to a point where he begins not only to complain in the pages of the diary, but to rebel against the system which was trying to swallow him alive. In this awareness he occasionally rises to tragic heights. He writes, Alas, the days here are filled with longing and anger, sorrow and shame.’
He comes to an almost Kafkaesque understanding of his powerlessness in the face of an inhumane state machine which erases the boundary between freedom and unfreedom. He rises to tragic irony when he writes about the ‘historical inevitability’ of the camps:
A path of defeats, misery and rage. A path that makes you even more contemptible, a path humiliating to the humanity in you. Sometimes, though, you try cold-blooded analysis and much of that peters out for lack of fuel. There have been prisons throughout history so why, ha ha ha, shouldn’t I be in one rather than only other people? This labour camp existence is necessary in particular historical circumstances, hence necessary also for me.
This is only a diary, but Chistyakov, a guard at BAM who, against his wishes, became a cog in an enormous machine of repression, defends in it his right to at least jot down these entries.
In 1935, when Chistyakov was sent to BAM, Stalin famously announced, ‘Life has become better, life has become merrier!’ In his diary this minor figure, astonishing as it may seem, himself unaware of the fact, flatly gainsays the all-powerful Leader. If only in a whisper, if only in secret, Chistyakov announces something both terrible and crucial for Russia: ‘In the state system a human being’s individuality doesn’t matter.’
The destiny of the diary’s author was played out as he had foretold. In 1937 Chistyakov was arrested, but was probably not sentenced to a particularly long term, since otherwise he could not have been on the front line in 1941. He was killed 300 kilometres from his beloved Moscow, which he probably never saw again.
We do not know where Ivan Chistyakov was in 1939 when, along the railway built by the labour of prisoners he had guarded in 1935–6, long echelons of wagons passed bearing new prisoners to BAM. Among them was one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Nikolai Zabolotsky. Years later he was to describe BAM as, in all probability, Ivan Chistyakov might have wished to:
Our train of sorrows trundled along the Siberian Railway for two months and more. Two small, iced-up windows near the roof timidly illuminated our goods wagon for a short while during the day. The rest of the time the stump of a candle burned in a lantern, and if no candles were issued, the wagon was immersed in impenetrable darkness. Huddled close to each other, we lay in this primal darkness, listening to the thudding of the wheels and abandoning ourselves to cheerless thoughts about our lot. In the mornings we were able barely to glimpse through the tiny window the boundless expanses of the fields of Siberia, the infinite snowbound taiga, the shadows of towns and villages canopied by plumes of vertical smoke, the fantastic sheer cliffs of Lake Baikal. We were transported on and on, to the Far East, to the world’s end. In early February we arrived at Khabarovsk. We stood there for a long time. Then suddenly we were pulled backwards, travelled to Volochaevka and turned off the main line to the north along a new branch line. To either side of the track we passed columns of camps with their watchtowers, and settlements with new gingerbread houses built to a standard design. The Kingdom of BAM welcomed us, its new settlers. The train stopped, the bolts clattered, and we emerged from our refuge into this new world, bright with sun and fettered by 50 degrees of frost, and surrounded by slender, spectral Far East birch trees which rose to the very sky.‡‡‡‡
It is a miracle that Chistyakov’s diary, whose entries break off, probably, with his arrest, somehow survived, that it did not fall into the hands of NKVD officials, that it was not discarded and destroyed, and that somebody managed to send it to Moscow.
Thanks to this miracle, one more voice of a lonely man who lived in a fearful era has come down to us.
* The GPU of Soviet Russia in 1923 became the OGPU; this was the United State Political Directorate of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR; the NKVD was the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.
† The GULag was the State Directorate of Camps of the NKVD.
‡ The Chinese Eastern Railway (KVZhD) m north-east China passed through Manchuria, part of China, and linked Chita with Vladivostok and Port Arthur. It was built in 1897-1903 as a southern branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway, belonged to Russia, and was maintained by Russian subjects. In 1928 all the Russians servicing the railway were expelled from China, and in 1934 it was sold to the government of Manchuria. In 1945 it was returned to the USSR, and in 1952 transferred back to China.
§ Vasiliy Grossman, Zhizn’ i sud’ba, Moscow, 1988, pp.790-1.
¶ By 1940, Frenkel was head of the Directorate of Railway Construction of the NKVD Gulag. That is, he was m charge of all the railway-building camps of the USSR.
# Varlam Shalamov (1907-82) was one of Russia’s most gifted writers of the second half of the twentieth century. He spent seventeen years m Stalin’s camps.
** Varlam Shalamov, Vishera: Antiroman, Moscow, 1989, p.43.
†† The Stakhanov norm was a heightened production quota. The term appeared in 1935 and is associated with the name of Alexey Stakhanov, a coal miner who purportedly exceeded by many times the quota for mining coal.
‡‡ Shalamov, ibid., p.45.
§§ ‘Malingerers’ were prisoners who for one reason or another refused to go out to work.
¶¶ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULAG, vol. 2, Moscow, 1988, p.494.
## The Armed Guards Unit, Voenizirovannaya okhrana.
*** ‘Zek’, abbreviation from ‘zaklyuchenny’, a prisoner.
††† A pun in which ‘Sovetskaya vlast’, Soviet power, is replaced by the brutal ‘Solovetskaya vlast’, Solovki power. The Solovki special-purpose forced labour camp was set up in 1923 and closed in 1933.
‡‡‡ Varlam Shalamov, p.43.
§§§ Third Section – the Third Cheka Operational Unit was a section in the camp administration representing the NKVD or interior ministry. Its task was to monitor the mood and behaviour of the prisoners. It had powers to bring criminal charges, carry out arrests, and conduct preliminary investigations.
¶¶¶ All penalties imposed on prisoners were likely also to deprive them of the right to early release.
### Chistyakov often uses the outdated term ‘revolutionary tribunal’, an institution created in 1917 which existed only until 1922. As an army officer he was in fact answerable to a military tribunal.
**** Varlam Shalamov, p.25.
††† Of course, there already were some educated prisoners in BAMLag. Until 1934 the renowned scholar and philosopher Pavel Florensky was there serving a ten-year term. Chistyakov’s diary
contains no mention of anybody sentenced for political crimes, however.
‡‡‡ Article 35 of the Criminal Code provided for up to five years’ imprisonment for violating the passport laws or for those categorized as ‘socially harmful elements’. These included tramps, prostitutes and petty criminals.
§§§ Mikhail Kalinin was a Soviet party and government official, at that time chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the USSR.
¶¶¶ A new Soviet constitution was adopted on 5 December 1936.
### The ‘United Anti-Soviet Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre’ was a criminal case fabricated in the mid-i930s, in which a number of individuals were accused of conducting anti-Soviet activity, espionage, sabotage, terrorism and complicity in the murder of Sergey Kirov, and preparing terrorist acts against leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet government. There were sixteen accused, including Grigoriy Zinoviev who had already been imprisoned in connection with a ‘Moscow Centre’ criminal case, and Lev Kamenev, who had been imprisoned in connection with a ‘Kremlin’ criminal case. The trial was held m Moscow on 19–24 August 1936, and all the accused were sentenced to death by firing squad.
***** Varlam Shalamov, p.46.
†††† The reference is to an armed guard who was also a prisoner or former prisoner.
‡‡‡‡ From ‘Strange’ Poetry and ‘Strange’ Prose: a philological Festshrift in honour of the centenary of N. A. Zabolotsky, eds., E. A. Yablokov (Moscow) and I. E. Loshchilov (Novosibirsk), Moscow: ‘Pyataya strana’, 2003, p.13.
9 October 1935
A new stage in my life.
10 p.m. It’s dark and damp in Svobodny. Mud and more mud. The luggage store is cramped and smoke-filled. A prop holds up the sagging ceiling, people sprawl on the floor. There is a jumble of torn quilted jackets with mismatched patches. It’s difficult to find two people who look different, as they all have the same strange expression stamped on their faces, the same suspicious, furtive look. Unshaven faces, shaven heads. Knapsacks and trunks. Dejection, boredom. Siberia!
The town hardly lives up to its name.* Fences and more fences, or empty land. Here a house, there a house, but with all the windows shuttered from the outside. Unwelcoming, spooky, depressing, cheerless. My first encounter: not a smart, upright soldier of the Red Army but some sort of scruffy partisan in a shabby greatcoat, no tabs on his collar, scuffed boots, cap plonked on his head, rifle over his shoulder. The local community hotel is a village house partitioned into cramped rooms. Overheated. Incessant snoring.
10 October 1935
Morning. I walk down Soviet Street. Unmetalled, no pavement. More fences, pigs, puddles, dung, geese. I could be in Gogol’s Mirgorod, but this is Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway Central.
HQ is a two-storey brick building, with flowerbeds and a modern electric clock. Road signs: two reflective triangles and a 30 km speed limit. Same mud. Hostel. More mud.
First night in my life feeding bedbugs. Cold. No discipline here either. Incessant swearing.
‘Panteleyev, don’t give me that crap. Malingering, that’s what it is. You know what we call that?’
We call it a crime.
Swearing to the rooftops, incessant, so dense you could lodge an axe in it.
VOKhR, the Armed Guards Unit. Bunks, coloured blankets, illiterate slogans. Some men in summer-weight tunics, some in winter tunics, jackets quilted and not, leather or canvas or string belts. They lie on their beds, smoking. Two are grappling, rolling around locked together, one with his legs in the air, laughing, squealing. Another laments his lot with a wheezing accordion, bawling, ‘We are not afraid of work, we just ain’t gonna do it.’ Men cleaning rifles, shaving, playing draughts, one even managing to read.
‘Who’s on duty here?’ I ask. ‘Me,’ another partisan replies, getting up from poking embers in the stove. He’s wearing padded winter trousers, a summer tunic, winter felt boots, and a convict’s hat back to front on his head with a tuft of ginger hair sticking out. There’s a canvas cartridge pouch on his belt.† He starts trying to tidy himself up, shifting from foot to foot, uncertain how to behave. I find out later this sentinel has never been in the army and only had a few months’ training on the job. What a hero! Few of them are any better.
What am I doing here? I ask myself. I feel ashamed of the little square lieutenant’s insignia on my collar tab, and of being a commander, and living in 1935 across the road from the nationally celebrated Second Track of the Trans-Siberian Railway, shamed by a brilliant, soaring concrete bridge.
21 October 1935
Arkhara is a hill surrounded by a hole, a village at the foot of a three-humped mound, with 200 rickety all-but-windowless hovels.‡ At the foot of the hill trucks trundle from the sand quarry down a dirt track to the station. What a desolate, lonesome place.
22 October 1935
I spent the night in a barracks hut. Cold. Killed a louse. Met the platoon commander.§ He seems pretty thick etc. Walked back along the railway track.
My thoughts are all over the place, like pages torn out of a book, shuffled, stacked, crumpled, curling like paper on a fire. I’m disorientated. Lonely. Sad.
Twenty days ago I was in Moscow, alive, living my life, but now? There’s no life here. There’s no telling how high the clouds are, and it’s impossible to take in the endlessness of the hills and the emptiness of the landscape. One hill, then another, then another, then another, on and on for thousands of kilometres. It’s bewildering. Life starts to feel insignificant and futile. It gives me the creeps.
Moscow! Moscow! So far away, so out of reach!
Freezing temperatures. I hope they finish the earthworks on the bridge soon and I’m moved somewhere else. A comforting thought, providing I ignore the possibility it might be somewhere even worse.
23 October 1935
I slept all night in the warm. The joy of sleeping without needing a pile of bedclothes.
The day greets me with a stiff breeze as I walk along the track. Zeks grafting, inching towards freedom with every cubic metre of earth they shift and every metre of rail they lay, but what do I have to do to get demobbed? I didn’t wash today: no water. Tomorrow? Probably still none. I can only dream of steaming in a bathhouse. Bathhouses make you happy. Bathhouses are heaven.
24 October 1935
I met our company commander this morning. He looks like a moustachioed Ukrainian anarchist from the Civil War, like most (all) of the rest of them. Quite some creek I’m up!
Could I ever have imagined I would one day stomp the hills of Arkhara? I never even knew they existed.
Unencompassable vastness, bleak and wild. How small and insignificant a thing is man, how frail his grasp of time. We think two or three months ahead but beyond that is bafflement. It all just telescopes into an unfathomable future.
Autumn is all around. There are haystacks, and the first ice on the River Arkhara appears. Autumn is brown. The haze above the distant hills merges with the horizon and you can’t make out the sky, what are hilltops, what are rainclouds. A steady wind blows constantly and the oak leaves rustle in lifeless synchrony. The sun does shine, but it’s pale and cold, a nickel-plated disc you can stare at. Was I really born to be a platoon commander at the Baikal-Amur Mainline forced labour camp? How smoothly it happened. They just called me in and sent me off. Party members have the Party Committee, the factory management, and the trade union to intercede, so Bazarov gets to stay in Moscow. For the rest of us, nobody puts in a word.
25 October 1935
Life is like riding a bicycle: you pedal along and try to steer, but first there is mud, then a pothole, then you have to swerve to avoid a sharp stone. But if you stop pedalling, you’ll fall off.
Incessant swearing in the barracks, by grunts and commanders alike.
26 October 1935
A raging wind drives the thunderclouds low. Autumn! The russet incline of the hill is hacked into a cliff face day by day, exposing layers of geology. Trucks drive up, and moments later
drive away, shuttling without respite between hill and railway station. The people, like ants, are patiently, persistently destroying the hill, transforming its hump into a square in front of the future station. The gash widens: fifteen hundred workers are a mere sprinkling in the maw of the hill, but their crowbars and shovels are having an impact. They count the cubic metres, fighting for the right to live outside, to be free. They rush through everything, whatever the weather. There is a hunger to work and work and work.
There are only statistics, statistics, statistics.
Days, cubic metres, kilometres.
If their strength did not give out, these people would work here night and day.
They work a ten-day week.
The USSR is impatient for the Second Track. The Soviet Far East is impatient for goods.
The Second Track will open up this region, speed its development. And so on.
27-28 October 1935
I count the phalanxes of prisoners in.¶
The prisoner-run administration seems to have better living conditions than the guards.
I can just hop on a moving goods train and hop off again. Life goes bowling along, except when you have a 30 km footslog.
29 October 1935
Rain and slush. The clay has been churned into sludge, which makes walking tough. Today is a footslog day. Twenty km to Phalanx 13.
We’ve been invited to dinner by the section commander. We walk into the village and enter a huge Ukrainian-style house that has been plastered from the inside with clay then whitewashed. Icons are draped with embroidered linen. The bedstead is a trestle bed with a lacy coverlet and the pillows are in grey chintz pillowslips. Everything is incongruous: the rags stuffed in windows where the glass is missing, the Russian stove, the icons, the bed. Dinner is different too. We have borsch with meat from a goat slaughtered yesterday, then noodles in milk with white gingerbread, home-made with butter. The Ukrainians are in their third year here and have a smallholding with a cow, three pigs, ten chickens. Sometimes they even have honey. Life could be worse for them.
The Day Will Pass Away Page 3