I Squad have lost it, which is no surprise. They’re stuck out in the forest with none of the amenities human beings need to live, e.g., food for the soul or the mind. They’re out of touch with civilization and have food only for their stomachs, so they end up behaving like animals. Even wolves gather and play together. But us? It is forbidden for two commanders of the same educational level to serve together. What sort of policy is that? They shift you from one place to another saying you were getting too close. We have screwball superiors who couldn’t understand human psychology even if they were allowed to and just demoralize you. I’ll stick it out till autumn, and at the end of September, that’s it! Freedom or jail! I now have one idea for getting discharged – a report or speech at a meeting. I have seven months to think something up. I do want to see the Far East Region in the summer, then I’ll have savoured all the seasons.
Bystrykin, a platoon commander, has TB but doesn’t want to leave. Why? Because for him this life is perfect and he gets fed. For me, it would be hip, hip, hurray!
Golodnyak has arrived. Why have the top brass moved him here? Is it clemency or does he scare them? I got talking to a doctor in the canteen and learned an interesting fact. One of our doctors qualified as a bookkeeper but is said to ‘know about diseases’. How amusing.
29 March 1936
For a long time, they haven’t been able to get this man they pulled off an engine to talk. He had hidden on a frame under the boiler where he’d be impossible to spot. Another got hold of a form, a train driver’s travel permit, went to the station duty officer and, as soon as the man went out, stamped and signed it etc. himself. He took the place of a train driver who was late. He was brought back to the phalanx.
‘Ah, welcome back!’
‘I have no idea who you are.’
‘Stop wasting our time!’
‘Judas!’
Nichepurenko comes snooping every day, asking why I don’t want to serve at BAM.
I find out I’m being appointed to the commandant platoon to strengthen discipline. It looks like they’re planning to switch me from one platoon to another. As soon as the trouble-shooting at one is done, they’ll move me to the next. Great.
This is the second day I’ve been able to rest my mind. I’ve been hanging around at HQ, reminiscing about phalanxes, what the zeks get up to – some who siphoned off porridge through a pipe, some who tunnelled out of the compound and so on. Warm sun, cold wind.
Playing chess with Savchuk.
30 March 1936
Golodnyak tells me about the. virtuosity of Divisional Commander Azarov. He ought to be prosecuted but at BAM these things are shrugged off. Azarov got food off the platoon quartermaster and exchanged it for gold. He helped himself to half the guards’ vegetable plot and, when he left, swapped it for a couple of piglets. Nothing out of the ordinary, then. According to the clerks, the new divisional commander (Afanasiev) gets drunk with them. They’re careerists, but they’re Party members who can supposedly be trusted. Although they can also be called to account.
Golodnyak wants to get out too. That is the ideological and moral state of our political guardians. He submitted an application, got called in by the boss and political adviser, was given a dressing down and threatened. Now, with no room for manoeuvre, the lad’s staying. Everyone here thinks only about how to get away – perhaps the boss and political adviser too? But possibly not. They may find BAM is somewhere they can exercise power.
31 March 1936
There’s an in-service review in progress, but it tests neither your politics nor anything else. The section commander in charge of staffing hasn’t a clue. What a lot of cobblers! The general knowledge of the divisional commander, according to Golodnyak, was no more than passable. I’m conscious that I’m well ahead in all disciplines.
Company Commander Gridin declined to sit the exam in order not to undermine his authority (by displaying his ignorance). Khrenkov claims to have conducted school-leavers’ exams but has no pedagogical theory or practical skills. He’s a Party member, so perhaps he did just sit there applauding or asking preposterous questions and being given preposterous answers. It was all over by 2 p.m. and the afternoon was warm and wonderful. Rapid thaw, mud.
1 April
They give the order and now, so easily and straightforwardly, Savchuk is stuck in 1 Squad.
The sun is really hot. Bloody hell! I play chess with the company commander. I probe him. S’s prediction was right. The commander is not a chess player but a big baby. He calls me a cheat. Your heart and soul are petty, sir, base and spiteful.
The mud is completely impassable. One person is out in felt boots, another squelching through in woven shoes, and nobody turns a hair. I wander down the track. Thoughts, thoughts.
At the end of the squad commanders’ training course, the head of section delivers a ‘speech’! It’s a mishmash of vacuous platitudes, often beside the point. Commanders, commanders!
I’ve still got nowhere to live but I need to hold out in Zavitaya till the autumn. I can’t hunt game in summer anyway. Come the autumn I’m going to be in Moscow! The guards are drinking themselves into a stupor. The Third Section staff are on the bottle too.
I have an inexplicable sense of anticipation. It’s warmer with every passing day. My mind is muddled, my thoughts don’t make any sense. People are really living in Moscow, although in Moscow, it so happens, they are saying the same about BAM. They don’t know the truth and believe all the propaganda. In the evening Nichepureriko reports what the students are saying about me: the platoon commander ought not to be at BAM, there must have been a mistake. Too right. A mistake that should be put right.
2 April 1936
Absolutely nothing to do. If I had a room it would be different. This one and that come and go on holiday.
I don’t know what to do with myself. My only relaxation is going for a walk along the track. Spring is erupting ever more strongly but the mud is as deep as ever. An unusual wind has been blowing from the same direction for over a month. The divisional commander really does not deserve the bars on his collar, and that tells on the leadership and productivity here. Acting Commander Bezyaev of 2 Platoon is the deputy platoon commander for the regiment. He’s barely literate, uneducated and completely incapable of providing the guards with leadership. These people are all Party or YCL members. I’ll imitate the principles they work to, but the guards infuriate me. How is it possible to be too thick to string two words together and still exist? The only thing they are really good at is swearing. Take Sonkov. He’s a great lanky fellow with a low brow and a stupid, vacant look in his eyes. He’s so ungainly you wonder if he’s actually an ape or an orang-utang. He’s standing in HQ in a fur jacket with his hands in his pockets.
He’s asked, ‘What are you doing in here?’
‘Eh, what?’
He gives himself a shake and the belt slides off his belly as if he were pregnant. He snivels loudly, wipes his hand up from his mouth, and sneezes over a room full of people.
‘Take your hands out of your pockets!’
‘What, something wrong with my hands?’
‘Are you a guard or not?!’
‘I am a guard. Course I am, why are you getting at me?’
He starts stamping the mud from his boots and kicking it under the table. His mouth turns down at the corner and he sticks out his jaw. Starts hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Well, why are you standing there? What do you need?’ ‘Well, like, I’m here because of this business. What you going on at me for?’
How the hell am I supposed to re-educate these morons, waste my strength and health and get stressed out over them when they don’t even understand human speech? They’re not interested. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you they’ve all ended up as guards by some semi-official route. The Gulag has strange ways of recruiting its workforce.
By 15 April the Second Track is to be completed as far as Khabarovsk, and I’ll probably end up dumped in 1 Squad. Meanwhile the
years are passing, taking my short life with them. I have to fight, take a risk, be ambitious.
Zavitaya is so quiet, the village all just impassable mud, puddles and pigs. What sort of life do the villagers have? The same as any other railway settlement?
What makes them happy, where are their goals and aspirations? There are young people growing up here.
Sometimes you take a newspaper, the army’s Red Star, say, for 9 February 1936, No. 32/3279, and read ‘Into the realm of science’, and can draw your own conclusions.
The people sitting at HQ drawing up action plans understand sod all about our work or have no interest in witnessing it. It makes you wonder. These are Party members, people trust them and think everything is fine. I’m either a fool or a complete idiot, working my butt off trying to teach my classes in an exemplary fashion.
Lilin has just arrived from Moscow. It’s best to say nothing. It pains me. For 300 rubles a month I could end up living half my life at BAM with as many rights as a stray dog, or I could be in Moscow living like a human being. Even so, I wouldn’t work for a certain institution, not even in Moscow for 300 a month. Lilin is crafty, telling me I should urge the company commander to transfer me to the periphery, so he gets to stay in Zavitaya himself. We’ll see who outwits whom. All the same, he’s smart for thinking that out. None of the locals could have.
‘Duty officer!’ I hear someone say, ‘there’s no water, we’ve nothing to cook breakfast with and the cook’s asleep!’
‘Well, wake her up!’
‘What’s the point of waking her up if there’s no water?’
No chance of getting washed, that’s life. I went out without even a mug of tea. Nice. Great. Wonderful! I’d love to live like this for the next five years.
3 April 1936
Gridin is up to something in not appointing me anywhere. I’ll bide my time. Pukhov: ‘What is the Stakhanov movement? It is all about life becoming merrier, that’s what!’ The wind whistles straight through my room.
4, 5 and 6 April 1936
Secretary of the BAM Party Committee has arrived. There’s been a delay completing the Second Track and the top brass are spitting fire. They threaten us. ‘People who delay the work are enemies and we have laws for dealing with them. Those who are passive are enemies twice over. The Party knows they are there, relies on them, but they are not doing their job!’ He beats all about the bush, but can’t just tell us what to do. They issue quotas for how much ballast they want loaded without taking account of what is technically feasible. They call that ‘tightening the screws’. I take out a pencil and calculate there is no way we can manage 250 wagons. They give the company commander responsibility for the quarry and he promptly delegates it to me. I’m not complaining! At least he won’t be sending me to a squad and I should be able to get some rest.
Interesting news! The ‘soldiers of the track’ are to be paid between 2 rubles 24 and 6 rubles 40, depending on their work category. Work and earn as much as you choose. If you are a paid volunteer you are only forced to labour if you are being punished. If they really follow through with this, I’ll have my discharge before you know it. For the time being, though, my only option is to hand in a really negative report and exploit the conversation that ensues.
How important clothes are! My leather jacket is enough to gain me respect, regardless of how many pips I have on my collar tabs. They deferentially call me the commissioner or the GPU agent.
Lots of positive things are said about the zeks, but about us? Not a peep. Don’t they know that having somewhere comfortable to live raises productivity? I’ve had two nights without sleep now, at the quarry and at the track, carrying the can for Gridin. But it is all for the best. Slowly but surely I am doing the BAM thing, currying favour with the top brass.
I continue to lose at chess, flattering my superior’s vanity, and he doesn’t have the wits or the intelligence to recognize what a humiliating position he has put himself in. All I hear from him is, ‘You’ve not done that right!’ I confess my failing and do my best to show him how right he is, while in my heart of hearts I think, ‘What an idiot!’ There is no way he will ever understand how an excavator or the points on the railway work. He is, not to mince words, a ploughboy. How a plough works, that’s the kind of ‘machinery’ he does understand.
He orders me all over the quarry: ‘Go and see what sort of nonsense they’re up to with the shunting engine.’ The shunting engine is, of course, exactly where it should be. Or else, ‘Why is the shunting engine jerking like that?’ Because it’s pulling forty wagons of sand and the poor little engine [illegible] to move it one metre.
Life is better for our senior colleagues. They call you on the phone:
‘Provide us with such-and-such!’
‘This is so-and-so speaking. Send me this and that!’
What are we supposed to say? ‘Excuse me, you’re talking to the platoon commander’?
They laugh. They already know it’s me, or if they don’t they will ask. We are not popular. When they find planks they panel their offices at HQ, while I have nowhere to live. I am bivouacked next to our headquarters, and during the day I just wander about. The devil knows what’s up with the weather. In the sun it’s plus 15, and in the shade minus 15. The north wind chills you to the bone.
And this is how the Stakhanov movement works: they certify Stakhanovites’ statistics at a meeting in the Education and Culture Unit, and sometimes make them up there as well. At BAM anything is possible.
7 April 1936
Summer clouds are appearing in the sky. The larks are singing their hearts out, but it’s still cold. I go to the quarry. No shuttles. They were all taken to Irkun yesterday evening.
I went back to my cold slum and gathered up wood shavings and bits of rotten wood to try to heat it. Now I’m lying about, writing these lines. Keep out of sight of the boss and all will be well. I still have no official job. The political adviser and storekeeper are trying to organize volleyball and football nets. They unearth one but can’t work out what it used to be for. The political adviser asks me. I tell him it’s a camouflage net. They agree.
8 April 1936
My commissar, as we jokingly call the political instructor from Phalanx 7, turns up. Tells us, ‘The top brass are asserting themselves. Secretary of the BAM Party Committee Bachevsky is on the loose. One prisoner complained to her phalanx leader that the dog handler forced her to be his mistress, that the guards beat up the zeks and are no better than policemen under the Tsar, and so on. Bachevsky sets up a court hearing. He questions her in front of the phalanx leader and she turns to the man and
says:
“‘Do you remember, your wife turned up and she was crying and swearing at me for messing about with her husband?”
“‘That clears that up!” says Badaevsky.’
What business has Bachevsky to conduct a judicial investigation without any qualifications, to undermine a volunteer guard’s authority for no reason, and smear our unit? And then they complain about escapes. Still, what can you do? They’ve got the power and like throwing their weight about. Or perhaps he’s hoping to get discharged too.
Gridin’s adjutant, Kamushkin, was also there. I asked him how things were in Russia. ‘Just fine! I had no wish to come back here!’
The civilian site foreman provided further confirmation of the general mood: ‘If they say we can apply to be discharged, I’ll be first in the queue. I’m a Party member, but work at BAM? No-o thanks. I’ve had enough. I value living my own life too much.’
It has got warmer. About time too. I’ve been assigned to command 3 Platoon but there’s something they’re not telling me. Perhaps it’s nothing, but everyone is being terribly secretive. That platoon is a shambles. There are Party members all over the place, but they don’t want to work. We’ll follow their example.
Inyushkin is ill; he’s not coming out of his house and nothing is being done about it. Bystrykin has not been out to the phalanxes once in the pa
st forty-five days. As for the guards . . . What a collection of misfits!!! Divisional commander asks an orderly:
‘Who are you?’
‘The orderly.’
‘Oh, a big shot!’
‘And who are you?’
‘The divisional commander.’
‘Oh, another big shot!’
The orderly turns his back on him and says no more.
I’ve been elected, in my absence, to the trade union’s inspection committee. I’ll stick it out till the autumn, see what summer’s like in the Far East Region, do some sketching, then get out. The company commander is letting me stay in his quarters while he’s on holiday. Until then, the devil knows, I’m living like a dog.
9 April 1936
I take over 3 Platoon. It’s a madhouse, a shambles. Three platoon commanders have come and gone with no proper handovers or reception. It’s chaos and disorder. Everything is shrugged off, every disaster considered normal. I’ve noticed a change in myself, in how I received 4 Platoon in 1935 and how now, in 1936, I’m doing it with 3 Platoon. I suppose I’ve become an old hand, a savvy labour camp officer.
It’s warm outside. The north wind is still blowing but it’s no longer so cold. I sit in the company commander’s office with Golodnyak and the political adviser, debating the transitoriness of life at BAM. We touch on the incident with Bansky in Phalanx 7.
Golodnyak says, ‘I don’t care if they kick me out, I’m going to alert the appropriate authorities to that case.’
To which the political adviser says quite openly, ‘You don’t think Golodnyak might come to regret that?’
I attach here Golodnyak’s report as documentation of the deeds and misdeeds of the top brass and as testimony to the illiteracy and general educational level of the political supervisors.***** Golodnyak needs to retain the support of the company commander, and many others would do well not to knock the Guards Unit. The company commander gets paid 700 rubles a month. Outside the barbed wire I reckon his market value would be 120 to 150 rubles. Make of that what you will.
The Day Will Pass Away Page 11