The Day Will Pass Away

by Ivan Chistyakov

  ‘Did your wife sew those trousers for you? Look at the crotch! Is that in reserve in case you get a hernia?’

  Nichepurenko bursts out: ‘I didn’t know the company commander was holding back my leave, that they wouldn’t let me resign, and all that time I was busting a gut. Not any more.’

  The evening is velvety, pink and warm. The sap is up in the trees, they are fresh, leafy and emerald green. The only entertainment for the residents and young people here is to go down to the station, see the train arrive, and mill about.

  But again, what do I need to do to get out of this place? I’ve seen enough of summer in the Far East Region. It’s nothing particularly remarkable or unremarkable. Emptiness, ugliness. A government commission is coming to declare the Second Track open. If I can stick it out till October, something should happen. Either to me or to BAM. I fear my patience may run out first. Perhaps things might even get better. Political Instructor Golodnyak is heading east to Phalanx 19.

  4 June 1936

  Today is summer. Hot. They dismissed Azarov and that’s the end of the matter. The chief sits there listing escapes.

  He was holed up in his room for the winter to keep out of the cold. He’s doing the same in the summer, but to keep out of the heat. If it’s cool he goes out to bask in the sunshine. I spent till 2.30 a.m. yesterday playing billiards and overslept till 10.00 today. Went out to sketch at the quarry. There’s been an escape in Phalanx 11. Who the hell cares! When you look back at everything you did in the day – everything you coordinated, agreed, investigated – you could almost believe it was calm and wonderful. I’m morally dead. Here’s an example of the way BAM functions: they’ve relieved me of command after a month of service standing in for Gridin and I haven’t received a kopek. BAM has its own way of doing things.

  5-6 June 1936

  Two days and nothing in them worth writing about. On the holiday I went to a so-called sports field of the District Department of the NKVD for a competition. All I did was upset myself.

  When I was wearing shorts and a vest and spiked shoes I remembered the stadium in Moscow, remembered being alive. Best not to. Told Adjutant Kamushkin I would serve only till autumn or opt to face trial. Political Instructor Sergeyev came round again. Also asked how I was finding the work. I told him, no later than autumn. He said I would get my discharge, they wouldn’t try to hold on to me. I don’t know how true that is, but it cheered me up a bit.

  7 June 1936

  They expect leadership from the likes of Pakhomov. Nanny Pakhomov is a bootlicker who’s in with the company commander. He wants to pick up shock-work credits and get back home as soon as possible. Gridin gloats, ‘See how I make them knuckle down!’

  Got sent Red Sport, which was unsettling.¶¶¶¶¶ That’s where life is, so nothing new. I went to the office with Sergeyev and found them playing cards. That infuriated me. That sadist G[ridin] will be back soon, so I need to make hay while I can. Kamushkin and Khrenkov are not too devoted to the service and roll in at 11 or 12. What can I do about it? Nothing! I’ve learned to deal with it Cheka style, as they say. The Third Section are bastards, though. They’re bringing a case against Platoon Commander Ogurtsov over Baranov, because someone informed that Baranov had lived for a month with the guards, eating and drinking and not paying for it.

  Are there really people who live in freedom? I am going to win mine no matter what it costs. I’m not having some group leader try to teach me the rudiments of political literacy. What a joke!

  8 June 1936

  The touching concern for the Armed Guards Unit is evident everywhere. Take the canteen. So off-hand, and should you ever ask for anything, you’re finished. You won’t get served for an hour or more. Not only is there no choice of food, you don’t even get two courses. Pilaf today, with dried-out rice. Whether you consider it edible and whether you want to eat it is entirely up to you. Take it or leave it. You want some white bread? Should someone organize that for you? No one does. The canteen workers don’t give a damn, so there is nothing like that. There isn’t even anything to buy. If you are not full after one helping, too bad, because you won’t be getting a second. Fancy some ice cream or cranberry juice? You must be joking. As for queueing, no problem. You can queue for an hour or more because how you spend your time during the four-hour break is your affair.

  9 June 1936

  These are the sort of people we need:

  ‘I got there with 2,000 on me. The whole village comes running. Girls! I put three quarters of a litre of vodka on the table straight off. The women are looking at me, but I don’t turn a hair. I walk out the next day, hands in my pockets, and anyone who hadn’t seen me yesterday is asking, “What’s going on?” A commissar from the political section? I walk along looking like a collective farm director. Drunk out of my mind every day. Thought I might have stayed there, but what is there to do in a village? Can’t earn anything worthwhile, picking away at the soil! No, I thought, I’m off. And here I am.’

  I notice HQ are having meetings, taking decisions, passing resolutions, drawing conclusions. They’ll be announcing whose work was exemplary and who’s to face the court. Platoon Commander Nikolenko comes prying and asks how I’m doing. I tell him, I’m here till October and then either they let me leave or I’ll choose trial. I do seem to have accepted the idea of facing trial.

  During the night there’s an escape from the Third Section. They told Goryachev and ten people ended up in the punishment cells. When it’s dark, people run away. There are houses all around, so you can’t shoot. You can’t beat anyone or you might get time yourself.

  The weather’s nasty. One or two days warm, then five or six days of rain at the Far East Region holiday resort.

  io, ii and 12 June 1936

  Emotions, moods and so on blunted, leaving only criminal inclinations. Sometimes I feel a spark of life, but nobody here can fan it and give my thoughts some focus. It’s turning me into a bloodless creature. But my emotions still proclaim their existence and demand proper sustenance. I’m not sure what it is best to compare the unit to: is it more like a monastery or a coffin? Perhaps a bit of both. It’s like a monastery because there’s nothing culturally Soviet about it, and a coffin because a person slowly dies, and with him all sign of life, except that people escape. But my blood is still pulsing, and with it thoughts swarm and pour in a rushing torrent and, interrupting each other, rise, rise into consciousness in a disorderly mob, then take a certain course and I can relax into thinking about the situation calmly again. My old life is becoming history, as if it had been lived by someone else.

  So even my inner world recedes day by day into eternity until it reaches freezing point. You start believing they can make you lose all emotion. Yet every day brings you nearer to freedom. Only, what kind of path are you walking to get there? 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. As time passes, memories of that other life, which everybody except the camp inmates and me is living, will cease to be painful. I will be able to gaze levelly at it.

  They will give me no option but to do that, by deducting service credits which might have shortened my stint here. I will walk over the sand and the hills, through the swamps and the permafrost, through the dense Siberian forests and the quagmires. We are everywhere. And everywhere life springs eternal. I will learn the laws of life and its particulars. If only in my imagination, I will see live people, witness the things they do, and be among them, live among them. But what of reality!!! My thoughts break off, and where is my right to life? What have I done, what kind of criminal am I? Am I even a criminal? Perhaps this is how it has to be. Perhaps I am not supposed to live my own life
. That would explain everything. Here you are presented with the sight of what you were, of what you had stored up, and that is all you now have to live on.

  13 June 1936

  It looks like they’ve invented a way of punishing people by forcing them to live a different life while still being fully conscious of their old one. From the perspective of history you don’t count, so just stay where you are and keep your mouth shut.

  But the reason we have education is so we can be objective, and the reason I have consciousness is so that I can feel.

  It’s easy to switch off from everything for a moment and rush headlong after horror, but you can’t do that every hour, every second, for long years. There are times when you have to seriously ask yourself whether you should win by dying. But there are more moments when you feel you are almost being forced to live, in a way and in circumstances designed to make you see how completely contemptible you are.

  Here is Yershov’s political rhetoric:

  ‘Preparations for the May Day holiday were a disgrace. An incorrect direction was given to the Stakhanov movement, which started from the top down rather than from the grassroots up, a political minus.

  ‘There was an under-appreciation of the review, an inappropriately convivial approach to work by the acting company commander. There was no leadership of the phalanxes by the company’s units. Obligations were taken on but carried out in a very basic manner.’

  Political Adviser Khrenkov summarized admirably: ‘Give him a quick punch in the face and kick him out of the People’s Commissariat of Transport.’

  They were pleased: ‘Your reports are documentary evidence of your social profile which, it must be said, is poor.’

  How can they not wince when they harp on about my social antecedents? It’s obvious that they want to crush me morally, but what the hell. The result: it’s all over. The acting company commander did a job but it is not being registered – he blew it, and that’s that!!!! And here’s the clincher. The head of the Third Section, after beating about the bush, comes out with:

  ‘You need to quit the Armed Guards Unit.’

  ? !!?! ???

  (Delighted to. Perhaps from tomorrow?)

  ‘Were you recruited directly?’

  ‘No, through the Gulag.’

  ‘Well, that is more difficult. You will have to stay until the end of the project.’

  That’s the answer to how long our service is to last. There is an opportunity there, though, not to be missed. Nikolenko, my successor as platoon commander, is in a worse situation than I am. He is a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

  I need to get out of here, and the sooner the better.

  16 and 17 June 1936

  Two days of meetings. The first is once again about the Stakhanovites and the acting heads, including, of course, me. Why are you undermining, misunderstanding, misrepresenting, etc. the Stakhanov movement? We’ll let them go on at us for now. Krivoruchko refuses to supervise us.

  ‘Not my kind of work, I couldn’t cope, and I can’t neglect my main work. I’ve only just taken on the platoon! I don’t know the people, there’s the escapes . . . ’

  They cut him short.

  ‘So you’re refusing to work? Admit it!’

  They are working on him as a YCL, and criticizing me, although not by name. That in itself is an easing of the situation, or a victory for me. A meeting with the political commanders. My nerves are at breaking point. After Political Adviser Khrenkov’s report (who kept butting in while Adjutant Kamushkin was speaking), someone remarks: ‘We don’t have enough guards.’

  That is the nearest we get to support and a boost for my morale. Regarding my non-accommodation, they wriggle out of answering: ‘We found him four places but he wouldn’t accept any of them.’

  Thanks for that. By then I was ready to weep. No point appealing to Company Commander Gridin, the political adviser or anyone else. My only option is to commit some crime.

  While shaving, blood spurts from my face. I have no appetite and I feel nauseous. Every day brings new demonstrations of BAM virtuosity. Ogurtsov gets a bonus, which leads to a drunken binge and denunciations of him for failing to repay money borrowed from zek guards. Here I detect the hand of the political adviser and Gridin. Afanasiev is eager to join the Armed Guards Unit and is working at it, giving speeches the top brass like to hear and engaging in mild self-criticism. Everyone is very tense but afraid to speak out, which is probably diplomatic.

  The ‘soldiers of the track’ are trusted more than us. If one of the prisoners makes a denunciation to the Third Section, they drag us in. One bitch got fired from the kitchen, claimed Afanasiev raped her, and now the lad is facing a court hearing. While she was working in the platoon kitchen, everybody used her. The political adviser of 1 Division denounced me, claiming I had said something out of turn. It’s clear they are dumping non-Party members. There are three of us in the company. Have they made Bolsheviks of us? No. They cheered us up no end by noting that Brench was improving. Yes, he was developing from someone barely literate into a political instructor and then a divisional political adviser. What sense does that make? They could have made something out of me. That might have made sense.

  18 June 1936

  The latest joyous tidings: mass escape of five zeks from Phalanx 11. I feel like topping myself, but the cold light of reason tells me to wait. Sooner or later I’m going to get convicted, preferably sooner because then it will be over sooner. I am now openly on the warpath, cocked and ready to fire. Devyatkin just wants out too. He let a criminal group loose without a guard, despite earlier warnings.

  Went to 1 Squad. There’s something wrong with the way they work. Yershov says it’s better to let five escape than not allow a brigade out to work. They have no transport to shift turf 4 km and their food is appalling. Of course they’re protesting. I feel terrible, my thoughts are totally confused.

  19 June 1936

  We are being blamed for everything. Political Adviser Khrenkov hasn’t been out to Phalanx 11. The guards are offended. The mass of the ‘soldiers of the track’ don’t know him either as a Communist or as a political adviser. HQ hand down orders to complete this and that. Political Instructor Sergeyev confirms that the guards of Phalanx 11 are dissatisfied with Khrenkov. Sergeyev is also cheesed off that he is not getting firewood and that Pakhomov spends his time playing with the chief’s children and does damn all else.

  20, 21 and 22 June 1936

  Life can’t get back to normal because we don’t have normality here. My legs are sore, rheumatism. At night I feed bedbugs. My memory is playing tricks, I can’t remember what happened yesterday, the 21st. I went to the theatre. It was the usual provincial stuff. They changed costumes in a couple of seconds. It was complete ribald gibberish; for example, ‘orders taken for children’s felt boots made from their parents’ hair’ generated mirth and wild applause from the populace of Zavitaya.##### That’s the local culture for you, their understanding of high living.

  Adjutant Kamushkin tries to make amends by asking, ‘Well, did you jail drunken tailors and did my hypotheses prove correct?’

  I reply drily, ‘Yes.’

  Things are no easier yet. I sat on the earth mound by the theatre and Kamushkin and his wife installed themselves opposite, talking to Lavrov.

  Kamushkin commented loudly, ‘Well, I don’t think he is going to last long.’

  He was referring to me. We’ll see.

  Escapes from Phalanx 11, and none of the top brass do anything other than talk, paying barely any attention. The unofficial reason was let slip by Khrenkov’s wife.

  ‘My husband and I should be in Moscow for the 7 November holiday.’

  That’s how it goes here, but what about reality? Khrenkov: ‘We support shock-work tempos!’ Khrenkov: ‘We support all the camp activities!’ He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  You get so tired of this. It would be good to get away from the top brass by riding out round the phalanxes
. Peace! Quiet! What a joy that would be!!!

  23 June 1936

  I went out to Phalanx 11, took the 44 as far as Bureya. The local operational group were nice to me. Nine zeks have taken off from Phalanx 6, Articles 56.17******* and 59.3. Everything is upside down – the Third Section, the operational group, and we are all pulling in different directions. Choose one of two holes: a prison term or the grave (shoot yourself).

  I catch a ride with a one and a half ton truck driving along a track between villages. It’s lurching so much the only thing I can do is to lie flat. It’s murderously hot and there’s dust in my underwear. When it mixes with sweat, a thick layer forms on your face and stretches the skin. We go up hills, speed round bends in all directions, crazy. I’m so thirsty I feel sick, but there’s no water anywhere. A stream provides relief. We drop off two agents, Kasumov and another whose name I don’t know, and then arrive at Rodionovka.

  I eat bread with milk. Morozov goes back to the truck. There are two agents to search, and me on my own.

  Strange, charred trees. A hunter’s lodge, a second, third, fourth. Two men move away but come back and sit down. I go over. They’re agents. The road must lead to Tyukan but forks in two directions. Which to take?

  Blyukher Collective Farm. Traditional Chinese huts. The stove chimney goes underground and leads to a dry tree smeared with clay 10 m away from the huts. In the hut, the top of the stove takes up half the room and serves as a table, bed, and anything they need. In the left corner is a pit with a firebox in it. No mugs. The only crockery is shared bowls.

  It starts raining. It’s 12 km to Tyukan and it’s ten at night. We’re soaked through, but we’re marching at speed so still feel warm. I’m furious about everything. If we catch them, I’ll kill them. We reach the track, but don’t know where we are. From Irkun to Tyukan is 6 km + 45 km and the rain seems heavy enough to make your bones go soggy. Tyukan. The signal is green. Oh, don’t let me miss the train! Will it stop, or even slow down enough for me to get on? There’s coal burning on the platform, someone will put it out. I hear whispering in the bushes.