So was the long, sad story of Sasha the Terrorist. Sasha was a kid from Moscow whose father had died in the war and whose mother had taken him with her to a kolkhoz, a collective farm, where she had to work to support herself and her young son. She was a good-looking woman. The chairman of the kolkhoz took a fancy to her and tried to seduce her. She resisted. The seduction turned to rape. In the midst of it, Sasha came home to the dreary little village house, surprised the director, and chased him away.
Sasha brooded over this for some time and then decided to kill the chairman.
He had a pistol—perhaps it had been his father’s. He followed the chairman and his wife one evening when they went by sleigh into the forest for firewood. Sasha was not a practiced shot. His first bullet only grazed the chairman’s arm. His second exploded the barrel of the rusty old pistol and injured Sasha’s hand. The chairman grabbed his ax, leaped from the sled, and nearly split Sasha’s skull.
A kolkhoz chairman is an official. Trying to kill him, therefore, is an attempted political assassination, never mind what he did to your mother. When Sasha recovered from his terrible head wound he was tried and convicted and, of course, given twenty-five, five, and five.
He was sent to Dzhezkazgan and assigned to the same railroad project where I had once unloaded freight cars. There he became involved in an escape plan with a man named Litvinenko, and it is from Litvinenko that I got the story.
Guards came to the hospital late one evening and told me that there was a man unconscious in the detention cell at the BUR. I called Adarich and the two of us were taken in convoy to see this man. Litvinenko was lying unconscious on the cold concrete floor. His body was covered with bruises from boots, fists, and clubs. Both his hands were broken. Adarich made as complete an examination as he could under the circumstances and told the BUR commandant that the man would die of internal injuries if he was not hospitalized, so he was sent back with us like a loose sack of raw meat and we went to work on him.
Litvinenko was a strong young man of twenty-six. He must have had tremendous inner resources to recover at all. For days he hung between life and death. Then he turned the corner and began to recover gradually but definitely, each day stronger and more alert, and by and by we began to talk and he told me what had happened to him and to his friend Sasha the Terrorist.
Sasha’s nickname had nothing to do with his attempt on the life of the chairman. The prisoners called him the Terrorist because he was the most lovable, easygoing person in camp and yet had 58.8: political terrorism. He was only sixteen. Ivan Litvinenko began by taking Sasha under his wing as a protective gesture, but they became very good and close friends and often talked together in a wistful way about their homes and families, and about the possibilities of escape.
Somehow they fell in with an older man I’ll call the Principal, a prisoner clerk at the railway project, who had already worked out an escape plan in his mind and was looking for some strong, young reliable accomplices. The Principal had observed that the prisoners assigned to unload cement cars got covered in cement dust and their numbers and faces were obliterated. It was a bit like the story of Grigori Ashvili in the beginning. The Principal concluded that it would be easy for someone like him to join such a work party without being noticed. He proposed to Sasha and Ivan Litvinenko that they carefully gather boards from which they could construct a false inner wall for one of these cement cars, complete with false rivet ends and so on, measured to the millimeter and provided with precise notches and pegs so that they could be assembled in seconds. Because the prisoners used boards as a sort of stretcher to carry cement bags out of the train, they believed they could smuggle the boards onto the car easily, and because everyone hated staying behind to clean the car in the choking dust, they would volunteer to do the cleanup and thus be the last ones in the car.
They built up their false wall components. Sasha and Ivan rehearsed the action of assembling them while they helped clean out cement cars. They went over every detail with the Principal. The Principal had access to the timetables showing what commodities were arriving when at the depot. He told them one day to start bringing bits of bread and sugar to make a cache at the station, and suggested that once they had several weeks’ supply of these tiny smuggled fragments they would be ready to go. But before they had more than a few dozen bits of sugar set aside, the Principal came to them in immense excitement one morning and announced that a cement train would be arriving that day and that he could not stand waiting any longer. They were young and confident and incautious. They immediately agreed. The Principal then proposed another ingenious idea: that he spend the day, while they were unloading, finding two more partners. If five were missing, he argued, the guards might just possibly think they had miscounted a whole rank in the column and not notice the escape. Often the guards would miscount one whole rank; it was a common event.
Some semiliterate counting off ranks of five would sing out something like this: “Twenty... eight!” (Pencil mark on the plywood sheet.) “Twenty... nine!” (Pencil mark again.) “Twenty...ten!” (Pencil mark. He’s really at thirty but with the pauses while he checks to see that there are really five men in each rank he’s getting confused.) “Thirty!” (Pencil mark.)
He’s calling it thirty but there are really thirty-one. When he reaches the end he will be short one rank. He will recount as many as eight or ten times until he gets his real number. Curses and groans and people falling down with exhaustion and hunger may propel him to hurry the count. Maybe, argued the Principal, maybe he’ll miscount once the wrong way and get a correct count! And the moment there is a correct count they march the convoy home and lock up the work site for the night.
Sasha and Ivan Litvinenko hastily agree. The train is coming and they have to get busy. They start unloading, smuggling their boards on the car and hiding them at the end under heaps of loose dust and full bags. The Principal hastily rounds up two more confederates I will call the Accountant and the Professional. Toward the end of the day, Ivan Litvinenko brings them a bag of cement. They slip into a shed and smear themselves. They join the work party on the platform. So far so good.
Sasha tells the rest of his brigade that he and Ivan will organize the cleanup.
Cries of “Good old Sasha the Terrorist!”, “Always count on Sasha!” The grateful brigade goes off to grab a little rest somewhere. Sasha and the other four grab their boards, smear them with cement, place the Accountant and the Professional up against the end wall and, with well-rehearsed movements, begin to close them in. A small board is left off at the bottom and Sasha is the only one still outside. He slips through the opening and they pull the last piece invisibly into place just as the brigadier’s assistant looks in to see bow the cleanup is coming.
“Good old Sasha the Terrorist indeed!” this man is heard shouting. The boards barely muffle his voice. “Here, you out there! Sasha has gone off to sneak a bit of a sleep somewhere, that dirty little rat. Get in here and finish the cleanup!”
Bad moments while shovels scrape against the false wall. Then the cursing, coughing, resentful cleanup crew is gone and the five escape artists brace themselves stiffly in their sixteen-inch blackness and wait for the next hurdle.
Very soon they hear a soldier climb aboard. They can tell by the hard boots. It lasts thirty seconds; the soldier of course sees only an empty car, more or less satisfactorily cleaned out, and clambers off again.
Then a marvelous moment as the first shudder of the train pulling itself together reaches them, and the even more marvelous slow click-click as they begin to roll smoothly out of the depot, out of the fenced-in zone, and, they hope, soon out of Dzhezkazgan.
At the gates that evening the guards begin the count. There is the usual mixture of grumbles, curses, and jokes as the first count goes wrong. Rising anger when it is wrong the same way the second time. An officer angrily takes over the count boards. Wrong the third time. One whole rank of five is missing. They must have miscounted when the convoy left camp
in the morning. Phone calls to camp. The search begins in the work site as darkness falls. The prisoners shiver for hours on the ground outside the gates. It is finally clear that it will be a long search. Some of the guard remain in the watchtowers. The convoy is marched away but not returned to camp. There are nearly two thousand workers on that site, from several camps. They are kept outside all night, huddling together. In the morning the files on all two thousand are produced, each person is individually checked, and it is discovered that five men have gone, and who they are.
On the third day some of the free civilian administrative personnel who work on the project are arrested and “intensive interrogation” is begun, nonstop. Within twenty-four hours more than a dozen of them have begged for mercy and confessed—one how he smuggled them out in a truck, another how he brought civilian clothes in for them, another who brought passports, and so on. All fabrications, of course, and none tally, and the MGB investigators are going out of their minds.
By the end of that same third day, the five in the boxcar are near the end of their endurance. They are weak from hunger because they had only begun to store food for three of them. The air is so thick with exhalation and the smell of urine and feces that they all have headaches. The train has made several stops, but they have collectively agreed that until now they have not covered enough ground.
Now they cautiously take out the last plate in their wall and Sasha breathes clean air for the first time. He sees that it is dark night and scampers to the boxcar door and pushes it back a few centimeters and sees that they are in a big rail yard on the outskirts of a city. The rest of them come out and look around.
The Principal was the first to volunteer and the Accountant was the second, and so those two slipped away ostensibly to reconnoiter, but they never came back. After a couple of hours the Professional’s nerves began to get pretty ragged. He said he would go and look for the others. He recognized the city as Sverdlovsk and said he knew his way around and would be back soon. He never came back. Finally Sasha and Ivan Litvinenko agreed that it would be suicide to be found in the city after the sun came up. They headed for the country, and had good luck, and by keeping away from towns and major roads they managed to walk right across the Ural Mountains in a matter of weeks. They ate berries. They raided a railway section man’s little house for civilian clothes and food. They stuck nettles in their swollen feet to bring the swelling down. They kept to the woods in the hill country and to rough country and swamps in the open, and finally, after an incredible two-thousand-kilometer trek past Kuibyshev, past Stalingrad, they stopped in a small village almost in the foothills of the Caucasus, on the banks of the Kuban between Kropotkin and Krasnodar. There they found shelter with some sympathetic villagers and rested. Ivan Litvinenko stayed with a woman, a young schoolteacher who asked him to marry her and promised to get false papers for him. He agreed, but he was not sincere. Both he and Sasha, who were now the closest of blood brothers, knew that to stay any time in strange territory would mean capture. They meant to push on west now, toward Odessa, They thought if they could find Ivan’s relatives in Moldavia they could hide in safety while they built up their strength and put together what they needed for an escape through the port of Odessa.
Long before this the Principal and the Accountant were arrested in Sverdlovsk. They both confessed. Their stories were not believed. They were terribly beaten, confronted with each other, and still stuck to what the MGB were convinced was a prearranged fabrication.
Then the Professional was given away by an informer and he told the same story. The MGB decided to look for the railway car. They were beginning to fear that the story was true.
One night Ivan slipped away from his schoolteacher while she slept, and together with Sasha headed further west: They were able to take the train part of the way. At Odessa they parted. Ivan would go to his home village in the Moldavian Republic, to get money from his parents. He told Sasha to walk every Friday by the famous statue of Cardinal Richelieu in Odessa, and when Ivan had money and food and a plan he would meet him there. He never did. On his second day at home his own brother gave him away to the MGB. The MGB treated him all right, but then he was brought back to Dzhezkazgan. His guards had been humiliated and harassed and kept up all night because of his audacity. Now they took delight in beating him savagely until somebody interfered and Adarich and I were called.
That is, in a way, Ivan Litvinenko’s story, because he told it. But I think of it as Sasha the Terrorist’s story because, as far as I knew, he was still free.
But any normal escape was doomed. There was no place to hide. The open desert gave you up to the little search planes, and if you did not die of exposure you were beaten up or shot and then, no matter how great the distance, you were brought back for hard punishment or grisly display. I was determined to try no plan that was not foolproof, and so far I had no such plan.
So all through the spring and into the early summer of 1952 I worked away at welding during the day and music during the night and while I dreamed of freedom and prayed for it, I was really resigned to the fact that for the time being at least I was a slave in a slave labor camp and there was no point pretending otherwise. Then in the middle of that overwhelmingly hot summer there was another development that looked bad at first but that soon changed my life radically for the better.
Chapter 21
My scrotal hernia began to strangulate. Adarich, the surgeon, had said to try to live with it until I was stronger, but I had let it go on too long. After a while the aches and discomfort it caused me diminished somewhat. It was a bit awkward to walk around with a bagful of fists between my legs, but you can get used to a lot of strange things, and I never went back to Adarich about it because it did not hurt too much and, I suppose, because I was afraid of having surgery in that delicate area. I had some pretty morbid notions of what it might amount to.
But it hurt a lot when I lifted heavy steel at the DOZ. I spent several very bad nights trying to tell myself that the pain would go away, but it did not. I finally had to face the fact that the whole area was badly inflamed and getting worse.
Adarich and Shkarin were shocked that I had waited so long. They said that I would have to have surgery within hours or else I would face the risk of serious peritonitis “You’ll have a bellyful of gangrene, my boy,” said Adarich, and took me right off to his little operating room. By now I had a dull, powerful pain throughout the lower abdomen. Adarich did his best to relax me, joking in a very casual way with easygoing remarks about the relationship of the size of my scrotum to my sexual abilities and so on. He sat me on the operating table with my head between my knees, made one injection under the skin at the base of the spine, and then moments later gave me a spinal. He was extremely deft. I felt very little discomfort. Moments later I was on my back and Adarich was pricking the soles of my feet and waiting for sensation to disappear. He had a new assistant physician named Mikhail Kublanov and a big former army feldsher named Leonid assisting him. They put up a sort of screen so that I could see their faces but not my belly or their hands. I could see the instruments being prepared and I was terrified. I said, “Couldn’t I have a general anesthetic? I’m frightened.”
Adarich said, “Listen, with your heart we’d never wake you up again. This is going to be an easy operation because your abdominal wall is so thin I’ll be through it in one cut. There!” I realized that he meant it. I could feel a painless kind of tugging and I could see from their eyes that they were getting into it. Into me. Adarich chatted and joked without stopping. He hurt me quite a bit moving my intestines around. I complained and he told me, “Stop complaining, my boy, you are about to see a sight that no living man has ever seen before: your own balls!”
He told Leonid to hold up my head and he showed me two small round pink objects. I don’t know what they were, I was too terrified to look closely. I don’t even remember whether I believed him or not.
Adarich was fantastically quick. He explained every st
ep, how he was using some underlying tissue to reinforce the damaged inguinal ring and prevent any further hernia, how he was suturing this layer of muscle and that layer. Kublanov said nothing, just handed instruments and held clamps and hemostats and so on. Then within minutes it was over and he had called Vanya, a powerful young orderly, to carry me in his arms to a bed.
I felt quite triumphant, despite some deep pain from the disturbed bowels, because I had remained conscious through the whole thing. That seemed some kind of accomplishment. Adarich warned me that it would hurt a lot when the spinal wore off, and said he would come and see. me in a couple of hours.
It was bad, but I had known a lot worse—and I was not upset about it. When Adarich came back, he helped take my mind off the pain by telling me that it now looked as though he would be able to justify the need for another feldsher in the hospital and that since I obviously could not go back to physical work for some time, it would make sense for me to resume training. If I was interested. I jumped at it.
An American in the Gulag Page 34