An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  But Kask would not let him alone. He argued that his “Pink Lotion” would bring happiness to millions around the world if it could be tested and proven. He put it to Riwe not as an opportunity but a duty. He said the lotion was his lifework and ambition and he could not bear to lose such a spectacular chance to experiment. He said that if it worked and if Riwe was still convinced he would be happier without hair, he could always shave his head and that he, Kask, would help him do it. He said that a man with hair could shave himself bald but a bald man could never shave himself hairy, and on and on and on and on until poor Riwe gave in just to get some peace.

  The funny thing is, it worked! It did not grow hair in the strict sense of the word: Riwe developed a thin coating of fuzz, like a newly hatched chick. You could only really see it when the light was behind him. It never needed cutting and it never got longer or thicker. Kask was ecstatic. It proved he was on the right track, he said, and Riwe, who really was compassionate and patient, underwent test after test and examination after examination while Kask tried to figure out what had gone wrong and what had gone right.

  The uneasiness that Adarich felt and worried about was widespread in the camp, although optimism was in the ascendant. The old hostilities between national groups, particularly Russians and Ukrainians, were very much alive and some of us believed that the kum was increasing his efforts to promote such quarrels as a way of heading off the mutinies, that all camp commandants and godfathers doubtless had nightmares about all the time. Marusich and I had agreed that the energies of the national organizations would be put to better use if they were pooled to fight the KGB and the commandant in subtle ways, but it was hard for the two groups to get together.

  Now, back in the hospital with lighter case loads and a great deal of freedom to move around the camp, I began to go among these groups to see what I could do to get them working together instead of against each other. Curiously, because I was American the two groups considered me neutral, and used me to carry messages of negotiation between their leaders. One way in which I was helpful to both sides was to arrange to hospitalize a member of their organization if the prison telegraph reported that this person was likely to be arrested or transferred by the KGB. Sometimes a week or two in the hospital was enough of a delay to cancel the plan entirely, and the man could stay on and continue to work with his group. The part I played was very small, but during this period there began to be a greater spirit of cooperation among the various groups and, as we learned later in, a very dramatic way, this cooperation was growing in other camps in the area as well.

  During this period of rising hopes, more and more prisoners entered formal appeals against their verdicts and sentences. It had been generally accepted that although most prisoners were innocent of anything more subversive than casual talk, and many not even guilty of that, there was simply no point in appealing your sentence because once the Organs had said you were guilty then you were indeed guilty and that was that. But now the appeals were entered thick and fast. One elderly Jew from Smolensk wrote an appeal every week, always to the same address. After twelve weeks he had received no reply. So, having a little money saved, he asked and got permission to send a cablegram to Moscow. The cable consisted of one word: NU?

  The replies to appeals, when they did come, were often baffling. One man had written a careful description of his case, telling the prosecutor’s office that he had been convicted of spying and terrorist activities in Leningrad in 1940 and 1941, but that he had a certificate showing that he was serving in the army in the Ukraine during that period and had many witnesses to attest to this, so could he please expect a review of his case? In reply, after many weeks, a letter came saying that, regarding his request, inquiries had been made and it was confirmed that his wristwatch had been legally confiscated. Irrational incidents like this were not uncommon. We never knew whether it was bureaucratic stupidity or a deliberate device to so discourage the appellant that he would discontinue bothering the government.

  The real effect was to harden the resolve of many of us to find ways to harass our captors, and to accelerate the process of freeing us by making it less and less useful to have us around as slaves.

  In the meantime the camp administration tried to be nice to us, and we were easily seduced because it had been a long time since there had been any pleasure in most of our lives.

  The culture brigade was still touring the camps. I had been suspended for a while after I came home drunk from town, but I soon got back into it, and we were busy practicing and increasing our repertoire two nights a week when we got the news that we were to be combined with a similar brigade from a women’s camp in the Dzhezkazgan area, and that in fact some women performers would be invited to come and work with us at the next rehearsal. This was tremendously exciting. All the men were scrubbed shiny when the night arrived. There were only about ten of us, and, when they came, two women. We were taken outside the camp itself to the administration building opposite the gates, and there we met in a large upstairs hall.

  There was a female guard with the two women.

  Both the women were singers. One was a radio operator from Minsk who had worked in a jamming station. Her whole shift was arrested the night the clock was five minutes slow and they failed to jam the first five minutes of a broadcast from Franco’s Spain. She got fifteen years. Her name was Zoya Tumilovich. The other girl was an Armenian named Nadya, but I never got to know her very well because something snapped when I met Zoya, and all those years of repression and deprivation, of the total absence of a woman from my life, threw up an enormous, irresistible need to be close to this woman. It was not a matter of falling in love: I just had to be close to her, hold her, hand when I could, flirt with her, look in her eyes, do what I could to be near her.

  The guards were very easygoing when we first got together. They allowed us several minutes of informal ice-breaking before we had to begin our rehearsals; so the men all strolled over to the women, both sexes terribly shy, and there was a round of solemn embraces as there might have been meeting a group of old friends of the same sex. But when it was my turn I could not resist putting my lips to Zoya’s cheek and pressing my hand hard in the small of her back. She looked in my eyes and blushed but she did not pull away. I stuck to her like a burr in those first few minutes and made it as clear as I could that I was terribly interested, and she responded very warmly. By the second or third rehearsal we were exchanging very frank gazes and sneaking touches under the noses of the guards. It was immensely arousing and frustrating at the same time because there was no conceivable way of being alone together.

  The concert we were to do jointly was just a few weeks away. I was confident that during the traveling between camps and the excitement of performances Zoya and I would find some way to be alone. But suddenly that confidence got a bad blow. The rehearsals were canceled indefinitely. There were rumors of a terrible rebellion at the camp near Kingir, about twenty-seven kilometers from ours, and suddenly everything became as harsh and tight and terrible as it had been when I first arrived in Dzhezkazgan.

  The story I pieced together from a number of sources. At first it was just confused rumors. Guards in a Kingir convoy had come to work drunk and shot a man for fun and the whole camp had gone on a protest strike. Or the guards had shot a whole work column and the camp was rioting. Or variations on those basic events.

  Later on Victor turned up at the hospital. He had been in Kingir at the time and was able to describe a good part of what happened. None of our guards would tell us anything. Lavrenov was absolutely tight-mouthed about it, and nervous as a cat. But finally we put together a story that looked like this: The convoys had been getting pretty lax. You used to have to march silently with your hands behind your back, but in the thaw many convoys had stopped being rigid about this. One day a Kingir convoy leader started shouting at his column that the prisoners were not obeying regulations and they better get their hands back and shut up. It was very tense and there was a
lot of muttered ugly talk from the prisoners. One guard was drunk; just one. He got carried away, or perhaps he was frightened by the mutinous appearance of the prisoners, or perhaps his convoy commander egged him on. No one knew. But what was known was that he opened fire with his submachine gun, his avtomat. By the time he had emptied the drum of its seventy-two dumdum bullets there were nine men lying dead and more than thirty wounded, some of them very seriously.

  The Kingir camps were well organized. There were two or three women’s camps there and a continual stream of love affairs between men and women who never saw each other. They were assigned to alternate shifts at the work sites, where they would leave notes and drawings for each other and develop elaborate and serious relationships. Once in a while a male column going to the work site would pass a female column returning, and they would call out, “Is Ivan Stepanovich there?” or “Which of you is Tanya L.? Is Tanya there?” In this way they sometimes got glimpses of each other and years later I found out that many of these couples married after their release. At this time the relationships were part of the fabric of closeness that allowed the whole Kingir complex, men and women, to communicate through a very rapid parasha and arrive at an area-wide decision overnight. They came to the work site the next morning and simply sat down, with a universal refusal to work until that guard had been punished and a special commission from Moscow had been sent to the camps to investigate conditions there.

  The authorities announced that the guard had been apprehended and imprisoned. Things quieted down for a couple of weeks. Then word came from another camp in another area, via the prison telegraph, that the guard in question had turned up there looking quite tanned and healthy as if he had been on a vacation somewhere, sporting a new medal and back at work. There was no way to corroborate this, of course, and it may have been a provocative fiction. But fiction or not, it was believed and it was provocative.

  The KGB had unsubtly shipped in a huge etap of professional criminals. They expected the urki to carry on as usual and intimidate the politicals, but things had changed among the professionals by now. I had seen it coming as far back as early 1951 when I left Sukhanovka the second time. Now the urki knew a great deal of what was going on and had stopped calling the political prisoners fascists and even included them sometimes as part of The People, the lyudi, if their record of resistance against the authorities was a good one. Besides, these professionals heard there were a lot of women in the area and they were not going to risk losing the favor of these women, if they ever met, by harassing the men with whom the women were said to be on good terms.

  The Kingir camp came to a full stop this time, according to the story that was passed on to me. A commission of army generals from Moscow appeared, but this backfired as well because some of the prisoners recognized these so-called generals from Moscow as local KGB. Guards began to get trigger happy again, and there was a lot more shooting. The prisoners broke down the walls between the camps. There were never armed guards inside the camps, so they could get away with this by keeping a good distance from the watchtowers and using other buildings as barricades. Now the guards fled the camps entirely. The prisoners dug trenches and took over the food supply center. It became a state of siege. The prisoners were organized under a former colonel of the army named, I think, Kuznetsov, and they declared themselves a local soviet, loyal to the Moscow government, and demanding only that wanton killing stop and that a genuine commission come from Moscow to see things as they really were. They conducted themselves with great discipline.

  There was a move to kill all the known informers in camp, but Kuznetsov managed to persuade the prisoners that their best interest lay in conducting themselves with the greatest of restraint and dignity. He was a romantic too.

  A whole division of the MVD was entrenched around the camp. Inside, the prisoners managed to build a radio transmitter to let the civilians outside know what was going on. They also built a huge kite and sent it thousands of feet into the air carrying leaflets which were then released over the town of Kingir, explaining the prisoners’ determination to behave in a civilized way and repeating their demand for an investigative commission.

  The MVD cut off the water supply; the prisoners dug a deep well. The military pulled down the gates with tractors and called to the prisoners who wished to come out, saying that they would be given safe conduct; this was a move to lure out the informers, who were presumed to be terrified for their lives. Some informers fled, but the prisoners built up barricades inside the open gates, and declared the barricades to be a line no one could cross with impunity unless approved by the camp soviet.

  They held political lectures and gave safe passage to KGB officers from outside to come in and see how responsible people were conducting themselves. They kept sending out the same message in every way they could devise: the radio transmitter, the kite, the lectures with invited official guests. The message was: We are not mutineers. We are simply political prisoners trying to defend our rights as Soviet citizens.

  Finally a genuine commission came from Moscow. For three days they held hearings on a red-covered table inside the gates. They left and a division of crack tank troops called the Black Cats moved in with dozens of tanks armed with blank cannon shells. They stuck the cannons inside barracks windows and blazed away. Hundreds of prisoners had concussions. Thousands panicked and fled into the streets and many were run down and crushed by the tanks tearing insanely through the whole area. The streets were wet with blood and littered with crushed limbs and intestines. All resistance was totally broken, and later on bulldozers came in and scooped up a mountain of corpses for a mass burial. This happened on the fortieth day, and on that day we found that our own camp was surrounded by tanks too. The gates were opened so we could see them and see the cannons pointed straight into the camp. We did not know only blanks had been fired at Kingir. No one was taken to work that day and nothing was said. The wordless message was a! lowed to sink in. We were completely stunned and subdued by it all.

  I assumed, as soon as the full story of Kingir began to be revealed, that I would never see Zoya again and that all these notions of bringing men and women together would be called off after what had happened a few kilometers away. But I was wrong. Perhaps the MVD assumed that the show of force had been sufficient, and perhaps they were right. Those tanks certainly put an end to any dreaming that might have been going on about the softening of fundamental concepts of who held power and what it was used for and how t was used when the chips were down. Once the smoke had rolled away the administration seemed as though it wanted to pick up life where it had stopped briefly for Kingir. The culture brigade rehearsals were resumed. At first they were a bit subdued, but gradually we got back into the spirit that had begun them. There was no point in sulking. We had been prisoners for years, nearly six years for me, twenty for others; this was a chance to bring some music and some warmth and some humanity to our fellow sailors, all lonely and oppressed on those Gulag waters. So we got on with it.

  The first mixed concert was held in our own mess hall. I stole fifty grams—about two ounces—of hospital alcohol, pure alcohol, to fortify me before going on. I really do not remember much about that concert, except that it was received with wave after wave of applause from a house so full that people were sitting on each other. I remember that Zoya sang beautifully and that I was swept by desire for her. I think I probably played acceptably; my Seventh Waltz of Chopin was applauded as though it were Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. Our acrobatic display went off without a hitch, despite my pre-concert double shot of hospital alcohol. There was a short humorous sketch that got laughs before the first line” was spoken. We had pulled together five tables to make a stage, and rigged a makeshift curtain which, like all makeshift curtains in all amateur theatricals, did not work very well. The make-up room was the kitchen, and to get to the stage we had to stumble across the legs of the audience at one end of the front row. The center of the front row was reserved for the co
mmandants and the godfathers of our own and the adjoining camps, and the women’s camps, and they led the applause and were to all intents and purposes as enthusiastic as the prisoners. Backstage between the acts there was the kind of first-night jitters and excitement that I believe is common in any theatrical performance.

  The performers helped each other tidy up their borrowed civilian clothes and for luck embraced each participant as he or she went out to begin a number. The good mood and excitement caught even the guards, who made rude but not unpleasant peasant jokes and hung around and watched us backstage with considerable curiosity. We all began to feel that Kingir was just an aberration, a disruption in the smooth flow of gradual improvements in our lot. Zoya and I exchanged unambiguous glances all that Sunday afternoon. We still had no way of finding some privacy but I felt sure a way would come. Zoya told me she had found out that there would be another concert the following week at a different camp, and we would see each other again soon.

  The next morning I was called to the prison photographer, a prisoner named Epstein, where I had to borrow a civilian jacket and have a formal photograph taken. Epstein did not know what it was for. “Probably the KGB wants to see you again,” he said gloomily. “Maybe for a confrontation. It happens.”

  I asked him to make a copy of the photograph for my own use and he agreed, and I tried to shut the I possibilities of what it all meant out of my mind.

  The best way was to practice my music and my acrobatic routines with Grigori Levko. Levko taught me a solo number called the Crocodile, in which I would lie on the floor, lock my elbows against my sides and lift myself straight off the floor with my hands only, my feet straight out behind me not touching the floor, and then gradually remove one hand from the I floor so my whole body was suspended horizontally above one hand. Then I worked on being able to pick up a flat handkerchief with my lips while walking on my hands. I could get a standing matchbox, but the extra inch-and-a-half descent to get the handkerchief kept eluding me. I made it an all-or-nothing objective to get that handkerchief. Little obsessions like these, plus the concentrated guitar practice, kept my mind off the possibility of another encounter with the interrogators.