And so, in these circumstances, the convoy guard systematically mixed the thieves and the politicals in each compartment of their Stolypin, not through lack of space for them elsewhere and not through haste, but out of greed. And the thieves did not let them down: they stripped the beavers10 of everything, and then those possessions migrated into the suitcases of the convoy.
But what could be done if the beavers had been loaded into the Stolypin cars, and the train was moving, and there simply weren’t any thieves at all—they simply hadn’t put any aboard? What if they weren’t being shipped out on prisoner transports that day, even from one of the stations along the way? This could and did happen—several such cases are known.
In 1947 they were transporting from Moscow to the Vladimir Central Prison a group of foreigners who had opulent possessions—as could be seen the very first time their suitcases were opened. At that point, the convoy itself began a systematic confiscation of their belongings right there in the railroad car. So that nothing should be missed, the prisoners were forced to undress down to their bare skin and to sit on the floor of the car near the toilet while their things were examined and taken away. But the convoy guard failed to take into account that they were taking these prisoners not to a camp but to a genuine prison. On their arrival there, I. A. Korneyev handed in a written complaint, describing exactly what had happened. They found the particular unit of convoy guards and searched them. Some of the things were recovered and returned to their owners, who also received compensation in money for those that weren’t recovered. They say that the convoy guards got from ten to fifteen years. However, this is something that cannot be checked, and anyway they would have been convicted under an ordinary nonpolitical article of the Code, and they wouldn’t have had to spend a long time in prison.
However, that was an exceptional case, and if he had managed to restrain his greed in time, the chief of the convoy would have realized that it was better not to get involved in it. And here is another, less complicated case, which probably means that it happened often. In August, 1945, in the Moscow-Novosibirsk Stolypin car (in which A. Susi was being transported), it turned out that there weren’t any thieves. And the trip was a long one, and the Stolypins just crawled along at that time. Without hurrying in the least, all in good time, the convoy chief declared a search—one prisoner at a time in the corridor with his things. Those summoned were made to undress in accordance with prison rules, but that wasn’t why the search was being conducted, for each prisoner who had been searched was, in fact, put right back into his own crowded compartment, and any knife, anything forbidden, could simply have been passed from hand to hand. The real purpose of the search was to examine their personal articles—the clothes they were wearing and whatever was in their bags. And right there, beside the bags, not in the least bored by the whole protracted search, the chief of the convoy guard, an officer, stood with a haughty poker face, with his assistant, a sergeant, beside him. Sinful greed kept trying to pop out, but the officer kept it hidden under a pretended indifference. It was the same situation as an old rake looking over little girls but embarrassed by the presence of outsiders—yes, and by that of the girls too—and not knowing exactly how to proceed. How badly he needed just a few thieves! But there were no thieves in the transport.
There were no thieves aboard, but there were individuals among the prisoners who had already been infected by the thief-laden atmosphere of the prison. After all, the example of thieves is instructive and calls forth imitations: it demonstrates that there is an easy way to live in prison. Two recent officers were in one of the compartments—Sanin (from the navy) and Merezhkov. They were both 58’s, but their attitudes had already changed. Sanin, with Merezhkov’s support, proclaimed himself the monitor of the compartment and, through a convoy guard, requested a meeting with their chief. (He had fathomed that haughtiness and its need of a pimp!) This was unheard of, but Sanin was summoned, and they had a chat somewhere. Following Sanin’s example, someone in the second compartment also asked for a meeting. And that person was similarly received.
And the next morning they issued not twenty ounces of bread—the prisoner-transport ration at the time—but no more than nine ounces.
They gave out the ration, and a quiet murmur began. A murmur, but in fear of any “collective action,” these politicals did not speak up. In the event, only one among them loudly asked the guard distributing the bread: “Citizen chief! How much does this ration weigh?”
“The correct weight,” he was told.
“I demand a reweighing; otherwise I will not accept it!” the dissatisfied prisoner declared loudly.
The whole car fell silent. Many waited before beginning to eat their ration, expecting that theirs, too, would be reweighed. And at that moment, in all his spotlessness, the officer appeared. Everyone fell silent, which made his words all the weightier and all the more irresistible.
“Which one here spoke out against the Soviet government?”
All hearts stopped beating. (People will protest that this is a universal approach, that even out in freedom every little chief declares himself to be the Soviet government, and just try to argue with him about it. But for those who are panicky, who have just been sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda, the threat is more frightening.)
“Who was starting a mutiny over the bread ration?” the officer demanded.
“Citizen lieutenant, I only wanted . . .” The guilty rebel was already trying to explain it all away.
“Aha, you’re the bastard? You’re the one who doesn’t like the Soviet government?”
(And why rebel? Why argue? Wasn’t it really easier to eat that little underweight ration, to suffer it in silence? And now he had fallen right in it!)
“You stinking shit! You counterrevolutionary! You ought to be hanged, and you have the nerve to demand that the bread ration be reweighed! You rat—the Soviet government gives you food and drink, and you have the brass to be dissatisfied? Do you know what you’re going to get for that?”
Orders to the guard: “Take him out!” The lock rattles. “Come on out, you! Hands behind your back!” They bring out the unfortunate.
“Now who else is dissatisfied? Who else wants his bread ration reweighed?”
(And it’s not as if you could prove anything anyway. It’s not as if they’d take your word against the lieutenant’s if you were to complain somewhere that there were only nine ounces instead of twenty.)
It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip. All the rest turned out to be satisfied, and that was how the penalty ration was confirmed for all the days of the long journey. And they began to withhold the sugar too. The convoy had appropriated it.
(And this took place during the summer of our two great victories—over Germany and Japan—victories which embellish the history of our Fatherland and which our grandsons and great-grandsons will learn about in school.)
The prisoners went hungry for a day and then a second day, by which time several of them began to get a bit wiser, and Sanin said to his compartment: “Look, fellows: If we go on this way, we’re lost. Come on now, all of you who have some good stuff with you, let me have it, and I’ll trade it for something to eat.” With great self-assurance he accepted some articles and turned down others. (Not all the prisoners were willing to let their things go—and, you see, no one forced them to either.) And then he and Merezhkov asked to be allowed to leave the compartment, and, strangely enough, the convoy let them out. Taking the things, they went off toward the compartment of the convoy guard, and they returned from there with sliced loaves of bread and with makhorka. These very loaves constituted the eleven ounces missing from the daily rations. Now, however, they were not distributed on an equal basis but went only to those who had handed over their belongings.
And that was quite fair: after all, they had all admitted they were satisfied with the reduced bread ration. It was also fair because the belongings were, after all, worth something, and it was right that they s
hould be paid for. And it was also fair in the long view because those things were simply too good for camp and were destined anyway to be taken away or stolen there.
The makhorka had belonged to the guard. The soldiers shared their precious makhorka with the prisoners. And that was fair, too, since they had eaten the prisoners’ bread and drunk up their sugar, which was too good for enemies anyway. And, last, it was only fair, too, that Sanin and Merezhkov took the largest share for themselves even though they’d contributed nothing—because without them all this would not have been arranged.
And so they sat crammed in there, in the semidarkness, and some of them chewed on their neighbors’ chunks of bread and their neighbors sat there and watched them. The guard permitted smoking only on a collective basis, every two hours—and the whole car was as filled with smoke as if there’d been a fire. Those who at first had clung to their things now regretted that they hadn’t given them to Sanin and asked him to take them, but Sanin said he’d only take them later on.
This whole operation wouldn’t have worked so well and so thoroughly had it not been for the slow trains and slow Stolypin cars of the immediate postwar years, when they kept unhitching them from one train and hitching them to another and held them waiting in the stations. And, at the same time, if it hadn’t been the immediate postwar period, neither would there have been those greed-inspiring belongings. Their train took a week to get to Kuibyshev—and during that entire week they got only nine ounces of bread a day. (This, to be sure, was twice the ration distributed during the siege of Leningrad.) And they did get dried Caspian carp and water, in addition. They had to ransom their remaining bread ration with their personal possessions. And soon the supply of these articles exceeded the demand, and the convoy guards became very choosy and reluctant to take more things.
They were received at the Kuibyshev Transit Prison, given baths, and returned as a group to that very same Stolypin. The convoy which took them over was new—but, in passing on the relay baton, the previous crew had evidently told them how to put the squeeze on, and the very same system of ransoming their own rations functioned all the way to Novosibirsk. (It is easy to see how this infectious experiment might have spread rapidly through whole units of the convoy guards.)
And when they were unloaded on the ground between the tracks in Novosibirsk, some new officer came up and asked them: “Any complaints against the convoy?” And they were all so confused that nobody answered.
The first chief of convoy had calculated accurately—this was Russia!
* * *
Another factor which distinguishes Stolypin passengers from the rest of the train is that they do not know where their train is going and at what station they will disembark: after all, they don’t have tickets, and they don’t read the route signs on the cars. In Moscow, they sometimes load them on so far from the station platform that even the Muscovites among them don’t know which of the eight Moscow stations they are at. For several hours the prisoners sit all squeezed together in the stench while they wait for a switching engine. And finally it comes and takes the zak car to the already made-up train. If it is summertime, the station loudspeakers can be heard: “Moscow to Ufa departing from Track 3. Moscow to Tashkent still loading at Platform 1 . . .” That means it’s the Kazan Station, and those who know the geography of the Archipelago are now explaining to their comrades that Vorkuta and Pechora are out: they leave from the Yaroslavl Station; and the Kirov and Gorky camps11 are out too. They never send people from Moscow to Byelorussia, the Ukraine, or the Caucasus anyway. They have no room there even for their own. Let’s listen some more: the Ufa train has left, and ours hasn’t moved. The Tashkent train has started, and we’re still here. “Moscow to Novosibirsk departing. All those seeing passengers off, disembark. . . . All passengers show their tickets. . . .” We have started. Our train! And what does that prove? Nothing so far. The middle Volga area is still open, and the South Urals. And Kazakhstan with the Dzhezkazgan copper mines. And Taishet, with its factory for creosoting railroad ties (where, they say, creosote penetrates the skin and bones and its vapors fill the lungs—and that is death). All Siberia is still open to us—all the way to Sovetskaya Gavan. The Kolyma too. And Norilsk.
And if it is wintertime, the car is battened down and the loudspeakers are inaudible. If the convoy guards obey their regulations, then you’ll hear nary a whisper from them about the route either. And thus we set out, and, entangled in other bodies, fall asleep to the clacking of the wheels without knowing whether we will see forest or steppe through the window tomorrow. Through that window in the corridor. From the middle shelf, through the grating, the corridor, the two windowpanes, and still another grating, you can still see some switching tracks and a piece of open space hurtling by the train. If the windowpanes have not frosted over, you can sometimes even read the names of the stations—some Avsyunino or Undol. Where are these stations? No one in the compartment knows. Sometimes you can judge from the sun whether you are being taken north or east. Or at some place called Tufanovo, they might shove some dilapidated nonpolitical offender into your compartment, and he would tell you he was being taken to Danilov to be tried and was scared he’d get a couple of years. In this way you would find out that you’d gone through Yaroslavl that night, which meant that the first transit prison on your route would be Vologda. And some know-it-alls in the compartment would savor gloomily the famous flourish, stressing all the “o’s,” of the Vologda guards: “The Vologda convoy guards don’t joke!”
But even after figuring out the general direction, you still haven’t really found out anything: transit prisons lie in clusters on your route, and you can be shunted off to one side or another from any one of them. You don’t fancy Ukhta, nor Inta, nor Vorkuta. But do you think that Construction Project 501—a railroad in the tundra, crossing northern Siberia—is any sweeter? It is worse than any of them.
Five years after the war, when the waves of prisoners had finally settled within the river banks (or perhaps they had merely expanded the MVD staffs?), the Ministry sorted out the millions of piles of cases and started sending along with each sentenced prisoner a sealed envelope that contained his case file and, visible through a slot in the envelope, his route and destination, inserted for the convoy (and the convoy wasn’t supposed to know anything more than that—because the contents of the file might have a corrupting influence). So then, if you were lying on the middle bunk, and the sergeant stopped right next to you, and you could read upside down, you might be fast enough to read that someone was being taken to Knyazh-Pogost and that you were being sent to Kargopol.
So now there would be more worries! What was Kargopol Camp? Who had ever heard of it? What kind of general-assignment work did they have there? (There did exist general-assignment work which was fatal, and some that was not that bad.) Was this a death camp or not?
And then how had you failed to let your family know in the hurry of leaving, and they thought you were still in the Stalinogorsk Camp near Tula? If you were very nervous about this and very inventive, you might succeed in solving that problem too: you might find someone with a piece of pencil lead half an inch long and a piece of crumpled paper. Making sure the convoy doesn’t see you from the corridor (you are forbidden to lie with your feet toward the corridor; your head has to be in that direction), hunched over and facing in the opposite direction, you write to your family, between lurches of the car, that you have suddenly been taken from where you were and are being sent somewhere else, and you might be able to send only one letter a year from your new destination, so let them be prepared for this eventuality. You have to fold your letter into a triangle and carry it to the toilet in the hope of a lucky break: they might just take you there while approaching a station or just after passing a station, and the convoy guard on the car platform might get careless, and you can quickly press down on the flush pedal and, using your body as a shield, throw the letter into the hole. It will get wet and soiled, but it might fall right through and
land between the rails. Or it might even get through dry, and the draft beneath the car will catch and whirl it, and it will fall under the wheels or miss them and land on the downward slope of the embankment. Perhaps it will lie there until it rains, until it snows, until it disintegrates, but perhaps a human hand will pick it up. And if this person isn’t a stickler for the Party line, he will make the address legible, he will straighten out the letters, or perhaps put it in an envelope, and perhaps the letter will even reach its destination. Sometimes such letters do arrive—postage due, half-blurred, washed out, crumpled, but carrying a clearly defined splash of grief.
* * *
But it is better still to stop as soon as possible being a sucker—that ridiculous greenhorn, that prey, that victim. The chances are ninety-five out of a hundred that your letter won’t get there. But even if it does, it will bring no happiness to your home. And you won’t be measuring your life and breath by hours and days once you have entered this epic country: arrivals and departures here are separated by decades, by a quarter-century. You will never return to your former world. And the sooner you get used to being without your near and dear ones, and the sooner they get used to being without you, the better it will be. And the easier!
And keep as few things as possible, so that you don’t have to fear for them. Don’t take a suitcase for the convoy guard to crush at the door of the car (when there are twenty-five people in a compartment, what else could he figure out to do with it?). And don’t wear new boots, and don’t wear fashionable oxfords, and don’t wear a woolen suit: these things are going to be stolen, taken away, swept aside, or switched, either in the Stolypin car, or in the Black Maria, or in the transit prison. Give them up without a struggle—because otherwise the humiliation will poison your heart. They will take them away from you in a fight, and trying to hold onto your property will only leave you with a bloodied mouth. All those brazen snouts, those jeering manners, those two-legged dregs, are repulsive to you. But by owning things and trembling about their fate aren’t you forfeiting the rare opportunity of observing and understanding? And do you think that the freebooters, the pirates, the great privateers, painted in such lively colors by Kipling and Gumilyev, were not simply these same blatnye, these same thieves? That’s just what they were. Fascinating in romantic literary portraits, why are they so repulsive to you here?
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 58