The years 1944–1945 brought to the exile colonies unusually heavy reinforcements from the “liberated” (occupied) territories, and 1947–1949 yet others from the Western republics. All these streams together, even without the exiled peasants, exceeded many times over the figure of 500,000 exiles which was all that Tsarist Russia, the prison house of nations, could muster in the whole course of the nineteenth century.
For what crimes was a citizen of our country in the thirties and forties punishable by exile or banishment?
The commonest crimes can easily be indicated:
1. Belonging to a criminal nationality (for this see the next chapter).
2. A previous term of imprisonment in the camps.
3. Residence in a criminal environment (seditious Leningrad, or areas in which there was a partisan movement, such as the Western Ukraine or the Baltic States).
And then many of the tributaries enumerated at the very beginning of this book branched out to feed the exile system as well as the camps, continually casting up some of their burden on the shores of exile.
We cannot go into the different types and cases of exile, because all our knowledge of it derives from casual stories or letters. If A. M. Ar——v had not written his letter, the reader would not have the following story. In 1943 news came to a village around Vyatka that one of its kolkhoz peasants, Kozhurin, a private in the infantry, had either been sent to a punitive unit or shot outright. His wife, who had six children (the oldest was ten years, the youngest six months old, and two sisters of hers, spinsters nearing fifty, also lived with her), was immediately visited by the executants (you already know the word, reader—it is a euphemism for “executioners”). They gave the family no time to sell anything (their house, cow, sheep, hay, wood, were all abandoned to the pilferers), threw all nine of them with their smaller possessions onto a sledge, and took them sixty kilometers in a hard frost to the town of Vyatka (Kirov). Why they did not freeze on the way God only knows. They were kept for six weeks at the Kirov Transit Prison, then sent to a small pottery near Ukhta. The spinster sisters ate from rubbish heaps, both went mad and both died. The mother and children stayed alive only thanks to the help (the politically ignorant, unpatriotic, in fact anti-Soviet help) of the local population. The sons all served in the army when they grew up and are said to have “completed their military and political training with distinction.” Their mother returned to her native village in 1960—and found not a single log, not a single brick from the stove, where her house had been.
A little cameo like this can surely be threaded on the necklace of our Great Fatherland Victory? But nobody will touch it—it isn’t typical.
To what necklace will you add, to what category of exiles will you assign soldiers disabled in the Fatherland War, and exiled because of it? We know almost nothing about them. They were exiled to a certain northern island—exiled because they had consented to be mutilated in war for the glory of the Fatherland and in order to improve the health of a nation, which had by now won such victories in all forms of athletics and ball games. These luckless war heroes are held there on their unknown island, naturally without the right to correspond with the mainland (a very few letters break through, and this is how we know about it), and naturally on meager rations, because they cannot work hard enough to warrant generosity.
I believe they are still living out their days there.
Chapter 4
Nations in Exile
THE BUSINESS OF banishment was immeasurably improved and speeded up when they drove the first special settlers into exile. In the year of the Great Break they designated the dekulakized as “special settlers”—and this made for much greater flexibility and efficiency; it left no grounds for appeal since it was not only kulaks who were dekulakized. Call them “special settlers,” and no one can wriggle free.
Then the Great Father gave orders that this word be applied to banished nations.
Even He was slow to realize the value of his discovery. His first experiment was very cautious. In 1937 some tens of thousands of those suspicious Koreans were swiftly and quietly transferred from the Far East to Kazakhstan. So swiftly that they spent the first winter in mud-brick houses without windows (where would all that glass have come from!). And so quietly that nobody except the neighboring Kazakhs learned of this resettlement, no one who counted let slip a word about it, no foreign correspondent uttered a squeak.
He liked it. He remembered it. And in 1940 the same method was applied on the outskirts of Leningrad, cradle of the Revolution. But this time the banished were not taken at night and at bayonet point. Instead, it was called a “triumphal send-off” to the (newly conquered) Karelo-Finnish Republic. At high noon, with red flags flapping and brass bands braying, the Leningrad Finns and Estonians were dispatched to settle their new native soil.
These were mere trial runs. Only in July, 1941, did the time come to test the method at full power: the autonomous and of course traitorous republic of the Volga Germans (with its twin capitals, Engels and Marxstadt) had to be expunged and its population hurled somewhere well to the East in a matter of days. Here for the first time the dynamic method of exiling whole peoples was applied in all its purity, and how much easier, how much more rewarding it proved to use a single criterion—that of nationality—rather than all those individual interrogations, and decrees each naming a single person. As for the Germans seized in other parts of Russia (and every last one was gathered in), local NKVD officers had no need of higher education to determine whether a man was an enemy or not. If the name’s German—grab him.
The system had been proved and perfected, and henceforward would fasten its pitiless talons on any nation pointed out to it, designated and doomed as treacherous—and more adroitly every time: the Chechens; the Ingush; the Karachai; the Balkars; the Kalmyks; the Kurds; the Crimean Tatars; and finally, the Caucasian Greeks. What made the system particularly effective was that the decision taken by the Father of the Peoples was made known to a particular people not in the form of verbose legal proceedings, but by means of a military operation carried out by modern motorized infantry. Armed divisions enter the doomed people’s locality by night and occupy key positions. The criminal nation wakes up and sees every settlement ringed with machine guns and automatic rifles. And they are given twelve hours to get ready whatever each of them can carry in his hands. Then each of them is made to sit cross-legged in the back of a lorry, like a prisoner (old women, mothers with babies at the breast: sit down, all of you; you heard the order!), and the lorries travel under escort to the railway station. From there prison trains take them to a new place.
Neatness and uniformity! That is the advantage of exiling whole nations at once! No special cases! No exceptions, no individual protests! They all go quietly, because . . . they’re all in it together. All ages and both sexes go, and that still leaves something to be said. Those still in the womb go, too, and are exiled unborn, by the same decree. Yes, children not yet conceived go into exile, for it is their lot to be conceived under the high hand of the same decree; and from the very day of their birth, whatever that obsolete and tiresome Article 35 of the Criminal Code may say (“Sentence of exile cannot be passed on persons under 16 years of age”), from the moment they thrust their heads out into the light they will be special settlers, exiles in perpetuity. Their coming of age, their sixteenth birthdays, will be marked only by the first of their regular outings to report at the MVD post.
All that the exiles have left behind them—their houses, wide open and still warm, their belongings lying in disorder, the home put together and improved by ten or even twenty generations—passes without differentiation to the agents of the punitive organs, then some of it to the state, some to neighbors belonging to more fortunate nations, and nobody will write to complain about the loss of a cow, a piece of furniture, or some crockery.
The only crack in the principle of uniformity was made by mixed marriages (not for nothing has our socialist state always been against
them). When the Germans, and later the Greeks, were exiled, spouses belonging to other nationalities were not sent with them. But this caused a great deal of confusion, and left foci of infection in places supposedly sterilized. (Like those old Greek women who came home to their children to die.)
Where were the exiled nations sent? Kazakhstan was much favored—and there, together with the ordinary exiles, they formed more than half the republic’s population, so that it could aptly be called Ka-zek-stan. But Central Asia, Siberia (where very many Kalmyks perished along the Yenisei), the Northern Urals, and the Northern European areas of the U.S.S.R. all received their fair share.
For every nation exiled, an epic will someday be written—on its separation from its native land, and its destruction in Siberia. Only the nations themselves can voice their feelings about all they have lived through: we have no words to speak for them, and we must not get under their feet.
The tedium of it all! Nothing but the same thing over and over again. At the beginning of this Part VI we appeared to be discussing something new: not the camps, but the exile system. And this chapter made a fresh start: our theme was no longer the administrative exiles, but the special settlers.
Yet we are back where we started.
Must we—and if so, how often must we repeat ourselves again and again and again—tell the story of other, and different, exile colonies? In other places? At other periods? Peopled by other exiled nations?
And if so, which? . . .
Chapter 5
End of Sentence
IN EIGHT YEARS of prison and prison camp I had never heard anyone who had experienced exile say a good word about it. But from his first days in jail under investigation and in transit, simply because the six flat stone surfaces of a cell press in on him too closely, the dream of exile burns like a secret light in the prisoner’s mind, a flickering iridescent mirage, and the wasted breasts of prisoners on their dark bunks heave in sighs of longing: “If only they would sentence me to exile!”
I did not escape the common lot; far from it—the dream of exile had me more powerfully than most in its grip. I even sent a naïve appeal to the Supreme Soviet: for commutation of my eight years in the camps to exile for life, in however remote and wild a place. The elephant did not even sneeze in reply. (I had not yet realized that lifelong exile would always be waiting for me, but that it would come after, not instead of, the camp.)
In 1952 a dozen prisoners were “released” from the 3,000-strong “Russian” Camp Division at Ekibastuz. It looked very strange at the time: 58s, let out through the gates! Ekibastuz had been in existence for three years by then, and not a single man had been released, nor had anyone reached the end of his sentence. Evidently, for the few who had lived to see the day, the first wartime tenners had just ended.
We impatiently awaited letters from them. A few came, directly or indirectly. And we learned that nearly all of them had been taken from the camp to places of exile, although their sentences had not included exile. But this surprised no one. It was clear to our jailers and to us that justice, length of sentence, formal documentation, had nothing to do with it; the point was that once we had been declared enemies, the state would ever after assert the right of the stronger and trample us, crush us, squash us, until the day we died. And we were so used to it, it had become so much part of us, that no other state of affairs would have seemed normal either to the regime or to us.
In Stalin’s last years it was not the fate of the exiles that caused alarm, but that of the nominally liberated, those who to all appearances were now safely beyond the gates, and unguarded, those from whom the tutelary gray wing of the MVD had apparently been withdrawn. Exile, which the powers that be obtusely regarded as an additional punishment, was a prolongation of the prisoner’s irresponsible existence, the fatalistic routine in which he feels so secure. Exile relieved us of the need to choose a place of residence for ourselves, and so from troublesome uncertainties and errors. No place would have been right, except that to which they had sent us. This was the one and only place in the whole Soviet Union where no one could reproach us as intruders.
As we left the camp under guard we were still careful to respect the final prison superstitions: on no account must you look back at your last prison (or else you will return), and you must do the right thing with your spoon. (What was the right thing, though? Some said take it with you, or you would return for it; others said fling it at the prison, or else the prison would pursue you. I had molded my spoon myself in the foundry, and I took it with me.)
They took us to the jail—and the jail admitted us without the usual body search and bath. The accursed walls were losing some of their harshness! In the morning the block superintendent unlocked the door and said almost in a whisper, “Come out and bring all your belongings.”
The devil was unclenching his claws. . . .
We stepped out into the arms of a red spring morning. The dawn light was warming the brick walls of the jail. A lorry was waiting for us in the middle of the yard, with two zeks who were joining our party already sitting in the back. This was the time to breathe deeply, to look around, to steep ourselves in the uniqueness of that moment—but we simply could not waste the chance to strike up an acquaintance. . . .
In the morning they sent up a lorry, and the same escort, after a night out of barracks, came to fetch us. Sixty kilometers farther into the steppe. We got stuck in muddy hollows, and jumped down from the lorry (something we could not have done as zeks) to heave and push it out of the mire, to get the eventful journey over and arrive in perpetual exile more quickly. The escort troops stood in a half-circle and kept guard over us.
The steppe sped by, kilometer after kilometer. To right and to left, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but harsh gray inedible grass, and only very occasionally a wretched Kazakh village framed with trees. At length the tops of a few poplars (Kok-Terek means “green poplar”) appeared ahead of us, over the curve of the steppe.
We had arrived! The lorry sped between Chechen and Kazakh adobe huts, raising a cloud of dust and drawing a pack of indignant dogs in pursuit. Amiable donkeys with little carts made way for us, and from one yard a camel turned slowly and contemptuously to look at us. There were people, too, but we had eyes only for the women—those unfamiliar, forgotten creatures: look at that pretty dark girl in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand to watch our lorry pass; look at those three walking together in flowery red dresses. Not one of them Russian. “This is all right—we shall find wives for ourselves yet!”
Directly across the street from the MGB stood an amazing building, one story, yet quite high; four Doric columns solemnly upheld a false portico, at the foot of the columns were two steps faced with smooth stone, and over all this—there was a blackened straw roof. My heart could not help beating faster. It was a school! A ten-year school. Stop pounding, be quiet, you nuisance. That building is nothing to you.
Crossing the main street to the magic gate goes a girl with waved hair, neatly dressed in a little wasp-waisted jacket. Surely she is walking on air? She is a teacher! She is too young to have graduated from an institute; she must have attended a seven-year school and then a teachers’ training college. How I envy her! What a gulf there is between her and a common laborer like me. We belong to different estates, and I would never dare to walk arm in arm with her.
The Commandants were easygoing and allowed us exiles to spend the night not in a locked room but out in the yard, on hay.
A night under the open sky! We had forgotten what it was like. . . . There had always been locks, and bars, always walls and ceilings.
It was only the third of March, but there was not the slightest chill in the night air; it was still almost summery, as it had been in the daytime. Again and again the braying of donkeys rose over the sprawling town of Kok-Terek, long-drawn-out and passionate, telling the she-asses of their love, of the ungovernable strength flooding their bodies. Some of the braying was probably the she-asse
s answering.
I cannot sleep! I walk and walk and walk in the moonlight. The donkeys sing their song. The camels sing. Every fiber in me sings: I am free! I am free!
In the end I lie down beside my comrades, on some hay under the open-sided shelter. Two steps away from us, horses stand at their mangers peacefully champing hay all night long. Surely there could be no sweeter, no more friendly sound on this our first night of freedom.
Champ away, you mild, inoffensive creatures!
Next day we were allowed to move into private lodgings. I found myself a henhouse to suit my pocket, with a single bleary window and such a low roof that even where it was highest, in the middle, I could not stand upright. “Give me a low-roofed cottage,” I once wrote in prison, dreaming of exile. It was not very pleasant, all the same, not being able to raise my head. Still, it was a little house of my own! The floor was earthen. I put my padded camp vest on it, and there was my bed! I had no oil lamp as yet—I had nothing!! an exile must select and buy every single thing he needs, as though he has just landed on this earth—but I did not feel the want of it. All those years, in our cells and our huts, the state’s electricity had seared our souls, and now darkness was bliss. Even darkness can be an element of freedom!
What more could I desire? . . .
But the morning of March 6 surpassed anything that I could have wished for! Chadova, my elderly landlady, an exile from Novgorod, whispered, because she dared not say it out loud: “Go and listen to the radio. I’m afraid to repeat what I’ve just heard.”
The Gulag Archipelago Page 51