Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  But when the descendant of the Decembrist got his diploma, he abandoned Edit Abramovna and demanded a divorce.

  “Like all Jews, she’s got too many relatives. That’s no good for me.”

  He may have abandoned Edit Abramovna, but he was not able to abandon Far East Construction. He had to go back to the Far North, if only for three years. His ability to get on with the authorities had won Lunin, a qualified doctor, an unexpectedly important appointment: chief of the surgical department of the central hospital for prisoners on the left bank, in the settlement of Debin. By then, 1948, I was the senior paramedic in the surgical department.

  Lunin’s appointment was as sudden as a thunderbolt.

  The nub of the matter was that a surgeon called Rubantsev, the former chief of the department, was a wartime surgeon at the front, a major in the medical service, a capable and experienced worker who had come here after the war and meant to stay. Rubantsev had one major fault: he couldn’t get on with the top bosses, hated sycophants and liars, and was treated as an outsider by Shcherbakov, the head of health services in Kolyma. Rubantsev had signed a contract and had come already warned to treat the prisoners as his enemies; but he was a clever, independent-minded man and very soon realized that his “political” preparation had been a deceit. Rubantsev’s colleagues were self-serving, slanderous, idle swine, while the prisoners—of all professions, including the medical—were the people who kept the hospital, the treatments, and the business going. Rubantsev grasped the truth and refused to conceal it. He applied for a transfer to Magadan, where there was a secondary school: he had a school-age son. His application was refused, though not in writing. After a lot of trouble he managed a few months later to get his son a place in a boarding school about ninety kilometers from Debin. Rubantsev was by now confident about his job, and he was getting rid of the idlers and the thieves. These actions, which threatened the general peace, were immediately reported to Shcherbakov’s headquarters in Magadan.

  Shcherbakov disliked refinement in his dealings with others. Swearing, threats, criminal charges were all very well when talking to prisoners and former prisoners, but they didn’t go down well with a contract worker, a surgeon from the front, with medals on his chest.

  Shcherbakov dug up Rubantsev’s old application and transferred him to Magadan. Even though it was the middle of the academic year, even though everything was now running smoothly in the surgical department, Rubantsev was forced to abandon it all and leave. . . .

  Lunin and I met on the stairs. He had a habit of blushing when he was embarrassed. His cheeks now flushed with blood. But he did “treat” me to a cigarette, expressed pleasure at my success, my “career,” and he told me about Edit Abramovna.

  Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Rubantsev had left. Two days later a drunken party was organized in the treatment room: the surgical spirit was tried out by Kovaliov, the chief doctor, and by Vinokurov, the head of the hospital, who had both been rather afraid of Rubantsev and had avoided visiting the surgical department. Doctors’ surgeries began to have drinking parties to which prisoners—female nurses and ward assistants—were invited: in short, all hell was let loose. Operations in the sterile department began to be done with wounds left unsutured, because nobody would use precious spirits to sterilize the operation area. The bosses were walking half drunk up and down the surgical department.

  This hospital was my hospital. After I finished my courses at the end of 1946, I came here with the patients. I witnessed the hospital’s expansion. It had been a building that belonged to the Kolyma regiment; after the war a specialist in military camouflage rejected the building because it could be seen among the mountains from ten kilometers away. It was given to the hospital for prisoners. Its owners, the Kolyma regiment, as they were leaving, ripped out all the water pipes and drainage pipes that could be ripped out of an enormous three-story building; they removed all the furniture from the auditorium and burned it in the boiler room. The walls were smashed, the doors broken down. The Kolyma regiment left in true Russian style. We carefully restored everything, screw by screw, and brick by brick.

  We were a collection of doctors and paramedics who were trying to do the best we could. For very many of us this was our sacred duty, paying back our medical education by helping people.

  •

  All the idle scroungers raised their heads the moment Rubantsev left.

  “Why are you taking spirits from the cupboard?”

  “Go stuff yourself,” a nurse replied. She went on: “There’s no Rubantsev now, thank God. Sergei Mikhailovich said I could. . . .”

  I was struck, depressed by Lunin’s behavior. The orgies continued.

  During one of his five-minute pep talks, Lunin mocked Rubantsev: “He never did a single stomach ulcer operation, and he calls himself a surgeon?”

  This was a familiar subject. True, Rubantsev didn’t operate on stomach ulcers. The patients from the therapeutic department who had this diagnosis were prisoners, and they were emaciated, dystrophic; they had no hope of surviving an operation. “Bad background,” Rubantsev used to say.

  “Coward,” yelled Lunin, accepting twelve of these patients from the therapeutic department. All twelve were operated on, and all twelve died. The hospital doctors had a reminder of Rubantsev’s experience and mercy.

  “Sergei Mikhailovich, we can’t work like this.”

  “I’m not taking instructions from you!”

  I submitted a request to summon a commission from Magadan. I was transferred to the forest, to serve a forestry brigade. They wanted to send me to a punishment mine, but the NKVD man in the district headquarters persuaded them not to: this was no longer 1938, it wasn’t worth it.

  A commission did come and Lunin was “dismissed from Far Eastern Construction.” So instead of three years, he was forced to work for just eighteen months.

  A year later, when the hospital’s management was changed, I came back from my paramedic clinic in the forest and took over the hospital’s reception room.

  Once in a Moscow street I met the descendant of the Decembrist. We ignored each other.

  •

  It was sixteen years later when I found out that Edit Abramovna had managed a second time to get Lunin reinstated at Far Eastern Construction. She and Lunin came to the settlement of Pevek in Chukotka. This was where they had their last conversation and their last, fatal discussion. Edit Abramovna threw herself into the water and drowned.

  Sometimes sleeping pills don’t work, and I wake up in the middle of the night. I recall the past and I can see a charming female face and can hear a low voice say, “Sergei, is this your friend?”

  1962

  POORCOMS

  ON RUSSIA’S tragic pages of 1937 and 1938 there are also some lyrical lines, written in very peculiar handwriting. A curious custom, a tradition that had been kept up for several decades, was current in the cells of Butyrki prison, that enormous organism with its complex life of a great many blocks, cellars, and towers, all packed to the gills, to the point of suffocation, with prisoners under investigation, and this custom continued, despite the maelstrom of arrests, the parties of prisoners departing without verdicts or sentences, in cells crowded with living human beings.

  The constantly enforced vigilance, which had grown into spy mania, was a disease that had the whole country in its grip. To any trivial incident or slip of the tongue an ominous secret meaning was attributed, and this meaning was subjected to interpretation in the interrogators’ offices.

  One contribution made by the prison department was a prohibition on any gifts of things or food to prisoners under investigation. The wise men of the legal world asserted that any text, even an extract from Anna Karenina, could be communicated to the prison just by a combination of two buns, five apples, and an old pair of trousers.

  Such “signals from the outside world,” the fruit of the inflamed brains of the eager old hands of the Institution, were stopped without exception. From now on only money could be
sent in, and no more than fifty rubles a month to each prisoner. The money transfer could only be in round figures—ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty rubles—so as to make sure than no new coded “alphabet” of signals could be developed.

  The simplest and most reliable action was to forbid all money transfers, but such a measure was left to the interrogator dealing with a particular “case.” “In the interests of the investigation” he had the right to forbid all forms of money transfer. But there was also a commercial interest at play: the shop or “stall” in Butyrki prison increased its turnover by an enormous amount once parcels of food and other things were forbidden.

  For some reason the administration hesitated to refuse all help from relatives and friends, even though it was confident that if it did take such action there would be no protest, either inside the prison or outside in the free world.

  There was a severe limitation and restriction of the rights, vestigial as those were, of prisoners under investigation.

  No Russian liked to be a witness at a trial. Traditionally, at a Russian trial there is little difference between being a witness and being the accused, and the former’s “involvement” in the case is a definite black mark on his future reputation. The situation of prisoners under investigation is even worse. All of them are potentially “going down” for a long time, for it is considered that “Caesar’s wife has no vices” and that the Ministry of Interior organs never make mistakes. Nobody is arrested without good reason. A guilty verdict is the logical outcome of an arrest; a prisoner under investigation may get a short sentence or a long one, depending either on his good fortune, his “lucky star,” or on a whole agglomeration of reasons, including the bedbugs biting the interrogator the night before he wrote his report or the voting pattern in the American Congress.

  There is, basically, only one exit door in the pretrial prison—into the Black Maria, the prison bus that takes sentenced prisoners to the railway station. At the station they are loaded into goods vans, and trains of endless prison carriages slowly proceed along the track until they finally reach one of the thousands of labor camps.

  This sense of doom leaves its mark on the behavior of pretrial prisoners. Carefree self-assurance gives way to grim pessimism and a loss of moral strength. Under interrogation the pretrial prisoner has to battle with phantoms, phantoms of gigantic strength. The prisoner is used to dealing with real things, but now he is battling with a Phantom. But this “flame burns and it hurts when this pike strikes you.”[26] Everything except the actual case is horribly real. His nerves tautened, his spirit crushed by struggling with fantastical visions, defeated by their extent, the prisoner loses his will. He signs everything that the interrogator has invented, and from that moment he himself becomes a figure in the unreal world he has been struggling against, he becomes a pawn in the terrible and obscure bloody game that is being played out in the interrogators’ offices.

  “Where has he been taken?”

  “To Lefortovo. To sign.”

  Prisoners under investigation know they are doomed. The prison people on the other side of the bars, the administration, also know it. Commandants, duty wardens, sentries, escort guards have grown accustomed to regarding pretrial prisoners as actual, not just potential, convicts.

  One pretrial detainee in 1937, during a check by the chief guard on duty, asked a question about the new constitution then being introduced. The chief guard retorted brusquely, “That doesn’t apply to you. Your constitution is the Criminal Code.”

  Changes, too, were about to affect prisoners in the camps who were under investigation. The camps always had plenty of convicts under investigation, for being given a sentence did not in the least mean exemption from the effects of all the articles of the Criminal Code. The articles applied here as much as they did in the outside world, except that everything—denunciations, punishments, interrogations—was far more brazen, more coarse, and more fictional.

  When parcels of food or other things were forbidden in the capital, a special “pretrial ration” was introduced on the periphery of the prison world, in the camps: it consisted of a mug of water and three hundred grams of bread a day. The solitary confinement conditions inflicted on prisoners under investigation quickly brought them to the edge of the grave. The pretrial ration was an attempt to extract the “best of proofs,” a voluntary confession by the prisoner, the suspect, the accused under investigation.

  •

  In 1937 Butyrki prison permitted money transfers of not more than fifty rubles a month. For this sum anyone who had the money in his personal account could get food from the prison shop, being allowed to spend thirteen rubles four times a month: there was one shop day a week. If the prisoner had more money when he was arrested, then it was put in his personal account, but he was not allowed to spend more than fifty rubles.

  Naturally, there was no cash. Receipts were issued and the account was run on the basis of these receipts, which the shop assistant made out by hand, invariably in red ink.

  For any communication with the authorities and to keep up comradely discipline in the cell, there was the age-old institution of cell elders.

  Every week, a day before the shop day, the administration would, during an inspection, let the cell elder have a slate and a piece of chalk. The elder had to write down on the slate a list of all the purchases that the prisoners in his cell wanted to make. Usually one side of the slate listed the total quantity of each food item, and the other side recorded whose orders these quantities corresponded to.

  It normally took a whole day to draw up this list. Prison life was, after all, made up of a great variety of events, big and small, but all of them were equally important to every prisoner. On the morning of the following day the cell elder, accompanied by one or two other men, would go to the shop to fetch the purchases, which would be weighed out according to the “individual orders.”

  The prison shop had a range of groceries: butter, sausages, cheese, white bread, cigarettes, tobacco.

  •

  The weekly rations for the prison diet had been worked out on a permanent basis. If a prisoner ever forgot what day of the week it was, they would know by the smell of the soup served for dinner, or the case of the single-course supper. On Mondays it was always pea soup for dinner and oats porridge for supper; on Tuesdays millet soup and pearl-barley porridge. Over six months spent in pretrial detention each prison dish would be served exactly twenty-five times; food in Butyrki prison was always famous for its variety.

  Anyone who had money could buy, if only four times a month at thirteen rubles a time, a few tastier and more nourishing, healthier items, to supplement the prison gruel and “shrapnel.”

  Those who had no money could not, of course, make any purchases. There were always people, and more than one or two, in the cell who didn’t have a penny. Such a person might be from another town, arrested in the street and “top secretly.” His wife would be rushing around to all the prisons and headquarters and police stations in town, trying without success to find out her husband’s “address.” The rule in all institutions was to decline to answer, to observe complete silence. A wife would carry a parcel from prison to prison—perhaps it would be accepted, which meant that her husband was still alive, and if it wasn’t accepted, then she had nothing but anxious nights ahead of her.

  Or the detainee might be the father of a family; immediately after his arrest, his wife, children, and other relatives would be forced to disown him. Tormenting him from the moment he was arrested with nonstop interrogations, his interrogator would try to extract from him a confession to something he had never done. As a method of persuasion, apart from threats and beatings, the detainee would have his money taken away.

  Relatives and friends had very good reasons to be afraid to visit the prison with parcels or money. If you were persistent with your gifts or your search or your inquiries, you would frequently incur suspicion, resulting in undesirable and serious unpleasantness at your place of work, or e
ven arrest: such cases did happen.

  There was yet another sort of unfortunate detainee. In cell sixty-eight there was Lionka, a youth of about seventeen from the Tuma district in Moscow Province; in the 1930s Tuma was the backwoods.

  Lionka was a fat, pasty-faced youth with unhealthy skin. He hadn’t seen fresh air for a long time, but he thought life in prison was splendid. He was fed better than he had ever been fed before. Almost everyone treated him to luxuries from the prison shop. He had learned to smoke proper cigarettes, not roll-your-own. He was moved to wonderment by everything around him: how interesting it was here, what nice people—a whole new world was revealed to this illiterate boy from the Tuma district. He thought the case against him was some sort of game, a delusion: it didn’t bother him in the least. All he wanted was for his life in pretrial prison, where he was so well-fed, where it was so clean and warm, to go on forever.

  His case was an astonishing one. It was an exact repetition of the Chekhov story “The Malefactor.” Lionka had been unscrewing the bolts on the railway track to make fishing weights and was caught in flagrante delicto and put on trial as a saboteur, under paragraph 7 of article 58. Lionka had never heard of Chekhov’s story, and he tried to “prove” to the interrogator, just like Chekhov’s classic hero, that he never undid two adjacent bolts, that he “understood” what he was doing. . . .

  On the basis of the statements given by the lad from Tuma, the interrogator built up extraordinary “concepts,” the most innocent of which made Lionka liable to the death penalty. But the investigation failed to link Lionka to anybody at all, and that was why Lionka was now starting a second year in prison, waiting for the investigators to find that link.

  People who had no money in their personal prison account had to survive on official rations with no supplements. Prison rations were dreary. Even the slightest variety in nourishment brightens up a prisoner’s life and makes it somehow more cheerful.