All these dead people came from Berzin’s close circle. Many thousands of people, free contract workers and prisoners—mine bosses and camp bosses, chiefs of various camp centers, political instructors, party secretaries, guards and clerks of works, barracks elders and foreman—were shot or “rewarded” with sentences in connection with the “Berzin case.” How many thousands of years did the sentences to prison and camps amount to? Who knows . . . ?
In the suffocating smoke of provocations at the time, the Kolyma version of the sensational Moscow trials looked quite respectable.
The second maelstrom that shook all of Kolyma consisted of endless camp executions, the so-called Garanin policy of finishing off enemies of the people, finishing off Trotskyists.
For many months the morning and evening roll calls involved the reading out of countless death sentences. In temperatures of minus 50, musicians who were nonpolitical prisoners would play a flourish before and after the announcement of each death order. The smoking gas lanterns failed to disperse the darkness; they merely drew hundreds of eyes to the frosted sheets of thin paper on which those terrible words were typed. At the time this didn’t seem to apply to us. It all seemed alien, too terrible to be real. But the flourish was real, and it was as loud as thunder. The musicians’ lips froze as they pressed them to the mouthpieces of the flutes, the silvery saxtubas, the cornets. The cigarette paper was covered in hoarfrost, and some boss or other would shake the snowflakes off it with his sleeve, trying to read and then yell out the surname of the next man to be shot. Every list ended with the same words: “The sentence has been carried out. Head of the Administration of Northeast Corrective Labor Camps, Colonel Garanin.”
I saw Garanin some fifty times. He was about forty-five, broad-shouldered, potbellied, balding, with energetic dark eyes. He rushed between the northern mines day and night in his black ZIS-101 car. Later I heard that he personally executed people. Garanin was the chairman of the death-sentence troika. Orders were read out day and night: “The sentence has been carried out. Head of the Administration of Northeast Corrective Labor Camps, Colonel Garanin.” Given the Stalinist traditions of those years, Garanin could not have had long to live. In fact he was seized, arrested, condemned as a Japanese spy and shot in Magadan.
Not one of the numerous Garanin death sentences was ever annulled by anyone. Garanin was one of the many Stalin hangmen to be killed by other hangmen when the time came.
A cover story was spread to explain his arrest and death. The real Garanin was alleged to have been killed on his way to work by a Japanese spy, and it was Garanin’s sister, who had come to stay with her brother, who exposed the spy.
That legend was one of hundreds of thousands of fairy tales with which Stalin’s era stuffed the ears and brains of ordinary men and women.
What did Colonel Garanin execute people for? What did he murder them for? “For counterrevolutionary agitation” was one of the headings in Garanin’s orders. Nobody needs to be told what constituted counterrevolutionary agitation outside the prisons in 1937. If you praised a Russian novel published abroad, ten years for ASA (anti-Soviet agitation). If you said that the queues for liquid soap were extremely long, five years for ASA. And, following Russian custom and in keeping with the Russian character, anyone who got five years was happy not to have gotten ten. If he got ten, he was happy not to get twenty-five, and if he got twenty-five he would dance for joy because he wasn’t going to be shot.
The camps didn’t have that ladder of five, ten, twenty-five. You only had to say out loud that the work was too hard and that was enough to get shot. For any remark about Stalin, even the most innocent: shooting. To stay silent when others were shouting “Hurrah” for Stalin was also enough to get yourself shot. Silence, as everyone by now knows, is a form of agitation. Interrogators at every mine would compile lists of future corpses, tomorrow’s corpses, based on the reports of their “grasses,” informers, and a great number of volunteers, players in the well-known camp octet ensemble where “seven blow their instruments, and one bangs his drum.” The sayings of the gangster world are aphorisms. But there was no actual case file. And there was no investigation. Statements by a troika, that well-known Stalin-era institution, were enough to lead to death.
Punched cards had not yet come into use, but the camp statisticians tried to make things easier for themselves by producing “formulars” with special markings. A “blank” with a diagonal blue stripe was used for the personal files of Trotskyists. Green (or mauve?) stripes were used for “recidivists,” political ones, of course. Filing is filing, and you can’t color a blank form with each individual’s blood.
What else would you be shot for? “For insulting a camp guard.” What was that? It meant verbal offense, a response that was insufficiently respectful, any talking back in response to a beating, punches, kicks. Any gesture by a prisoner that was too casual when talking to a guard was treated as “attacking a guard.”
“For refusing to work.” A great number of men perished without ever understanding the lethal danger of their action. Feeble old men, hungry, exhausted people, didn’t have the strength to take a step outside the gates when we were led off to work in the morning. Such a refusal was documented. “Given footwear and clothes appropriate to the season.” The forms for such documents were printed on a duplicator, and in mines that had the money blank forms were even ordered from the printers, and on these forms all that had to be entered were the surname and such data as year of birth, article of criminal code and sentence. . . . Three refusals meant execution. According to the law. Many people were unable to understand the main law of the camps—what the camps were invented for—that you couldn’t refuse to work, that a refusal would be treated as the most monstrous crime, worse than any form of sabotage. You had to at least summon your last reserve of strength and somehow crawl to the workplace. A guard had to sign for each “unit,” for each “unit of labor,” and then the production people would sign their “acceptance.” And you’d be saved. From being shot, at least for today. Once you were at work you needn’t actually work, and in any case you wouldn’t be able to. Endure the agony of the day until it ends. You will do very little as far as production is concerned, but you’re not an “objector,” so they can’t shoot you. They say that the authorities have no such “right” in such cases. Whether they do have a right or not, I don’t know, but many times over many years I had to struggle to stop myself from refusing to work and halting at the gates when the camp was led out to work.
“For stealing metal.” Anyone on whom “metal” was found was shot. Later on, they spared your life and just gave you an extra sentence of five or ten years. A lot of metal nuggets passed through my hands—the Partisan mine was very “nuggety”—but the only feeling gold aroused in me was one of the profoundest revulsion. You needed skill to spot a nugget, to distinguish it from stone. Experienced workmen taught the novices this important skill, so that they didn’t throw gold into the barrow and have the warden watching over the sizing trommel yell at them, “Hey you, you slobs, you’ve sent nuggets down to be washed again!” Prisoners were paid a bonus for gold nuggets: a ruble a gram for anything fifty-one grams or over. There were no scales at the pit face. Deciding whether the nugget you’d found was forty or sixty grams could only be done by the warden. We never told anyone more senior than the foreman when we found one. I found a lot of nuggets that had been rejected and I was twice put up for payment. One nugget weighed sixty grams, the other eighty. Naturally, I never got any actual cash. All I got was a “Stakhanov card,” which gave me a shock worker’s ration for the next ten days, and a pinch of tobacco from both the guard and the foreman. And I was grateful for that.
The most frequent “heading” under which a great number of men were shot was “for failing to fulfill the norm.” Whole brigades were executed for this camp crime. It too was based on theoretical considerations. At the time the state plan was “brought down” all over the country to every machine-tool in all t
he factories and plants. In prisoner country, in Kolyma, the plan was implemented down to each pit face, each barrow, each pickax. The state plan was the law! Failure to fulfill the state plan was a counterrevolutionary crime. Anyone who failed to fulfill the norm was off to the next world!
The third lethal maelstrom, which took away more prisoners’ lives than the first two combined, was mass death from starvation, beatings, and disease. The gangsters, the common criminals, those “friends of the people,” played an enormous part in this.
In all of 1937, of the two or three thousand listed as working at the Partisan mine, just two men, one free worker and one prisoner, died. They were buried next to each other at the bottom of a hill. Each grave was marked by something like an obelisk: the free man’s was a bit higher, the prisoner’s was a bit lower. In 1938 there was a whole brigade standing by to dig graves. Rock and permafrost refuse to accept the corpses. The ground had to be drilled, blown up, and the stones and earth had to be excavated. Digging gravel and “smashing out” prospector shafts were jobs that required very similar techniques, as far as tools, materials, and “labor force” were concerned. A whole brigade was assigned solely to dig graves, just common graves for nameless corpses. Actually, they were not entirely nameless. The procedures specified that the labor supervisor, as a representative of the camp authorities, had to tie a plywood label to the corpse’s left ankle, with the number of the corpse’s personal file. Everyone was buried naked. What else would you expect? Gold teeth were knocked out, again as the protocol dictated, and listed in a special burial document. The pit, once it was full of corpses, was filled by dumping stones over them, but the ground still refused to accept the corpses. They were doomed to be imperishable in the Far North’s permafrost.
Doctors were afraid to put down the true cause of death on their certificates. New diagnoses appeared: polyavitaminosis, pellagra, dysentery, APE, or acute physical emaciation, which was at least a step in the direction of the truth. APE was as cryptic an acronym as the initials NFI, the secret beloved of the poet Lermontov, finally deciphered by the critic Andronikov. Such diagnoses were made only by the bravest doctors, those who weren’t themselves prisoners. The formula “alimentary dystrophy” was pronounced by the Kolyma doctors later, during the war, after the Leningrad blockade, when it was now deemed possible to give the true cause of death, albeit using Latin terminology. The Leningrad poet Vera Inber wrote, “The burning of a guttered candle, all the dryly listed symptoms of what doctors call in learned language alimentary dystrophy: things that anyone who isn’t a philologist specializing in Latin would define by the Russian word for hunger.” I used to repeat those lines quite often. People I knew who liked poetry had vanished long ago. But Inber’s words had a resonance for every Kolyma inhabitant.
Everyone beat the workmen: the orderly, the hairdresser, the foreman, the political instructor, the supervisor, the escort guard, the barracks elder, the office manager, the labor manager—all of them. When you can beat people up and murder them with impunity, your soul is depraved and corrupted. I saw and knew all of those who did this. . . . The escort guard was then responsible, thanks to the wisdom of some top bosses, for the plan being fulfilled. That was why the guards used their rifle butts as enthusiastically as they could to beat the plan into fulfillment. Other guards behaved even worse; they put the responsibility onto the common criminals, who were always insinuated into brigades of article 58 men. The criminals didn’t work. They merely ensured that the plan was fulfilled. They walked around the pit face with a stick, which they called their “thermometer,” and beat up the mute and helpless freiers. They could beat you to death. The foremen, who had been appointed from the ranks of ordinary prisoners, tried their very hardest to prove to the bosses that they, the foremen, were on the side of the authorities, not the prisoners. Foremen tried to forget that they too were political prisoners. Not that they had ever been politicals. Nor had, in any case, any of the article 58 men at the time. The reason that it was possible to dispatch millions of people so successfully was that these people were innocent.
They were martyrs, not heroes.
1964
HANDWRITING
LATE ONE night Krist was summoned to go “behind the stables.” That was what the camp called a cottage that was right at the base of a hill on the edge of the settlement. It was inhabited by the interrogator for especially important cases. The joke in the camp was that there were no cases that were not especially important, since any infringement or even the appearance of an infringement was punishable by death. Either death, or complete acquittal. Not that anyone could say they’d been fully acquitted. Ready for anything, indifferent to everything, Krist followed the narrow path. A light came on in the kitchen building. It was probably the bread cutter starting to cut up the bread rations for breakfast. For breakfast tomorrow. Would Krist live to see tomorrow and its breakfast? He didn’t know and was very happy not to know. Krist’s feet trod on something not like snow or ice fragments. He bent down, picked up a frozen crust and immediately recognized it as a clump of frozen turnip peelings. The ice had already thawed in his hands, and he thrust the crusty peelings into his mouth. There was obviously no need to hurry. Krist walked the length of the path, starting from the last barracks, and he realized that he was the first to walk this long, snow-covered path, that today nobody had trodden it before, along the settlement edge, to see the interrogator. Pieces of turnip had frozen to the snow all along the way. They looked as if they were wrapped in cellophane. Krist found ten pieces, some bigger, some smaller. It was a long time since Krist had seen anyone who would throw turnip peelings into the snow. It must have been a free contract worker, not a prisoner, of course. Perhaps it was the interrogator himself. Krist chewed up and swallowed all the crusts. He could taste in his mouth something he had long forgotten: his native earth, fresh vegetables. In a happy mood, Krist knocked at the door of the interrogator’s cottage.
The interrogator was a short, skinny and unshaven man. All he had here was his office and an iron bunk covered with a soldier’s blanket and a crumpled dirty pillow. The desk was a roughly made piece of furniture with crookedly placed drawers, packed tight with papers and folders. There was a box of index cards on the windowsill. The set of shelves was also packed tight with folders. Half of an empty can served as an ashtray. The clock showed half past ten. The interrogator was lighting the iron stove with paper.
His skin was white, he was pale, like all interrogators. He didn’t have an orderly, or a revolver.
“Sit down, Krist,” he said, addressing the prisoner politely and moving an old stool for him to sit on. He was sitting on a chair, another homemade item, with a high back.
“I’ve looked through your file,” said the interrogator, “and I have a proposition for you. I don’t know if you’ll find it acceptable.”
Krist froze in expectation. The interrogator said nothing for a while.
“I need to know a few more things about you.”
Krist raised his head and, although he tried not to, belched. It was a pleasant belch with an insistent taste of fresh turnip.
“Write an application.”
“An application?”
“Yes, an application. Here’s a sheet of paper, here’s a pen.”
“An application? What about? To whom?”
“To anyone you like! All right, if not an application, then a poem by Blok. It makes no difference. Do you get it? Or Pushkin’s ‘Bird’:
Yesterday I opened the prison
Of my ethereal captive,
I returned the songster to the woods,
I gave her back her freedom,—”
the interrogator declaimed.
“That’s not Pushkin’s ‘Bird,’ ” Krist whispered, straining every fiber of his desiccated brain.
“Whose is it then?”
“Tumansky’s.”
“Tumansky’s? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Aha, you need a handwriting sa
mple for an expert opinion, do you? To see if I’m a murderer? Or if I wrote a letter to the outside? Or forged a shop voucher for the gangsters?”
“Not at all. We don’t have any problem getting samples of that sort.” The interrogator smiled, exposing his swollen bleeding gums and small teeth. However slight this flashed smile was, it added a little light to the room. And also to Krist’s soul. He couldn’t help looking into the interrogator’s mouth.
“Yes,” said the latter, catching Krist’s gaze. “Scurvy, scurvy. Even free men aren’t exempt from scurvy here. There are no fresh vegetables.”
Krist thought about the turnip. It was Krist who had gotten the vitamins, since there were more vitamins in the peelings than in the inside. Krist wanted to keep the conversation going, to tell the interrogator how he had sucked and stroked the turnip peelings that the interrogator had thrown away. But he held back, fearing that this boss would punish him for being excessively familiar.
“Well, have you got it, or not? I need to take a look at your handwriting.”
Krist still failed to understand a thing.
“Write!” dictated the interrogator. “ ‘To the chief of the mine. Prisoner Krist, date of birth, article, sentence, application. I ask to be transferred to lighter work. . . .’ That will do.”
Kolyma Stories Page 51