Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  A prisoner senses that he is doomed. In a month or two he will die, as his comrades are dying before his eyes.

  He will not escape death, but he would like to die free, not at the pit face, in a ditch, after collapsing from tiredness and hunger.

  In summer the mine work is harder than in winter. Sand is washed in summer. The prisoner’s weakened brain suggests a way out that would make it possible to hold out for the summer and spend the winter warm and in a building.

  That is how the idea of “leaving for the ice” is born, as these escapes along the highway are so colorfully called.

  Two, three, or four prisoners run into the taiga, into the mountains, and settle in some cave or bear’s den a few kilometers from the main highway, which is an enormous route stretching two thousand kilometers and cutting through the whole of Kolyma.

  The fugitive has a supply of matches, tobacco, food, and clothing: whatever he can get together for his escape. However, it is almost never possible to collect things in advance, and if it were, that would attract suspicion and thus would wreck the escape plans.

  Sometimes, the night before the escape, they rob the camp shop, or stall, as it’s called in the camp, and leave for the mountains with their stolen food. Mostly, though, people run away with nothing, to live off the land. Living off the land, however, does not mean eating grass, roots, mice, and chipmunks.

  Trucks move up and down the enormous highway day and night. Many of these trucks are carrying food supplies. In the mountains the road is one of constant changes in gradient, and trucks crawl slowly up to a pass. To leap onto a truck carrying flour and throw off a couple of sacks gives you a food supply for the whole summer. And flour is not the only thing being transported. After the first robberies trucks carrying food began to be sent off with armed convoys, but not every truck had this protection.

  Apart from daylight robbery on the highway, fugitives would rob the settlements nearest to their den, small roadside outposts where two or three people lived and maintained the highway. The bigger and bolder groups of fugitives would stop trucks and rob both the passengers and the loads.

  If they were lucky these escapees recovered both physically and “spiritually” in the course of the summer.

  If they laid their bonfires carefully, and the traces of their loot were thoroughly eliminated, for the guards were vigilant and sharp-sighted, the fugitives could live until late autumn. Subzero temperatures and snow would force them out of the bare, inhospitable forest. The aspens and poplars lost their leaves, the larches dropped their rust-colored needles onto the cold, dirty moss. The fugitives no longer had the strength to hold out, and they came out onto the highway and surrendered at the nearest checkpoint. They were arrested and tried, not always quickly, for winter had set in some time before, and they were given a sentence for escaping. Then they joined the ranks of the workmen at the mine where (if they happened to go back to the same mine they had fled) they found their former brigade workmates were no longer there. They’d either died or, as semi-corpses, had gone to join invalid squads.

  In 1939 the first “relief teams” and “sanatorium points” were set up for debilitated workmen. But since it would have required several years, not several days, to “recover,” these innovations did not have the desired effect of restoring working strength. On the other hand, Kolyma’s inhabitants, who believed that as long as a prisoner kept his sense of irony, he would remain human, learned by heart a sly rhyme:

  First Convalescent Centers, then the Teams,

  A tag on your ankle, and now sweet dreams!

  A tag with the number of the case file was tied to the left leg of a prisoner when he was buried.

  The fugitive, however, remained healthy and alive, even if he got five extra years (unless the interrogator managed to stitch him up for robbing trucks), for it made no real difference whether you had a sentence of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years, because it was impossible to work at a pit face even for five years. Five weeks was the limit for a mine pit face.

  These “spa holiday” escapes became more common, as did the robberies and the murders. But it wasn’t the robberies or the murders that irritated the top authorities, who were used to dealing with paper and figures, not with living people.

  The figures told them that the value of what was lost to robbery and murder was not worth counting, for it was far less than the value of lost working hours and days.

  “Spa holiday” escapes were what the authorities were most frightened by. Article 82 of the Criminal Code was now wholly forgotten and was never applied again.

  Escape attempts were now to be treated as crimes against good order, against the administration, the state: as political acts.

  Fugitives began to be charged under article 58, no more and no less, on the same level as traitors to the motherland. And the paragraph of article 58 that was chosen was widely known to the judiciary, for it had earlier been used in the Mines’ Trial of wreckers.[36] This was paragraph 14 of article 58: “counterrevolutionary sabotage.” An escape was a refusal to work, and refusal to work was counterrevolutionary sabotage. Fugitives were now to be tried under this article and paragraph. Ten years for attempting to escape became the minimum additional sentence. A second escape was punishable by twenty-five years.

  That didn’t put anyone off and didn’t reduce the number of escapes or of robberies.

  At the same time any avoidance of work or refusal to work was also interpreted as sabotage, and the punishment for refusing to work, the worst camp crime, kept on being increased. “Twenty-five years imprisonment, plus five years’ deprivation of civic rights” was the formula applied for many years during and after the war in sentencing those who refused work and those who tried to escape.

  The specific features that distinguish Kolyma escapes from more ordinary escapes do not make them any less difficult. It may be easy, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to overstep the limit that turns absence without leave into an escape, but the difficulties increase with every day, with every hour that a man moves across the inhospitable environment of the Far North, hostile to anything that lives. The extremely short periods for escaping, the very brief seasons, force the fugitive to make hurried preparations, and to cover, in a short time, distances that are enormous and difficult. Bears and lynxes pose little danger to a fugitive. He perishes because of his own helplessness in this harsh region where he has very few ways to struggle for his life.

  The local terrain is agonizing for anyone traveling on foot. One mountain pass comes after the other, ravine after ravine. The animal paths are barely noticeable, the ground in the thin, ugly taiga forest is just unstable wet moss. It is risky to sleep without a campfire: the underground cold of the permafrost doesn’t allow the rocks to get warm during the day. There is no food on the journey except for dry reindeer moss, which can be ground up and mixed with flour and then baked into flat bread. It is no easy task to kill a ptarmigan or a nutcracker with a stick. Mushrooms and berries are not very nourishing on a journey, and in any case they are only found at the end of the short summer season, which means that the fugitive must take his entire supply of food with him from the camp.

  The taiga paths are hard enough for a fugitive, but the preparations for escape are even harder. Any day, any hour the would-be fugitive may be unmasked and betrayed to the authorities by his fellow prisoners. The main danger is not the guards or the wardens, but fellow prisoners who live alongside the would-be fugitive for twenty-four hours a day.

  Every fugitive knows that not only will nobody help him if they notice anything suspicious, but that they will take notice of anything they see. A prisoner may be on his last legs, starving and exhausted, but he will crawl or stagger to the guardhouse in order to denounce and unmask a comrade. This is done for a reason: the boss may reward him with tobacco, may praise him, may say thank you. The informer portrays his own cowardice and vileness as something like his duty. The only people he won’t denounce are the gangsters, because
he is afraid of getting stabbed with a knife or being strangled with a piece of rope.

  A mass escape where there are more than two or three taking part, unless it is something as elemental and sudden as a mutiny, is almost unthinkable. It would be impossible to plan, given the people who fill the camps, depraved, mercenary, starving, and full of mutual loathing.

  It is significant that the only mass escape ever prepared in advance, however it was to end, succeeded because that part of the camp where the escapees came from had none of the old Kolyma hands who were so poisoned and degraded by their experience, so debased by hunger, cold, and beatings—and therefore there was nobody who might have betrayed the fugitives to the authorities.

  In One-Story America Ilf and Petrov point out, half jokingly, half seriously, a Russian national characteristic, something that is innate to Russian nature: an irresistible urge to complain. This national feature, when distorted by the crooked mirror of camp life, finds its outlet in denouncing one’s fellow man.

  An escape can suddenly flare up as an improvisation, like a natural catastrophe or a forest fire, which makes the fate of those involved—casual, peaceful bystanders, swept into the vortex of action almost against their own will—even more tragic.

  None of them had yet formed a proper idea of the treachery of a Kolyma autumn, not realizing that the scarlet blazing of the leaves, the grass, and the trees lasts for no more than two or three days, and then from a high, pale-blue sky, just slightly brighter than usual, fine, cold snow can suddenly start to fall. None of the fugitives knew what to make of the green branches of dwarf pine that suddenly flatten themselves to the ground, clinging to the earth before the fugitives’ eyes, or what to make of the sudden flight of the fish downstream.

  Nobody knew whether there were any settlements in the taiga or, if so, what they might be like. Those who came from the Far East or from Siberia made the mistake of relying on their knowledge of the taiga and their hunting skills.

  At the end of a postwar autumn an open truck carrying twenty-five prisoners was making its way to a hard-labor camp. A few dozen kilometers from their destination, the prisoners hurled themselves at the guards, disarmed them and went on the run, all twenty-five of them.

  It was snowing, and the snow was mercilessly icy. The fugitives had no warm clothes. The dogs quickly caught their scent: they had split into four groups. The group armed with guns taken from the guards was shot dead. Two groups were caught a day later, and the last group on the fourth day. The latter were sent straight to the hospital; they all had fourth-degree frostbite on both hands and feet. The Kolyma subzero temperatures and Kolyma nature were always on the side of the authorities and always hostile to any solitary fugitive.

  The fugitives spent a long time in a separate hospital ward, with a guard by the door. The hospital was for prisoners, but not for hard-labor ones. All five men were amputees, losing a hand or a foot; two of them lost both feet.

  That was how the Kolyma cold dealt with hasty and naïve novices.

  Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky understood this very well. He had, in fact, been a lieutenant colonel in the war. Here he was just prisoner Yanovsky, the cultural organizer of a big camp section. This section was set up right after the war and included only new prisoners, war criminals, men who had served under General Vlasov and ex-prisoners of war who had served in German units or as policemen under German occupation, or those who had lived in villages occupied by the Germans and were suspected of collaboration.

  They included men who had recent experience of war, of confronting death every day. They were used to risk, to using their animal instincts in fighting for their lives. They were experienced killers.

  They included men who had already escaped from German, Russian, and British captivity . . . people who were used to staking their lives on a card, people whose boldness was nurtured by example and training. They were scouts and soldiers who were trained to kill. They continued the war in these new circumstances, a war for themselves against the state.

  The authorities were used to dealing with submissive Trotskyists and did not suspect that they were now dealing with men of deeds, of action above all.

  A few months before the events we are about to describe, this camp had been visited by a top boss. When he found out more about the life the new arrivals were leading and their work in production, the boss felt indignant that cultural work, amateur shows in the camp, left much to be desired. But former Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky, the camp’s cultural organizer, respectfully reported: “Don’t worry, we are rehearsing for a concert all Kolyma will be talking about.”

  That was a very risky thing to say, but nobody paid any attention at the time, and, in fact, Yanovsky had been sure they would not.

  All that winter the participants in the escape planned for spring slowly, one by one getting promoted to jobs in the camp support staff. The labor organizer, the barracks elder, the paramedic, the hairdresser, and the foreman—all the staff posts for prisoners were taken by men chosen by Yanovsky himself. They included pilots, drivers, scouts: all the men who could make a daringly planned escape succeed. The Kolyma conditions were studied, nobody overlooked the difficulties, and nobody made any mistakes. Their aim was freedom, or the good fortune to die in battle with weapons in their hands, rather than in the camp bunks, from starvation or beatings.

  Yanovsky realized how important, how vital it was for his comrades to keep up their physical strength and endurance, as well as their moral and spiritual strength. If you had a job on the camp support staff, you could be fed well enough not to grow weaker.

  The usual silent Kolyma spring came. No birds sang, not a drop of rain fell. The larches put on their bright-green young needles, the thin bare forest seemed to get thicker, the trees grew closer to one another, hiding people and animals in their branches. The white, or rather, pale-lilac nights began.

  The guardhouse by the camp gates had two doors, one leading out of, and one leading into the camp: such were the architectural specifications of this sort of building. Two guards were on duty on each shift.

  At precisely five in the morning, there was a knock on the guardhouse window. The duty guard looked through the glass and saw that the camp cook Soldatov had come for the key to the pantry. The key was kept in the guardhouse, on a hook hammered into the wall. For the last few months the cook had come here every day at precisely five in the morning to fetch the keys. The duty guard unhooked the door and let Soldatov in. The second guard was not there: he had just left by the outer door. The apartment where he and his family lived was about three hundred meters from the guardhouse.

  Everything had been worked out in advance, and the author of this show was watching through the little window the first act of a spectacle he had planned long ago. He saw everything that had been rehearsed a thousand times in his imagination and reason become living flesh and blood.

  The cook went toward the wall where the key was hanging, and there was another knock at the door. The guard knew the man who was knocking. It was prisoner Shevtsov, a mechanic and weapons expert who had often repaired machine guns, rifles, and pistols for the squad; he was one of their men.

  At that very moment Soldatov rushed the guard from behind and strangled him, with the assistance of Shevtsov, who had now come into the guardhouse. They threw the corpse under a trestle bed in the corner of the guardhouse, and hid it behind a pile of firewood. Soldatov and Shevtsov pulled off the dead man’s greatcoat, hat, and boots. Then Soldatov, dressed in a guard’s uniform and armed with a revolver, sat at the duty desk. The second guard now returned. Before he could figure out what was happening, he too was strangled. Shevtsov put on his clothes.

  Suddenly, the wife of the second guard came into the guardhouse. They didn’t kill her: they just bound her hand and foot, gagged her, and placed her next to the dead guards.

  An escort guard had now brought a brigade of workmen, and he came into the guardhouse to sign for the people he had been entrusted with. He too was
killed. Another rifle and another greatcoat were thus obtained.

  People were now moving around the yard by the guardhouse, as was to be expected when they were lined up for work. Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky took over command.

  The area around the guard towers at the nearest corners of the zone was in the field of fire. There were sentries in both towers, but in the murky morning light after a white night the sentries saw nothing suspicious in the clearing by the guardhouse. As usual, the duty guard opened the gates, counted the men, as he always did, and two escort guards came out to take over the brigade. Now the guards lined up a small brigade of just ten, no, nine men, and led them off. . . . The fact that this brigade turned off the road onto a path didn’t alarm the sentries either. The path led past the guards’ squad, and guards had sometimes taken workmen that way before, if the lineup for work was delayed.

  The brigade walked past the guards’ squad. When the sleepy duty guard saw them through the open door, he only had time to wonder why the brigade was being led down the path in single file, and not in the usual lines along the road, before he was knocked out and disarmed, and the “brigade” then rushed to the pyramid of rifles standing right in front of the duty guards, in the entrance to the barracks.

  Armed with an automatic, Yanovsky flung open the door to a room where forty guards, young professionals in the escort-guard service, were sleeping. A round of automatic fire aimed at the ceiling made them all lie down on the floor under their bunks. Handing his automatic to Shevtsov, Yanovsky went out into the yard where his men had broken into the guard squad’s stores and were now pulling out supplies of food, weapons, and ammunition.

  The sentries in the towers decided not to open fire. Later, they said that it was impossible to see or understand what was happening in the guards’ squad. Nobody believed their statements, and the sentries were consequently punished.