The fugitives took their time getting ready. Yanovsky ordered them to carry only weapons and ammunition, as many cartridges as possible, but as far as food was concerned, only biscuits and chocolate. Nikolsky the paramedic stuffed his bag with individual Red Cross packets. Everyone put on their new military uniforms and chose the right size of boots from the squad’s storeroom.
While they were leaving the camp in a line, like prisoners, while they were raiding the guards’ squad, they realized that not everyone who was to take part was there. Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky’s friend Piotr Kuznetsov, a foreman, was missing. He had unexpectedly been transferred to the night shift instead of the regular foreman, who had fallen ill. Yanovsky wouldn’t leave without his comrade. They had been through a lot and planned a lot together. The foreman was summoned. Kuznetsov came and changed into a soldier’s uniform. The commander of the squad that had been raided and the chief of the camp stayed in their apartments until they were told by their orderlies that the fugitives had left the camp’s territory.
The telephone cable had been cut, and a message about the escape could be sent to the nearest camp department only after the fugitives had reached the main highway, Kolyma’s central road.
As they emerged onto the highway, the fugitives stopped the first empty truck. The driver, threatened with a revolver, got out of the cab, and Kobaridze, a fighter pilot, took over the wheel. Yanovsky got into the cab next to Kobaridze and unfolded on his lap a map taken from the guards’ squad. The truck sped off to Seimchan, the nearest airfield. To hijack a plane and fly away!
Second, third, fourth left turn. Fifth turn!
The truck turned left off the main highway and sped over a seething river, along a precarious rocky cornice, on a narrow, stony, winding road that crackled under the wheels. Kobaridze slowed down. It wouldn’t have taken a second to fly off at an angle into the water seventy feet below. They could see the tiny, toylike houses of an expedition down below, by the stream. The road bent, as it made its way around rock after rock, and then went downhill as it came down from the pass. Settlement houses loomed up out of the taiga. They were now quite near, and Yanovsky saw through the cab’s windshield a soldier running toward the truck with his rifle cradled in his hands.
The soldier leapt to one side, the truck rushed past him, and immediately afterward a short round of shots could be heard, fired at the departing fugitives. The guards had now been warned.
Yanovsky had already made his decision: ten kilometers or so down the road Kobaridze put on the brakes. The fugitives abandoned the truck, and, striding across the moss-covered drainage ditch, entered the taiga and vanished. It was still about another seventy kilometers to the airfield. Yanovsky decided to head across country.
They spent the night all together in a cave not far from a small mountain stream; they warmed themselves on each other’s bodies and put out sentries.
The next morning, no sooner had the escapees set off than they came across special operations men: a local detachment was combing the forest. Four special operations men were killed by the fugitives’ first shots. Yanovsky ordered his men to set fire to the forest: the wind was blowing in the direction of their pursuers. The fugitives moved on.
By now truckloads of soldiers were speeding up and down the Kolyma roads. An invisible army of regular troops had rushed to help the camp guards and the special operations men. Dozens of military vehicles were patrolling the central highway.
For scores of kilometers the road to Seimchan was crowded with military units. The top Kolyma authorities were personally directing this unusual operation.
They had guessed what Yanovsky’s plan would be and had mobilized such a quantity of regular troops to guard the airfield that they had trouble finding room for them all on the approaches to it.
By the evening of the second day, Yanovsky’s group had been discovered again: they joined battle. The troops left ten dead on the battlefield. Yanovsky exploited the direction of the wind and again set fire to the taiga and got away, this time by crossing a large mountain stream. The fugitives’ camp for the third night, when they still hadn’t lost a single man, was chosen by Yanovsky. It was in a marsh, with haystacks in the middle.
The fugitives spent the night in the haystacks, and when the white night was over, when the taiga sun lit up the crowns of the trees, they could see that the marsh was surrounded by soldiers. Without really bothering to take cover, soldiers were running from tree to tree.
The commander of the squad the fugitives had attacked at the beginning of their campaign waved a rag and shouted, “Surrender, you’re surrounded. You’ve got nowhere to hide. . . .”
Shevtsov stuck his head out of a haystack.“You’re right. Come and take my weapon. . . .”
The squad commander jumped onto the track in the marsh and ran toward the haystacks. He rocked from side to side, dropped his cap and fell facedown into a puddle in the marsh. Shevtsov’s bullet had hit him in the forehead.
Chaotic fire then broke out everywhere. Commands could be heard, soldiers rushed the stacks from all sides, but the ring of defenders, invisible fugitives hidden in hay, cut the attack short. The wounded groaned, those that were unharmed lay down in the marsh. From time to time a rifle was fired, and a soldier’s body convulsed before stretching out.
Again, the haystacks came under fire. This time there was no response. After an hour’s shooting, a new attack was mounted, and again it was stopped by the fugitives’ gunfire. Again, there were corpses in the marsh, and the wounded groaned.
A prolonged burst of fire began again. Two machine guns were set up and after a few rounds there was yet another attack.
The haystacks were silent.
As the soldiers raked each haystack apart, they found that only one fugitive was still alive: the cook, Soldatov. Both his calves had been hit, as had his shoulder and forearm, but he was still breathing. All the others were dead of gunshot wounds. But there were only nine, instead of eleven of them.
Yanovsky wasn’t there, nor was Kuznetsov.
That evening, twenty kilometers further upstream, an unknown person dressed in military uniform was detained. Surrounded by soldiers, he killed himself with a pistol shot. The dead man was immediately identified. It was Kuznetsov.
The only one missing was the leader, Lieutenant Colonel Yanovsky. His fate remained unknown. The search for him went on for a long time, many months. He couldn’t have swum down the river nor gotten away on mountain paths; everything had been very thoroughly blocked. Very likely he had committed suicide after hiding first in a deep cave or bear’s den where his corpse was eaten by the beasts of the taiga.
The best surgeon and two free contract paramedics (they had to be free ones, not prisoners) were summoned from the central hospital to deal with the wounded from this battle. It was almost evening by the time the hospital pickup truck got as far as the Elgen collective farm where the active squad’s headquarters were. There were so many military Studebakers on the road that its journey had been delayed.
“What’s going on here? A war?” the surgeon asked the chief boss, the man who had been leading the operation.
“War or no war, so far we’ve got twenty-eight dead. And you can count the wounded for yourself.”
The surgeon was bandaging and operating until the evening.
“How many escapees?”
“Twelve.”
“You should have called for aircraft to bomb them, bomb them. With atom bombs.”
The boss gave the surgeon a sidelong glance.
“You’re always clowning, I’ve known you for a long time. But you’ll see. I’ll be dismissed and forced to retire early.” The boss gave a deep sigh.
He was prescient. It was because of this escape that he was transferred from Kolyma and dismissed.
Soldatov recovered and was sentenced to twenty-five years. The camp boss got ten years, the sentries who had been in the towers each got five. As a result of this case a great number of people at the min
e—more than sixty—were convicted: anyone who knew something and said nothing, anyone who helped or thought of helping, but didn’t get around to it. The commander of the squad would have received a long sentence, but Shevtsov’s bullet had spared him the inevitable punishment.
Even Potapova, the doctor and the head of the health section, on whose staff the escaped paramedic Nikolsky had worked, was held accountable, but the authorities managed to save her by quickly transferring her somewhere else.
1959
THE FIRST TOOTH
THE PARTY of prisoners being moved was the party I had dreamed of in my long boyhood years: blackened faces, blue lips, burned by the April sun of the Urals. Gigantic escort guards leaping onto moving sleds and the sleds flying up into the air; the one-eyed guard with the scar of an ax wound right across his face; the chief guard’s bright blue eyes. By the afternoon of the first day of the prisoners’ journey we knew his surname: Shcherbakov. We prisoners—there were about two hundred of us—now knew our boss’s surname, by something of a miracle that I couldn’t take in or comprehend. The prisoners pronounced this name all the time, as if our journey with Shcherbakov would go on forever. And he became a permanent feature of our life. That was how it was for many of us. Shcherbakov’s enormous, agile figure would suddenly turn up here or there, now running ahead to meet us and watch with his own eyes the last wagon in the party passing, and only then chasing up to the front and overtaking us. Yes, we had wagons, classic wagons, on which the local Russian settlers were transporting their baggage. The convoy continued its five-day journey, the prisoners walking in ranks, without luggage. Whenever they stopped or were checked, they reminded one of the ragged lines of new recruits at a railway station. But all the railway stations were far behind where we were going to spend our lives. It was morning, a cheerful April morning. It was not yet light at the gradually lifting semidarkness of the monastery yard where our party was lining up, yawning and coughing, before setting off on a distant journey.
It was in the cellars of the Solikamsk police station, which used to be a monastery, that we spent the night after being handed over by caring and taciturn Moscow guards to those commanded by the blue-eyed Shcherbakov: a horde of tanned fighting men who yelled at us. The previous evening we had poured down into a cold, chilled cellar. The church was surrounded by ice and snow that thawed just a little in the daytime, but refroze at night. Blue and gray snowdrifts covered the whole yard and, to get to the real white snow, you had to break the hard crust of ice that cut your hands, then dig a pit, and only then could you haul out of the pit the thick-grained, crumbly snow, which thawed so joyfully in your mouth and, burningly fresh, revived you a little.
I was one of the first to go into the cellar and so I could choose a spot where it was a bit warmer. The enormous icy vaults frightened me. I was an inexperienced youth and my eyes looked for something like a stove, if only the sort that Vera Figner and Morozov [37] had in their cells. I couldn’t find anything. But by chance I had a comrade, if only for a moment while I entered the prison-church cellar. He was a squat gangster, Gusev, and he pushed me against the wall to the only window, which was covered with bars and had double glazing. The window was semi-circular and rose about a meter from the floor; it was like an embrasure. I was thinking of choosing somewhere warmer, but the crowd of people kept pouring in through the door and there was no way of turning back.
Just as calm as before, not saying a word to me, Gusev struck the glass with the toe of his boot and smashed first the inner frame, then the outer one. Cold air, burning me like boiling water, rushed through the hole. Caught by this stream of air, I shivered with cold. I was in any case already frozen by the long wait and the endless roll call in the yard. It took me some time to understand Gusev’s wisdom. All night we two were the only ones out of two hundred prisoners who could breathe fresh air. People were so packed, so crammed into the cellar that sitting or lying down was impossible: you could only stand.
A dirty, stifling white fog of men’s breath filled the cellar halfway up the walls. People began to faint. Those gasping for breath tried to break through toward the door where there was a crack and a spy hole. They tried to breathe through the spy hole. But the guard standing outside would every now and again stick the bayonet on the end of his rifle through the spy hole, so that any attempts to breathe fresh air through the prison spy hole were abandoned. Obviously, no paramedics or doctors were called to help those who had fainted. Just Gusev and I were lucky enough to be holding out by the panes that Gusev had so wisely smashed. It took a long time to line us up. . . . We were the last to come out. The mist had dispersed and we could see the ceiling, a vaulted ceiling: the sky of the prison and church was so near you could touch it. On the vaults of the Solikamsk police station I found letters drawn in charcoal, enormous letters covering the entire ceiling: “Comrades, we have been dying for three days and nights in this grave, but we’re not dead yet. Courage, comrades!”
Orders were yelled out and the party of prisoners crawled out beyond the boundaries of Solikamsk and set off for the plains below. The sky was bright blue, like the chief guard’s eyes. The sun burned our faces, the wind cooled them; they turned brown by the first night of the journey. Our overnight stay, prepared in advance, always involved the same fixed procedure. Two huts, one tidier and one more wretched and shedlike, sometimes an actual shed, were rented from the peasants to accommodate the prisoners for the night. You had to try and get in the “tidy” one, of course. But that didn’t depend on choice: every evening we were sent past the chief guard who showed with a wave of his arm where the next prisoner would spend the next night. At the time I thought Shcherbakov was the wisest of the wise, because he didn’t poke around in various papers and lists to look for “data” on your criminal conviction, but just waved an arm to separate a following prisoner the moment the party of prisoners came to a halt. Later it occurred to me that Shcherbakov was observant. On all occasions his choice, made by some unfathomable principle, turned out to be correct. All the article 58 prisoners were kept together, as were all the 35ers. Some time later, a year or two, I realized there was nothing miraculous about Shcherbakov’s wisdom. The knack of guessing the crime by a prisoner’s looks could be acquired by anyone. In our party there could have been additional signs, such as baggage, suitcases. But luggage was transported separately, on peasant carts and sleds.
On our journey’s first night an event occurred which is the subject of this story. Two hundred men were standing, waiting for the chief guard to appear, when on the left we heard yells, bustles, people gasping, roaring, swearing, and, finally an articulate shout: “Dragons! Dragons!” A man was flung down onto the snow in front of the ranks of prisoners. His face was smashed and bloody, somebody had rammed a lambskin hat over his head, but the head stuck out and could not conceal a narrow wound that was oozing blood. The man was wearing a homemade garment of brown woven cloth: a Ukrainian of some sort. I knew him. It was Piotr Zayats, a sectarian. He’d been brought from Moscow in the same railway car as me. He spent all his time praying and praying.
“He refuses to stand for roll call,” a guard reported, panting and heated by the fuss.
“Make him stand up,” ordered the chief guard.
Two enormous guards made Zayats stand up, supporting his arms. But Zayats was a head taller than them; he had a bigger build, he was heavier.
“Are you going to stand, or won’t you?”
Shcherbakov punched Zayats in the face. Zayats spat into the snow.
Suddenly I felt a burning heat in my heart. I suddenly understood that everything, all my life was now facing a decisive moment. If I didn’t do anything—but what, I did not know—it meant that my journey with this party was pointless, that my twenty years of life were pointless.
Burning shame at my own cowardice drained from my cheeks. I felt my cheeks turning cold and my body becoming light.
I stepped forward from the ranks and said in a cracking voice, “Don’t dare h
it that man.”
Shcherbakov examined me with great amazement.“Get back into line.”
I got back into line. Shcherbakov gave the order, and the party, divided between two huts, obeying the movement of Shcherbakov’s finger, started dispersing in the darkness. Shcherbakov’s finger pointed out the “dirty” hut for me.
We lay down to sleep in damp year-old straw that stank of mold. The straw was spread over bare smooth earth. We lay down in a heap for warmth, and only the gangsters, settling around a lantern that hung from a beam, played their eternal game of snap or poker. Soon, however, even the gangsters went to sleep. So did I, as I contemplated what I had done. I had no older comrade or example to follow. I was alone in this party, I had no friends or comrades. My sleep was interrupted. A lantern shone in my face, and one of my neighbors, a gangster, woken up by this, was repeating confidently and servilely, “It’s him, him. . . .”
A guard was holding the lantern.
“Come outside.”
“I’ll get my coat on.”
“Come out as you are.”
I went out. I was shaking with nerves, and I didn’t understand what would happen next.
Two guards and I came out onto the porch.
“Take off your underclothes!”
I did so.
“Kneel in the snow.”
I knelt. I looked at the porch and saw two rifles pointed at me. How much time passed that night in the Urals, my first night in the Urals, I don’t remember.
I heard an order: “Get dressed.”
I put on my underclothes. I was struck on the ear and I fell onto the snow. A blow from a heavy heel got me straight in the teeth. My mouth was filled with warm blood and quickly swelled up.
“Get back to the barracks.”
I went into the barracks, got to my place where another body had already taken over. Everyone was asleep or pretending to be asleep. . . . The salty taste of blood lingered on. There was something else in my mouth, alien, unwanted, so I grabbed it with my fingers and, with an effort, pulled it out of my mouth. It was a tooth that had been knocked out. I threw it out on the rotten straw, on the bare earth floor.
Kolyma Stories Page 75