[47] A river and town in northern Siberia.
[48] Piotr Yakubovich’s memoir about fifteen years of Siberian hard labor as a political prisoner 1884–1899.
[49] The memoirs of Clément Henri Sanson were actually a mystification by Honoré de Balzac.
[50] Les Bals des gibières started in 1794 as a protest by nobles whose relatives had been guillotined.
BOOK THREE: THE SPADE ARTIST
[1] Aleksandr Chayanov and Ivan Kondratiev were highly original economists. Both were shot in the terror of 1937–38.
[2] Nikolai Krylenko, famous as a chess player and mountain climber, was the People’s Commissar for Justice during the 1930s. His “rubber-band” policy meant that any criminal could have his sentence reduced to one year or extended for life, depending on his behavior. “Reforging” meant reforming criminal character through productive labor. Krylenko was shot in July 1938.
[3] The Serpantinnaya (the name comes from the serpentine layout of the ditches in which the dead were buried) was an NKVD camp, nominally a pretrial prison, near Magadan, used primarily for mass executions. Some thirty thousand prisoners are thought to have been killed there in the late 1930s. Only four are believed to have emerged alive.
[4] Method number three was torture.
[5] This railway provided a shortcut from Siberia to Vladivostok through Chinese Manchuria. In 1928 its Soviet employees were repatriated to Russia; most ended up in the camps.
[6] Engineer Kiseliov resembles the engineer Kiseliov in Book Two, but Shalamov has changed his patronym from Ivanovich to Dmitriyevich.
[7] A celebrated young and defiant partisan, hanged by the Germans in 1941.
[8] Savva Timofeyevich Morozov was one of Russia’s richest and most progressive manufacturers. He was a patron of the socialists and defended his workers’ rights. In 1905 he was certified insane at his indignant family’s request and was found shot later the same year. It is not known if he was murdered, or committed suicide.
[9] At the Congress of 1956 Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes; many surviving political prisoners were then “rehabilitated.”
[10] This story is based on the lives of the author’s parents, Father Tikhon Nikolayevich Shalamov (1868–1933) and Nadezhda Aleksandrovna (1870–1934).
[11] Foreign ambassadors to Russia retreated to Vologda in spring 1918, fearing a German invasion of Saint Petersburg. Three of them (Joseph Noulens of France, Bruce Lockhart of Great Britain, and David Francis of the U.S.) were accused of fomenting an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy with tsarist officers there.
[12] Lomonosov and Lavoisier were both chemists, as well as poets.
[13] Friedrich (or Fiodor) Erismann was a Swiss ophthalmologist who in 1870 as a hygienist in Saint Petersburg invented an ergonomic school desk, usually constructed as a double, with an integrated bench and table. It became the standard school desk in Russia for the next century.
[14] Potassium permanganate crystals are very caustic; only a 1:1,000 solution is used on burns.
[15] Leonid Zakovsky, much-feared Leningrad NKVD chief, shot in 1938.
[16] A reference to Pushkin’s poem “The Hero”: “Rather than ten thousand low truths I prefer / A deceit that uplifts us.”
[17] Lines from Heinrich Heine’s “Doktrin.” (Shalamov quotes them in a translation by Aleksei Pleshcheyev.)
[18] In fact Dr. Yakov (not “David”) Umansky died in 1951.
[19] Genetics, known as “Weismannism,” was a banned topic in the USSR from 1937 until 1964.
[20] These students, “fonovtsy,” were officials and managers who in the late 1920s were enrolled in fast-track university courses to raise their qualifications.
[21] The surname Blagorazumov means “prudent.”
[22] The manifesto of an anti-Stalinist left-wing group within the party in the mid-1920s, led by Timofei Sapronov, who was shot in 1937.
[23] This statement, contradicting what was said about Zader’s Russian a few paragraphs earlier, is in the original text.
[24] Dr. Gaaz, who died in 1853, was the kindly chief prison doctor in Moscow. He saw Dostoevsky off on his journey to prison in Siberia.
[25] In 1952 Stalin attacked Jewish doctors, accusing them of being “murderers in white coats.” Although after Stalin’s death Beria had the doctors released before trial, several died under torture.
[26] Nikolai Muralov was a leader of the armed Bolshevik rebellion in Moscow; a Trotskyist, he was arrested in 1936 and shot in 1937.
[27] Karl Maksimovich Behr (1792–1876), a founder of the Russian Geographical Society, was an Estonian geologist famous for his work on the asymmetry of riverbeds in the Russian Arctic and the shores of the Caspian Sea.
[28] In the summer of 1907 the revolutionary Vladimir Zenzinov escaped exile to Yakutsk and, pretending to be a gold miner, walked 1,600 kilometers to the sea of Okhotsk, where he left Russia on a Japanese schooner.
[29] Eugene Vidocq was a real French detective in the first half of the nineteenth century; Monsieur Lecoq was a fictional detective in the novels of Émile Gaboriau.
[30] G. I. Chubarov was a Red Army officer who with twenty others committed a gang rape in 1927.
[31] General Krasnov, the pro-German head of the Don Cossacks, was not taken prisoner until 1945, when he was handed to the Soviets and hanged. Possibly Shalamov confuses him with Ataman Annenkov, the White Russian leader who was betrayed to the Soviets by the Chinese and executed in 1927.
[32] Article 16 made actions similar to crimes punishable, even if not covered by the Criminal Code.
[33] Article 35 allowed for up to five years’ deportation or exile for persons considered “dangerous.”
[34] Umberto Nobile’s expedition by airship to the North Pole in 1928 ended in a crash. Soviet pilots rescued two of the three men who walked off in search of help, but Finn Malmgren’s body was never found, and there were rumors that he was eaten by the others.
[35] Joseph Stalin, in 1930.
[36] One of the first Soviet show trials, the 1928 “Mines’ Trial” accused engineers, especially foreigners, of sabotage. Over one hundred were convicted, and eleven were sentenced to death.
[37] Vera Figner and Nikolai Morozov were prominent political prisoners in the 1880s.
[38] Named in the second half of the 1900s after Prime Minister Piotr Stolypin, who was famed for restoring law and order.
[39] Fiodor Raskolnikov, prominent revolutionary, later diplomat, who defected and was murdered in 1939 on Stalin’s orders.
[40] The Wild Division was a group of several thousand volunteers, mainly from the North Caucasus, led by the tsar’s brother. They fought in World War I, taking few prisoners.
[41] Lieutenant Kijé, the subject of a story by Yuri Tynianov and an opera by Prokofiev, was a bureaucratic blunder at the end of the eighteenth century. Kijé means “who is also.” In this story, AKA Berdy means “also known as” (onzhe) Berdy. A nonexistent person was created for the records.
[42] In the late 1940s Lidia Timashuk wrote a letter denouncing (perhaps justifiably) the Kremlin doctors for negligence in treating Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov, who died of a heart attack.
Kolyma Stories Page 81