Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  Thus, can it be that a human being – no matter who – would not want to free himself from this torment that keeps him from sleeping and against which he struggles by scratching his own dirty body till it bleeds?

  No, of course not. But the first ‘but’ arises over the lack of any work-release time for the bathhouse. Bathhouse sessions are arranged either before or after work. After many hours of work in the cold (and it’s no easier in the summer) when all thoughts and hopes are concentrated on the desire to reach one’s bunk and food so as to fall asleep as soon as possible, the bathhouse delay is almost unendurable. The bathhouse is always located an appreciable distance from living quarters, since it serves not only convicts but civilians from the village as well. Usually it is situated in the civilian village, and not in camp.

  The bathhouse always takes up much more than the hour necessary to wash and delouse clothing. Many people have to wash themselves, one group after the other, and all late-comers have to wait their turn in the cold. They are brought to the bathhouse directly from work without any stopover in camp, since they would all scatter and find some way to evade going there. When it’s very cold the camp administration attempts to shorten the outside waiting period and admits the convicts directly to the dressing-rooms. The dressing-rooms are intended for ten to fifteen persons but the camp authorities pack in up to a hundred men in outer clothing. The dressing-rooms are either unheated or poorly heated. Everything and everyone is mixed together – naked men and men in coats. There is a constant shoving, swearing, and general hubbub. Profiting from the noise and the crush, both common criminals and political prisoners steal their neighbors’ belongings. Different work gangs who live separately have been brought together, and it’s never possible to recover anything. Furthermore, there’s nowhere to entrust anything for safe keeping.

  The second, or rather the third ‘but’ arises from the fact that the janitors are obliged to clean up the barracks while the work gang is in the bathhouse. The barracks are swept, washed, and everything judged to be unnecessary is mercilessly thrown out. In camp every rag is treasured, and enormous amounts of energy are expended to acquire a spare pair of mittens or extra foot rags. Bulkier things are treasured even more, and food highest of all. All this disappears without a trace and in full accordance with the law while the convicts are in the bathhouse. It’s useless to take things to work with you and from there to the bathhouse; they are immediately noticed by the vigilant and experienced eye of the camp criminal element. Mittens or foot rags can be easily exchanged for a smoke.

  It is characteristic of man, be he beggar or Nobel laureate, that he quickly acquires petty things. In any move (having nothing to do with jail) we are amazed at the number of small things we have accumulated and cannot imagine where they all come from. And all these possessions are given away, sold, thrown out – until we achieve with great difficulty the level necessary to close the lid of the suitcase. The same is true of the convict. He is, after all, a working man and needs a needle and material for patches, and an extra bowl perhaps. All this is cast out and then reaccumulated after each bathhouse day, unless it is buried somewhere deep in the snow to be dug up again the next day.

  In Dostoevsky’s time the bathhouse provided one basin of hot water (anything over that had to be paid for). That standard has been retained to this very day. It’s always a wooden basin with not very hot water. Prisoners are permitted any amount of those burning pieces of ice that stick to the fingers; they’re kept in barrels. There’s never a second basin to dilute the water, and the hot water is cooled by the pieces of ice. That, however, is all the water a convict receives to wash the hair on his head and his entire body.

  A convict must be able to wash himself with any portion of water – from a spoonful to a cistern-full. If he gets only a spoonful, he wets his gummy festering eyes and considers his toilet completed. If he gets a cistern of water, he splashes it on his neighbors, refills his basin every minute, and somehow manages to use up his portion in the allotted time.

  All this testifies to quick-wittedness in the resolution of such an everyday question as the bathhouse. But it does not, of course, solve the question of cleanliness. The dream of getting clean in the bathhouse is an impossible dream.

  In the bathhouse itself there is constant uproar accompanied by smoke, crowding, and shouting; there’s even a common turn of speech: ‘to shout as in the bathhouse’. There is no extra water, and no one can buy any. But it’s not just water that’s in short supply. There’s not enough heat either. The iron stoves are not always red-hot the way they should be, and most of the time it’s simply cold in the bathhouse. The feeling of coldness is increased by a thousand drafts from under the doors, from cracks. Cracks between the logs are stuffed with moss which quickly dries up and turns to powder, leaving holes to the outside. Every stay in the bathhouse involves the risk of catching cold – a danger that everyone, including the doctors, is aware of. After every bathhouse session the list of people freed from work is lengthened. These are truly ill people, and the doctors know it.

  Remember that the wood for the bathhouse is physically carried in on the evening of the previous day on the shoulders of the work gang. Again, this delays returning to the barracks by about two hours and cannot but create an anti-bathhouse mood.

  But that’s not all. The worst thing is the obligatory disinfestation chamber.

  In camp there is ‘individual’ and ‘common’ underwear; such are the verbal pearls found in official speech. ‘Individual’ underwear is newer and somewhat better and is reserved for trusties, convict foremen, and other privileged persons. No convict has his own underwear. The so-called individual underwear is washed separately and more carefully. It’s also replaced more often. ‘Common’ underwear is underwear for anyone. It’s handed out in the bathhouse right after bathing in exchange for dirty underwear, which is gathered and counted separately beforehand. There’s no opportunity to select anything according to size. Clean underwear is a pure lottery, and I felt a strange and terrible pity at seeing adult men cry over the injustice of receiving worn-out clean underwear in exchange for dirty good underwear. Nothing can take the mind of a human being off the unpleasantnesses that comprise life. Only vaguely do the convicts realize that, after all, this inconvenience will end the next bathhouse day, that their lives are what’s ruined, that there is no reason to worry over some underwear, that they received the old, good underwear by chance. But no, they quarrel and cry. This is, of course, a manifestation of those psychoses that are characteristic of a convict’s every action, of that same ‘dementia’ which one neuropathologist termed a universal illness.

  The spiritual ups and downs of a convict’s life have shifted to the point where receiving underwear from a small dark window leading into the depths of the bathhouse is an event that transcends the nerves. Having washed themselves, the men gather at the window far in advance of the actual distribution of underwear. Over and over again they discuss in detail the underwear received last time, the underwear received five years ago at Bamlag. As soon as the board is raised that closes off the small window from within, they rush to it, jostling each other with their slippery, dirty, and stinking bodies.

  The underwear is not always dry. Too often it’s handed out wet – either there wasn’t time enough to dry it or they were short of logs. To put on wet or damp underwear is not a pleasant experience for anyone.

  Curses rain down upon the indifferent heads of the men working in the bathhouse. Those who have to put on the damp underwear truly begin to feel the cold, but they must wait for the disinfected outer garments to be handed out.

  What exactly is the disinfestation chamber? It is a pit covered with a tarpaulin roof and smeared with clay on the inside. The heat is provided by an iron stove, the mouth of which faces out into the entrance hall. Pea coats, quilted jackets, and pants are hung on poles, the door is tightly shut, and the disinfector begins ‘laying on the heat’. There are no thermometers or bags of sulfur t
o determine the temperature achieved. Success depends on chance or the diligence of the disinfector.

  At best only those things that hang close to the stove are well heated. The remainder, blocked from the heat by the closer items, only get damp. Those in the far corner are taken out cold. No lice are killed by this disinfestation chamber. It’s only a formality, and the apparatus has been created for the purpose of tormenting the convict still more.

  The doctors understand this very well, but the camp can’t be left without a disinfestation chamber. When the prisoners have spent an additional hour waiting in the large dressing room, totally indistinguishable clothing is dragged out by the armful and thrown on the floor. It is up to each person to locate his clothing. The convict swears and dons padded trousers, jacket, and pea coat – all wet from the steam. Afterward, at night, he will sacrifice his last hours of sleep to attempt to dry his clothing at the barracks stove.

  It is not hard to understand why no one likes bathhouse day.

  The Green Procurator

  Values shift here, in Kolyma, and any one of our concepts – even though its name may be pronounced in the usual way and spelled with the usual letters – may contain some new element or meaning, something for which there is no equivalent on the mainland. Here everything is judged by different standards: customs and habits are unique, and the meaning of every word has changed.

  When it is impossible to describe a new event, feeling, or concept for which ordinary human language has no word, a new term is created, borrowed from the language of the legislator of style and taste in the Far North – the criminal world.

  Semantic metamorphoses touch not only such concepts as Love, Family, Honor, Work, Virtue, Vice, Crime, but even words that are quite specific to the world of the Far North and that have been born within its bowels – for example, ESCAPE…

  In my early youth I read about Kropotkin’s flight, in 1876, from the Fortress of Peter and Paul. His was a classic escape: a daredevil cab at the prison gates, a lady with a revolver under her cape, an exact calculation of the number of steps from the guardhouse door, the prisoner’s sprint under fire, the clatter of horse hooves on the cobblestone pavement.

  Later I read memoirs of persons who had been sent to exile in Siberia under the czars. I found their escapes from Yakutia and Verxoyansk bitterly disappointing: a sleigh-ride with horses hitched nose to tail, arrival at the train station, purchase of a ticket at the ticket window… I could never understand why this was called an ‘escape’. Such escapes were once called ‘unwarranted absence from place of residence’, and I believe that this was a far more accurate description than the romantic word ‘flight’. Even the escape of the Social Revolutionary Zenzinov did not give the feeling of a real escape like Kropotkin’s. An American yacht simply approached the boat on which Zenzinov was fishing and took him on board.

  There were always plenty of escape attempts in Kolyma, and they were all unsuccessful, because of the particularly severe nature of the polar region, which the czarist government never attempted to colonize with convicts – as it did Sakhalin.

  Distances to the mainland ran into thousands of miles; the nearest settlements were those surrounding the mines of Far Northern Construction and Aldan, and we were separated from them by a taiga vacuum of six hundred miles.

  True, the distance to America was significantly shorter. At its narrowest point, the Bering Strait is only fifty-five miles wide, but the border was so heavily guarded as to be absolutely impassable.

  The main escape route led to Yakutsk. From there travel had to be either by water or on horseback. There were no planes in those days, but even so it would have been a simple matter to lock up the planes reliably.

  It is understandable that there were no escape attempts in the winter; all convicts (and not only convicts) dream fervently of spending the winter under a roof next to a cast-iron stove.

  Spring presents an unbearable temptation; it is always that way. To the compelling meteorological factor is added the power of cold logic. A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch field mice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits…

  No matter how cold the summer nights are in the north, in the land of the permafrost, no experienced man will catch cold if he sleeps on a rock, makes a mattress of grass or branches, avoids sleeping on his back, and changes position regularly from one side to the other.

  The choice of Kolyma as a camp location was a brilliant one, because of the impossibility of escape. Nevertheless, here as everywhere, the power of illusion is strong, and the price of such an illusion is paid in bitter days spent in punishment cells, additional sentences, beatings, hunger, and frequently death.

  There were many escape attempts, which always began when the first emeralds colored the fingernails of the larches.

  The convicts who tried to escape were almost always newcomers serving their first year, men in whose hearts freedom and vanity had not yet been annihilated, men whose reason had not yet come to grips with Far North conditions so different from those of the mainland. Until then the mainland was, after all, the only world that they had known. Distressed to the very depths of their souls by everything they saw, the beatings, torture, mockery, degradation, these newcomers fled – some more efficiently, others less – but all came to the same end. Some were caught in two days, others in a week, still others in two weeks…

  At first there were no long sentences for escaped prisoners. Ultimately, however, they were tried under Point 14 of Article 58 of the Criminal Code. Escape is a refusal to work and is therefore counter-revolutionary sabotage. Ten years was thus to become the minimal ‘supplementary’ sentence for an escape attempt. Repeated attempts were punished with twenty-five years. This frightened no one, nor did it lessen the number of escape attempts or of burglaries. But all that was to come later.

  The enormous staff of camp guards with their thousands of German shepherds combined efforts with the border patrol and the vast army stationed in Kolyma and masquerading under the title ‘The Kolyma Regiment’. Together, these groups had more than enough manpower to catch one hundred out of every hundred escapees.

  How could escape be possible, and wouldn’t it have been simpler to beef up the camp guards rather than hunt down those who had already escaped?

  Economic considerations justify maintaining a staff of ‘headhunters’, since this is cheaper than setting up a ‘deadbolt’ system of the prison variety. It is extraordinarily difficult to prevent the escape itself. Even the gigantic network of informers recruited from the prisoners themselves and paid with cheap cigarettes and soup is inadequate.

  This is a question of human psychology with its twists and turns, and it is impossible to foresee who will attempt an escape, or when, or why. What happens is often quite different from that which might have been expected.

  Of course, all sorts of preventive measures can be taken – arrests, imprisonment in those prisons within prisons that are called ‘punishment zones’, transfers of ‘suspicious’ prisoners from one place to another. Many such measures have been worked out, and they probably lessen the number of escapes. There would have been even more attempts had it not been for these punishment zones situated deep in the taiga under heavy guard.

  People do manage to escape even from punishment zones, however, while no one attempts to escape from unguarded work sites. Anything can happen in camp.

  Spring is a time of preparation. More guards and dogs are sent in, and additional training and special instructions are the rule. As for the prisoners, they also prepare – hiding tins of food and dried bread, selecting ‘partners’.

  There is a single example of a classic escape from Kolyma, carefully prepared and executed in a brilliant, methodical fashion. It is the exception that proves the rule. Even in this escape, however, a tiny insignificant thread was left that led back to the escapee – even though the search took two year
s. Evidently it was a question of the professional pride of the investigators, Vidokov and Lekokov, and considerably greater attention, effort, and money were spent on it than was normally done.

  It is curious that the escapee who demonstrated such energy and wit was neither a ‘political’ nor a professional criminal, either of whom might have been expected to specialize in such affairs. He was an embezzler with a ten-year sentence.

  Even this is understandable. An escape by a ‘political’ is always related to the mood of the ‘outside’ and – like a hunger strike in prison – draws its strength from its connection with the outside. A prisoner must know, and know well in advance, the eventual goal of his escape. What goal could any political have had in 1937? People whose political connections are accidental and insignificant do not flee from prison. They might try to escape to their family and friends, but in 1938 that would have involved bringing repressive measures down on the heads of anyone whom the escapee might have seen on the street.

  In such instances there was no getting off with fifteen or twenty years. The political would have been a threat to the very lives of his friends and family. Someone would have had to conceal him, render him assistance. None of the politicals in 1938 tried to escape.

  The few men who actually served out their sentences and returned home found that their own wives checked the correctness and legality of their release papers and raced their neighbors to the police station to announce their husbands’ arrival.

  Reprisals taken upon innocent persons were quite simple. Instead of being reprimanded or issued a warning, they were tortured and then sentenced to ten or twenty years of prison or hard labor. All that was left to such persons was death. And they died with no thought of escape, displaying once more that national quality of passivity glorified by the poet Tiutchev and shamelessly exploited on later occasions by politicians of all levels.