Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later. No one attempted to escape from Kolyma at that time; it would have been insane…

  Those few years are the golden age of Kolyma. The horrible Yezhov, who was a true enemy of the people, spoke indignantly of the period at one of the meetings of the Central Committee shortly before unleashing his own wave of terror that was to be christened the ‘Yezhovshchina’.

  It was in 1938 that Kolyma was transformed into a special camp for recidivists and Trotskyites, and escapes began to be punished with three-year sentences.

  ‘Why did you escape? You couldn’t have had a compass or a map?’

  ‘We did it anyway. Alexander promised to be our guide…’

  They were being held at a transit prison. There were three of them who had unsuccessfully tried to escape: Nicholas Karev, a twenty-five-year-old former Leningrad journalist, Fyodor Vasiliev, a bookkeeper from Rostov who was the same age, and Alexander Kotelnikov, a Kamchatka Eskimo and reindeer-driver who had been arrested for stealing government property. Kotelnikov must have been about fifty years old, but he could have been a lot older, since it is hard to tell the age of a Yakut, Kamchadal, or Evenk. Kotelnikov spoke good Russian, but he couldn’t pronounce the Russian ‘sh’ and always replaced it with ‘s’ as did all the dialect speakers of the Chukotsk Peninsula. He knew who Pushkin and Nekrasov were, had been in Khabarovsk, and was an experienced traveler. He was a romantic by nature, judging by the gleam in his eye.

  It was he who volunteered to lead his young friends out of confinement.

  ‘I told them America was closer and that we should head in that direction, but they wanted to make it to the mainland, so I gave in. We had to reach the Chukchi Eskimos, the migrating ones who were here before the Russians came. We didn’t make it.’

  They were gone for only four days. They had left in the middle of September, in boots and summer clothing, certain they would have no difficulty in reaching the Chukchi camps, where Kotelnikov had assured them they would find friendship and assistance. But it snowed – a thick, early snow. Kotelnikov entered an Evenk village to buy deerskin boots. He bought the boots, and by evening a patrol caught up with them.

  ‘The Tungus are traitors, enemies,’ Kotelnikov fumed.

  The old reindeer-driver had offered to lead Karev and Vasiliev out of the taiga without expecting any payment whatsoever. He was not particularly grieved by his new three-year ‘add-on’.

  ‘They’ll send me to the mines as soon as spring comes. I’ll just take off again.’

  To shorten the time, he taught Karev and Vasiliev the Chukotsk language of the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was Karev, of course, who had initiated the whole affair. He cut a theatrical figure – even in this prison setting – and his modulated, velvet-toned voice betrayed his frivolousness. It couldn’t even have been called adventurousness. With each passing day he understood better the futility of the attempt, became moody, and weakened.

  Vasiliev was simply a good soul ready to share his friend’s fate. Their escape attempt had taken place during the first year of their imprisonment, while they still had illusions… and physical strength.

  Twelve cans of meat disappeared on a ‘white’ summer night from the tent-kitchen of a geological prospecting group. The loss was highly mysterious, since all forty employees and technologists were civilians with good salaries who had little need to steal cans of meat. Even if these cans had been worth some fantastic sum, there was no one to buy them in this remote, endless forest. The ‘bear’ explanation was immediately rejected, since nothing else in the kitchen had been touched. It was suggested that someone might have been trying to get even with the cook, who was in charge of the food. But the cook was a genial sort who denied that he had a secret enemy among the forty men. To check the matter out, the foreman, Kasaev, armed two of the stronger men with knives and set out with them to examine the area. He himself took with him the only weapon in camp – a small-caliber rifle. The surrounding area consisted of gray-brown ravines devoid of the slightest trace of greenery. They led to a limestone plateau. The geologist’s camp was located in a sort of pit on the green shore of a creek.

  It did not take long to find out what had happened. In about two hours the party leisurely climbed a plateau, and a worker with particularly good eyesight stretched out his hand: a moving point could be made out on the horizon. The search party went along the ridge of slippery tuff, young stone that had not yet completely formed. This young tuff is similar to white butter and has a repulsive, salty taste. A man’s foot will sink into it as if into a swamp, and when a boot is dipped in this semi-liquid, buttery stone, it is covered by a white paint-like substance.

  It was easy to walk along the ridge, and they caught up with the man in about an hour and a half. He was dressed in the shreds of an old pea jacket and quilted pants with the knees missing. Both pant legs had been cut off to make footwear, which had already worn to shreds. The man had also cut off the sleeves of the pea jacket to wrap around his feet. His leather or rubber boots had evidently been long since worn through on the stones and branches and had been abandoned.

  The man had a shaggy beard and was pale from unendurable suffering. He had diarrhea, terrible diarrhea. Eleven untouched cans of meat lay next to him on the rocks. One can had been broken open and eaten the day before.

  He had been trying to make his way to Magadan for a month and was circling in the forest like a man rowing a boat in a deep lake-fog. He had lost all sense of direction and was walking at random when, totally exhausted, he came upon the camp. He had been catching field mice and eating grass. He had managed to hold out until the previous day when he noticed the smoke of our fire. He waited for night, took the cans, and crawled up on to the plateau by morning. He also took matches from the kitchen, but there was no need for them. He ate the meat, and his dry mouth and terrible thirst forced him to descend the ravine to the creek. There he drank and drank the cold, delicious water. The next day his face was all puffed up, and a gastric cramp robbed him of his last strength. He was glad that his journey was over – no matter in what fashion.

  Captured at that very same camp was another escapee, an important person of some kind. One of a group who had escaped from a neighboring mine, robbing and killing the mine director himself, this man was the last of the ten to be captured. Two were killed, seven caught, and this last member of the group was captured on the twenty-first day. He had no shoes, and the soles of his feet were cracked and bleeding. He said that he had eaten a tiny fish a week earlier. He had caught the fish in a dried-up stream, but it had taken him several hours, and he was debilitated by hunger. His face was swollen and drained of blood. The guards took considerable care with his diet and treatment. They even mobilized the camp medic and gave him strict orders to take special care of the prisoner. The man spent three days in camp, where he washed, ate his fill, got his hair cut, and shaved. Then he was taken away by a patrol for questioning, after which he was undoubtedly shot. The man knew this would happen, but he had seen a lot in the camps, and his indifference had long since reached the stage where a man becomes a fatalist and swims with the current. The guards were with him the entire time and would not permit anyone to talk to him. Each evening he would sit on the porch of the bathhouse and watch the enormous cherry-red sunset. The light of the evening sun was reflected in his eyes and they seemed to be on fire – a beautiful sight.

  Orotukan is a settlement in Kolyma with a monument to Tatyana Malandin, and the Orotukan Club bears her name. Tatyana Malandin was a civilian employee, a member of the Komsomol, who fell into the clutches of escaped professional criminals. She was robbed and raped ‘in chorus’ – in the loathsome expression of the criminal world. And she was murdered in the taiga, a few hundred yards from the village. This occurred in 1938, and the authorities vainly spread rumors that she had been murdered by ‘Trotskyites’. The absurdity of such a slander, howeve
r, was too obvious, and it enraged even Lieutenant Malandin, the uncle of the murdered girl. A camp employee, Malandin henceforth reversed his attitude to the criminals and the politicals in camp. From that time on he hated the former and did favors for the latter.

  Both the men described above were recaptured when their strength was virtually exhausted. Another man conducted himself quite differently when he was detained by a group of workers on a path near the test pits. A heavy rain had been falling for three days, and several workers put on their raincoats and pants to check the small tent, which served as a kitchen; it contained food and cooking utensils. There was also a portable smithy with an anvil, a furnace, and a supply of drilling tools. The smithy and kitchen stood in the bed of a mountain creek, in a ravine about a mile and a half from the sleeping tents.

  Mountain rivers easily burst their banks when it rains, and the weather was fully expected to pull its usual tricks. The sight that the men came upon, however, left them totally dumbfounded. Nothing remained. Where there had been a smithy with tools for the entire site – drills, bits, picks, shovels, blacksmith tools – there was nothing. Nor was there any kitchen with the summer’s food supply. There were no pots, no dishes – nothing. The appearance of the ravine had been totally changed by new stones brought down from somewhere by the raging water. Everything had been carried off downstream, and the workers followed the river-banks for several miles, but did not find so much as a piece of iron. Much later, when the water had receded, an enameled bowl was found in the rose willows growing on the shore near the mouth of the creek. This crushed and twisted bowl filled with sand was all that was left after the storm and the spring flood.

  Returning home, the workers came upon a man in canvas boots, wearing a soaked-through raincoat and carrying a bag over his shoulder.

  ‘Are you an escapee?’ Vaska Rybin, one of the ditch diggers of the expedition, asked the man.

  ‘That’s right,’ the man answered in a sort of semi-confirming tone. ‘I need to get dry…’

  ‘Come with us to our tent; we have a fire in the stove.’ In the rainy summer weather the stove was always kept hot. All forty men lived in the tent.

  The man took off his boots, hung his footcloths next to the stove, pulled out a tin cigarette case, shook some cheap tobacco on to a scrap of newspaper, and lit up.

  ‘Where are you going in such a rain?’

  ‘To Magadan.’

  ‘Would you like something to eat?’

  ‘What do you have?’

  The soup and pearl-barley kasha didn’t tempt the man. He untied his sack and took out a piece of sausage.

  ‘You know how to escape in style,’ Rybin said.

  Vasily Kochetov, an older worker who was second-in-charge of the work gang, stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Rybin asked him.

  ‘To get some air,’ Kochetov responded and stepped over the threshold of the tent.

  Rybin smirked.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to the escaped prisoner. ‘Pick up your stuff and get off to wherever you’re going. He just went for the boss – to arrest you. Don’t worry, we don’t have soldiers, but you had better get on your way. Here’s some bread, and take some tobacco. The rain seems to be letting up; you’re in luck. Just keep heading for the big hill, and you can’t go wrong.’

  The escaped prisoner silently wrapped the dry ends of his wet footcloths around his feet, pulled on his boots, lifted his sack to his shoulder, and left.

  About ten minutes later the piece of canvas that served as a door flung back, and the foreman, Kasaev, came in with a small-caliber rifle over his shoulder. With him were two other foremen, followed by Kochetov.

  Kasaev stood silently while his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness of the tent. He looked around, but no one paid any attention to the newcomers. Everyone was busy with his own affairs – some were asleep, others were mending their clothing, others were whittling some complicated erotic figures from a log, and still others were playing the game bura with home-made cards.

  Rybin was setting his charred pot, made from a tin can, on the glowing coals.

  ‘Where is he?’ Kasaev shouted.

  ‘Gone,’ Rybin answered calmly. ‘Picked up his stuff and left. What did you want me to do – arrest him?’

  ‘He got undressed,’ Kochetov shouted. ‘He wanted to sleep.’

  ‘How about you? You went out to get some fresh air, and where did you scurry off to in the rain?’

  ‘Let’s go home,’ Kasaev said. ‘As for you, Rybin, you had better watch your step or things are going to go badly for you.’

  ‘What can you do to me?’ Rybin said, walking up to Kasaev. ‘Sprinkle salt on my head? Or maybe cut my throat while I’m sleeping? Is that it?’

  The foreman left.

  This is one small lyric episode in the monotonously gloomy tale of men fleeing Kolyma.

  The camp supervisor was worried by the number of escapees dropping in – three of them in one month. He requested that a guard post of armed soldiers be sent, but he was turned down. Headquarters was not willing to take on such expenditures on behalf of civilian employees, and they told him to take care of the matter, using the resources he already had at his disposal. By that time Kasaev’s small-caliber rifle had been supplemented by two double-barreled, center-firing shotguns that were loaded with pieces of lead – as if for bear. Nevertheless, these guns were too unreliable to count on if the camp were attacked by a group of hungry and desperate escapees.

  The camp director was an experienced man, and he came up with the idea of building two guard towers similar to those in real forced labor camps. It was clever camouflage. The false guard towers were intended to convince escaped convicts that there were armed guards at the site.

  Evidently the camp director’s idea was successful; no escaped convicts appeared on the site after that, even though we were not much more than a hundred miles from Magadan.

  The search for the ‘first of all metals’ – that is, for gold – shifted into the Chai-Urinsk Valley along the same path that Krivoshei had taken. When that happened, dozens fled into the forest. From there it was closer than ever to the mainland, but the authorities were well aware of this fact. The number of secret guard posts was dramatically increased, and the hunt for escaped convicts reached its peak. Squadrons of soldiers combed the taiga, rendering totally impossible ‘release by the green procurator’ – the popular phrase used to describe escapes. The ‘green procurator’ freed fewer and fewer prisoners, and finally stopped freeing anyone at all.

  Recaptured prisoners were killed on the spot, and the morgue at Arkagala was packed with bodies being held for identification by the fingerprint service.

  The Arkagala coalmine near the settlement of Kadykchan was famous for its coal deposits. The coal seams were as thick as eight, thirteen, or even twenty-one yards. About six miles from the mine was a military ‘outpost’. The soldiers slept, ate, and were generally based there in the forest.

  In the summer of 1940 the outpost was commanded by Corporal Postnikov, a man who hungered for murder and performed his job with eagerness and passion. He personally captured five escaped convicts and was awarded some sort of medal and a sum of money, as was the custom in such cases. The reward for the dead was the same as for the living, so there was no sense in delivering captured prisoners in one piece.

  One pale August morning Postnikov ambushed an escaped convict who had come down to the river to drink. Postnikov shot and killed the prisoner with his Mauser, and it was decided not to drag the body back to the village but to abandon it in the taiga. There were a lot of bear and lynx tracks in the vicinity.

  Postnikov took an axe and chopped off both hands at the wrist so that Bookkeeping could take fingerprints. He put the hands into his pouch and set off home to write up the latest report on a successful hunt.

  The report was dispatched on the same day; one of the soldiers took the package and Postnikov gave the rest of the men the day off in hon
or of his good fortune.

  That night the dead man got up and with the bloody stumps of his forearms pressed to his chest somehow reached the tent in which the convict-laborers lived. His face pale and drained of blood, he stood at the doorway and peered in with unusually blue, crazed eyes. Bent double and leaning against the door frame, he glared from under lowered brows and groaned. He was shaking terribly. Black blood spotted his quilted jacket, his pants, and his rubber boots. He was given some hot soup, and his terrible wrists were wrapped in rags. Fellow prisoners started to take him to the first-aid station, but Corporal Postnikov himself, along with some soldiers, came running from the hut that served as the outpost.

  The soldiers took the man off somewhere – but not to the hospital or the first-aid station. I never heard anything more of the prisoner with the chopped-off hands.

  My First Tooth

  The column of men was just as I had dreamed all through my boyhood years. Everywhere were blackened faces and blue mouths burned by the Ural sun in April. Enormous guards leaped into sleighs which flew by without stopping. One of the guards had a single eye and a scar slash across his face. The head guard had bright-blue eyes and we all, all two hundred convicts, knew his name before half the first day had passed – Sherbakov. We learned it by magic, in some unfathomable, incomprehensible way. The convicts uttered his name in an offhand fashion as if it were something they had long been familiar with and this trip with him would last for ever. Indeed, he entered our lives for eternity. That is just the way it was – at least for many of us. Sherbakov’s enormous, supple figure appeared briefly everywhere. He would run ahead of the column and meet it, and then follow the last cart with his eyes before rushing forward to catch up and overtake it. Yes, we had carts, the classic carts of Siberia. Our group was making a five-day march in convict file. We carried no special goods with us and whenever we stopped anywhere or had to be counted, our irregular ranks reminded one of recruits at a railway station. It would be a long time, however, before the paths of our lives led us to any railway stations. It was a crisp April morning, and our yawning, coughing group was mustered in the twilight of a monastery courtyard before setting out on the long journey.