‘A soldier broke my arm.’
‘A soldier? Can it be that our soldiers beat the prisoners? You can’t mean a guard, but some convict work gang leader.’
‘Yeah, I guess it was a work gang leader.’
‘See what a bad memory you have? My arrival here is not a run-of-the-mill kind of thing. I’m the boss. And we will not permit beatings! In general, rudeness, hooliganism, and swearing has to come to an end. I already gave a talk at a meeting of the Planning Board. I told them that if the director of Far North Construction is impolite in his conversations with the headquarters chief, and the headquarters chief permits himself to use obscene, abusive language with the director of mines, then how does the mine chief talk to the area heads? It’s nothing but a stream of obscenities. But those are still mainland obscenities. The area head chews out his superintendents, work gang leaders, and foremen for using the obscenities of the Kolyma underground world. And what’s left then to the foreman or work gang leader? All they can do is take a stick and beat on the workers. Isn’t that the way it is?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the major.
‘Nikishov gave a talk at that same conference. He said: “You’re new people. You don’t know Kolyma. The conditions here are special. Morality is different here.” But I told him we came here to work and we will work, not the way Nikishov says, but the way Comrade Stalin says.’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said the major.
When they heard that the matter had reached Stalin, the patients fell silent.
Behind the door was a crowd of area supervisors; they had been summoned from their apartments and were waiting, along with the hospital director, for the speech to end.
‘They’re removing Nikishov?’ Baikov, director of the Second Therapeutic Ward asked quietly, but he was hushed up.
The chief of political control came out of the ward and shook hands with the doctors.
‘How about some dinner?’ asked the hospital director. ‘It’s on the table.’
‘No, no,’ the chief of political control looked at his watch. ‘I have to make it to the west area, to Susuman by tonight. We have a meeting tomorrow. But maybe… I don’t want to eat, but here’s what we can do. Give me the briefcase.’ The gray-haired chief took the heavy briefcase from the major’s hands.
‘Can you give me a glucose injection?’
‘Glucose?’ asked the hospital director, not understanding.
‘Yes, glucose. An intravenous injection. I haven’t drunk anything alcoholic since I was a kid… I don’t smoke. But every other day I have a glucose injection. Twenty cubic centimeters of glucose intravenously. A doctor in Moscow advised me to do it. Keeps me in great shape. Better than ginseng or testosterone. I always carry the glucose with me, but I don’t carry a needle; I can get a needle in any hospital. You can give me the shot.’
‘I don’t know how,’ said the hospital director. ‘Let me hold the tourniquet. Here’s the surgeon on duty; that’s right up his alley.’
‘No,’ said the surgeon on duty. ‘I don’t know how to do that either. That can’t be done by just any doctor, sir.’
‘Well, how about an orderly?’
‘We don’t have any non-convict orderlies.’
‘How about this one?’
‘He’s a convict.’
‘Funny. But what’s the difference? Can you do it?’
‘I can,’ I said.
‘Sterilize a syringe…’
I boiled a syringe and cooled it. The gray-haired chief took a box with ‘glucose’ from his briefcase, and the hospital director poured some alcohol on his arm. With the assistance of the party organizer, he broke the glass seal and drew the solution into the syringe. The hospital director attached a needle to the syringe, handed it to me, and tightened the rubber tourniquet on the man’s arm; I gave him the shot and pressed the place with a cotton wad.
‘I have veins like a truck-driver,’ the chief joked graciously with me.
I said nothing.
‘Well, I’ve rested; it’s time to get on the road.’ The gray-haired chief got up.
‘How about the therapeutic wards?’ asked the hospital director, afraid that if the guests had to return to examine the therapeutic patients, he would get chewed out for not having reminded them in time.
‘There’s no reason for us to visit the therapeutic wards,’ said the chief of political control. ‘We’re pursuing a specific goal on this trip.’
‘How about dinner?’
‘No dinners. Business comes first.’
The car of the chief of political control roared to life and disappeared into the frozen dark.
The Life of Engineer Kipreev
For many years I thought that death was a form of life. Comforted by the vagueness of this notion, I attempted to work out a positive formula to preserve my own existence in this vale of tears.
I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself – frequently – and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.
Much later I realized that I had simply built myself a refuge, avoided the problem, for when at the critical moment the decision between life and death became an exercise of the will, I would not be the same man as before. I would inevitably weaken, become a traitor, betray myself. Instead of thinking of death, I simply felt that my former decision needed some other answer, that my promises to myself, the oaths of youth, were naïve and very artificial. It was Engineer Kipreev’s story that convinced me.
I never in my life betrayed or sold anyone down the river. But I don’t know how I would have held out if they had beaten me. I passed through all stages of the investigation, by the greatest good luck, without beatings – ‘method number three’. My investigators never laid a finger on me. This was chance, nothing more. It was simply that I was interrogated early – in the first half of 1937, before they resorted to torture.
Engineer Kipreev, however, was arrested in 1938, and he could vividly imagine the beatings. He survived the blows and even attacked his investigator. Beaten still more, he was thrown into a punishment cell. Nevertheless, the investigators obtained his signature easily: they threatened to arrest his wife, and Kipreev ‘signed’.
Throughout his life Kipreev carried with him this terrible weight on his conscience. There are more than a few humiliations and degradations in the life of a prisoner. The diaries of members of Russia’s liberation movement are marked by one traumatic act – the request for a pardon. Before the revolution this was considered a mark of eternal shame. Even after the revolution former political prisoners and exiles refused to receive anyone who had ever asked the czar for freedom or for a reduction of sentence.
In the thirties, not only were petitioners for pardons forgiven but also those who had signed confessions that incriminated both themselves and others, often with bloody consequences.
Representatives of the former unyielding view had long since grown old and perished in exile or in the camps. Those who had been imprisoned and had passed through the process of investigation were all ‘petitioners’.
For this reason no one ever knew what moral torments Kipreev subjected himself to in his departure for the Sea of Okhotsk – to Vladivostok and Magadan.
Kipreev had been a physicist and engineer at the Kharkov Physical Institute, where the first Soviet experiments with nuclear reactions were conducted. The nuclear scientist Kur-chatov worked there. The purges had not passed over the Kharkov Institute, and Kipreev became one of the first victims of our atomic science.
Kipreev knew his own true worth, but his superiors did not. Moreover, moral stamina has little connection with talent, with scientific experience, or even with the love of science. Aware of the beatings at the interrogations, Kipreev prepared to act in the simplest manner – to fight back like a beast, to answer blow with blow without caring whether his torment
or was simply carrying out, or had personally invented, ‘method number three’. Kipreev was beaten and thrown into a punishment cell. Everything began again. His physical strength betrayed him, and then so did his moral stamina. Kipreev ‘signed’. They threatened to arrest his wife. Kipreev knew endless shame became of this weakness, because he, an educated man, had collapsed when he encountered brute force. Right there in the prison Kipreev swore an oath never again to repeat his shameful act. But then, Kipreev was the only one who perceived his act as shameful. On the neighboring bunks lay other men who had also signed confessions and committed slander. They lay there and did not die. Shame has no boundaries. Or, rather, the boundaries are always personal, and each resident of an interrogation cell sets standards for himself.
Kipreev arrived in Kolyma with a five-year sentence, confident that he would find the path to early release to the mainland. An engineer had to be of value. An engineer could always earn credit for extra working days, be released, have his sentence shortened. While Kipreev had nothing but contempt for physical labor in camp, he quickly realized that only death waited at the end of that path. If he could just find a job where he could apply even a tenth of his technical skills, he would obtain his freedom. At the very least, he would retain his skills.
Experience at the mine, fingers broken in the scraper, physical exhaustion, and emaciation brought Kipreev to the hospital and from there to the transit prison.
The engineer’s problem was that he could not resist the temptation to invent; he could not restrain himself from searching for scientific and technical solutions to the chaos that he saw all around him.
As for the camp and its directors, they looked upon Kipreev as a slave, nothing more. Kipreev’s energy, for which he had cursed himself a thousand times, sought an outlet.
The stakes in this game had to be worthy of an engineer and a scientist. The stakes were freedom.
There is a brief ironic verse about Kolyma that describes it as a strange or wonderful planet; nine months is winter and the rest is summer:
Kolyma, Kolyma – chudnaya planeta,
Deviat’ mesiatsev zima,
Ostal’noe – leto.
This is not the only strange thing about Kolyma. During the war, people paid a hundred rubles for an apple, and an error in the distribution of fresh tomatoes from the mainland led to bloody dramas. All this – the apples and the tomatoes – was for the civilian world, to which Kipreev did not belong. It was a strange planet not only because the taiga was the law, nor because it was a Stalinist death camp. And it wasn’t strange just because there was a shortage there of cheap tobacco and the special tea leaves used to make chifir, a powerful, almost narcotic drink. Chifir leaves and cheap tobacco were the currency of Kolyma, its true gold, and they were used to acquire everything else.
The biggest shortage, however, was of glass – glass objects, laboratory glassware, instruments. The cold increased the fragility of glass, but the permitted ‘breakage’ was not increased. A simple medical thermometer cost 300 rubles, but there were no underground bazaars that sold thermometers. The doctor had to present a formal request to the head of medical services for the entire region, since a medical thermometer was harder to hide than the Mona Lisa. But the doctor never presented any such request. He simply paid 300 rubles out of his own pocket and brought the thermometer with him from home to take the temperature of the critically ill.
In Kolyma a tin can is a poem. It is a convenient measuring cup that is always at hand. Water, various grains, flour, pudding, soup, tea can be stored in it. It is a mug from which to drink chifir. It is also a good vessel in which to brew chifir. The mug is sterile, since it has been purified by fire. Soup and tea can be heated in a tin can – either on a stove or over a camp-fire.
A three-liter tin can fastened to the belt with a wire handle is the classic cooking pot of every ‘goner’. And who in Kolyma has not been or will not eventually become a ‘goner’?
In a wooden window-frame, tiny pieces of broken glass, like cells, are arranged to serve as panes to let in light. A transparent jar can conveniently be used to store medication in the outpatient clinic. In the camp cafeteria, a pint jar is a serving dish for fruit compote.
But neither thermometers, nor laboratory glassware, nor simple jars make up the principal shortage of glass in Kolyma – the shortage of electric light-bulbs.
In Kolyma there are hundreds of mines, thousands of sites, sections, shafts, tens of thousands of mine faces with gold, uranium, lead, and tungsten, thousands of work groups dispatched from the camps, civilian villages, camp zones, guard barracks, and everywhere there is one crying need – light, light, light. Kolyma has no sun, no light for nine months. The raging, never-setting summer sun provides no salvation, for in winter nothing is left of it. Light and energy come from pairs of tractors, or from a locomotive.
Industrial tools, gold washers, mine faces all demand light. Mine faces lit up by floodlights lengthen the night shift and make labor more productive. Electric lights are needed everywhere. Three-hundred-, five-hundred-, one-thousand-watt bulbs are shipped in from the mainland to provide light for the barracks and the mines, but the uneven supply of electricity from the portable-generator motors guarantees that these bulbs will burn out earlier than they should.
The electric-light-bulb shortage in Kolyma is a national problem. It is not only the mine face that must be lit up but also the camp grounds, the barbed wire and the guard towers, which are built in greater and not lesser quantities in the Far North.
The guards on duty must have light. In the mines insufficient light is simply noted in the log, but in camp it might lead to escape attempts. Obviously there is nowhere to escape to from Kolyma, and no one has ever attempted to escape, but the law is the law, and if there isn’t sufficient lighting or enough bulbs, burning torches are carried to the outer perimeters of the camp and left there in the snow until morning. A torch is made from a rag soaked in oil or gasoline.
Electric bulbs burn out quickly and cannot be repaired.
Kipreev wrote a note that amazed the chief of Far Eastern Construction. The chief could already feel the medal he would add to his other military decorations (military, not civilian).
It seemed the bulbs could be repaired if the glass was in one piece.
All over Kolyma stern instructions were hurriedly circulated to the effect that burned-out bulbs must be delivered carefully to Magadan. At the industrial complex forty-seven miles from Magadan, a factory for the repair of electric light-bulbs was built. Engineer Kipreev was appointed director of the factory.
All other personnel was civilian. This happy invention was entrusted to the hands of dependable civilians working on contract. Kipreev, however, paid no attention to this circumstance, believing that the creators of the factory could not help but take notice of him.
The result was stupendous. Of course, the bulbs didn’t have a long life after being repaired, but Kipreev saved Kolyma a definite quantity of hours and days. There were many of these days, and the state reaped an enormous profit, a military profit, a golden profit.
The chief of Far Eastern Construction was awarded the Order of Lenin. All supervisors who had anything to do with repairing the bulbs received medals also.
Neither Moscow nor Magadan, however, ever considered rewarding the convict Kipreev. For them Kipreev was a slave, an intelligent slave, but nothing more. Nevertheless, the chief of Far Eastern Construction did not consider it possible to forget all about his pen-pal in the taiga.
A celebration of great pomp took place in Kolyma, a celebration so great that a small group of people in Moscow took note of it. It was held in honor of the chief of Far Eastern Construction, of all those who had received medals and official expressions of gratitude for work well done. Aside from the official expressions of gratitude for work well done, aside from the official governmental decree, the chief of Far Eastern Construction had also issued bonuses, awards, and official expressions of gratitude. All those who
participated in bulb repair, all the foremen of the factory with the bulb-repair shop were presented with American packages, in addition to the medals and certificates. These packages, which had been received during the war under Lend-Lease, contained suits, neckties, and shoes. One of the suits had evidently disappeared during delivery, but the shoes were of red American leather and had thick soles – the dream of every foreman.
The chief of Far Eastern Construction consulted with his right-hand man, and they came to the conclusion that there could be no higher dream for a convict-engineer. As for shortening his sentence or releasing him altogether, the chief would not even dream of asking Moscow about that in such troubled political times. A slave should be satisfied with his master’s old shoes and suit.
All Kolyma buzzed about these presents – literally all Kolyma. The local foremen received more than enough medals and official expressions of gratitude, but an American suit and American shoes with thick soles were in the same category as a trip to the moon or another planet.
The solemn evening arrived, and the cardboard boxes gleamed on a table covered with a red cloth.
The chief of Far Eastern Construction read from a paper in which Kipreev’s name was not mentioned, could not be mentioned. Then he read aloud the list of those who were to receive presents. Kipreev’s name came last in the list. The engineer stepped up to the table which was brightly lit – by his light-bulbs – and took the box from the hands of the chief of Far Eastern Construction.
Enunciating each word distinctly, Kipreev said in a loud voice: ‘I won’t wear American hand-me-downs.’ Then he put the box back on the table.
Kipreev was arrested on the spot and sentenced to an additional eight years. I don’t know precisely which article of the criminal code was cited, but in any case that is meaningless in Kolyma and interests no one.
Kolyma Tales Page 41