Father with friends, St. Petersburg, March, 1958.
I recall a winter trip father made to St. Petersburg for a special KGB school in 1958 and he returned with this photograph showing the monument to the highly respected Nikoli Przewalski, who was a Russian citizen, a naturalist, explorer, map-maker, and a colonel in the Tsar’s army. He found wild horses in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert around 1880 and these small, primitive looking, multihued, multipurpose animals are now called Przewalski Horses. They are the only living, true wild horse in the world, having 66 chromosomes instead of the 64 found in domestic horses. They were placed on the endangered species list. It is fun to think that the Golden Horde used these animals to invade Russia but no evidence is readily available to support this thought.
Attaining the rank of a KGB Lieutenant Colonel, my father knew many secrets. He was reaching that point in an agent’s life where disposing of him and burying his secrets might become a priority for the hierarchy. Fortunately, this practice stopped with the death of Joseph Stalin.
36. The Gulag
This tale involves my father, a family friend and a Nobel Prizewinning author.
It started long ago in 1939. My father, then Lieutenant Mikhail Ivanovich Sariechev, was assigned as commander of an artillery supply depot in Uluntsiric in the southeastern desert of Mongolia. The Red Army had been repelling the Japanese invasion of Mongolia. They had fought the aggressive Japanese and defeated them in the large prolonged battle of Khalkin-Gol and there were numerous other small skirmishes.
Mikhail became friends with a handsome 21-year-old lieutenant named Pavel Vassilyevich Chulpenyev, who commanded a mortar platoon. These two men became close friends over the next few years. They would frequently get together with other bored young officers in the evenings and play poker. One night in late August of 1941 the four players which included my father, Pavel, the military medical assistant Lozovsky, and another lieutenant, were talking about the German invasion, Operation Barbarossa. Hitler had aborted his peace treaty with Stalin just two months before, on June 22, 1941, with a long anticipated attack along a 2,000-mile front, and his fascists forces were rapidly advancing on Russian turf.
The young officers all knew that the fascists would take a lot of Soviet soil. The Russians would have to fight very hard and it would take years and years to repel them. They knew that the Germans had been planning and strategizing this for a long time and they had mobilized earlier, had better equipment, and had actual combat experience in Europe that included the rapid blitzkrieg attack. It was also common knowledge that over four million men were in the invasion force, over 200 German divisions and maybe 50 more divisions from Finland and Romania. It was the largest invasion force in history.
The young officers were criticizing the two Generals Voroshilov and Budionny who were advocating a huge expansion of Horse Calvary as the main deterrent against the German invasion. Someone said laughingly, “The official line is that our retreat on the Western Front is a maneuver, we’re decoying them, just like we did with Napoleon. We are just waiting for a cold winter, and then our warm mobile ponies will charge their frozen tanks.”
Another officer commented, “Hell, we all know this is ridiculous. Look what happened to the Polish Cavalry that went against the Wehrmacht tanks!”
The last bold outburst gave them all pause and they discretely changed the conversation. “Let’s not talk about this, Let’s play cards.”
Within days, the Political Branch of the division summoned Lieutenant Pavel Chulpenyev and expelled him from the Komsomol, the young people’s political organization, for a defeatist attitude, for praising German equipment and for belittling the strategy of the High Command. They then placed him under arrest, marched him into the desert, gave him a shovel, and ordered him to dig. They ordered him to lie down in the hole when it was waist deep, and that was it. Pavel was huge, two meters tall (six and a half feet), an ex-boxer, and had a reputation as a quiet and gentle man. He lived in that hole for 30 days with his feces and urine. His daily ration was 100 grams of bread (three and a half ounces) and one glass of water, lowered to him on a cord. There was no protection from the Mongolian sun or the cold desert nights. Within ten days, he was swarming with lice. There was no traditional torture, it was not necessary.
This was a unique prison, a group of holes in the desert. Just a few men could easily guard it with a simple rule: “Shoot anybody you can see.”
They took him to interrogation for the first time after 15 days. There was a pot of borscht and a loaf of white bread sliced diagonally in an attractive fashion. Pavel got none of it. They kept him in the interrogation room for three days without food, water, or sleep. Occasionally, they escorted him out to the bathroom. Three interrogators on eight-hour shifts kept after him continuously to break him. They then presented a meal: Ukrainian borscht, a thick lamb chop, fried potatoes, and red wine in a crystal carafe. The prisoner, having a lifelong aversion to alcohol, would not drink the wine. After the banquet, he still refused to sign the confession.
Possibly, the fact that Pavel didn’t drink saved his life. Officials arrested a Chinese Eastern Railroad man named Blaginin at the same time as Pavel and he received the same treatment. Unfortunately, Blaginin became slightly drunk; he confessed and they shot him.
The 36th Motorized Division Military Tribunal included Lebedev, the Division Political Commissar, and Slesarev, the Chief of the Political Branch. The Tribunal found Pavel guilty. The sentence was ten years imprisonment plus three years of disenfranchisement, which is to deprive a person of citizenship with all its attached rights and privileges.
My father and other officers had no idea that their friend Pavel had endured such hardships. They were of course immediately informed of the guilty finding and of the sentence imposed but it was only years later that the whole truth came out, as it usually does in the end.
There were at least ten similar cases in each division of the army during World War II. The Russians had hundreds of divisions. It also occurred in the air force and the navy. It gave the Military Tribunals justification for their existence and kept Stalin happier. This is not a method unique to Communists. Harsh treatment of innocents as a way to maintain discipline is a common and ancient thread with virtually all armies and navies.
The tsars traditionally maintained prisons for hundreds of years but the system of forced labor camps actually started in 1919 and, following many changes, became the Gulag in 1930, under the control of the secret police. Gulag is a Russian acronym for Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps. It includes a system of labor camps plus the required detention and transit camps and prisons. The inmates are called zeks, which is prison slang for prisoner. The Russian word zaklyuchenny translates as prisoner or someone locked up.
My father’s friend Pavel survived the Gulag. He was a logger, chopping down trees for most of his ten years in prison. There were many tricks to staying alive. For instance, almost all prisoners smoked and Pavel did not, so he traded the cheap, foul, and occasionally rotten tobacco for food. He had a reputation as a good worker and it helped. He took a personal interest in his logging skills and that was likely a major reason he survived. For instance, he would place a stake in the ground and then endeavor to drive it completely into the ground by accurately felling a tree on top of it. He had only a broadax and a desire to survive. Most people give up completely before their nebulous hope can become strong. It is similar to a combat soldier who is not effective until he assumes that he is dead and living on borrowed time.
A young and beautiful local girl named Nadezhda noticed Pavel working in the forest. He was huge, good-looking, and hard to miss. When she could, she would toss bread, potatoes, or other food scraps to him. Her name translates as Hope. When Pavel learned her name, he gained great strength from it and felt that he might actually survive his ordeal. Following Pavel’s release from prison, he found piecemeal work in a small poor settlement situated near the prison. The admirers met each other and marri
ed. He built a wooden shack in the forest by a beautiful meadow. They later had two girls.
The people in this place were poor and uneducated. Many of them were released prisoners with no money and nowhere to go. Some had completed their prison sentence but were still under the “disfranchisement from the state” portion of their sentence. This involved different sanctions. For instance, some prisoners were not allowed to use the postal system while others could receive letters and packages from their families. They were only allowed to live within a small specified area. Some could not use vehicles, and on and on.
It was in this Gulag swamp that my father finally located Pavel, 20 years after his arrest. Many people were lost in this swamp forever and it is amazing that father found Pavel.
After many years of unofficial investigation, Mikhail determined that their old friend, the military medical assistant Lozovsky, was responsible for falsely informing upon Pavel. He located him and traveled to face him. Lozovsky admitted his guilt. “Yes, I did it!” He paused. “I had to, there was no other choice. The Political Commissar told me to give him a name or he would take me. I am not strong enough to survive that prison life. You can see that it would be a death sentence for me. You were already married and supporting an invalid sister and several other people. I could not destroy all those people. The other lieutenant was not strong enough. He also would not have survived prison life. However, Pavel is big and strong. He was single. He could take it and make it through all right. Therefore, I chose him. That’s the truth of it.”
Mikhail said, “You are a son-of-a bitch!” He walked away and never again spoke to Lozovsky. Years later father forgave him completely but at the time of their meeting he most assuredly did not! Lozovsky’s guilt dominated his life but he always felt that he had made the correct choice in a most difficult decision. Pavel himself held no animosity to any of the principles involved, including his accusers.
Pavel became acquainted with Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the now famous classic Russian author and historian, during their incarceration. Solzhenitsyn came from a family of Cossack intellectuals. He had a degree in mathematics and a strong interest in literature. During World War II he was an Artillery Captain. He was critical of Joseph Stalin and in 1945 wrote a letter stating his views. The reward was eight years in prison and labor camps plus three more years in forced exile. Solzhenitsyn settled in Ryazan in 1956 with permission of the officials. He became a mathematics teacher and began his writing career. The early 1960s was a de-Stalinizing period that favored a loosening of cultural restraints and favored Solzhenitsyn.
Khrushchev allowed publication of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich due to popular pressure toward a consumer-orientated society and agitation by intellectuals for greater freedom of expression. At the same time, though, the Soviet bureaucracy feared that reform would get out of hand. Khrushchev even allowed Soviet tourists to go overseas for the first time, but then he crudely condemned Soviet avant-garde artists. Neither Khrushchev nor anyone else could put everything back into Pandora’s Box.
Solzhenitsyn’s first book created an explosion heard around the world and he was an instant celebrity. It encouraged other prisoners to step up and start writing about their own experiences. This information on the extent of suffering and death and on the huge numbers of prisoners within the Gulag was a revelation for many Russians. The hierarchy had compartmentalized information on a need-to-know basis and even my father later admitted that prior to this information, he had little factual knowledge of the Gulag.
My father met Solzhenitsyn in the ancient Russian city of Ryazan during the 1960s after publication of his classic short novel. The KGB sent an invitation to the author to meet with an official. The KGB ordered my father to be this official. The point of the meeting is not entirely clear to me but, presumably, it was to reassess the writer, to determine if the state could expect more problems from him, what the writer’s long-term plans were, and so forth. Doing extensive research on the writer, my dad laid out a precise plan with questions and directions. In addition, my father wanted to talk about Pavel. Possibly Pavel was the reason my father was chosen for this task.
They shared a mutual friendship and respect of Pavel. Mikhail had great empathy and love for Pavel and he well knew that Pavel’s false imprisonment could easily have been himself instead. Mikhail’s feelings for Solzhenitsyn were conflicting. He respected the writer who had survived eight years in the Gulag and was a good friend of Pavel. Father thought that the writer was a patriot and a good and honest man. His incarceration in the Gulag just for writing a letter expressing his opinion was, to my father, simply poor judgment. Mikhail, like many Russians, was shocked that Solzhenitsyn’s book won the Nobel Prize. Even his writing style was in a rough slang that offended the ears of many.
The instant that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn entered the room for their meeting, my father felt his scorn and contempt. Although Aleksandr was careful to not be disrespectful, his feelings were obvious; he wore them on his sleeve. Father started the interview with feelings of respect and admiration for the writer but they turned to dislike after about ten minutes. Even with the mutual friendship of Pavel, there was no way that these two men could become friendly.
Solzhenitsyn’s experiences provided him with strong opinions on many topics. He had no use for KGB officials and could never be friendly with one, including my father. Nevertheless, he was willing to talk. He was not afraid of my father or afraid to voice his thoughts and they talked openly about many things without restrictions. It was a most unusual conversation. However, my dad considered the meeting a failure, as the author maneuvered the conversation to avoid commitment. He kept changing the topics and would not answer the questions directly. And, disappointingly, Solzhenitsyn would not discuss Pavel.
At that time, Solzhenitsyn was teaching mathematics in a privileged school in Ryazan which championed Soviet ideology. Mikhail tried to warn the author of the obvious, that he was in a dangerous situation. Although my dad was in the state security part of the KGB, not the political division, he was well aware that the author could disappear. Not long afterward, Solzhenitsyn relocated in Moscow where he finished writing The Gulag Archipelago. The Ryazan KGB was probably pleased that the author was gone and no longer a pain in their neck. It was a good solution to an awkward situation.
Pavel and his wife moved to Moscow and they were frequent visitors with my dad, my mom, and me. Our two families became closer. In the 1970s Dad organized a reunion of his Army friends and for three days, old stories, vodka, and tears filled the house. Thirty-nine other lieutenants graduated with my father in 1939 from Tambov Military School. Ten of them received orders to go to Mongolia. Out of an original class of 40, only seven men with their wives attended the reunion. All of them were veterans of Mongolia. The other 33 men had given their lives fighting fascism for their Mother Russia.
Pavel Chulpenyev in Moscow, about 1975.
Pavel obtained a position as a bus operator in Moscow and he held that job for 20 years until he retired. It satisfied him and he was content. Coming from a privileged family, he received an excellent education. He was intelligent, knowledgeable, and handsome. His beautiful wife was a simple, down-to-earth woman who did not expect much from life. She had only a few years of school and hers was a poor family barely surviving. Nadezhda was an excellent wife and mother who kept a clean house and worked hard. She was a survivor and probably could survive anywhere. Always a strong supporter of her husband, she never complained. It was a beautiful marriage and they loved each other and their two daughters very much. After the death of Pavel and Nadezhda, we lost track of their daughters. They might still live in Moscow under married names.
Pavel and father, about 1983.
It is inconceivable that Pavel, who joined the army to help defend his country, would be treated like that. How many millions of others suffered a similar fate? The common people never believed that people like Pavel Vassilyevich Chul
penyev were bad. When Stalin was still alive people would often say, confidentially, “Oh, he must be an honest and brave man; he was a political prisoner in the Gulag!” One can only speculate on what positive services these lost souls could have performed for the Soviet Union under different circumstances.
Solzhenitsyn’s books Gulag Archipelago, Books I and II, published in 1973 and 1974, state what was believed at that time, that jealousy over a woman was the motivation for Pavel’s arrest (Pavel also believed that for many years). It was in summer of 1979 when Pavel told us that the motive for his arrest was simply a quota to fill for examples of “the maintenance of good order and discipline.” The Russian people both then and now generally believe that the secret police had a quota of people to arrest each month, just to justify their positions and prove that they were working and doing a good job. Of course, no one discussed this openly.
During the 25 years preceding his death, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin forcibly collectivized agriculture to industrialize the agrarian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and bring it to a world superpower status. He consolidated his position through police terror, he helped defeat the rise of fascism and imperialism in World War II, and he extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Stalin was the chief architect of Soviet totalitarianism and a skilled, ruthless organizer. He shattered the remnants of freedom for individuals, the press, and society as he failed to promote individual prosperity. Yet he created a mighty iron-triangle of politics, military, and industry as he led a backward Soviet Union into the Nuclear Age. But I wonder what life would be like if Comrade Lenin had just lived longer.
Soviet citizens recognize that Stalin was one mean son-of-a-bitch, no question, but they do not feel that they are to blame for him. They believed that attempting to overthrow him would only have made matters worse. An old adage goes, “the more you stir fecal material, the worse it stinks!”
My Russian Family Page 27