by Frazier
We set out from Topolinoe with the sun still high. Evidence of prison camps began to appear at about twenty-five kilometers from the village. There were old fences and guard towers back in the trees, and small buildings. I was surprised at how much I had missed in the darkness the night before, even with the full moon. A building on the left-hand side close to the road had been the bakery for several lagers, Aleksandr said. We passed more guard towers, more small log buildings. At km marker 136—marker 53, measuring from Topolinoe—Aleksandr pulled over and said there was a lager just down the hill on the left. From the road all that could be seen was part of a snow-covered roof and the top of another guard tower. Sergei and I got out and started down the hill in the thigh-deep snow.
Chapter 29
The lager lay in a narrow valley between sparsely wooded hills. The gray, scraggly trees, which did not make it to the hills’ higher slopes, grew more thickly near the lager and partly surrounded it; a few small birches had sprung up inside what had been the camp’s perimeter. Their bare branches contrasted with the white of the snow on the roof of the barracks, whose wall, set back under the eaves, was dark. In the whiteness of an open field, a guard tower tilted sideways like someone putting all his weight on one leg. A ladderlike set of steps still led up to it, and two eyelike window openings added to the anthropomorphic effect. In the endless and pristine snow cover, I saw no tire tracks, road ruts, abandoned oil drums, or other sign that any human had been here since the camp was left to the elements half a century before.
At first view the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts several yards beyond, and the low, shameful barracks with its two doors and three windows fit exactly with the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in the mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the lager from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its genericness and became instead this particular Russian structure of its own.
To begin with, the whole place was as handmade as a mud hut. The fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s weren’t factory stock that had been produced elsewhere, but plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them to complete the L. And the side of the barracks wall, which had appeared from a distance to be stucco, was actually a daubed plastering over thin strips of lath that crossed each other diagonally like basketwork. I broke a piece of the plastering off in my hand; at one time it had been painted a pale yellow and it crumbled easily. It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand.
Aside from the nails and the barbed wire, I could see almost no factory-made product that had been used in the construction. Next to the windows were white ceramic insulators that had probably held electrified wire; no trace of mullions or window glass remained. The roof beam ran parallel to the building’s length, and along the slope of the roof at each end a facing board about five inches wide had been nailed. These boards covered the raw edge of the roof and extended from beam to eaves, and at the end of each board a very small swirl of scrollwork had been carved. The embellishment was so out of place it caught the eye. I wondered what carpenter or designer had thought to put a touch of decoration on such a building.
Regions of deep cold preserve antiquities just as hot deserts do. Had the climate here been temperate, moisture and vegetation would have consumed this structure long ago. But in northern Siberia, with only a dozen or so weeks of reprieve from intense cold every year, and nothing below but permafrost, the old prison camp had hibernated into the present more or less unchanged. Around it, like a bubble of prehistoric air frozen inside a glacier, a familiar atmosphere of 1954 endured.
Maybe one reason I am susceptible to the dread Russia-love is that Russia evokes childhood for me. In the 1950s, when I was a boy, adults talked and worried and wondered about Russia all the time. For anyone who grew up then, Russia might have been the only other significant country in the world. I was six years old in 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik, and I remember the interest my father took in that event. Dad was a chemical engineer and he had a keen admiration for mechanical ingenuity of every kind. After Sputnik first went up, he used to bring my younger siblings and me into our front yard at night before bedtime to try to show us the satellite as it passed by. At his research lab in Cleveland—he worked for Standard Oil of Ohio—he and his colleagues rigged a radio dish on the roof of the building so they could pick up Sputnik’s transmissions. Some evenings after dinner, Dad would put on his long coat and his fedora—the style of hat almost every man wore then, from Eisenhower to Clark Gable to Vyacheslav Molotov—and he would drive back to his lab for a night of listening for the satellite. The air of mystery and excitement he gave off as he left made an impression on me. I could tell he got a kick out of this, like a do-it-yourself spy—and in fact, with the Cold War secrecy surrounding Sputnik, the tracking data he and his colleagues compiled was for a while the only public information about Sputnik available in the United States. When he explained the satellite’s orbit to me, I thought about Ohio’s actual location on the planet for the first time.
The day the Soviets sent up the rocket carrying Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, I came in from playing in the yard with my friends on that spring afternoon and found my father dejectedly hanging up his coat in the front hall closet. I asked what was wrong and he said the Russians had just launched a man into space, and now we would never catch up to them in the space race. I asked why and he said because their scientists were so much smarter than ours, because their country was so much bigger than ours that they had many more brilliant scientists to draw from. Also, he said, their kids were better at science than our kids were. I took this last to be aimed at me; I had never been as good at math and science as he had hoped. My father always tended to give in to his bad moods and indulge them. He had a flair for gloom and doom.
Years later when I was walking in Moscow and I saw in the distance a big upward-swooping statue with a cosmonaut at the top, and the Russian friend I was with told me it was the Yuri Gagarin monument, I knew for sure that the date on the statue’s base would be a date in the spring. I remembered how Dad’s dejection had contrasted with the spring day. And of course I was right—Yuri Gagarin’s flight had occurred on April 12, 1961.
Dad used to tell my siblings and me—and my mother, too, I suppose—that we had no idea what the rest of the world was like. In our happy Ohio existence we would never understand the war, or the Depression (my mother had lived through the Depression, too), or countries not like America, or how people in places like Russia lived. The word “sheltered” came up a lot. Dad could portray remoteness and imponderability better than anyone else I’ve known. His voice would become sort of furry with melancholy as he said, “You’ll never know how they live, or what they went through in the war. Life under somebody like Stalin is so totally removed from your lives.” He would shake his head at our innocence and say, “No, it’s not anything you’ll ever know. It’s another world.” And truly, in Hudson, Ohio, in the 1950s, a prison camp like this one in the fastness of northern Siberia would have seemed as remote from us as the grave of the Titanic at the bottom of the sea.
Sergei came wading through the snow on the other side of the barracks. He had stopped videotaping and was stepping quietly, almost tiptoeing. I knew he didn’t approve of my interest in this sort of thing, and I felt some guilt that I had made him see it. But his face as he approached showed no rancor, only a sort of wide-eyed, watchful awe. We didn’t say anything to each other. Slowly, simultaneously, we moved to see what the place was like inside. Sergei went in at a door. I stayed outside and looked in at a window. I didn’t want to seem to be poking around (though of course I was). Going in seemed to be something f
or him to do rather than for me; he was next of kin, in a sense, while I was merely a foreign observer.
The floor of the barracks was worn planking, tightly joined and still sound. I saw nothing on it but a few twists of straw and the wooden sole of a shoe. A short, cylindrical iron stove rusted near a corner. Its stovepipe was gone and the hole for it in the plank roof above had been covered over. Prisoners who had lived in barracks like this reported that the stove usually heated a radius of fifteen to eighteen feet. As this building was maybe thirty feet from end to end, areas of it must have always been cold. From inside you could see the logs that the walls were made of. The cracks between the logs had been chinked with moss. The barracks space had been divided into several rooms, with bunks set into the walls. The bunks also were made of bare planks—some planed on both sides, some planed on only one. Planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down.
This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held. Often prisoners in places like this had to sleep on the unimproved planking, or on thin mattresses stuffed with sawdust. For covering they might have had a single blanket, or nothing besides the clothes they wore during the day. Mornings began as early as 4:00 a.m., when the guards would awaken them by pounding with a hammer on a saw blade. That wake-up alarm, and the screeching of the guard dogs’chains on the wires stretched between the guard towers as the dogs ran back and forth, were characteristic sounds of the camps. Before the prisoners went out to work they were given breakfast—usually soup with a small piece of fish or meat, and bread. Even in 1977, not a lean time, the diet in Soviet strict-regime camps provided only two thousand six hundred calories per prisoner per day, less in the punishment blocks and sick wards. The international standard for a person actively working is three thousand two hundred to four thousand two hundred calories per day. Like almost all labor-camp prisoners, the ones in this barracks would have been hungry almost all the time.
Hunger in the camps made people eat many things. In the camps of the Kolyma during the warmer months, some of the prisoners ate grass. Intellectuals, for unknown reasons, were more subject to that malady. People who ate grass generally did not live long. Varlam Shalamov, the writer who survived seventeen years in Kolyma, wrote about prisoners there during the war who ate half a Lend-Lease barrel of machine grease before the guards drove them off with rifle shots. The prisoners had thought the machine grease might be butter; they said it tasted about as much like butter as American bread tasted like bread. They showed no ill effects afterward. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn told of a work detail in Kolyma who were doing excavations when they came across a frozen-solid, perfectly preserved ancient stream complete with prehistoric fish and salamanders. He said that a magazine of the Soviet Academy of Sciences reported that unfortunately these interesting specimens could not be studied, because the workers who unearthed them ate them on the spot. He said the magazine did not identify these workers as convict laborers, though from that detail an astute reader would understand they were.
After breakfast in the lager came inspection, and then the prisoners would be lined up in the camp yard to receive orders for the day. If they were to be sent on a timber-cutting detail, the best assignment was that of taking the smaller limbs trimmed from the downed trees and feeding them to the fire. If their day’s job was to work on the road, breaking a path through the snow with their bodies for horses and vehicles to follow, the assignment you wanted least was to be the man who walked on point, ahead of the others. Usually prisoners received no food during their twelve-hour workday. Guards watched them the whole time, and they had to keep within a boundary indicated by pieces of red cloth or other markers distributed around the work site. Any prisoner who crossed the boundary area would be shot, and the guard who shot him would get a day or two off. Sometimes guards tried to fool prisoners into going over the line just so they could shoot them. If the prisoners were doing road building, they toiled with picks, sledgehammers, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Even in forty-below weather the work caused them to sweat heavily. Back at camp at the end of the day, they had to stand in formation for another roll call while the sweat froze in their clothes. Then they marched into the barracks for a supper that was similar to breakfast, followed by a brief time for personal activities like letter writing and reading the little mail they were allowed. Then sleep.
As a bizarre extra, some camp systems maintained small orchestras. Occasionally in the mornings as the prisoners marched off to work, and in the evenings when they returned, the orchestra would be at the lager gate encouraging them with upbeat melodies.
Of course the death toll was cruelly high. More than a million died in the camps just in 1937–38, the Great Purge’s peak years. A main goal of the Soviet labor-camp system was to take those citizens the Soviet Union did not need, for political or social or unfathomable reasons, and convert their lives to gold and timber that could be traded abroad. Almost from the beginnings of the camps, people outside the country knew or suspected what was going on in them, but the Soviet government simply denied all accusations and the subject receded from view. In 1941, after the Soviet Union joined the Allies and had to release its Polish prisoners, some of these survivors with firsthand experience told what they knew, and the ongoing horror of the camps became established beyond reasonable denial.
When the war was over, and the United States made agreements with Stalin whereby Russian P.O.W.s brought from France and Germany at the end of the war would be repatriated, some of those slated for return committed suicide in places of temporary confinement like Ellis Island and Fort Dix, New Jersey, rather than face the gulag. As Russia retook Poland, many Poles once again wound up in the gulag. Some who had lived through the Nazi occupation said Hitler was nothing compared to this, and they now wished they had fought on Hitler’s side. A prisoner who had survived Dachau hanged himself when he was shipped to Kolyma. Gulag prisoners who knew the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin regretted that fate had put them in this time and place, and not in slavery in the American South a hundred years before. As Negro slaves, they reasoned, at least they would have lived someplace warm, and would have been whipped and branded but not worked to death outright. In 1945, news reached the camps that the United States now possessed the atomic bomb. According to Solzhenitsyn, this unexpected development gave hope to many prisoners, who began to pray for atomic war.
As I looked at the tiers of bunks I pictured male zeks—the word for gulag prisoners—lying on them, but the prisoners here might have been women, too. Female zeks worked in timber-cutting camps and on road-building details, and even mining gold. Their resilience was greater than men’s, as was their ability to withstand pain. Or perhaps this barracks had been one of those occupied by and completely under the control of criminals. This distressingly numerous class played the camp system to exempt themselves from labor and, with the encouragement of the authorities, preyed on the political prisoners. The criminals’ ethics and speech seeped into everybody’s life. Political prisoners later said that the criminals in the camps were more dangerous than the meager food and the killing work conditions. The gulag also had lagers for children. Eugenia Ginsburg, who served fifteen years in the camps of Kolyma, wrote that when a camp of children prisoners in Magadan was given two guard-dog puppies to raise for a while, the children at first could not think of anything to name them. The poverty of their surroundings had stripped their imaginations bare. Finally they chose names from common objects they saw every day. They named one puppy Ladle and the other Pail.
Unlike the prisons of the tsars, the lagers of Soviet Siberia (or Soviet anywhere) were virtually escapeproof. To anyone sizing up the surroundings of this camp on the Olchan River, it would have been obvious that the country was tough traveling even for a well-equipped nonnative; for a ragged escapee being hunted by guards who feared for their own lives if they failed, the c
old and geography constituted a fearful prison in themselves. Stories of the very few who did get away, even temporarily, became legends in the camps.
Shalamov told the story (a fictional one, like all Shalamov’s Kolyma stories, but based on fact) of a prisoner named Krivoshei who escaped from a Kolyma camp by impersonating a geologist. Krivoshei was fortunate in that he had a helpful wife on the outside who kept him supplied with money. One summer day, Krivoshei walked away from his work team, hired some native assistants, and with a geologist’s hammer and a few other props continued slowly out of the region, collecting rock samples as he went. Occasionally he would stop and ship crates of random rocks to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Krivoshei was an educated and self-possessed man, quite believable in his role as a scientist, though he knew nothing about geology. In a month or so he had crossed the mountain chain that separates Kolyma from Yakutia, and in time he made his way to the city of Yakutsk. To keep up his disguise, he paid a visit to the local scientific society (this was in Stalin times, before the geologists I met were there), and the directors of the society were so impressed by him that they begged him to give a lecture about his geological discoveries. Having little choice, Krivoshei agreed, cautioning the directors that he must keep certain details secret on orders from Moscow. Then he winged a lecture as best he could, somewhat mystifying his audience. They asked him to repeat it for the local students, and again he obliged. He managed to leave Yakutsk with his cover intact, and he made his way to a small city in western Russia, where he established himself and disappeared from view for a while. The authorities tracked him down as a result of the correspondence he had maintained with his wife, and Krivoshei was rearrested and shipped back to Kolyma. He had remained at large for two years.