Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  Then God in his goodness had brought her Razan: a gentle man, an honest man, a skilled barber. What mattered that he was a Jew? Did he not treat her kindly, and silently endure her children’s taunts? His lovemaking may have lacked the lustiness of Pyotr’s, but his tenderness was equally romantic. He valued her advice and even sought it. She was more than an equal; she held in his eyes an honored place. How many Russian women in Solovki would have her incentives to flee? She would take Gregori with her. The thought of joining her family, leaving the country, and making a new life with a treasured husband would inspire her inventive mind to discover a way off the island. Nothing would hold her back. Whenever the government orders came to completely evacuate the islands, she and Gregori would be ready. As the train rattled toward Kem, she knew that to succeed she would need cooperation, which could be bought with the gold coins she had secreted vaginally and the jewels pleated into her hair.

  At the moment, a full bladder was more real than her imagined escapes. To reach the pail at the end of the car, she had to drag three other women down the center aisle. Their jailer, refusing to free any of them from their collective chains, delighted in seeing the women huddle for privacy to urinate or defecate. That night, as the odorous car echoed with stertorous breathing, the train halted amidst a grinding of brakes and hissing of steam. The prisoners were uncaged and ordered to exit the train, though still a few miles short of their destination. Torrential rains had washed out a section of track.

  With the guards roaring like mad bulls, the chained prisoners were led into impenetrable fog and made to walk the remaining distance to Kem. The mud in some places reached to their ankles. Finally, the rain dissolved into a drizzle as fine as water dust. But this respite was interrupted violently by a hurricane wind blowing out of the north; the cracking treetops brought to mind demons crying out in the night. They passed several huts with iron roofing that rattled like metal snakes. By the time they exited the desolate forest and made their way into Kem, a bare village except for one pretty church, Anna had experienced levels of hell that Dante ignored: first on the train, where humans lived in suffocating quarters so unsanitary that they wished for release through death, and then in the town, where the wind broke wooden window frames that showered splinters into the roadways, and dislodged chimney bricks that flew through the air like shrapnel. As she looked out to sea, she saw that several fishing boats had lost their sails and been swamped. Two of them, right before her eyes, sank to the bottom of the bay. When, she wondered, would their corpses wash ashore?

  Herding the women from the Kem Transit Camp to the boat for the short trip to Solovki, the guards hurried them along with whipping sticks and addressed them as “whore,” “bitch,” “cunt.” Some of the women thieves, trying to assert their dignity, yelled at the prostitutes, “We may steal, but we don’t sell ourselves,” to which the prostitutes answered, “At least we sell what belongs to us, not stolen goods.” Fortunately for Anna, she found a place on the deck and escaped being consigned to the hold, where the women had even less space than on the train. In the distance, she could see the white fortress walls, stained rust-colored by rain, of the Solovki Kremlin. Many of the onion domes had been removed and replaced with roofs that resembled cowsheds. Soon she would see the neglected gardens and canals, the decaying walls and broken windows. Even from the sea, the monastery looked forbiddingly grim, the perfect locale for unspeakable crimes. Built from cyclopean stones, it resembled a giant sarcophagus that would hold the dead after Armageddon. Its design—sharp contours and squares—exuded solidity and convinced the onlooker that here resided power, that here ruled a stern and merciless god called not Jesus or Stalin but “pitilessness.”

  On the dock of Solovki Island, Commandant Trubetskoi and Chief Warden Ponomarev, in black boots and tunics, their sartorial homage to Stalin, met the prisoners.

  “Some of you,” said the commandant, hitting his leg with a baton, “will wade into the sea and gather seaweed from the shore. The water is bitterly cold, but it will harden you and prepare you for camp life. Some will go out in large boats to gather the weeds from the sea bottom with long hooked poles. Some will preserve the seaweed in piles and ferment it onshore, weather permitting. If we remain here until spring, some will scatter the piles so the seeds can adequately dry. Some will prepare it for burning. The ashes, containing iodine, will be poured into a well. Later on, they will be taken to a factory at the Solovki Kremlin and processed.”

  The commandant nodded toward his chief warden, who added, “Those of you on the seaweed detail will regard yourselves as lucky. The others among you, because of your offenses, will be assigned to fish for herring, tan leather, make bricks, dig for salt, and bury the dead. Anyone who fails to obey will be exposed to the elements: in winter, the cold and snow; in summer, the mosquitoes. Now, how many of you can read and write? Anna Lipnoskaya, step forward. We understand from your papers that you can do both.”

  As Anna moved out of the line, several men and women followed, insisting that they too were literate. Everyone knew that office work was less taxing than physical labor. But, unlike the volunteers, Anna also knew how to use an abacus, a skill that led the camp authorities to assign her to keeping the books on iodine production. Led past the administration building, she noticed, even at this late date, that the flower bed in front of the camp administration building contained the outline of an elephant, a visual pun. “SLON,” the Russian word for elephant, was the acronym for “Solovetski Special Purpose Camp.” Her bookkeeping position entitled her to shared quarters in the old Saint Petersburg guesthouse, where her room was larger and more comfortable than were most, and contained a small wood stove, a luxury provided to few. After her jailer escort had left, her roommate, Lydia, a thin and wrinkled girl still in her twenties, with hair the color of goose feathers, told her that hundreds of zeks, camp prisoners, lived in old dugouts, stifling barracks, and unheated monastery cells.

  “Prisoners,” said Lydia in a hushed voice, one that most zeks assumed lest they be overheard, “are often mutilated by sadistic guards with whips, chains, pliers, needles, and other sharp objects. During the summer, the unruly zeks are tied to a stake near the woods, where the millions of insects—mosquitoes, black flies, biting ants—eat them alive. Beware ‘Sekirka,’” she said, passing her hand under her chin and across her neck to signify death. Although Anna pressed her, she refused to elaborate. Not until Gregori returned from Anzer Island and was stationed on Sekirnaya Hill, Poleax Hill, did she learn about the punishment cells in the two-story cathedral, where men and women prisoners were brought for infractions that ranged from serious to trivial to sit all day on a single pole, no more than twelve inches around, suspended across the width of the narrow church and raised high enough so that one’s feet could not touch the ground. For the zeks to maintain their balance demanded not only dexterity but also strength. If they fell, the guards either beat them or tied the poor inmates lengthwise to a log, which they rolled down a flight of 365 steps carved out of a steep slope next to the church. Already starved and emaciated, the prisoners reached the bottom unrecognizable.

  “You do know,” said a defiant Lydia, “that some of Russia’s greatest intellectuals have lived and died here: scientists, artists, poets, mathematicians, philosophers, historians, engineers. To endure in this hell, I tell myself that I’m lucky to be among such famous company.” She said nothing about Stalin’s picture over her bed.

  A day later, Anna took up her job in the administration building, trying to make sense of the financial ledgers. Bookkeeping in Solovki was worse than inadequate. Inmates changed names, kept frozen bodies under their beds to double their rations, fixed the books so that ten pounds of seaweed became twenty, and lost countless items between the lines of debit and credit. A competent accounting of prisoners, even a sloppy one, would have connected Gregori Lipnoskii and Anna Shtuba. In fact, Anna kept waiting for some official to mention her son. But Gregori’s name never surfaced; hence, she was forced
to ask, sotto voce, if anyone knew his whereabouts. She soon learned that he had been assigned to attend the sick and dying on Anzer Island, a short distance from Solovki, though in bad weather a harrowing boat journey. By means of a bribe, she managed to transmit word to him that she was now on the main island working in the accounting office. His reply: He hoped shortly to find an assignment, like his current one on Golgotha Hill, caring for the dying. Priests and doctors, for good reason, worked side by side. When medicine failed the body, the priests cured the patients’ souls.

  During her first days on the island, what struck Anna, besides the incompetence of the authorities, were the ever-present wind, the absence of below-zero weather, and the quiet. “The White Sea,” said Lydia, “is warmed by the Norwegian Current, a northern arm of the Gulf Stream.” Twenty degrees Fahrenheit Anna regarded as balmy. Although she had arrived on the island in the midst of a storm and a turbulent sea, on the succeeding days, the water seemed barely to move, and the absence of waves created an absolute silence. “Had you come during the summer and not in October,” said Lydia, “you’d marvel at how easy it is to see to the bottom.” Even now, peering into the sunless sky and inky water, Anna could understand why monks had settled this area. The stillness promoted contemplation. How hateful that the reverential Solovki landscape should have been obscenely violated by torturers. If only the world knew; or would the world’s preoccupation with its own comfort blind it to cruelty, as was the case with Maxim Gorky, who had years before come to this island prison and then failed to tell the truth of what he’d experienced?

  Near the arched gate to the monastery stood a huge sign: “Life has become better. Life has become happier. I. Stalin.”

  The unseasonable calm, however, ended abruptly, as violent winds assailed the monastery walls, raced among the graves and the uncut cemetery grass, and howled down the dark passageways, compounding the cold of the monks’ cells that the Communists had turned into jails. Each night, Anna doubled the blankets and imagined the past that Lydia invoked, until she could hear the moans of the dead. Her heart trembled. She envisioned men kneeling before a crucifix praying for release from the sickness and pain of the flesh. In her dreams, she saw monks with pallid faces staring through window gratings out to the salt sea and envying birds freely swimming in the air. From their eyes fell silent, bitter tears. Miraculously, the monks faded and in their place stood prisoners, languishing, withering, drying up. She wondered: Do they, like the monks, hear the doleful tolling of the bell? John Donne’s words came to her, the ones her ex-priest often quoted, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Even though Lydia had shown her, on the monastery portals, representations of the miracles that took place in this frigid hell—fish falling from the sky to feed the monks, the Virgin Mary driving the enemy to flee from these sacred precincts—Anna knew that untimely death waited for everyone on this cursed island.

  No sooner had she started making sense of the account books than the labor force started to dwindle, slowly being sent on barges to Kem. She smiled knowing that the best time for her and Gregori to escape was in the confusion of retreat. For six months of the year, the White Sea was frozen, but not thick enough to permit a sled to traverse it. Patches of open water could be missed in the raging snowstorms and in the black winter nights. Then, too, one could not ignore the bitter frosts and mists that befogged the sea. No, escape would not lie across the icy sea; it would have to come from a precise knowledge of the camp: from knowing that the frozen, dead zeks buried underfoot, their fingers, hands, elbows, legs, and heads sticking out of the snow, would be staying behind, but not the NKVD corpses.

  Anna quickly learned the geography of Solovki—the woods, the clearings, the marshes—and the vocabulary of the verminous camp. To survive in the camp, one had to know prison jargon and how to use it. Years later, she still had her notes.

  The camp prisoners, both men and women, were generally divided into two groups: the criminals (urki) and the politicals, who were disparagingly called “counterrevolutionaries” or “enemies of the people,” even though most of them were farmers and industrial workers. The criminals mercilessly preyed on the politicals, whom they hated even more than they did the despised camp officials. Criminals roamed the camp freely, enforcing the rules of their overlords. They served as jailers and guards, observing no moral code except their own. To show their contempt for “normal society,” they defecated, urinated, masturbated, and fornicated in public. The greater the outrage, the greater their pleasure.

  Anna quickly saw that the criminals had formed themselves into a class society with strict rules. At the bottom were rapists and petty thieves, such as pickpockets; at the top were bank robbers and murderers. The bosses were the pachans, who ruled those below them, meting out jobs, punishment, and favors. Each class had its own tattoos, most of them sentimental, “I’ll always love my beloved mother,” or obscene, “Girls, suck my cock.” But the pachans inked their chests, stomachs, and backs with eagles, sunrays, hammers, anvils, copulating couples, and the faces of Marx, or Lenin, or Stalin, mostly the last.

  Unlike the general camp diction, the criminals had their own crapulous slang, blatnoe slovo, or thieves’ music, which included a number of Yiddish and Hebrew words, no doubt owing to the Jewish gangs in Odessa. The criminals also had their own way of walking, in small short steps with legs parted slightly, and they paid special attention to their dress and caps. A peak folded up or down or worn toward the back all conveyed a special meaning, a code that Anna shortly cracked.

  The Stukachi, the stoolies, came principally from the Tsar’s former officers in the White Guard and from the ranks of the priests. For the smallest gain—an extra bowl of soup, a crust of bread, a night with one of the women prisoners, a heavy blanket—they would inform. A good many of them served as jailers, never missing a chance to prove that they could be more brutal than the wardens, who came from the criminal class. Despised and distrusted, these former soldiers and criminals, prisoners themselves, saved the government money by policing the others. This practice, first tried in Africa by the colonial powers, was now being copied by the Soviets and would subsequently be perfected by the Nazis. The prisoners, though, were far from helpless. On more than one occasion, an informer lured into the woods never returned; and in the matter of tufta, the Stukachi could often be bribed. Every prisoner had his work norm, whether for tanning, or fishing, or gathering seaweed. The norms were inhumanly high and therefore impossible to meet. Failure meant whippings and possibly death. To circumvent the authorities, the prisoners would put, in the bottom of the holding pits, rocks and logs, and cover them with mud and sticks. The day’s work would be piled on top of the tufta so that it appeared that the day’s norm was met. Without this deception, no work team or individual could possibly have harvested the allotted amount. The fact that men outnumbered the women and children ten to one meant that females could easily trade their bodies for favors. Abortions were therefore frequent and jealousy rampant.

  Anna’s comeliness did not go unnoticed. Her first day at work, Comrade Monty Vessalikovski, the adjutant in charge of the accounting office, put his hand on her shoulder and tried to run it down the front of her frock. She grabbed his wrist, turned, and said sweetly, “Where is the blat?”

  Tall and strikingly handsome, Monty cut quite a figure but for one imperfection. His black head of hair stood straight up, as if electrified. Cropping his hair would have prevented this effect, but he believed that his hair was one of his most seductive features. The Vessalikovski family had immigrated from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Moscow, where he had attended a technical institute and specialized in hydrology. Monty’s father, a shoemaker, treated his son as an avatar, and his mother regarded him as a Soviet hero only one degree below Stalin. At his laboratory job, he strutted about like a commissar, refusing to speak to inferiors and taking credit for work that others performed. In time, his vaingloriousness proved an assassin to his ambitions. His comrades accused him
of being an enemy of the people, an accusation not far from the mark, and applauded when he was led off to the train for Solovki. Put in charge of repairing the island’s old irrigation canals, he regarded himself as superior to those who had to wield axes and saws and poles. Made a jailer and then an adjutant, because of his willingness to inform, he used his position as assistant to the chief warden to justify wearing his former laboratory uniform and have his way with the women. When his eye fell on Anna, she concluded that she could put his bachelor serpent in her service.

  “A quickie,” she told him, “is for peasants. When the moment is right, we will have time to indulge ourselves in a proper bed without fear of interruption.”

  Although Monty reluctantly agreed, his desire and passion grew more insistent. Whatever Anna wanted for herself, he supplied, particularly smoked foods, which figured in her escape plans and which he stole from the official larder. Each “gift” that she received earned Monty a teasing peck on the cheek. Sometimes she would even show him some leg. Envisioning the day of their consummation, he made plans. A fire would be blazing in his log stove. She would slowly undress in front of him, or perhaps he would undress her. It all depended on which would better intensify the moment. He would have on the table next to his bed a bottle of red wine and two glasses. The door, of course, would be safely secured. A candle made from beeswax, not a cheap, smoky taper, would sit at a distance on top of his clothing chest. The light would cast a shadow, creating a romantic mood. Although he had never married, before his exile he had enjoyed numerous lady friends; the camp women he bedded he regarded as deshovkee, whores. His one concern was that before he could have his way with Anna, the camp would be evacuated, a process that had begun slowly in the summer, even though prisoners were still arriving daily. He never could understand the logic of the Gulag. But as the evacuation gained momentum, so did his passion. He therefore decided to have Anna as soon as he could. One evening, with everyone gone from the office, he threw her on the tufted couch and, treating her like a camp criminal, possessed her roughly. She knew better than to resist or cry out lest she invite his displeasure, with a consequent loss of privileges: food, firewood, footwear, and fabrics. But she swore to herself that Monty would pay dearly for his thirty seconds of excitement. No one hurt Anna freely; Pyotr had proved that truth.