The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  Our station stops were entirely random. We would pull into what looked like a decent-sized town and chug out again after a couple of minutes. Then we would wait for half an hour at a platform carved out of the forest, where there were no shops and no one got on or off.

  My two neighbours alighted at the stop for Syktyvkar and were replaced by two muscled lads in their twenties. Much to my delight, they invited me down to sit with them, meaning I could get off my sweaty mattress for the first time that day. They regaled me with tales of working on the North Stream gas pipeline, which will pump gas to Western Europe.

  We drank beer and they swapped tales of industrial accidents. A comrade had slipped off the top of the pipe and broken his leg. A foreman had stepped back to check a weld, fallen off the scaffolding and broken his back. The other one laughed at that. It was far worse, he said, working for foreign contractors, since they make you check your welds until there are no leaks at all, and that takes hours.

  One of them, Sergei, came from Inta and had nothing to say in its favour.

  ‘It’s a dying town,’ he said, and asked where I would be staying. I mentioned the name of the hotel, and he just laughed. ‘If you can call it a hotel.’

  My heart sank a little as I climbed back to my bunk for the night.

  When I awoke – it was hard to call it morning, since it never gets dark in summer this far north – the black humps of the Ural Mountains had heaved themselves over the horizon to the east. They were streaked with snow, and looked menacing and old.

  The man who drove me from the station to town pointed out the last working coal mine. Otherwise, the town was sinking back into the swamp it was born of.

  ‘I used to work in that one,’ he said, as we passed another shuttered working.

  Father Dmitry, like most of the prisoners who came through here, worked in the mines. The pressing need for coal of the war years had passed by the late 1940s. Coal was far more accessible and of better quality in Ukraine. But the logic of power in the gulag meant that the bosses’ empires were untouchable. To close the mines here would have deprived someone of influence, so the coal was hewn out of the ground, loaded on to trucks and sent south to feed the Soviet machine, whether it was needed or not.

  One story Father Dmitry liked to tell was how, in the coal mine, he asked the lift operator to hold the controls while he spoke to people on the level below. He lay on the ground, with his head over the shaft and shouted down to them. He focused on the conversation and did not notice when a comrade screamed for him to get back, that the lift was coming. The lift operator had forgotten his promise, and the cage was speeding down towards the back of his head. At that point, a Moldovan called Stan screamed ‘in a voice’, Father Dmitry wrote, ‘of the kind used at the front’.

  He looked back, and the cage passed within inches of his face. ‘Everyone was terribly worked up, but I was calm, I somehow did not sense the danger. I still don’t.’

  Father Dmitry arrived in the camps in 1948, the year the government cracked down in earnest on the freedoms Soviet citizens had come to enjoy during the chaos of World War Two. To show how alien this was to what was happening elsewhere in the world, 1948 was the year when Britain founded the National Health Service, when the United States gifted Marshall Aid to Western Europe, and when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  In 1948, the Soviet government divided the inmates in two. The prisoners called ‘criminals’ – those guilty of murder, rape and other ordinary crimes – were now housed separately from those convicted of political crimes. The number of ‘politicals’, who now got a tougher routine, had increased. Among the camp inmates were hundreds of thousands of returning prisoners of war – traitors for having surrendered in battle. There were also unruly elements from all the lands – Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, East Prussia, Bessarabia, Karelia, Poland and so on – that had been added to the Soviet empire after the war. They were all put to work.

  Father Dmitry, a half-educated peasant boy, was locked up as a political prisoner and thrown together with professors and officers and priests from all over Eastern Europe. The camps were full of Poles, Balts and Germans, and even the occasional Westerner marooned here by bureaucracy.

  It was a university, and many of the lessons were brutal. One professor, Father Dmitry wrote, complained about his treatment and was locked in the punishment cell immediately. The punishment cell was four walls and no roof – in winter. The professor came out chastened and never spoke up again. They were called by number – Father Dmitry was K-956 – not by name, and worked fourteen-hour days until they were skeletal and exhausted.

  One Lithuanian became so emaciated that he gained extra rations, but he did not eat them. Something inside his brain had snapped. He squirrelled them away in his suitcase, until he was sent to the hospital wing and died.

  Prisoners could receive one letter a year. They had ten minutes to eat lunch.

  ‘From this hard life a lot of people became grasses, informers, so as to somehow ease their lives: many of them were killed. One Lithuanian informer was killed when he had just a month until his release.’

  From the earliest days of the camps, prisoners had found solace in religion. The violence between different groups of prisoners, and from guards, encouraged individuals to form groups, to seek out like-minded inmates to share their troubles with. The rituals of Christianity helped many of them find comfort, and helped encourage them to believe in a world outside the fences and tundra that surrounded them.

  ‘I stayed joyous and optimistic for a long time, and then I too suffered these bleak thoughts, that I would never get out of there . . . My only release was that there was another life, there was God. He sees all our sufferings. When I told the prisoners that our sufferings would end, they looked at me like I was a baby who doesn’t understand life. And when I told them I had been at the front – so as to say that I wasn’t a baby – they didn’t believe me.’

  When Father Dmitry was in Inta the prisoners lived in long wooden barracks. Those are all but gone now, having rotted into the muck like many of the buildings that replaced them. The conditions in the Russian Arctic are so severe that the weather will find the smallest weakness in a building, squeeze its way in like an infection and reduce it to a hump of masonry and wood in just a few years.

  My car dropped me off outside the Northern Girl hotel, identified by a sign above a doorway in a block of flats near the central square. The lobby housed a cosmetics kiosk. At the reception window was a blonde woman who clearly spent much of her spare time trying out the kiosk’s products.

  I had not reserved a room, but that was fine. The price was 1,800 roubles – about £36. That seemed steep, but it was manageable. I handed over my passport. That was when she realized I was a foreigner, and I needed to pay a ‘coefficient’ of three. She consulted her calculator.

  ‘That means 5,400 roubles,’ she said with finality.

  Many Soviet institutions once had a double price scale, with foreigners made to pay vastly higher prices than locals, but it is now supposed to be illegal. I told her so. I told her I would not pay over £100 for a hotel in Moscow, even if it had a spa, pool and sauna, and refused to pay her charge. She rang her administrator, who came down and tried to ring the manager. He was not there, so she rang the former manager, who expressed surprise that he was being consulted on a business he had nothing to do with, and rang off. She then, inexplicably, rang the Federal Migration Service, who also could not help. I would still, they told me, have to pay the 5,400 roubles. I refused.

  At this point, and seemingly randomly, the administrator offered me a revised coefficient of 1.2, which allowed them to save face and me to save money. We had a deal.

  It was only when I was sat on the chair in my bedroom, which had a single bed, a chair and a kettle and was on the ground floor facing a yard, that I realized that – in half an hour of haggling – neither of the women had expressed any interest at all in my visit to Inta
. This was a small town, in a wilderness, an overnight train journey from the nearest airport, with no tourist amenities or business opportunities. And yet, they were acting as if foreigners swanned in and out all the time. This was a blow, since hotel receptionists tend to be a key source of help in a new town. On my way out, I tried to engage the heavily made-up woman in conversation. The few miners left, she said, earn 20,000 roubles a month sometimes but normally around 14,000.

  The town’s coal is no longer in demand, and the shafts are largely worked out. The population peaked above 60,000 in 1989. Now only half that many people are registered as living in Inta, and many of those really work somewhere else. The trend is repeated in Komi as a whole. At the end of the Soviet period, one and a quarter million people lived in this region. Now there are 950,000 – a population decline of 25 per cent in twenty years.

  I hoped the receptionist might ask about me about what I was doing in her crumbling town. But she showed no more interest in me than she had the first time round.

  My fallback plan was Inta Museum, which would I hoped be full of information on the gulag. After all, the town had no other history, and the exhibits would have to include something. Here too my foreign nationality cost me extra, though I got my money’s worth, since they had no 50-rouble tickets. The woman behind the cash desk had to tear out separately five 10-rouble tickets along the edge of her ruler. Another woman was ready to take my coat but I was not wearing one. It was far too hot for anyone to be wearing anything more than a shirt, and I was the only visitor, so she was presumably not having a very busy day.

  The museum’s first room was devoted to the Soviet Union’s Victory in World War Two, under the slogan ‘The victory was forged in the gulag too’. There was a photo of the order signed on 22 July 1941 which had kept all prisoners locked up for the duration. That order kept Father Dmitry’s father in the camps for an extra five years on top of his four-year sentence. The exhibit did not mention the two million gulag prisoners who had died forging the victory.

  The room devoted to coal had a roundabout way of showing the drop in the workforce. Coal production had dropped from 9,099,000 tonnes in 1989 to 4,851 tonnes in 2001. During that period each worker had become almost twice as efficient. I did not need to do the sums to realize the heart had been ripped out of the town.

  An old woman walked the museum with me. She turned on the lights in each room; sat down to check I examined all the exhibits; turned off the lights after me. I trudged round, then asked if the director was in her office and whether I might speak to her. She was not. And no one else would have anything to tell me, apparently.

  The director’s secretary gave off the air of someone who received so many requests for access that she would rather corral all the visitors into one group before allowing them past. I would have to come back. It was to be another two days before I finally made it into the director’s presence.

  The day stretched before me, so I set out to explore. Every building looked tired. The one bit of fresh paint I saw – bright orange used to smarten up an arch leading into an otherwise ordinary courtyard – had been defaced with the single scrawled word ‘cock’, and a crude sketch of male genitalia. Walking on, I headed for two factory chimneys that dominated the town. Built of dark brick, one bore the date 1952 and a red star. Father Dmitry must have seen this being built. Perhaps he had helped build it. The factory – a power station – was not working, and I briefly wondered if the only thing more depressing than a belching factory chimney was a non-belching factory chimney, before ordering myself to cheer up.

  A minibus slowed down enticingly so I climbed on board and rode to the end of the line on a whim. Here the apartment blocks were invisible, and the Great Inta River surged past, muscles flexing beneath its khaki surface. This had once been a region of wooden houses and gardens on the bluff above the river. They were rotten and collapsed now, the gardens choked with stagnant grass. The entrance gates to the Kapital coal mine gaped, and the mine’s lift tower stood a hundred metres away. Thickly lagged pipes rose up over the gates into a square-sided arch. The pipes were lifted high to allow trucks to pass safely underneath, but no trucks had come this way for years.

  At the end of a long track was a cemetery, filled with Lithuanian names and birch trees. The mosquitoes poured out of the damp grass, covering my arms and clustering at my ankles. They were stupid and easy to kill, not like the streetwise ones in Moscow that know how to hide on dark patches so you cannot spot them against the background. But here they swarmed in such numbers that I could not keep up with them and I was bitten a dozen times in a minute. A path led through the wood, between the graves, to a monument of a woman in Lithuanian national dress bearing a ball in her left hand. On the back, in several languages, it said, ‘To those who did not return’.

  Although the gulag is generally imagined to have been unbearably cold, for many prisoners it was the blood-sucking parasites during the summers that caused the most torment. The writer Oleg Volkov, on lying down to sleep on his first night on Solovki, was appalled to see bedbugs dropping on to him from the ceiling. There were so many he could not sleep, and went outside. There the clouds of mosquitoes were equally intolerable.

  Guards used the mosquitoes as a punishment, stripping off recalcitrant prisoners and tying them to posts in the forest. Their whole bodies would swell up. As I fled the graveyard I had a glimpse of that torment. The mosquitoes might not blot out the sun but, given the chance, they could swell your face enough to turn you blind.

  For half an hour I waited for the bus to return. Then I got tired of beating off the mosquitoes and walked.

  There did not seem to be much else to do, so I retreated to the Barakuda bar and took out the thick bundle of papers that is Two Years in Abez, a memoir by A. A. Vaneyev, a former inmate of a camp a few dozen kilometres to the north of here, and an account of life inside. I had been carrying a few books around with me, including Father Dmitry’s various volumes of memoirs and a couple of books on the gulag. Vaneyev’s manuscript was the only one I had yet to read, so I ordered a beer and settled in.

  The book is mainly a description of the writer’s relations with Lev Karsavin, a religious philosopher who fled St Petersburg after the 1917 revolution. After wanderings in Europe, he found a new home in Lithuania which, between the two world wars, was an independent state. He learned Lithuanian and became an inspiration to a generation of Orthodox writers.

  In 1939, Stalin and Hitler carved up Europe between them, and Stalin got Lithuania – as well as eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia and various other places that took his fancy – while Hitler got western Poland and a free hand with France. This inglorious episode is one that modern Russia prefers to forget. The two dictators fell out a couple of years later, and their armies would chew Lithuania to pieces between them over the course of World War Two. Eventually, however, Stalin came out on top and thousands of patriotic Lithuanians ended up here: many of them, like Karsavin, for ever.

  One of the strangest quirks of the gulag was that, although it took no interest in keeping prisoners alive when they were healthy, it provided hospitals to nurse them back to health when they were sick. Karsavin, born in 1882 and thus an old man when he was arrested in 1949, never left the hospital.

  The memoir’s main theme is how life continued in the camp. Professors of all subjects and priests of all religions were happy to discuss their disciplines with each other and anyone else who was interested. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, bitterly cold in the winter and plagued by mosquitoes in summer, but it was a strange kind of haven from the horrors Stalin unleashed on the Soviet Union in his last paranoid years.

  ‘When they brought us here,’ Vaneyev wrote, ‘all of these circumstances created a terrible impression. With time, however, they became somehow familiar and did not stop us living. And life went on in its own way, not so much independent of the circumstances, but finding its own unexpected way within them.’

  The strange side-effect of t
he influx of educated people from all over Russia and Eastern Europe was that the camps had a freedom absent in the Soviet Union as a whole. Stalin’s last year featured crackdowns on, among others, biologists who believed in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection through inherited characteristics. Stalin favoured the non-scientific but ideologically purer Trofim Lysenko, whose idea that you could pass on to your children characteristics you had acquired during your lifetime squared with the communists’ desire to perfect human beings.

  One of Stalin’s last acts was to unleash an anti-Semitic campaign against the Jews, marked by the arrests of Kremlin doctors who were allegedly plotting against him. Stalin had come to believe that Jewish nationalists were all American spies and wanted them dismissed from their jobs and arrested.

  In the gulag, however, none of this mattered since everyone shared the same miserable conditions, Russians, and Jews, Darwinists and charlatans alike. The bedside of the ailing Karsavin became a debating club and a university for young men like Vaneyev. In one of the most touching exchanges, the doctor orders the debaters out of his hospital ward when a winter evening has gone on too long.

  ‘It is so cold, is it not time to go to your homes?’ Then he paused. ‘Oh my God. What have we come to, when we call these barracks home, where your only home is a bed and a table. Terrible, terrible. And this is by our standards comfort, most people don’t even have this.’

  People, infinitely adaptable, found a way to survive even here. They even adapted to the mosquitoes. There are stories of the insects swarming in numbers large enough to suffocate reindeer; of reindeer herds so maddened they will drown in rivers to escape the bites. People of Vaneyev’s age called the mosquitoes Messerschmitts after the German fighter planes, and delighted in killing them. One evening Vaneyev sat with Karsavin in the open air, along with Nikolai Punin, husband of the poet Anna Akhmatova, when a mosquito alighted on the professor’s bald head. Karsavin did not brush it off, but allowed it to drink his blood and fly off.