The Last Man in Russia

by Oliver Bullough

  ‘If this helps to solve our demographic issue, it would come in handy. In any case, I hope it will,’ he said.

  Gleb Yakunin, however, said the government had completely miscalculated the belt’s powers. He pointed out that the belt had been making its progress around the country when Putin was booed at the martial-arts bout. According to him, Putin’s humiliation before his supporters was the true miracle wrought by the Virgin Mary.

  ‘Everything began when they brought the belt here. That was when the spirit of freedom was unleashed,’ he said.

  The ability to cure infertility is only one of the belt’s minor qualities, he said. Far more important is its ability to protect a nation from its enemies. Yakunin said that, in bringing in the belt, Putin had undermined himself. He had not realized that he is in fact his own nation’s enemy.

  ‘It was an act of blasphemy because Putin is not a true believer, and now the belt is miraculously causing the nation to rise up,’ he said. ‘Whatever Putin does now it is too late. Business is opposed to him, the young people too. Trying to suffocate the movement and turn us into North Korea is just stupid.’

  His delight in what had happened was overpowering. He laughed and nodded constantly, convinced that Putin had succeeded in defeating himself. He even seemed amused by the thought that he could be arrested once more, and sent back to the camps.

  When Yakunin was sent to prison in 1981, he rode in a prison train, guarded and shackled. When I took the same line in 2012, I had one of the luxurious berths favoured by richer Russians and foreigners. I had been forced to change my ticket at the last minute, and all the cheapest berths were gone, meaning I was sharing a compartment with a well-tanned family from one of the oil towns of Siberia. They were returning home from holiday in Italy, where the weather had apparently been fantastic.

  The father of the family discussed sport with great persistence, but I managed to fall asleep anyway and in the morning they were gone, their places taken by two brunettes and a blonde from Nizhny Novgorod. They were off to a training seminar organized by their bank, but their conversation centred on a serial killer on the prowl in their hometown. He prefers blondes, said the blonde.

  This was the famous Trans-Siberian Mainline, and our train was heading for Beijing. My fellow passengers included two French women, a Brazilian man in tight shorts and at least a dozen Americans. Everyone disembarked at every stop and swarmed round the women selling pies, beer and soft drinks. The Americans were staying on the train all the way to China, a journey that would take them a week. I, however, reached the city of Perm that evening, swung my bag on to my shoulder and climbed down on to the platform.

  When Yakunin travelled from Perm to his camp, he was locked in a metal cage in the back of a truck. Once again I had a more comfortable time, sitting in the front seat of a four-wheel-drive truck driven by Alexander Ogaryshev, a local opposition politician who had volunteered to show me around. We pulled out of Perm through heavy traffic and over the River Kama, a tributary to the Volga, and into the forest that stretches from here for thousands of kilometres to the north and east.

  Alexander is a Perm native who trained as a lawyer at the interior ministry’s academy in Nizhny Novgorod. That is an elite institution, and graduating should have led to a highly lucrative position in the police, where income from bribes can exceed official salaries many times over. He said, however, that he had been so revolted by the corruption, and the difference between the high ideals preached at the academy and actual police practice, that he quit and went into business with some friends.

  ‘The corruption was total. They were just there to serve their own interests. Who paid more was all they cared about,’ he had said a couple of days before we drove into the forest, as we sat over coffee.

  ‘If I went to the station, they were all drinking. They respected nothing. The police should serve the state, they should want to be honest and to help people. They should not be serving just for the chance to make money.’

  He and his friends owned a network of casinos until the government made casinos illegal in 2009. Casinos still exist, of course, and there was one disguised as an internet café opposite my hotel, but now they are run by corrupt officials who are immune to the law. Alexander and his friends moved into the restaurant business in response, and he now owned three venues across Perm. We sat in one of them while he told me about winter 2011–12. He had driven all the way to Moscow to take part in the protests, a journey of more than 1,000 kilometres. On arriving there on 10 December, he went straight to Bolotnaya Square without having slept.

  ‘Our hope was that finally something could be changed in the country. Previously people just wanted to leave. I had this sense there that we could change things. I can sell up and leave at any time. I have a friend in Germany. For the first time, however, there was hope that we could change things, instead of this apathy. We need to keep this going. The protest was like a great unification. There were all these creative people with slogans that they invented themselves. The most creative people support the opposition, it was wonderful.’

  The Perm region itself did not see any particular protests against United Russia’s election. That may be because the party gained only 36 per cent there, which was down among the lowest levels in Russia, so there was not much to protest against.

  The lack of protests is unlikely to be because Perm residents are too cynical and apathetic to take action, however. They are descended from generations of exiles, and it has been a favoured dumping ground for the Russian government’s unwanted citizens for generations. Elmira Polubesova, a fifty-three-year-old activist from a liberal pressure group called Solidarity whom we were sitting with, boasted that Perm’s tradition of exile made it an island of freedom in an oppressive sea.

  ‘Judging by my own children, they have a chance to go to Canada but they say they want to stay here, they want to create conditions for a family, to change things. In Soviet times it was prestigious to be employed by someone, to have worked somewhere for forty years. The situation was such that you had to stay put, people were scared to leave or to speak out because they could lose their pension. But now people have changed, they work for themselves. The generation that was repressed is dying. Even I did not experience the repression that my mother had, and when people have not been personally affected they are not scared to decide things for themselves.’

  A ten-minute drive from the restaurant in Alexander’s four-wheel-drive was the puppet theatre, a shabby beige building closed for the summer. In the 1930s it had a different function: a detention centre for those suspected of counter-revolutionary crimes. In almost any other Russian city, its past would have been forgotten. In Perm, however, a group of local activists had persuaded the theatre’s management to let them set up a small museum round the back. Alexander Kalikh, a lean middle-aged man, is in charge of the project and he had agreed to show us around.

  We walked across the courtyard to a brick annexe, opened a steel door and ducked inside. Incongruously, puppets hung on the walls alongside the displays about the repressions of the Stalin years. This was still a theatre after all. Kalikh said he was planning to reopen a bricked-up window that had looked on to the courtyard, and through which prisoners had once spoken to their relatives.

  ‘No one kept here was aware that they would be taken to be shot but many people still alive remember seeing their relatives for the last time through that window.’

  A few officials were even assisting him in his efforts to commemorate the past, he said, including the Federal Prisons Service, which had provided a genuine grille from an old window. He speculated that officials from the Service might have a guilt complex through working for the organization that had imprisoned so many people.

  ‘The FSB is different, however. They haven’t helped us in twenty years, they must have an order not to. The local government does help us a little, but that’s because this is Perm, you know, it would not happen in other places.’

  Schoolc
hildren now come to the building not just for the puppet performances, but to learn about how the secret police arrested people on token charges, penned them up and then shot them. The museum has lists of the people who were kept here, and can always find people who lived on the same street as the visiting children.

  ‘We can show them the route the prisoners took to get here. That means for young people history is before their eyes. They have to sense that all this happened close to them, that it was not somewhere completely different. And we can show them that the times have not really changed. Look at the similarities between Stalin and Putin, now there has been a whole series of repressive reforms: to N G Os, to libel, to protest. Whose methods are these? Your rights mean nothing, we do not even know what will happen in a year.’

  On the way out, he pointed to a poster on the wall with a quote from the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko that loosely translates as ‘If we forget, we are cattle. If we remember, we’re a nation.’ As a slogan, it is defiant and proud. If you surrender to officials’ demands to forget their victims, you are collaborating in the crime.

  The Perm region was home to three of the last camps for political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Perm-35, Perm-36 and Perm-37 were nicknamed the Perm triangle. Perm was a major centre of the weapons industry in Soviet times and was thus closed to foreigners, which made it a good place to keep dissidents.

  Its glorious weapon-building past is attested to by a gigantic Order of Lenin in the centre of town, awarded in 1971 for its ‘great successes in the development of industrial production’. The fruits of that production are on show in a museum on the outskirts. Visitors can see everything from a tsarist-era cannon to a ballistic missile that could fly 9,600 kilometres and deliver a 0.6-megaton atomic device. More powerful missiles have been made since, but were not on display.

  Alexander Ogaryshev and I were on our way to Perm-36. Perm-35 and Perm-37 (where Yakunin served his term) still operate as prisons and are thus closed to visitors. Perm-36, however, the last point in the triangle, was abandoned. Former prisoners and members of Memorial, a charity devoted to historical research and human rights, took it over in 1992. At first they just wanted to preserve it, so future generations could see what a functioning camp had looked like. Having patched it up, however, they were faced with the question of what to do with it.

  The obvious solution was to open it to visitors, which is what they did. It remains the only functioning museum on the territory of the gulag anywhere in Russia, which means it is the closest equivalent Russia has to the memorial at Auschwitz. Perm-36 may not have been one of the most terrible islands in Solzhenitsyn’s archipelago, but it remains a unique memorial to the inhumanity of the twentieth century, and deserves to be far better known.

  Driving there from Perm took about two hours, a distance considered insignificant by locals but deeply monotonous for those not used to the forest. The trees were occasionally birch with white trunks and light-green leaves, but normally pines, all orange trunks and dark needles. Sometimes fields opened out on either side of the road, and they heralded a village of single-storey houses huddled together. When the turning to Perm-36 finally appeared to the right of the road it was a relief.

  We passed through the village of Kuchino, which seemed largely abandoned, then Makhnutino, which looked little better. The road was gravel, and we trailed a cloud of dust that billowed around us when we stopped at the police checkpoint. This was the weekend of the year when Perm-36 organizes a festival. Organizers expected 10,000 visitors and the police were taking a close interest. Among the blue-shirted officers, however, were volunteers in red T-shirts with the words ‘Territory of Freedom’ on the back, and they waved us through.

  The camp headquarters was a two-storey cream building on a bluff above the River Chusovaya. The river curved away around a broad flat field. Sand banks stretched alluringly out into the water, offering the chance of a swim. Swallows swooped to sip the river, and fish left ripples on its smooth surface. The prisoners, of course, saw none of this. They arrived in closed trucks and were ushered immediately behind the camp’s high fences and barbed wire. Often they had no clear idea of where they were. According to a camp legend, one intake of prisoners included an ornithologist who was able to judge by the birds he heard that they were near the Ural Mountains. Previously, no one had known.

  The headquarters is the only building in the camp above a single storey, and most of the others are brick and timber barracks overshadowed by green watchtowers armed with searchlights. These were where the prisoners lived for the duration of their sentences.

  We were among the first people to arrive for the three-day festival, and the camp was still largely deserted. We joined a tour run by a local pensioner called Sergei Spodin, who guided his group of eight with great skill and knowledge. The camp, he said, had included both living quarters and working quarters, where prisoners were expected to earn their keep. Outside the barracks were multiple rings of fences and barbed wire. Inside the barracks were informers paid with privileges like an extra tea ration.

  ‘In forty-one years there was not a single escape. The system worked very well.’

  Between this Tough Regime section of the camp and a second section, where prisoners lived in the even harsher Special Regime conditions, was a shooting range where the guards practised.

  ‘There was shooting day and night. As you can imagine, this had a significant effect on people’s psychology, because everyone knew they were not practising to shoot rabbits but to shoot people. This is a quiet region and you could hear the shooting 10 or 20 kilometres away. Everything was done to try to break people’s spirits.’

  Despite the guards’ best efforts, when Yakunin arrived in the Perm triangle in 1981 the dissidents were as defiant as ever. They had evolved a highly complex game to play with their jailers. Their aim was to publicize their plight and to smuggle information to the West, whence it would be broadcast back on foreign radio. This would embarrass the Soviet government, which insisted it protected its citizens’ human rights. The jailers’ aim was to break the dissidents’ spirits, to make them recant as Father Dmitry had done. Failing that, they just wanted to interrupt the flow of news updates.

  Yakunin’s arrival was heralded by an immediate flurry of reports on his progress in the underground Chronicle of Current Events (even now, he refused to tell me how the news reached the outside world).

  ‘Not long before Yakunin’s arrival in the camp all the Bibles were confiscated. On Yakunin’s arrival, his Bible was also confiscated,’ said the Chronicle’s issue number 62, dated July 1981.

  On 4 May 1981, it said, Yakunin and a group of others had started a hunger strike to protest against the Soviet Union’s failure to fulfil its international commitments to protect the human rights of its citizens. The hunger strike, Yakunin told me, had been the one weapon of the dissidents.

  ‘We wrote these statements for anniversaries and so on, and we were always smuggling them out. We organized hunger strikes and the guards hated it. They would beat us but they couldn’t stop us,’ he said, with a chuckle. ‘We wanted to show we were not broken, that we were taking part in the struggle in as far as we could.’

  Throughout the 1980s, the jailed dissidents risked their health and sometimes their lives by forcing themselves to go for extended periods without food. Sakharov went on hunger strike for the right of his wife to have medical treatment abroad, Yakunin for the right to have a Bible, others just to show they were alive. This was in itself a sign of how much the camps had changed since Stalin’s days. In the 1930s, a hunger strike would have led inevitably to death, since no one cared whether prisoners ate or not. Now, thanks to the pressure exerted by Western states, officials were under orders to keep the dissidents alive, and that gave the prisoners a lever to exert pressure on their guards.

  There was always something to go on hunger strike for, if only for the right to be officially considered a political prisoner. Anatoly Marchenko died in 1986 after a three-month
hunger strike aiming to secure the release of political prisoners.

  Other prisoners looked for less terrible ways to make their points. Vladimir Bukovsky, a poet imprisoned in the 1970s, described the lengths prisoners would go to to irritate their jailers, whose time could be wasted almost indefinitely by exploiting the bureaucratic complaints procedure.

  As he wrote in his memoirs:

  We had been schooled by our participation in the civil rights movement, we had received an excellent education in the camps, and we knew of the implacable force of one man’s refusal to submit. The authorities knew it too. They had long since abandoned any idea of basing their calculations on communist dogma. They no longer demanded of people a belief in the radiant future – all they needed was submission. And when they tried to starve us into it in the camps, or threw us into the punishment cells to rot, they were demanding not a belief in communism, but simply submission, or at least a willingness to compromise.

  Bukovsky and his comrades had no intention of compromising. They reacted to every departure from strict procedure by writing an official complaint, and they could write up to thirty letters of complaint a day. They patiently sent them higher and higher up the chain of command, then branched out sideways in ever more elaborate directions.

  It is best to address your complaints not to run-of-the-mill bureaucrats, but to the most unpredictable individuals and organizations, for instance to all the Deputies of the Supreme Soviet, or of the Soviets at republican, regional or city levels, to newspapers and magazines, to astronauts, writers, artists, ballerinas, to all the secretaries of the Central Committee, all generals, admirals, productivity champions, shepherds, deer-breeders, milkmaids, sportsmen, and so on and so forth.

  The guards came, if not to respect this kind of activism, at least to fear it and the extra work it created. Complaints could trigger committees of investigation, which had to be responded to, and it was best to avoid generating them. Although political prisoners had no special status in the camp system, they won the right to be addressed with the respectful plural form of the word ‘you’ and by their first name and patronymic. In any other prison, inmates were treated like rats.