Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  It was in this shed that I met Roman again. He didn’t recognize me. He was dressed like a “flame,” to use the common criminals’ expression, apt as always: tufts of cotton wool stuck out of his quilted jacket, his trousers, and his hat. Very likely, Roman had often been forced to run and get a “burning coal” to light some criminal’s cigarette. His eyes shone with famine; his cheeks were as ruddy as ever, but they no longer reminded you of balloons, for they were now stretched tight over his cheekbones. Roman lay in a corner, noisily breathing in the air. His chin rose and fell.

  “He’s going,” said his neighbor Denisov. “He’s got good foot wrappings.” Deftly pulling the dying man’s boots off, Denisov unwrapped the foot wrappings, which were made from green blanket material and were still strong. “That’s what you have to do,” he said, giving me a menacing look. But I didn’t care.

  Roman’s corpse was carried out when we were being lined up to be led off to work. His hat had also gone. The hems of his unbuttoned jacket dragged along the ground.

  Did Volodia Dobrovoltsev, the steamer, die? Was steaming a job, or a personality trait? It was a job that aroused only envy in the barracks of article 58 prisoners. Having separate barracks for politicals in a general camp where there were barracks for nonpoliticals and professional criminals, all surrounded by the same barbed wire, was, of course, a mockery of the law. Nobody got any protection from attacks by gangs and the gangsters’ gruesome score-settling.

  The steamer controlled an iron pipe emitting hot steam. The steam was used to heat the rock ore and small stones that had frozen together. The workman would regularly scrape out the warmed-up stone with a metal spoon the size of a human hand, attached to a three-meter-long handle.

  This was considered skilled work, since the steamer had to open and close the hot valves that led to the pipes from a booth where there was a primitive boiler. Being the boiler attendant was even better than being the steamer. Few engineers or mechanics convicted under article 58 could dream of getting a job like this, and not merely because it was skilled work. It was by pure chance that Volodia was chosen from a thousand others to do this job. It transformed him, however. He no longer had to think the eternal thought about how to get warm. . . . The icy cold no longer permeated his whole being, no longer stopped his brain from working. The hot pipe saved him. That was why everyone envied Dobrovoltsev.

  There was talk that he had gotten the steamer’s job unfairly; the job was viewed as sure proof that he was an informer, a spy. Naturally, the gangsters always said that anyone who had a job in the camp as a male nurse was drinking the workers’ blood. People knew what could come of this sort of reasoning: envy leads people to do bad things. Volodia immediately acquired immeasurable status in our eyes, as if we had discovered we had a remarkable violinist among us. The fact that Dobrovoltsev, because his job dictated it, left the barracks on his own and left the camp through the guardhouse, opening the guardhouse window and shouting out his number “twenty-five” in a loud, happy voice, was an anomaly we couldn’t get used to.

  Sometimes he worked near our pit face. Using our rights as acquaintances, we took turns running up and warming ourselves on his pipe. The pipe was four centimeters in diameter, so that when you held it in your clenched fist you could feel the warmth spreading from your hands to your body. It was impossible to tear yourself away and go back to the pit face, to the subzero cold.

  Volodia, unlike other steamers, never drove us away. He never said a word to us, although I knew that steamers were forbidden to let people like us warm themselves by the pipes. He stood there, surrounded by clouds of thick white steam. His clothes were iced up. Every fiber on his pea jacket shone like a crystal needle. He never talked to us. The job was, obviously, far too precious for that.

  •

  That Christmas Eve we were sitting around the stove. Because of the holiday, its iron sides were redder than usual. You immediately sensed the difference in temperature. Sitting around the stove, we felt sleepy, we felt lyrical.

  “It’d be good, pals, to go back home. Miracles do happen. . . .” said Glebov the horse man, who used to be a professor of philosophy and was notorious in our barracks for having forgotten his wife’s name a month previously. “Only, let’s have the truth. . . .”

  “Home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” I replied. “I’d rather go back to prison. I’m not joking. I wouldn’t like to go back to my family now. They’ll never understand me, they can’t possibly. I know that whatever they think is important is actually nothing. What’s important to me, what little I’ve got left, they can’t possibly understand or feel. I’ll just inflict more fear on them, one more fear to add to the thousands that their lives are full of. What I’ve seen here no person should see or even know about. Prison is quite different. It’s the only place I know where people aren’t afraid to say what they think. Where they get some spiritual rest. They get physical rest, too, because they don’t work. In prison every hour of your existence makes sense.”

  “What nonsense you’re talking,” said the former professor of philosophy. “It’s because you weren’t beaten under interrogation. Anyone who was subjected to method number three [4] will have a different opinion. . . .”

  “Piotr Ivanych, what do you say to that?”

  Piotr Ivanovich Timofeyev, who used to be the manager of a government company in the Urals, smiled and winked at Glebov.

  “I’d go home to my wife, Agnia. I’d buy a loaf of rye bread. I’d make myself some millet porridge: a couple of gallons of it. And another couple of gallons of dumpling soup! And I’d eat the lot. For the first time in my life I’d eat my fill of the stuff and I’d make Agnia eat the leftovers.”

  “How about you?” Glebov turned to Zvonkov, the getter in our mine, who in his former life had been a peasant in the provinces, Yaroslavl or Kostroma, or somewhere similar.

  “Home,” Zvonkov said gravely, without a smile. “I think I’d go there and not move an inch from my wife. Wherever she goes, I go, wherever she goes, I go. The trouble is I’ve been made to forget my work here, I’ve lost my love for the land. Well, I’ll find some job somewhere. . . .”

  “How about you?” Glebov touched our orderly’s knee with his hand.

  “First thing, I’d go to the Party District Committee. I remember there used to be masses of cigarette butts on the floor.”

  “Don’t joke, please. . . .”

  “I’m not joking.”

  Suddenly I realized that only one person hadn’t answered yet: it was Volodia Dobrovoltsev. He raised his head, not waiting to be asked. The light of the glowing coals came from the open stove door and shone into his eyes, which were alive and deep.

  “As for me,” his voice was calm and unhurried, “I’d like to be a stump. A human stump, you know, with no arms or legs. Then I’d find the strength to spit in their ugly mugs for everything they’ve been doing to us.”

  1960

  HOW IT BEGAN

  HOW DID it begin? On what winter day did the wind change and everything become frightening? In autumn we were still work—

  How did it begin? Kliuyev’s brigade was detained at work. Such a thing was unheard-of. The pit face was surrounded by the guards. It was a cross section, a gigantic pit, and the guards took up position around its edges. The inside of the pit was seething with people who were in a hurry to catch up with each other. Some did so with concealed alarm, others with the firm belief that today, this evening, were chance events. When dawn and morning came, it would all go away, things would be clearer and life would go on as before, albeit in camp fashion. Being detained at work: why? Before the day’s allotted work was finished. The blizzard screeched at a high pitch; the fine dry snow felt like sand hitting your cheeks. In the triangular beams of the floodlights that illuminated the pit faces at night, the snow swirled like specks of dust in a sunbeam, reminding me of the specks of dust in a sunbeam by the doors of my father’s shed. Except that i
n my childhood everything was small, warm, alive. Here everything was enormous, cold, and antagonistic. The wooden boxes, in which the earth and stones were carted out to the dump, screeched. Four men would take hold of a box, pushing, pulling, rolling, shoving, and dragging it to the edge of the dump, where they turned it around and tipped it over to pour the frozen stones into the ravine. The stones rolled down without much noise. There was Krupiansky in one place, Neiman in another, the foreman Kliuyev in yet another. All of them were in a hurry, but the work was never-ending. The siren had sounded at five, the mine siren had hooted and shrieked at five, when the brigade was allowed “home,” but it was about eleven at night now. “Home” meant barracks. Tomorrow at five in the morning it would be reveille and a new working day and a new target for the day. Our brigade had taken over from Kliuyev’s at this pit face. Today we’d been set to work at a neighboring pit face; only at midnight did we take over from Kliuyev’s brigade.

  How did it begin? A large number, a very large number of soldiers had suddenly come to the mine. Two new barracks, which the prisoners had built of logs for themselves, were handed over to the guards. We were left to spend the winter in tents, torn tarpaulin tents, pierced by stones from the explosions in the pit face. The tents were insulated: pillars were rammed into the earth and tarred paper was stretched over laths. Between the tent and the tarred paper there was a layer of air. We were told we could stuff the space with snow. But all that came later. Our barracks were handed over to the guards—that was the key fact. The guards didn’t like these barracks: they were made of unseasoned timber: larch is a treacherous wood, it doesn’t like people, and the walls, floors and ceilings still hadn’t dried out after a whole winter. Everyone knew that before: those whose flanks were supposed to dry out the barracks, and those who found themselves taking the barracks over. The guards accepted their misfortune as just another inconvenience of the north.

  Why were there guards at the Partisan mine? It was a small mine, which had no more than two or three prisoners in 1937. The Partisan’s neighbors, the Storm mine and the Berzin mine (its name was changed to Upper At-Uriakh when Berzin was shot), were towns with a population of between twelve and fourteen thousand prisoners. Of course, the maelstroms of death in 1938 made big changes to those numbers. But all that came later. Why did Partisan have to have a guard now? In 1937 the Partisan mine had just one soldier, always on duty, armed with a revolver. He had no trouble maintaining order in this peaceful kingdom of “Trotskyists.” And the gangsters? The duty guard turned a blind eye to their robbery expeditions and tours, and made sure he was diplomatically absent when things got especially critical. Everything was “quiet.” Yet now there was suddenly a horde of guards. Why?

  Suddenly a whole brigade of objectors, men who refused to work, was taken away: they were “Trotskyists” who in those days were not yet classified as objectors, but far less harshly as “non-working.” They lived in a separate barracks in the middle of the settlement, a prisoners’ settlement that was not enclosed and did not yet have the terrible name it would soon, very soon, have—“the zone.” Trotskyists received what was then their legal due: six hundred grams of bread a day and whatever hot food was specified. Their exemption from work was completely official. Any prisoner could join them and move to a non-working barracks. In autumn 1937 there were seventy-five men in that barracks. All of them suddenly vanished, the door swung open in the wind, and inside there was a dead, black emptiness.

  It suddenly turned out that there was a shortage of official rations, of the bread ration, that however much you wanted to eat you couldn’t buy anything, or ask a fellow prisoner for anything. You might still ask a comrade for a herring or a piece of herring, but bread? Suddenly things got so bad that nobody gave anyone anything to eat, everyone began eating, chewing something furtively, hurriedly, in the dark, groping about in their pockets for crumbs of bread. Searching for crumbs became an almost automatic action whenever a person had a free moment. But there were fewer and fewer free moments. An enormous barrel of cod-liver oil had always stood in the cobbler’s workshop. The barrel was waist-high, and anyone who wanted to could dip dirty rags into the barrel and grease their boots. It took me some time to realize that cod-liver oil was edible: it was an edible fat, it was nutritious, you could eat this boot grease. The moment of illumination was like Archimedes’s “Eureka!” I rushed, or rather, staggered off to the workshop. Alas, the barrel had been emptied a long time ago. Other people had gone down the road I had only just set off on.

  Dogs, German shepherds, were brought to the mine. Dogs?

  How did it begin? The pit face getters weren’t paid for November. I remember the first months working at the mine, August and September, when a mine warden (the term must have survived from the times of Nekrasov, from the 1870s) stopped to look at us toiling away and said, “Bad work, boys, bad. If you work like that you’ll have nothing to send home.” After a month we would find out that each man had earned something. Some mailed the money home to reassure their families. Others used the money to buy cigarettes, canned dairy products, white bread in the camp shop, or rather stall. All that stopped suddenly, out of the blue. A rumor spread like a gust of wind through the grapevine that no more money would be paid. This grapevine news, like everything else on the camp grapevine, turned out to be completely true. Any payment would be made only in food. The same went for the camp employees, whose name was legion, as well as the production bosses, whose numbers had multiplied plenty of times. The armed camp guards, the soldiers, would be supervising fulfillment of the plan.

  How did it begin? A heavy blizzard raged for several days, blocking the roads with snow and closing the pass over the mountains. The very first day that the snow stopped falling—during the blizzard we stayed at home—we were not taken home after work. Surrounded by guards, we slowly walked at our casual prisoners’ pace for several hours over unfamiliar paths toward the pass, climbing higher and higher. Fatigue, the steep ascent, the rarefied air, hunger, resentment—everything slowed us down. The guards urged us on with shouts that were like lashes from a whip. It was now getting completely dark—there were no stars shining—when we saw the lights of many campfires on the roads near the pass. The deeper the night, the brighter the bonfires burned; they burned with a fire of hope, hope of resting and eating. But no, the bonfires had not been lit for us. They were for the guards. A great number of fires when the temperature was forty or fifty below zero. The fires stretched out like a snake for about thirty kilometers. Somewhere at the bottom of snow-embanked pits stood men, clearing the road with spades. The snow-covered sides formed a narrow trench with walls five meters high. The snow was flung up in terraces, having to be tossed up two or three times. When all the men had been put in position and were surrounded by guards and a serpentine chain of campfire lights, the workers were left to their own devices. Two thousand men could choose not to work, to work badly, or to work desperately: nobody cared. The pass had to be cleared and until it was cleared, nobody would be allowed to move. We stood for many hours in this snow pit, swinging our spades to avoid freezing to death. That night I understood something terrible, I observed something that was later confirmed many times. The tenth and eleventh hour of such extra work is hard, agonizingly hard and difficult, but after that you stop noticing the time, and you are overwhelmed by the Great Indifference: hours flow like minutes, even faster. We returned home after working for twenty-three hours, and we had no appetite at all. We ate our twenty-four-hours’ ration of cooked food with an unusual lack of interest. It was very difficult to get to sleep.

  In the winter of 1937–38 three maelstroms of death coincided and swirled in the snow-covered pit faces of the Kolyma gold mines. The first maelstrom was the “Berzin case” when Eduard Berzin, the director of Far East Construction, the pioneer of the Kolyma camps, was shot as a Japanese spy at the end of 1937. He was summoned to Moscow and shot. His closest assistants, Filippov, Maisuradze, Yegorov, Vaskov, Tsvirko, the whole “Vishe
ra River” guard that had come in 1932 with Berzin to colonize the Kolyma region, perished with him. Ivan Gavrilovich Filippov had been the boss of the Administration of the Northeast Corrective Labor Camps, Berzin’s camp deputy. An old chekist, a member of the Collegium of OGPU, Filippov had at one time been the chairman of the “disposal” (i.e., execution) trio in the Solovetsky Islands camps in the Arctic. There is a documentary film from the 1920s called Solovetsky Islands. In that movie Filippov was filmed in his role as chief. Filippov died in the Magadan prison; his heart failed.

  The prison that was built in Magadan at the beginning of the 1930s was called the Vaskov Building. When the wooden structure was later rebuilt in stone it retained its original name. Vaskov was the surname of its chief. Vaskov was a solitary man and always spent his days off in the same way on the Vishera River, sitting on a bench in the garden, or the copse that stood as a garden, firing his .22 rifle into the leaves. Aleksei Yegorov, “Lioshka the redhead” as they called him on the Vishera, was in charge of production in Kolyma, administering several gold mines belonging to the Southern Administration. Tsvirko was the boss of the Northern Administration, which included the Partisan mine. In 1929 Tsvirko had been chief of a border guards division, and had gone on leave to Moscow. After an orgy in a restaurant, Tsvirko opened fire on the statue of Apollo’s chariot over the entrance to the Bolshoi Theater and ended up in prison. His epaulets and buttons were ripped off. In spring 1929 Tsvirko arrived with a party of prisoners on the Vishera to serve his three-year sentence. When Berzin arrived on the Vishera at the end of 1929, Tsvirko’s career took a sharp upturn. While still a prisoner he became the chief of the Parma expedition. Berzin took a great liking to him and had him accompany him to Kolyma. They say Tsvirko was shot in Magadan. Aleksandr Maisuradze was the chief of the accounting and distribution section. He had once served a sentence for “inflaming ethnic hostility,” was released while still on the Vishera, and also became one of Berzin’s favorites. He was arrested in Moscow when he was on leave and executed there and then.