Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Marusia Dmitriyeva occupied the next desk. She and her close friend Tamara Nikiforova were friendly with Chernikov. Both women had nonpolitical convictions, neither had been in the taiga, and both were eager students.

  Next to them sat Valia Tsukanova, a black-eyed Cossack girl from the Kuban. She was a patient from the hospital and was still wearing her hospital gown when she came to the first practicals. She had spent time in the taiga and she was a very successful student. It took some time for her face to lose the marks of hunger and illness, and when it did she turned out to be a beauty. Once she got her strength back, she began her “love life,” without waiting for the courses to end. Many men courted her, with no success. She became intimate with a blacksmith and used to run off to the forge to see him. After she was released, she worked for a number of years as a paramedic in a separate area.

  •

  We wanted to learn, and our teachers wanted to teach. They had badly missed animated speech, passing on knowledge, which they had been forbidden to do. Passing on knowledge was the whole point of their lives before their arrest. Professors and lecturers, people with PhDs in medicine, teachers for doctors’ continuing education, they had, for the first time in many years, found an outlet for their energy. Apart from one man, all the teachers in the courses were politicals, convicted under article 58.

  The authorities had suddenly come to the realization that a knowledge of the mysteries of the circulation of the blood might not always be connected with anti-Soviet propaganda, so the quality of the courses was assured by the high qualifications of the teachers. True, students were supposed to be nonpoliticals. But how could you find enough nonpoliticals with seven years’ schooling? In any case, nonpoliticals served their sentences doing privileged jobs and had no need of any courses. The top bosses didn’t want even to hear of article 58ers being brought into the courses. In the end, a compromise was found. Those convicted of ASA—anti-Soviet agitation—and paragraph 10 of article 58, crimes that were virtually nonpolitical, were allowed into the entry examinations.

  A timetable was compiled and displayed on the wall. A timetable! Everything as in normal life. A vehicle, which looked like a heavy-goods truck, an elderly taiga-goods vehicle, was somehow put in working order and lumbered over the gullies and marshes of Kolyma.

  Our first lecture was on anatomy. This subject was taught by the hospital anatomical pathologist David Umansky, an old man of seventy.

  An émigré in tsarist times, Umansky had received his medical degree in Brussels. He lived and worked in Odessa, where he had a successful medical practice, at least for a few years. He owned a great number of properties, but the revolution proved that houses were not the most reliable investments. He went back to medical practice. By the mid-1930s he sensed which way the wind was blowing and decided to retreat as far as he could by getting a job with Far East Construction. That didn’t save him. He was picked up “on the lists” for Far East Construction, and in 1938 arrested and sentenced to fifteen years. Since then he had been in charge of the hospital morgue. He was hindered from working properly by his contempt for people, his resentment at what had been done to his own life. He had enough wit not to quarrel with the doctors who were treating patients; he could have made things very unpleasant for them at autopsies. But perhaps it was not so much his wits as his contempt, a simple feeling of scorn, which allowed him to give way in arguments over postmortems.

  Dr. Umansky had a crystal-clear mind. He was a pretty good linguist—that was his hobby, his favorite pastime. He knew a lot of languages. In the camps he studied Asian languages and tried to deduce laws on their formation, spending all his free time in his morgue, where he lived with his assistant, the paramedic Dunayev.

  In conjunction with anatomy, Umansky taught, as if it were a mere joke, a course in Latin for future paramedics. I don’t know what kind of Latin it was, but I stopped having trouble with the genitive case when writing prescriptions.

  Dr. Umansky was a lively man who reacted to every political event and who had a well-considered opinion on any question of international or domestic matters. “The main thing, my dear friends,” he used to say in private conversations, “is to hang on and outlive Stalin. Stalin’s death is what will bring us freedom.” Alas, Umansky died in Magadan in 1953,[18] just before the event he had awaited for so many years.

  He was quite a good lecturer, albeit a somehow casual one. He was the least involved of all our teachers. From time to time there would be questions about what we’d learned, repeated lessons, or the replacement of general anatomy by the anatomy of a particular part. There was just one section of his science that Umansky refused outright to lecture on: the anatomy of the genital organs. Nothing could persuade him otherwise, so that the students finished their training without gaining any knowledge of this section, just because of their Brussels professor’s excessive prudery. What were Umansky’s reasons? He felt that the moral, cultural, and educational level of his students was so low that such topics would arouse an unhealthy interest. Such an unhealthy interest was aroused in schools, for example by anatomical atlases, and Umansky remembered this fact. He was wrong. The “provincials” would have had a completely serious attitude toward the question.

  He was a decent man and long before many other teachers he saw his students as human beings. Dr. Umansky was a convinced geneticist.[19] He would tell us about the splitting of chromosomes and, in passing, mention that there was another theory of the splitting of chromosomes, but that he didn’t know the new theory and had decided to tell us what he knew well. So we were brought up to be believers in genetics. The full triumph of geneticists, once the electron microscope was invented, came too late for Dr. Umansky. That triumph would have given the old doctor real joy.

  We learned by heart the names of bones and muscles, in Russian, not Latin, of course. Carried away, we memorized them enthusiastically. There is always a democratic element in rote learning; we were all equals in the eyes of the science of anatomy. Nobody made an effort to understand anything. We tried just to memorize. Bazarova and Petrashkevich, recent schoolchildren (if you omitted the time spent in incarceration, which in Petrashkevich’s case amounted to nearly eight years), had the most success.

  As I carefully memorized the lesson, I remembered hostel number one—Cherkaska—at Moscow University in 1926, where medical students, drunk from their practice classes, walked the corridors at night, memorizing, memorizing, with their fingers stuck in their ears. The hostel was full of loud noise, laughter and life. The special faculty [20] students, the literature students, the historians all laughed at the unfortunate rote learners of the medical faculty. We despised a subject where rote learning, not understanding, was required.

  Twenty years later I was learning anatomy by rote. Over those twenty years I had come to realize what specialization was, what applied sciences were, what medicine and engineering were. And now I had a God-given chance to study them myself.

  My brain was still able to take in and to reproduce knowledge.

  Dr. Blagorazumov lectured us on “The Foundations of Sanitation and Hygiene.” It was a dreary subject, and Blagorazumov was reluctant, or perhaps unable for reasons of political discretion, to liven up his lectures with any witticisms. He remembered 1938, when all specialists, doctors, engineers, accountants, were forced to work with barrows and pickaxes, following the “special instructions” sent from Moscow. For two years Blagorazumov had pushed a wheelbarrow, and three times he had been near death from hunger, cold, scurvy, and beatings. The third year he was permitted to practice as a paramedic at a clinic under a doctor who was a nonpolitical prisoner. Many doctors had died that year. Blagorazumov survived and never forgot: no chatting, not with anyone. Friendship only on “a drink and a bite” basis. Blagorazumov was much liked in the hospital. His binge drinking was covered up by the paramedics, and when it couldn’t be covered up, he was dragged off to solitary confinement, the punishment block. He would emerge from there to go on with his lec
tures. Nobody thought it strange.

  He was a thorough lecturer who made us take down his dictation on important points and then systematically checked our notes and our understanding. In short, Blagorazumov was a conscientious and prudent teacher.[21]

  •

  Pharmacology lectures were given by the hospital paramedic Ghoghoberidze, who had been the director of the Transcaucasian Pharmacological Institute. He had a good command of Russian and his speech had no more of a Georgian accent than Stalin’s did. He had once been a prominent party member: his signature was on Sapronov’s “The Platform of 15.”[22] From 1928 to 1937 Ghoghoberidze was in exile, then in 1937 he was given a new sentence: fifteen years in the Kolyma camps. Now he was approaching sixty and tormented by high blood pressure. He knew he would die soon, but he wasn’t afraid. He hated all scoundrels and, when in his own department he caught Dr. Krol taking bribes and contributions from prisoners, he beat up the doctor and made him hand back someone’s patent-leather boots and striped trousers. Ghoghoberidze never left Kolyma. He was released into permanent exile at Narym, but got permission to exchange Narym for Kolyma. He lived in the settlement of Yagodny, where he died in the early 1950s.

  The only nonpolitical convict among our teachers was Dr. Krol from Kharkov, a specialist in venereal and skin diseases. All our teachers worked to instill in us moral decency and portrayed, in lyrical digressions from their lectures, an ideal of moral purity, as they tried to develop a powerful sense of responsibility in those who would have the great task of helping the sick, sick prisoners, and, most of all, Kolyma prisoners. They repeatedly stressed, as best they could, what they had been inculcated with in their youth by medical institutes and faculties, by the Hippocratic oath. All of them except Krol. Krol sketched out different prospects for us, he approached our future jobs from a different angle, which he knew better. He never tired of painting a picture of the paramedic’s material prosperity. “You’ll earn enough for butter,” he would giggle, smiling in his carnivorous way. Krol had never-ending dark dealings with thieves, who would visit him even in the intervals between lectures. He was always selling, buying, or swapping something, and the presence of his students didn’t bother him. Treating the bosses for impotence gave Krol a substantial income and kept him safe during his term of imprisonment. Krol would undertake mysterious treatments involving herbal medicines. There was nobody to discipline him, and he had powerful connections.

  The two slaps on the face that Ghoghoberidze the paramedic had given him left Krol unmoved. “You went too far, pal, a bit too far,” he told Ghoghoberidze, who had turned green with anger.

  Krol was the object of general contempt from both his fellow teachers and the students. Moreover, his course was chaotic, for he had no talent for teaching. Diseases of the skin was the one section that I was compelled, after the courses were over, to read carefully for myself, with pencil and paper to hand.

  Olga Stepanovna Semeniak, once a lecturer in the diagnostic therapy faculty of the Kharkov Medical Institute, didn’t give any lectures in our courses. But she supervised our practicals. She taught me how to tap a patient’s chest and back, how to listen to his breathing. When our practicals were nearly over she gave me an old stethoscope, which is one of my few Kolyma mementos. She was about fifty and her ten-year sentence was not yet over. She had been convicted of counter-revolutionary agitation. Her husband and two children had stayed behind in the Ukraine, where they had all perished during the war. The war ended, and so did Olga Semeniak’s sentence, but she had nowhere to go. She stayed on in Magadan after she was released.

  Olga Semeniak had spent several years at the women’s camp at Elgen. She had found the strength to cope with her terrible grief. She had a gift for observation and saw that only one group of people kept their humanity in the camps, the believers, whether Orthodox or sectarians. She would pray twice a day in her “hut,” she read the Gospels, she tried to do good deeds. Doing good deeds was not difficult. Nobody can do more good deeds than a camp doctor can, but her temperament—stubborn, quick-tempered, and domineering—was an obstacle. Semeniak paid no attention to self-improvement in this respect.

  She was a strict, pedantic manager and ruled her staff with a rod of iron. She was always considerate to patients, though.

  After the working day was over, she would give her students dinner in the hospital cafeteria. She would usually sit there, drinking tea.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Nothing, except the lecture notes.”

  “Well, here’s something to read,” she passed a small book to me. It looked like a prayer book. It was a small volume of Blok, in the little series of the Poet’s Library.

  Two or three days later I gave her back the poetry.

  “Did you like it?”

  “Yes,” I felt too embarrassed to tell her that I knew—or had known—these verses well.

  “Read me ‘A Girl Was Singing in a Church Choir.’ ”

  I recited it.

  “Now, ‘O Faraway Mary, Bright Mary’ . . . good. Now this. . . .”

  I recited “In a Distant Blue Bedchamber.”

  “You realize that it was the boy that died. . . .”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “The boy died,” Olga’s dry lips repeated, as she wrinkled her taut white forehead. She said nothing for a while, and then: “Shall I give you something else?”

  “Please do.”

  She opened her desk drawer and took out a little book, like the Blok volume. It was a New Testament.

  “Read it, read it. Especially this bit: the apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.”

  A few days later I gave the book back. The agnosticism I had upheld throughout my conscious life had not made me a Christian. But in the camps I had not seen better people than the believers. Depravity affected everyone’s souls; only the believers held out. That was true, whether fifteen or five years previously.

  In Olga Semeniak’s hut I got to know Vasia Shvetsov, a foreman builder and former prisoner. He was a handsome twenty-five-year-old man who had enormous success with all the women in the camp. In Olga’s department he used to pay visits to Nina, a server in the kitchens. He was a sensible, able young man, had seen a lot of things clearly and could explain clearly, but I remembered him for one particular reason. I told him off because of Nina, who was pregnant.

  “She was asking for it,” said Shvetsov. “What can you do about it? I grew up in the camps. I was a boy when I was put in prison. As for all the women I’ve had, believe it or not, I’ve lost count. And you know what? I never ever slept with any of them in a bed. It was always somehow in the lobby, in a shed, everywhere except actually walking. Would you believe it?” That was Vasia’s story, the story of the most handsome young man in the hospital.

  Nikolai Sergeyevich Minin, a gynecologist and surgeon, was in charge of the women’s department. He didn’t give us lectures, but supervised our practical classes, in which there was no theory.

  When there were major snowstorms, snow covered the hospital settlement to the roof, and the smoke from the chimneys was the only way to tell where you were. Each department had steps cut into the snow, leading down to the entrance. We would climb upward out of our hostels, then run to the women’s department and enter Minin’s office at half past eight, put on our gowns, and, opening the door just a few inches, slip into the room. The usual five-minute procedure was taking place, as the nurse handed over the night shift. Minin, an enormous gray-bearded old man, sat at a tiny desk, frowning. When the night shift report was finished, he waved a hand and everyone started talking again. . . . Minin turned his head to the right. The senior nurse had brought a glass of a bluish liquid on a small glass tray. It smelled familiar. Minin took the little glass, drank it and smoothed down his gray mustache.

  “Blue Night liqueur,” he said, winking at the students.

  I was present several times at his operations. He always operated when he’d had one too many, but he assured us that
his hands weren’t going to shake. The theater nurses backed him up. But after the operation, when he was washing up, rinsing his hands in a big basin, he would sadly examine his uncontrollably trembling hands.

  “You’re past it, Nikolai, you’re past it,” he would quietly tell himself. But he went on operating for several years.

  Before Kolyma he had worked in Leningrad. He was arrested in 1937 and wheeled a barrow for two years in Kolyma. He was the coauthor of a major textbook on gynecology. The other author was Serebriakov, and after Minin was arrested the textbook began to be published with Serebriakov as the only named author. After he was released, Minin didn’t have the strength to bother with litigation. Like everyone else, he was released without the right to leave Kolyma. He began drinking even more heavily; in 1952 he hanged himself in his room in the settlement of Debin.

  As an old Bolshevik, during the revolution Minin conducted negotiations with the American Relief Agency on behalf of the Soviet government. He met Nansen. Later, he gave radio lectures on antireligious themes.

  Everyone was very fond of him. Somehow it always turned out that Minin wished everyone well, but did nothing for anyone, good or bad.

  Dr. Sergei Ivanovich Kulikov lectured on tuberculosis. In the 1930s citizens of the mainland were eagerly assured that the climate of Kolyma and of the Far East were identical, that the Kolyma mountains were good for treating tuberculosis and, at the very least, stabilized the condition of those with lung diseases. The enthusiasts for these views forgot that the bare hills of Kolyma were covered with marshes, that the Kolyma forested tundra was the very worst of places for those with bad lungs. They forgot about the almost 100-percent tubercular morbidity among the Evenki, Yakuts, and Yukagir peoples of Kolyma. No tuberculosis sections were planned for the prisoners’ hospitals. But Koch bacillus is Koch bacillus, and very extensive tuberculosis sections finally had to be set up.