Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Her husband had often told her, “Wars are won by whoever has the strongest nerves.” During her sleepless polar white nights, Angelina often whispered these words, a German general’s. She felt that her nerves were beginning to crack up. She was exhausted by the white silence of nature, the blank wall of uncaring humanity, the complete lack of any information and the worries, worries about her husband’s fate. He might have simply died of hunger during his journey, he could have been killed by other fugitives, he could have been shot by special forces. It was only the Institution’s unfailing attention to her and to her personal life that led Angelina to the happy conclusion that her husband had not been caught, that he was still a wanted man and, therefore, that her sufferings were not in vain.

  She wanted to confide in someone who might understand her and give her some advice. She knew so little about the Far North. She would have liked to lighten the terrible weight on her mind, a weight that she felt was growing every day, every hour.

  But whom could she confide in? She saw and suspected every man or woman as a spy, an informer, an observer, and her feelings were no illusion, for everyone she knew in all the settlements and towns of Kolyma had been summoned and warned by the Institution. All her acquaintances were eagerly waiting for her to open up.

  After her first year there she made several attempts to contact her Kharkov friends by post. All her letters were copied and sent to the Institution in Kharkov.

  By the end of the second year of her forced seclusion, she was almost destitute and she nearly despaired. All she knew was that her husband was still alive. Trying to get in touch with him, she sent letters addressed to Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshei to the “poste restante” in every major city.

  She got a reply in the form of a money transfer, and thereafter she received money every month. It wasn’t much: five hundred to eight hundred, from various places, and from various persons. Krivoshei was too clever to send money from Mariupol, while the Institution was too experienced not to understand this. There was a geographical map used in similar circumstances to mark out “war operations,” like the military’s headquarter maps. The flags put on it marked the places from which money had been sent to an addressee in the Far North: they were all at places with a railway station near and to the north of Mariupol, and each place was used only once. The detectives now had only to make a small effort to find out the surnames of persons who had taken up residence in Mariupol over the last two years and then to compare the photographs.

  That was how Krivoshei was arrested. His wife had been a bold and loyal helpmate. She had brought him, when he was in Arkagala, ID papers and more than fifty thousand rubles in cash.

  As soon as Krivoshei was arrested, she was given permission to leave. Morally and physically exhausted, Angelina left Kolyma on the very first steamship.

  Krivoshei served his second sentence as the manager of the chemical laboratory in the central hospital for prisoners. He enjoyed some small privileges allowed by the authorities, and he went on, as before, despising and fearing the politicals, being extremely cautious about whom he spoke to, cowardly and sensitive when others were talking. . . . This cowardice and extreme caution was not like the cowardice of the average citizen. It had a different basis. For Krivoshei anything political was alien and of no interest at all. He knew that it was this sort of criminality that cost the most in the camps and he refused to sacrifice his everyday, material, if not mental, peace, which was so dear, too dear, to him.

  Krivoshei lived as well as worked in the laboratory, not in the camp barracks; privileged prisoners were allowed to do so.

  His bunk, clean government-issue, was tucked away behind cupboards full of acids and alkalis. There were rumors that he enjoyed a particular, special form of debauchery in his cave, and that even the Irkutsk prostitute Sonechka, who would stop at nothing, was struck by his abilities and knowledge in this area. But all that may have been untrue, a camp put-up job.

  There were quite a few free ladies who wanted to have an affair with Krivoshei, a man in his prime. But Krivoshei the prisoner was careful and strong-willed: he curtailed all the offers that the ladies so generously made. He didn’t want any illicit, excessively risky connections that were likely to be punishable. He wanted peace and quiet.

  Krivoshei was credited regularly with working days. They may not have amounted to much, but after a few years he was released, though prohibited from leaving Kolyma. That didn’t bother him in the slightest. The very next day after he was released, it turned out that he had an excellent suit, and a coat that looked as if it had been tailored abroad, as well as a fine velour hat.

  He found a job to match his qualifications as a chemical engineer in one of the plants: actually, he was a specialist in “high pressure.” After working one week, he took leave “for family reasons,” as his papers stated.

  “I’m off to find a woman,” said Krivoshei with a faint smile. “A woman . . . ! I’m off to the bride fair at Elgen. I intend to get married.”

  That same evening he returned with a woman.

  Near Elgen, a state farm for women, there was a filling station at the edge of the settlement, in the country. All around, next to the barrels of gasoline, were bushes of willow and alder. This was where all the Elgen women, once released, used to gather. And the “bridegrooms,” former prisoners in search of a mate, would drive up. Matchmaking didn’t take long, like everything in Kolyma except a camp sentence; the trucks would drive back with the newlyweds. If necessary, they first got to know each other in the bushes, which were thick and tall enough for the purpose.

  In winter, all this business moved to private apartments or cabins, and naturally the initial bride inspections took longer in the winter months than in summer.

  “And what about Angelina?”

  “I’m not in contact with her any more.”

  It wasn’t worth inquiring whether this was true or not. Krivoshei was capable of responding with the splendid camp saying, “If you don’t believe me, take it as a fairy tale!”

  •

  Once upon a time in the 1920s, at the dawn of the “misty youth” of the camp institutions, in the few zones known as concentration camps, escape attempts were not punished by any additional sentences and seem not to have been considered crimes. It was thought natural for a convict, a prisoner, to run away, but the guards were obliged to hunt him down, and that constituted a completely understandable and normal relationship between the two groups of people who occupied different sides of the prison bars and who were linked to each other by those bars. Those were romantic times, when, to use de Musset’s words, “the future had not yet dawned, and the past no longer existed.” In the mid-1920s, Ataman Krasnov, taken prisoner, had been released on parole.[31] But above all, this was a time when the limits of a Russian’s patience had not yet been tested and had not been infinitely expanded, as happened in the second half of the 1930s.

  The Criminal Code of 1926 with its notorious article 16 (“in correspondence”)[32] and article 35, which designated a whole social group in society as “35ers,”[33] had not yet been written or devised.

  The first camps were opened on a very dubious legal basis. There was a lot of improvisation, or what is best called local arbitrariness. The notorious Kurilka of the Solovetsky Islands, who tied prisoners to tree stumps in the taiga so that the mosquitoes would devour them was, of course, an empirical man. The empirical nature of camp life and of camp rules was bloody: after all, experiments were being conducted with people, with live material. The top authorities might approve of Kurilka’s or someone similar’s experiments, and then his actions would have been put in the camp rule books, in the orders and instructions. Or his actions might have been condemned, and then Kurilka himself would have been put on trial. In any case, there were no long sentences then. In the whole of the fourth sector of the Solovetsky Islands there were only two prisoners who had ten-year sentences, and they were considered celebrities. One was a former colonel of the gendarm
erie, Rudenko, and the other was Mardzhanov, an officer who had served under the White Russian general Kappel. A five-year sentence was serious, and most sentences were for two or three years.

  It was in those years, before the beginning of the thirties, that escape was not punishable with any sentence. If you escaped, good luck to you; if you were caught alive that, again, was your good luck. People were not often caught alive: a taste for human blood fired the guards’ hatred for prisoners. A prisoner feared for his life, especially when he was being moved, or taken to camp in a group, when a careless word spoken to the escort guard could have you sent to the next world, “the moon,” as the slang put it. Stricter rules applied to escorted parties of prisoners, so that the escort guards could get away with a lot. When prisoners in transit were taken from one officer’s command to another’s they used to demand that the authorities tie their hands behind their backs, for they saw this as some sort of guarantee for their lives. They hoped that then they would not be “written off,” not listed under the sacramental formal cliché, “killed while attempting to escape.”

  Such killings were always investigated in a very slipshod way and, if the killer was intelligent enough to fire a second shot into the air, the matter always ended happily for the guard. His instructions prescribed a warning shot before aiming at a fugitive.

  On the Vishera, in the fourth department of the Special Purpose Camps—the Urals branch of the Solovetsky Island camps—Nesterov, commandant of the administration, would come out to meet fugitives who had been caught. Nesterov was a stocky, squat man with pale white hands, stubby fingers thickly covered with black hair (he seemed to grow hair even on his palms).

  The fugitives, dirty, hungry, badly beaten, tired, covered head to toe with gray dust from the road, were hurled down at Nesterov’s feet.

  “Right, come up, come nearer.”

  A fugitive would come nearer.

  “So you decided to have some fun! That’s good, that’s good.”

  “Please forgive me, Ivan Spiridonych.”

  “I forgive you,” Nesterov would say in a solemn lilting voice, as he got up from the porch. “I forgive you. But the state will not. . . .”

  His blue eyes turned cloudy and were covered by thread-like red veins. But his voice remained benevolent and kindly.

  “Well, choose,” said Nesterov idly. “A slapping or solitary. . . .”

  “A slapping, Ivan Spiridonych.”

  Nesterov’s hairy fist flew over the fugitive’s head, and the happy fugitive bounced away, wiping off his blood and spitting out his smashed teeth.

  “Go to the barracks.”

  Nesterov could knock anyone to the ground with one blow, one slap. This was what he was famous for and took pride in.

  The prisoner came off well, too. Nesterov’s slapping absolved him from further punishment.

  If the fugitive refused to settle things privately, and instead insisted on official retribution, on being held legally responsible, then he could expect the camp’s solitary confinement, a prison with an iron floor, where one, two, or three months on solitary rations would seem far worse than Nesterov’s slapping.

  If the fugitive then survived, his escape attempt had no particularly nasty consequences, except possibly during selections for release, when prisons were “unloaded,” and a former fugitive could no longer count on being successful.

  As the camps grew, so did the number of escapes. Increasing the number of guards did not achieve anything: it was too expensive, and in those times there were very few people who wanted to work as camp guards.

  The question of answering for escapes had been settled in an unsatisfactory, unreliable way. The decisions taken seemed childish.

  Soon a new clarification from Moscow was read out: the days that a fugitive was on the run, and the days he was serving in solitary for trying to escape, would not be included in the calculation of days served toward his basic sentence.

  This order aroused considerable dissatisfaction in the camp’s accounting departments. They had to increase their staff, and the camp accountants were not always capable of such complicated arithmetic.

  The order was implemented and read out to all the camp’s inmates during roll calls.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t put off future escapees.

  Every day, in the brief reports by squad commanders the figures for “on the run” increased, and the camp chief who read these summaries daily would frown more with each day.

  After the camp boss’s favorite, Kapitonov, a musician in the camp’s wind band, hung his cornet on the branch of the nearest pine tree and ran away, the boss became mentally unbalanced. When Kapitonov had left the camp, he had been carrying his shiny instrument as if it were a pass.

  Late that autumn three prisoners were killed while escaping. After they had been identified, the camp boss ordered their corpses to be exposed for three days and nights next to the camp gates through which the prisoners all went out to work. But even an official step as dramatic as this didn’t reduce the number of escapes.

  This was at the end of the 1920s. Then came the “reforging” of the White Sea canal. Concentration camps were renamed “corrective labor camps,” the numbers of prisoners rose by hundreds of thousands, and escapes were now treated as separate crimes. The 1926 code had article 82, prescribing a sentence of an extra year as a punishment for escape.

  This all happened on the mainland, not in Kolyma, where a camp had existed since 1932 but the question of escape did not arise until 1938. From that year on, the punishment for escape was increased: the prisoner’s term would be extended by three whole years.

  Why are the Kolyma years from 1932 to 1937 missing from the chronicle of escapes? This was the time when Eduard Petrovich Berzin was working there. The first Kolyma boss with the same rights as the highest party, Soviet and trade union authority over the district, the founder of Kolyma, who was shot in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1965, was once Felix Dzerzhinsky’s secretary, and a commander of a division of Latvian sharpshooters. He was the one who exposed the famous Bruce Lockhart conspiracy. Berzin tried, with great success, to solve the problem of colonizing a district with harsh conditions and, simultaneously, to solve the problem of reforging and isolation. There were work credits, which allowed men to return home after two or three years of a ten-year sentence. There was excellent food, clothing, a working day in winter of four to six hours, and in summer of ten hours, there were colossal salaries for prisoners, which allowed them to help their families and to return to the mainland, fully provided for after their sentence. Berzin didn’t believe that professional criminals could be reforged. He was too familiar with this elusive and vile human material. In the early years it was hard for thieves to get sent to Kolyma; those who succeeded in getting there had no regrets afterward.

  The prisoner cemeteries dating from that time are so few that you might think Kolyma inmates were immortal.

  Nobody actually escaped from Kolyma; that would have been crazy, pointless.

  Those few years were the golden age of Kolyma, which that unmasked spy and genuine enemy of the people Nikolai Yezhov spoke of with such indignation at a session of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, just before the Yezhov terror began.

  In 1938 Kolyma was transformed into a special camp for recidivists and for Trotskyists. Escape attempts were now punishable by three years.

  •

  “But how did you escape? You didn’t have a map or a compass.”

  “We just escaped. Aleksandr promised to lead us out. . . .”

  We were waiting to be sent off on a transit party. There were three failed escapees: Nikolai Karev, a twenty-five-year-old fellow who used to be a journalist in Leningrad; Fiodor Vasiliev, the same age, a bookkeeper from Rostov; and Aleksandr Kotelnikov, a Kamchadal. Aleksandr was a Kolyma aborigine, a native Kamchadal, by profession a reindeer herder, who had been condemned in Kolyma for stealing a load belonging to the state. He was about fifty, but could have been much ol
der; it’s very hard to tell a Yakut’s, a Chukchi’s, a Kamchadal’s, or an Evenk’s age just by their looks. Aleksandr spoke Russian well, it was just the sound “sh” that he could never pronounce—he replaced it with an “s,” as in all the dialects of the Chukotsk peninsula. He had some idea who Pushkin and Nekrasov were, he’d been to Khabarovsk. In short, he was an experienced traveler, but he was a romantic at heart, and his eyes blazed in a way that was far too youthful, even childlike.

  It was he who offered to lead his new young friends out of imprisonment.

  “I told them: get nearer to America, let’s go to America, but they wanted to go to the mainland, so I led them to the mainland. You have to get to the Chukchi, to the Chukchi nomads. The Chukchi used to be here, they left, as soon as Russians came to them. . . . It was too late.”

  The fugitives were on the run for just four days. They escaped at the beginning of September, wearing shoes, summer clothes, certain they would reach Chukotka settlements where, Aleksandr had assured them, they would find help and friendship.

  But it snowed, thick and early snow. Aleksandr went to an Evenki settlement to buy reindeer-skin boots. He bought them, and by evening a squad of special operations men had caught the fugitives.

  “Tungus people are enemies, traitors,” said Aleksandr, spitting.

  The old reindeer herder had offered to lead Karev and Vasiliev out of the taiga without any payment. He wasn’t downcast at getting an extra three-year sentence.

  “When spring comes, they’ll let me go to the mines to work, and I’ll leave again.”

  To pass the time he taught Karev and Vasiliev the Chukot language, Kamchadal. Karev was, of course, the instigator of this escape that was doomed to failure. His whole figure, which his modulated velvet voice made theatrical even in this prison-camp setting, gave off an air of frivolity that didn’t really amount to risk-taking. Each day taught him better how hopeless such attempts were, and he was more and more often plunged in thought as he grew weaker.