Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  I embraced my fellow prisoners’ dirty, stinking bodies and fell asleep. I fell asleep. I hadn’t even caught a chill.

  In the morning the party of prisoners set off, and Shcherbakov’s imperturbable blue eyes surveyed the rows of prisoners in his usual way. Piotr Zayats was standing in line, he wasn’t being beaten, and he wasn’t shouting anything about dragons. The gangsters gave me hostile and wary looks. Everyone in a camp has to learn to fend for himself.

  Another two days and nights on the journey, and we reached the administration building, a new log cabin on the banks of a river.

  Commandant Nesterov, a boss with hairy fists, came out to take over the party. Many of the criminals who had walked with me knew this Nesterov and praised him highly.

  “When they bring along people who’ve tried to escape, Nesterov comes out and says, ‘Ah, so you fellows have turned up. Well, choose: a slapping, or solitary.’ But solitary here is a cell with iron floors, and people can’t take more than three months there, then there’s interrogation and an extra sentence. ‘Slapping, please sir.’ He swings around, and they’re on the floor. He swings around again, and they’re down again. He was an expert. ‘Go to barracks!’ And that’s it. No more interrogation. A good boss.”

  Nesterov walked up and down the ranks, carefully examining people’s faces.

  “Any complaints against the guards?”

  “No, no,” came a ragged chorus of voices.

  “And you,” the hairy finger touched my chest. “Why can’t you answer properly? You’re mumbling something.”

  “He’s got a toothache,” the men next to me answered.

  “No,” I replied, trying to make my smashed mouth pronounce the words as clearly as I could. “No complaints against the guards.”

  •

  “It’s not a bad story,” I told Sazonov. “It’s literate and it makes sense. But it won’t get printed. And the end is sort of vague.”

  “I’ve got a different ending,” said Sazonov. “A year later I was a big boss in a camp. At that time we had reforging, and Shcherbakov was about to get the job of junior NKVD man in the section where I worked. I was in charge of a lot of things there, and Shcherbakov was afraid I’d remember the business with the tooth. Shcherbakov hadn’t forgotten the incident either. He had a big family, and the job was well-paid and well-regarded. He was a straightforward sort of man and came to see me to find out whether I had any objections to his being appointed. He brought a bottle with him to make peace the Russian way, but I wouldn’t drink with him. I assured him that I wouldn’t do anything bad to him.

  “Shcherbakov was very pleased. He apologized at length and hung around in the doorway, digging at the carpet with his heel the whole time. He couldn’t bring the conversation to an end. ‘You know,’ Shcherbakov said, ‘it was on the road, a party of prisoners. We had fugitives with us.’ ”

  “That ending is no good, either,” I told Sazonov.

  “Then I do have another one.

  “Before I was appointed to work in the section where Shcherbakov and I met again, I met the hospital porter Piotr Zayats in the camp settlement. He was no longer the young giant with black hair and black eyebrows. Instead I saw a limping, gray-haired old man, who was coughing blood. He didn’t even recognize me, and when I took him by the arm and spoke his surname, he tore himself free and went his own way. I could tell by his eyes that he was thinking his own thoughts, which I couldn’t penetrate, and whatever I did was irrelevant or offensive to a man conversing with less earthly beings.”

  “That version’s no good either,” I said.

  “Then I’ll let the first version stand. Even if you can’t get it into print, it’s easier when you’ve written it. If you write it down, you can let go of what happened. . . .”

  1964

  AN ECHO IN THE MOUNTAINS

  IN THE records department they were quite unable to choose a senior clerk. Later, when business expanded, this job required the work of a whole separate department, “the release group.” The senior clerk issued documents certifying a prisoner’s release. He was an important figure in a world where prisoners’ whole lives centered around the minute they received a document giving them the right to stop being a prisoner. The senior clerk himself had to be an ex-prisoner: that was what the economical staffing department had specified. Of course, you might be able to get a vacant job like this by being seconded from the party or through some trade union organization, or an army commander about to retire might have been talked into it, but those were different times. It wasn’t that easy to find people who were willing to work in the camps, no matter how high the polar bonuses were. Volunteering to work in the camps was still considered rather demeaning, and in the whole of the records office, which dealt with all prisoners’ affairs, there was only one free contract worker, Inspector Paskevich, a quiet binge drinker. He didn’t come to the office often; most of his time was spent traveling as a courier, for the camp was, as it was meant to be, placed a long way from any place where it could be seen.

  And now they were quite unable to find a senior clerk. Either a newly appointed employee had links to the world of gangsters and was doing their dirty work, or the clerk was releasing currency speculators from the south for money, or the fellow was honest and unshakable, but incompetent and chaotic, releasing people who shouldn’t be released.

  The senior authorities used all their energy to search for the person they needed. After all, any mistakes in release procedures were considered the worst form of criminality and could bring about the sudden end of a camp veteran’s career, “dismissed from the OGPU troops” or even ending up as the accused in court.

  The camp was one that a year previously had been called the fourth department of the Solovetsky Island camps. Now it was an important autonomous camp in the Northern Urals.

  All this camp lacked was a senior clerk.

  Then a specially guarded prisoner arrived from the actual Solovetsky Islands. This was something that seldom happened at Vishera. There was almost nobody who needed to be brought there under special guard: the authorities used red horse and cattle wagons with bunks inside, or the familiar hard-class passenger cars with their windows barred, so that it looked as if the carriages were ashamed of their bars. In the south, householders protected themselves from burglars by fitting bars in the most whimsical shapes—flowers or sunbeams. The southerners’ lively imagination devised these shapes for bars, shapes that didn’t offend a passerby’s eyes, and yet were still bars. Thus a hard-class passenger car stopped being an ordinary car when iron veils covered its eyes.

  In those days the famous “Stolypin”[38] wagons still ran along the long-distance lines in the Urals and in Siberia. The prisoners’ cars would keep the name Stolypin for many decades after they had ceased to be Stolypin’s.

  A Stolypin wagon had two small square windows on one side and several large ones on the other. The windows, which were barred, did not let anyone outside see what was going on inside, even if they put their eyes against them.

  Inside, the wagon was divided into two sections by massive bars with heavy, creaking doors; each half of the wagon had its own little window.

  At both ends there were compartments for the guards, and there was also a corridor for the guards.

  Specially guarded prisoners did not travel in Stolypin wagons. Escort guards took them individually in ordinary trains, booking an end compartment—everything was done in a “family” way, simply, as before the revolution. They had not yet gathered enough experience.

  A specially guarded prisoner arrived from the Island (as the Solovetsky Islands were then called, just as the island of Sakhalin was called the Island). When he was handed over, he turned out to be a short, elderly man on crutches, wearing the obligatory Solovetsky pea jacket made from greatcoat material and the Solovetsky hat with ear flaps.

  This man was calm and gray-haired. He moved jerkily, and it was obvious that he was still learning the art of walking with crutch
es, that he’d only recently become an invalid.

  The general barracks with double bunks was close-packed and stifling, even though the doors were kept wide open at both ends of the building. The wooden floor was strewn with sawdust, and the orderly who sat by the door would look, by the light of the seven-inch-wick kerosene lamp, at the fleas jumping up and down in the sawdust. From time to time he would lick a finger and start hunting these persistent insects.

  A place was assigned to the newcomer in these barracks. The night orderly for the barracks vaguely gestured with a hand to point out a dark, stinking corner where people were sleeping, dressed, in a heap and where there was no space for a cat, let alone a man.

  But the new arrival calmly pulled his hat over his ears and, laying his crutches on the long dinner table, climbed up to join the people sleeping there. He closed his eyes and did not move. Using his own weight, he squeezed himself in between the other bodies and, if his sleepy neighbors made any movement, the new man’s body immediately filled the tiny bit of space that was freed. Feeling with his elbow and hip for the bunk’s board, the newcomer relaxed his muscles and fell asleep.

  The next morning it turned out that this newly arrived invalid was in fact the long-awaited senior clerk whom the camp administration had been so eager to see.

  At lunchtime he was summoned to see the bosses, and by evening he had been transferred to another barracks for administrative support staff; this building was where all the camp officials who were ex-prisoners lived. It was a barracks of amazing and almost unique construction.

  It had been built when the camp chief was a former sailor who had sunk the Black Sea fleet when the famous midshipman Raskolnikov [39] arrived there.

  This sailor made his career on dry land, running the camps, and the building of a barracks for the support staff was his idea, a tribute to his naval past. The two-story bunks in these barracks were suspended from the ceiling on steel hawsers. The bunks hung in clusters, each for four men, like those for sailors in their crew’s quarters. For additional strength the construction was reinforced from the side by a thick, long steel cable.

  Thus the bunks swung together if just one man lying in the barracks made the slightest movement.

  Since several men moved at the same time, the hanging bunks were in constant motion, and they creaked and squeaked audibly, if quietly. The rocking and creaking never stopped for a minute at any time of the day or night. Only during the evening roll calls did the moving bunks hold still, like a weary pendulum, and fall silent.

  It was in these barracks that I got to know Stepanov, Mikhail Stepanovich Stepanov. That was the new senior clerk’s name, not one of the aliases that were so widespread here.

  In fact, twenty-fours earlier I had seen a packet containing his personal file, which the special escort guard had brought. It was a thin file in a green folder, beginning with the usual questionnaire and supplemented with two numbered photographs, full-face and profile, and a square space containing his fingerprints, something that looked like a cross section of a miniature tree.

  The questionnaire gave his date of birth, 1888. I remember well those three eights, and his place of work: Moscow, People’s Commissariat, Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. Member of the Bolshevik party since 1917.

  An answer to one of the final questions ran: “I have been subject to. . . . I was a member of the Social Revolutionary party from 1905. . . .” The answers were recorded, as usual, in an official hand, as briefly as possible.

  His sentence was ten years, or to be exact, the death penalty, commuted to ten years.

  His camp employment: he had been senior clerk at the Solovetsky Islands for over six months.

  Our Stepanov didn’t have a very interesting file. The camp had a lot of commanders who’d served Admiral Kolchak or General Annenkov; we had a commander of the notorious Wild Division;[40] there was a con woman who claimed to be the daughter of Tsar Nikolai Romanov; we had the famous pickpocket Karlov, nicknamed the Contractor—he really did look like a contractor—bald, with an enormous belly and puffy fingers. He was one of the deftest pickpockets, an artist whose skills were demonstrated to the bosses.

  There was a man called Mayerovsky, a burglar and an artist who never stopped drawing on things—a board or a piece of paper—one and the same subject, naked women and men intertwined in every possible unnatural position of intercourse. That was all Mayerovsky could draw. He was the black-sheep son of very well-off parents working in the world of scholarship. The gangsters considered him to be a total outsider.

  There were several counts, a few Georgian princes from Tsar Nicholas II’s suite.

  Stepanov’s personal file was placed in a new camp folder and put on the shelf with all the letter S’s.

  I wouldn’t have known his remarkable history, were it not for a chance conversation in the records office one Sunday.

  For the first time I saw Stepanov without his crutches. He was holding a stick, very easy to use, which he had evidently ordered long ago from the camp carpentry workshop. The stick had a hospital-type handle, bent inward, instead of being curved like an ordinary walking stick.

  I said, “Oho!” and congratulated him.

  “I’m getting better,” said Stepanov. “I haven’t got any fractures. It’s scurvy.”

  He rolled up a trouser leg and I saw a lilac-blue stripe that went up his skin. We were silent for a while.

  “Mikhail, why are you in prison?”

  “How could I not be?” he smiled. “I’m the one that let Antonov go free. . . .”

  As a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Stepanov, the son of a grammar school teacher, joined the party just before the 1905 uprising. He felt God himself had ordered him to do so, as was the fashion for young highly educated Russians at the time. Inspired by the aura of the legendary People’s Will, the newly created Socialist Revolutionary party was divided into many factions, big and small. Among these factions a prominent role was played by the Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists, a group led by a well-known terrorist, Mikhail Sokolov. Family ties led Stepanov to join this group, and he soon was carried away enough to join the world of underground Russia: secret meetings, safe houses, learning to shoot, learning to use dynamite.

  They always had a bottle of nitroglycerin in their laboratories, just in case they were arrested or searched.

  Seven armed party men were surrounded by police in their safe house. The Maximalists responded with gunfire, until they ran out of cartridges. Stepanov had been firing too. They were arrested, tried, and all of them were hanged, except for Stepanov, who was underage. Instead of a noose, Stepanov got penal servitude for life and ended up not far from Petersburg in Shlisselburg fortress.

  Penal servitude is a regime that varies according to the surroundings and the character of the autocrat. “Penal servitude for life” in tsarist times amounted to twenty years’ labor, with two years in handcuffs and four years in shackles.

  In Stepanov’s time Shlisselburg applied an effective innovation: they shackled the hard-labor convicts in pairs, the most reliable method of making them quarrel with each other.

  There is a story by Henri Barbusse demonstrating the tragedy of lovers who are shackled together and start to heartily loathe each other.

  This had been done to hard-labor convicts for some time. Choosing a partner for shackling was a splendid device of the experts in these matters. The prison authorities could play their best jokes: shackling a tall man to a short one, a sectarian to an atheist, and their specialty was making political “bouquets” by shackling an anarchist to a Socialist Revolutionary, or a Social Democrat to a land redistributor.

  If you didn’t want to quarrel with the man shackled to you, you both had to have the greatest self-restraint, or the blind submission of the younger to the elder, and a passionate desire on the part of the elder man to impart the very best of his inner self to his comrade.

  Occasionally human willpower, faced with a new and very powerful test, b
ecame even stronger. Characters and spirits were tempered.

  That was how Stepanov’s shackled period passed, wearing handcuffs and fetters.

  The years passed as penal servitude years did: you got used to the number, the ace of diamonds on the back of your prison garb, and didn’t even notice them.

  It was during that period that Stepanov, now a young man of twenty-two, met Sergo Orjonikidze in Shlisselburg. Sergo was a prominent propagandist, and he and Stepanov spent many days talking in Shlisselburg prison. Being befriended by Orjonikidze made Stepanov turn from a Maximalist to a Bolshevik Social Democrat.

  He began to adopt Sergo’s faith in Russia’s future and his own future. Stepanov was still young. Even if he had to serve every day of his “life” sentence, he would return to freedom before he was forty and would still be able to serve under a new banner. He would wait out those twenty years.

  But he had a far shorter time to wait. February 1917 opened the doors of the tsar’s prisons, and Stepanov found himself free much earlier than he had expected or been ready for. He sought out Orjonikidze, joined the Bolshevik Party, and took part in the storming of the Winter Palace. After the October Revolution, completing his military training, he went to the front as a Red commander and climbed the military ladder higher and higher as he went from front to front.

  On the Tambov front, fighting against Antonov, Brigade Commander Stepanov was in command of a combined force of armored trains, and had considerable success.

  The Antonov movement was now on the wane. Very mixed forces were ranged in the Tambov rebellion against the Red Army. The local villagers had suddenly been transformed into a regular army with its own commanders.

  Unlike many other leaders during the Civil War, Antonov looked after the morale of his units and inspired his soldiers through his political commissars, an institution that he copied from the commissars of the Red Army.