Somehow—by what had to be a nearly superhuman instinct for survival—the nineteen POWs and a handful of non-POW internees—mainly political dissidents, academics, and intellectuals—approached the gate alive. A year into their incarceration, their predicted longevity statistically approached an infinitesimally small chance that they would have lived to see this day. The conditions of their internment were inhuman by any civilized standards. Most of the men had lost over a third of their body weight owing to the imposition of forced hard labor and minimal or no food by the Dalstroy Agency which administered the area for the Soviet Union. The hapless prisoners were housed in seriously overcrowded, stinking, poorly-heated barracks.
The overcrowding problem was alleviated by the high death rate—more than 500,000 prisoners perished there. As the fat and flesh melted from their bodies; so, did all human emotions—love, friendship, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, hope for praise, credit, or fame, honesty, envy, or even hate. Prisoners lived in a camp surrounded by a barbed wire fence, unfeeling thugs of armed guards overlooking in watchtowers. Upon occasion, the watchtower guards had shooting events to kill prisoners arbitrarily at random to see who could put the most accurately placed bullet into a designated bodily kill zone. The prisoners themselves descended into the level of primeval animals—brutal and violent—who cared only for their own survival. Fellow prisoners turned informers for a crust of bread. Cannibalism was commonplace.
Prisoners in the gulag received their paika [food ration] according to the amount of work they performed that day. This was an incentive scheme the Soviets learned from the Nazis in their slave labor camps, including both coercive and motivational elements applied universally in all camps. It consisted in standardized formal “nourishment scales”—the size of the inmates’ rations depended on the percentage of the work quota delivered. A full ration barely provided enough food for survival. If a prisoner did not fulfill his daily work quota, he received even less food. If a prisoner consistently failed to fulfill his work quotas, he would slowly starve to death. The gulag was created as a system where people were worked to death with the certainty that there would always be more zeks coming into the “corrective labor camps.” Disease—especially tuberculosis—claimed half the prisoners who entered the camp. Guards read out the names of those to be shot every evening.
The elements were as harsh as the other prison conditions: there were two seasons—nine months of winter and three months of fall with temperatures ranging on average from -40° to -5° F during the winter months with spells of temperatures falling to incredible lows of -60° to as low as -90° once or twice a winter. Many of the dokhodyaga gave up the ghost on those days. Gulag guards in the Sevvostlag were not concerned with finding escaped prisoners: they would die anyhow from the cold and severe winters. Prisoners who did escape without getting shot were usually found dead miles away from the camp.
The man known as 1945-WC 2200186 survived because he found a way to grow carrots and onions. The other man, also known only by his prison number—1945-WC 2208592—grew cabbages and was a ruthless thief, willing to steal another prisoner’s food and let him starve to death or freeze. He killed more than one man to get food or the man’s mittens that would let him live one more day.
Although the two men were walking towards the gate, it did not seem to be much different from the routine of any other day. After ten to twelve hours of inhumanly hard work in the mine, they received a bowl of potato soup and a slice of frozen black bread if they were lucky. Antoine and Michaele survived the Siberian death camp partly because they were able to find the occasional raw, frozen, or even putrid dead owls and small rodents, or because they killed or stole to live.
There was some variation in the routine. Owing to the condition of the internees, it was often difficult to find people who were even able to gather firewood or to bury the dead. Sometimes when the numbers of the dead became so high that the stench bothered the guards, the guards suspended work in the tin mines and assigned inmates with a record of obedience to operate bulldozers to bury the partially frozen corpses. Sometimes they created huge mass graves and pushed stiffened bodies—thousands of bodies, thousands of skeletal corpses—with their twisted fingers, putrefying toes, frozen stumps, dry skin marked with blood and sores, and those starved staring eyes. Other times they were taken into the forest to labor at sawing, chopping trees, and digging rocks.
Rebellious prisoners were punished by being isolated in tiny cells of frozen concrete. For them, suicide was more common than the murders going on outside their putative coffins. In the slave camps of Kolyma, the vast majority of inmates—women, men, and children—never survived more than two years.
In the eight years they had been interned in the NKVD special camp, the two surviving men had never been allowed to approach closer than thirty yards from the gate or any fence line. Now they were slowly being herded to the entrance gate of the Valley of Death. It was evident that a new thing was happening, and new things were rarely good in the Sevvostlag. Unknown to the nineteen surviving officers and men of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier SS Division and the few non-military detainees—about half of political prisoners in the gulag camps were imprisoned without trial—the Dastroy Agency was starting a period of mass amnesties and the release of most political prisoners, and even the scant few remaining war criminals. Some nonessential producing camps were scheduled to close between 1953 and 1956.
Former SS officers, now known only as Antoine [1945-WC 2200186] and Michaele [1945-WC 2208592] were pushed roughly into an American-made Studebaker 6X6 troop truck without any explanation as to why or about their destination. The truck was modified to hold twenty men. Antoine and Michaele were two of forty-one men crammed into the inadequate space. It was still cold—but in northern Siberia, it was always cold in what passed for spring. The men were used to it; it had become a part of life; and they were glad to be alive, though they often groused to each other in their native French that they would just as soon live in hell. The truck jounced and swerved over slick slushy ruts in the wholly unpaved Stalinist “Road of Bones” for 1240 miles with occasional latrine stops and for a scanty serving of gray turnip or potato soup and black bread fortified with sawdust that had been their usual fare for the past seven years in the gulag. For one lunch of the weeklong journey, they were given the luxury of a slice of American Spam—said to be only one of two things that the USSR liked about America, the other being the Studebaker trucks.
The two men and thirty-nine others–sitting in relative misery in a conveyance that could have been hauling pigs or sheep–were from an assortment of countries and backgrounds. They sat on hard benches along the sides of the truck bed and were chained to the floor by one ankle. At night they slept on the still frozen ground chained to each other. When one turned over, they all had to turn. None of this was anything particularly different from the comforts of the camp. Taiga Yukaghirs in old NKVD uniforms drove the truck and served as the never gentle guards.
Finally—after a seven-day trip—the truck pulled up to a stop in front of the dilapidated municipal police station in the middle of Magadan, the very isolated main city of the Chukchi Peninsula and largest port of northeastern Russia. Their ankle locks were released; the men were given their discharge papers—dated, bewilderingly, October 1, 1945—and the men were herded off the truck clutching the papers which were their only worldly possessions other than the clothing on their backs. The truck then wheeled about and headed back in the direction from which it had come, leaving the bemused men alone in the street.
The men had been in Magadan before as part of their painful journey to slavery in the Valley of Death. After being captured, they traveled by train to Siberia. That trip proved to be a harbinger of their future. The trains were unbearably cramped and stifling. Only death of prisoners afforded a little more leg room. On the trains, the heat was terrible. There was serious lack of fresh air, and the dreadful overcrowded conditions exhausted the semi-starved men. Many
of the elderly prisoners, weak and emaciated, died along the way; and their corpses were left abandoned alongside the railroad tracks.
The worst was yet to come. The survivors of the grueling Trans-Siberian Railway train ride—the longest in the USSR—were disembarked at the Nakhodka transit camp. There, they encountered the bitter unrelenting cold. After three days, they were moved to Khabarovosk, which was part of the gulag archipelago. They then were forced onto decrepit ships and transported across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan’s natural harbor. Conditions aboard the ships were even harsher than they had endured on the train. The Soviet prison ships were sewage-ridden hellholes. Of the original three train loads of POWs, thousands died during the crossing. Antoine and Michaeles’ ship was caught for several weeks in early gathering ice. When it reached the Magadan port it carried only crew, guards, and two thousand thousand prisoners–5,200 POWs were left dead on the ice. The two men spent a month in Magadan working as slave labor on the fishing fleet. The seaport was only fully navigable from May to December, and the Dastroy Agency lashed and kicked the men onto the fishing trawlers to get as much free labor out of them as possible. The dwindling numbers of hardy remaining prisoners were hauled by cattle trucks to their new home in the Butugychag tin mine camp beyond the Arctic Circle.
Now, in 1953, the novelty of being free to walk about in Magadan and away from the slave-labor camp soon gave way to more primal concerns. Antoine Duvalier and Michaele Dupont were the only Frenchmen on the truck—and for all they knew—were the only members of their regiment still alive. They moved away from the other former prisoners, a natural grouping in which countrymen tended to find some similitude of camaraderie with their own. Hungarians, Serbs, Germans, and Baltics went their separate ways two-by-two. They were soon all lost among a populace of exceedingly poor and deprived Northern Russians who were just eking out a living in an unforgiving land. Most of those people had arrived during the recent war as displaced persons and were only a little better off than the newly released prisoners of the gulag. No one took an interest in anyone else. No one had the strength or resources to give help to another human being. Antoine and Michaele were out of prison, but only slightly better off than when they were in the camp. Their first priority was to find food.
Recipe
Rat Stew—for 1 or 2 Diners
Ingredients (as available):
4 lg rats. May substitute 2 gophers, 3 frozen owl carcasses, 10 squirrels, or 1 stolen chicken. May use leather belts or straps.
Any vegetables in as large amounts as findable and as season and/or availability permits, may add grass, green leaves, or fruit or vegetable peelings from refuse bins. Avoid wild mushrooms since they may be poisonous. Spices: anything available with salt as a premium
Preparation
Skin animals, cut off beaks and claws and discard.
Place meat items in the largest pot available, add 1–2 gal. of the cleanest water obtainable.
Bring to a hard boil until meat is putty soft (crucial to avoid food poisoning) Add vegetables for last 30–60 min. of boiling.
Serving
Place in regulation tin pots or pans and consume while still very hot. Recipient will remove bones and inedible portions. Do not save as leftovers (also crucial for safety)
BOOK ONE
WHAT
CHAPTER ONE
Arkhangelskoye Military Convalescent Home, Moscow, USSR, October 9, 1961
Lieutenant of militsiya Trushin Vasilyovich Stepanovich drew the black bean and now sat in his cramped and untidy office in the MYC [Moscow Criminal Investigations Department] building on Petrovka 38 Street to wait for the boredom of a quiet weekend to pass.
The Moscow Criminal Investigation Department [Russian-MYC]—established in 1722—is the Main Department of Internal Affairs of the city of Moscow. It was usually called simply the Moscow Police, and was the largest municipal police force in Russia with primary responsibilities in law enforcement and investigation within Moscow City. The Muscovite Police [more accurately, Militsya] is one of the oldest police departments established in Russia. Since the days of the tsars, its headquarters have been in the famous Petrovka 38 Street in the Tverskoy District, central Moscow.
First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s grip on the USSR was only slightly less draconian than that of his predecessor Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin—the Man of Steel—despite Khrushchev’s program of de-Stalinization. As the unopposed leader of Russia and its satellites during the Cold War, the First Secretary was concerned with the great struggle with the corrupt capitalist West. He maintained brutal control of the security forces, including the Militsya, which served the Soviet Union as its police force. Petty crime and murder rates plummeted during Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s reigns, and made Lt. Stepanovich’s life as a homicide detective a relatively easy one.
Stepanovich coughed a little from his latest Belomorkanal and took another sip of his cup of ersatz coffee in the drab office. The minor vices passed for cigarettes and coffee, respectively, in Soviet Russia. Lt. Stepanovich wondered at the popularity of the two because he detested both of them. He shrugged and continued to puff and sip. The pseudo cigarette came in the form of a papirosa—a hollow card board tube with no filter, a sort of disposable cigarette holder. Stepananovich compressed the tube into two separate surfaces. He so seldom had a real cigarette—a Western brand—that he no longer considered the way Russians were reduced to do their smoking to be odd. The coffee—so-called coffee—was a nearly unpalatable blend of roasted acorns, chicory root, beechnut, potato peelings, and wheat bran. The militia lieutenant thought he detected a hint of actual coffee in this latest rendition. It made him smile—the glorious Soviet industrial engine at work.
Trushin was twenty-seven years old, one of the youngest lieutenants of police in the entire Soviet Union. He was tall—five feet, ten inches—for a man born during the lean, starving times, when Stalin’s iron fist determined who should grow what; and who should get enough to eat. He had been seventeen years old when he volunteered for service in the Red Army in 1940. His first posting was to Pomerania, to assist in driving out the entrenched Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, and the French Charlemagne Division. There, in the bitter cold, he had become a man, seen death, known defeat, and finally revenge. He had been in a troop truck when the Charlemagne Division stragglers, blundering into an open field, were duly slaughtered. That was enough horror for him, but his unit had been sent on to Berlin to secure the German capital. He was one of the very few Red Army soldiers who survived without a wound. His heroism led to him receiving the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st Class, something that pleased him greatly, but about which he never told anyone except his wife, Katrinka.
His face was lined with memories of the terrible struggles and sacrifices he had witnessed and experienced. He was a slender, handsome, man in a hard way, with heavy dark hair and slightly olive complexion. He wore a Stalinist mustache; otherwise, he kept his scalp hair very short and militarily neat. His uniform was always newly cleaned and crisp, thanks to Katrinka. An old knee wound occasionally made him limp, but he decided he would do everything possible to avoid appearing like a needy old soldier. He was a hard worker, which gave his arms and legs deeply carved muscular definition. He avoided smiling because his teeth were crooked and overlapping, and there were gaps where he had lost three teeth to decay.
He finished two days’ worth of Pravda, sighed, and reluctantly began to pick up folders from his inbox to get the reports read and signed off. It was a routine that bored him almost to the frantic state. The Soviet Union was a giant records machine, and Stepanovich hated being a cog in it. But it was his job, and it brought in a meager salary that kept his own and Katrinka’s bodies and souls intact for another week.
The telephone jangled.
“Dah,” he said, “Stepanovich here.”
“We have a murder at the Military Convalescent Home,” Efreitor Lebedinsky sta
ted crisply.
“Somebody killed some old vet?” Stepanovich asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of his voice.
“That’s right, Lieutenant. And it’s likely to have political consequences.”
There was nothing Stepanovich liked to hear less than “political consequences.”
“Maybe you should come promptly, Lieutenant, if I may suggest.”
“I’ll be there. Secure the scene and nobody goes in or out of the home.”
“Yes, sir. Already done.”
“Political” meant hurry up, and it meant trouble. Anything political in Stepanovich’s experience meant it could never be done right, never proceeded by police rules and procedures, and if blame were attached to the investigation, he would get it. If credit were to be attached to the investigation, some bureaucrat up the line would garner that.
Lt. Stepanovich got up, checked the press of his uniform and the shine of his boots, and walked down the hall to the enlisted mess room. Four privates leaped to attention as their lieutenant entered the room.
The Charlemagne Murders Page 2