Gulag (52 page)

More typical is the Ukrainian report, which explains that children in the Ukrainian children’s labor colonies had been assigned jobs in woodwork, metalwork, and sewing.
⁹⁹
Kmiecik, who was in a children’s colony near Zhitomir, in Ukraine, worked in a furniture factory.
¹⁰⁰
Still, the colonies observed many of the same practices as the adult camps. There were production targets to be achieved, individual norms to meet, a regime to observe. One NKVD order of 1940 directed children between the ages of twelve and sixteen to work four-hour days, and to spend a further four hours on schoolwork. The same order required children age sixteen to eighteen to work eight-hour days, with two hours devoted to schoolwork.
¹⁰¹
In the Norilsk camp, this regime was not observed, as there was no school at all.
¹⁰²

In Kmiecik’s juvenile camp, there were only evening classes. Among other things, he was taught there that “England is an island in Western Europe . . . It is ruled by lords wearing red robes with white collars. They own the workers who toil for them, paying them little money.”
¹⁰³
Not that the children were there primarily to be educated: in 1944, Beria proudly informed Stalin that the Gulag’s juvenile camps had contributed impressively to the war effort, producing mines, grenades, and other goods worth a total of 150 million rubles.
¹⁰⁴

Children were also subjected to the same sort of camp propaganda as adults were. Camp newspapers of the mid-1930s feature child Stakhanovites, and gush with praise for the “35ers,” the street children placed in camps according to the law of 1935, glorifying those who had seen the light and been reformed by physical work. The same newspapers also lambast those children who had not understood that “they must abandon their past, that it is time to start a new life . . . Card games, drunkenness, hooliganism, refusal to work, thievery, etc., are all widespread among them.”
¹⁰⁵
To combat this youthful “parasitism,” children were made to take part in the same sorts of cultural-educational concerts as adults, singing the same Stalinist songs.
¹⁰⁶

Finally, children were subject to the same psychological pressures as adults. Another NKVD directive of 1941 called for the organization of an
agenturno-operativnoe obsluzhivanie—
a “network of informers”—within NKVD children’s colonies and children’s reception centers. Rumors had spread of counter-revolutionary sentiments among both the staff and the children in the camps, particularly the children of counter-revolutionaries. The children in one camp had even staged a mini-revolt. They took over the dining room, trashed it, and attacked the guards, wounding six of them.
¹⁰⁷

In only one sense were the children of the juvenile camps lucky: they had not been sent to ordinary camps, to be surrounded by ordinary adult prisoners, as other children were. Indeed, just like ubiquitous pregnant women, the endlessly expanding numbers of juveniles in adult camps provided a perennial headache for camp commanders. In October 1935, Genrikh Yagoda angrily wrote to all camp commanders that “despite my instructions, underaged prisoners are not being sent to work colonies for juveniles, but are being mixed up in prison with adults.” At last count, he stated, there had been 4,305 juveniles still in ordinary prisons.
¹⁰⁸
Thirteen years later, in 1948, investigators from the prosecutors’ office were still complaining that there were too many underaged prisoners in adult camps, where they were being corrupted by adult criminals. Even camp authorities noticed when a camp’s reigning criminal boss transformed one eighteen-year-old petty thief into a contract murderer.
¹⁰⁹

The
maloletki—
“juveniles”—inspired little sympathy among their fellow inmates. “Hunger and the horror of what had happened had deprived them of all defenses,” wrote Lev Razgon, who observed that the juveniles gravitated naturally toward those who seemed the strongest. These were the professional criminals, who turned the boys into “servants, mute slaves, jesters, hostages, and everything else,” and both boys and girls into prostitutes.
¹¹⁰
Their horrifying experiences failed to inspire much pity, however; on the contrary, some of the harshest invective in camp memoir literature is reserved for them. Razgon wrote that whatever their background, child prisoners soon “all displayed a frightening and incorrigibly vengeful cruelty, without restraint or responsibility.” Worse,

They feared nothing and no one. The guards and camp bosses were scared to enter the separate barracks where the juveniles lived. It was there that the vilest, most cynical and cruel acts that took place in the camps occurred. If one of the prisoners’ criminal leaders was gambling, lost everything and had staked his life as well, the boys would kill him for a day’s bread ration or simply “for the fun of it.” The girls boasted that they could satisfy an entire team of tree-fellers. There was nothing human left in these children and it was impossible to imagine that they might return to the normal world and become ordinary human beings again.
¹¹¹

Solzhenitsyn felt the same:

In their consciousness there was no demarcation line between what was permissible and what was not permissible, and no concept of good and evil. For them, everything that they desired was good and everything that hindered them was bad. They acquired their brazen and insolent manner of behavior because it was the most advantageous form of conduct in the camp . . .
¹¹²

A Dutch prisoner, Johan Wigmans, also writes of the young people who “probably did not really mind having to live in these camps. Officially they were supposed to work, but in practice that was the last thing they ever did. At the same time they had the benefit of regular means and ample opportunity of learning from their cronies.”
¹¹³

There were exceptions. Alexander Klein tells the story of two thirteen-year-old boys, arrested as partisans, who had received twenty-year camp sentences. The two remained ten years in the camps, managing to stick together by declaring hunger strikes when anyone separated them. Because of their age, people took pity on them, gave them easy work and extra food. Both managed to enroll in camp technical courses, becoming competent engineers before being let out in one of the amnesties that followed Stalin’s death. If it had not been for the camps, wrote Klein, “who would have helped half-literate country boys become educated people, good specialists?”
¹¹⁴

Nevertheless, when, in the late 1990s, I began to look around for memoirs of people who had been juvenile prisoners, I found it very difficult to find any. With the exception of Yakir’s, Kmiecik’s, and a handful of others collected by the Memorial Society and other organizations, there are very few.
¹¹⁵
Yet there had been tens of thousands of such children, and many should still have been alive. I even suggested to a Russian friend that we advertise in a newspaper, in an attempt to find a few such survivors to interview. “Don’t,” she advised me. “We all know what such people became.” Decades of propaganda, of posters draped across orphanage walls, thanking Stalin “for our happy childhood,” failed to convince the Soviet people that the children of the camps, the children of the streets, and the children of the orphanages had ever become anything but full-fledged members of the Soviet Union’s large and all-embracing criminal class.

Chapter 16

THE DYING

What does it mean—exhaustion?
What does it mean—fatigue?
Every movement is terrifying,
Every movement of your painful arms and legs
Terrible hunger—Raving over bread
“Bread, bread,” the heart beats.
Far away in the gloomy sky,
The indifferent sun turns.
Your breath is a thin whistle
It’s minus fifty degrees
What does it mean—dying?
The mountains look on, and remain silent.

—Nina Gagen-Torn, Memoria
¹

THROUGHOUT THE GULAG’S EXISTENCE, the prisoners always reserved a place at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy for the dying—or rather, for the living dead. A whole sub-dialect of camp slang was invented to describe them. Sometimes, the dying were called
fitili
, or “wicks,” as in the wick of a candle, soon to be blown out. They were also known as
gavnoedy
“shit-eaters” or
pomoechniki
“slop-swillers.” Most often they were called
dokhodyagi
, from the Russian verb
dokhodit
, “to reach” or “to attain,” a word usually translated as “goners.” Jacques Rossi, in his
Gulag
Handbook
, claims the expression was a sarcastic one: the dying were at last “reaching socialism.”
²
Others, more prosaically, say the expression meant they were reaching not socialism, but the end of their lives.

Put simply, the
dokhodyagi
were starving to death, and they suffered from the diseases of starvation and vitamin deficiency: scurvy, pellagra, various forms of diarrhea. In the early stages, these diseases manifested themselves in the form of loosened teeth and skin sores, symptoms which sometimes even afflicted the camp guards.
³
In later stages, prisoners would lose their ability to see in the dark. Gustav Herling remembered “the sight of the night-blind, walking slowly through the zone in the early mornings and evenings, their hands fluttering in front of them.”
⁴

The starving also experienced stomach problems, dizziness, and grotesque swelling of the legs. Thomas Sgovio, who came to the brink of starvation before recovering, woke up one morning to discover that one of his legs was “purple, twice the size of the other leg. It itched. There were blotches all over it.” Soon, “the blotches turned into huge boils. Blood and pus trickled from them. When I pressed a finger into the purple flesh—an indentation remained for a long time.” When Sgovio found his legs could not fit into his boots, he was told to slit the boots.
⁵

In the final stages of starvation, the
dokhodyagi
took on a bizarre and inhuman appearance, becoming the physical fulfillment of the dehumanizing rhetoric used by the state: in their dying days, enemies of the people ceased, in other words, to be people at all. They became demented, often ranting and raving for hours. Their skin was loose and dry. Their eyes had a strange gleam. They ate anything they could get their hands on—birds, dogs, garbage. They moved slowly, and could not control their bowels or their bladders, as a result of which they emitted a terrible odor. Tamara Petkevich describes the first time she saw them:

There behind the barbed wire was a row of creatures, distantly reminiscent of human beings . . . there were ten of them, skeletons of various sizes covered with brown, parchment-like skin, all stripped to the waist, with shaved heads and pendulous withered breasts. Their only clothing was some pathetic dirty underpants, and their shinbones projected from concave circles of emptiness. Women! Hunger, heat and hard toil had transformed them into dried specimens that still, unaccountably, clung to the last vestiges of life.
⁶

Varlam Shalamov has also left an unforgettable poetic description of the
dokhodyagi
, invoking their similarity to one another, their loss of identifying, humanizing characteristics, and their anonymity, which was part of the horror they inspired:

I raise my glass to a road in the forest
To those who fall on their way
To those who can’t drag themselves farther
But are forced to drag on

To their bluish hard lips
To their identical faces
To their torn, frost-covered coats
To their hands without gloves

To the water they sip, from an old tin can
To the scurvy which sticks to their teeth.
To the teeth of fattened gray dogs
Which awake them in the morning

To the sullen sun,
Which regards them without interest
To the snow-white tombstones,
The work of clever snowstorms

To the ration of raw, sticky bread
Swallowed quickly
To the pale, too-high sky
To the Ayan-Yuryakh river!
⁷

But the term
dokhodyaga
, as it was used in the Soviet camps, did not merely describe a physical state. The “goners,” as Sgovio has explained, were not just ill: they were prisoners who had reached a level of starvation so intense that they no longer looked after themselves. This deterioration usually progressed in stages, as prisoners stopped washing themselves, stopped controlling their bowels, stopped having normal human reactions to insults—until they became, quite literally, insane with hunger. Sgovio was deeply shocked the first time he met someone in this state, an American communist named Eisenstein, a man who had been an acquaintance in Moscow:

At first I did not recognize my friend. Eisenstein did not answer when I greeted him. His face wore the blank expression of the
dokhodyaga.
He looked through me as if I were not there. Eisenstein didn’t seem to see anyone. There was no expression at all in his eyes. Gathering the empty plates from the mess tables, he scanned each one of them for leftover food particles. He ran his fingers around the inside of the plates and then licked them.

Eisenstein, wrote Sgovio, had become like the other “wicks,” in that he had lost all sense of personal dignity:

They neglected themselves, did not wash—even when they had the opportunity to do so. Nor did the wicks bother to search for and kill the lice that sucked their blood. The
dokhodyagi
did not wipe the dribble off the ends of their noses with the sleeves of their
bushlats . . .
the wick was oblivious to blows. When set upon by fellow
zeks
, he would cover his head to ward off the punches. He would fall to the floor and when left alone, his condition permitting, he would get up and go off whimpering as if nothing had happened. After work the
dokhodyaga
could be seen hanging around the kitchen begging for scraps. For amusement, the cook would throw a dipperful of soup in his face. On such occasions, the poor soul would hurriedly pass his fingers over his wet whiskers and lick them . . . The wicks stood around the tables, waiting for someone to leave some soup or gruel. When that happened, the nearest lunged for the leavings. In the ensuing scramble they often spilled the soup. And then, on hands and knees, they fought and scraped until the last bit of precious food was stuffed into their mouths.
⁸

A few prisoners who became
dokhodyagi
, and who recovered and survived, have tried to explain, not wholly successfully, what it felt like to be one of the living dead. Janusz Bardach remembered that after eight months in Kolyma, “I felt dizzy upon awakening, and my mind was foggy. It took more time and effort to pull myself together and go to the mess hall in the morning.”
⁹
Yakov Éfrussi became a dokhodyaga after first having his glasses stolen—“to anyone near-sighted it will be perfectly clear what life is like without glasses, everything around you seems to be in a cloud”—and then losing the fingers of his left hand to frostbite. He described his feelings like this:

Constant hunger destroys the human psyche. It is impossible to stop thinking about food, you think about food all of the time. To your physical incapability is added moral weakness, as constant hunger removes your sense of self-respect, your sense of self-worth. All of your thoughts run in one direction: how to get more food? That’s why on the garbage pit, near the dining hall, at the entrance to the kitchen, the
dokhodyagi
were always milling about. They wait to see if someone won’t possibly throw something edible out of the kitchen, for instance some scraps of cabbage.
¹⁰

The attraction to the kitchen and the obsession with food blinded many to almost all other considerations, as Gustav Herling has also tried to describe:

There is no limit to the physical effects of hunger beyond which tottering human dignity might still keep its uncertain but independent balance. Many times I flattened my pale face against the frosted-glass pane of the kitchen window, to beg with a dumb look for another ladleful of thin soup from the Leningrad thief Fyedka who was in charge. And I remember that my best friend, the engineer Sadovski, once, on the empty platform by the kitchen, snatched from my hand a canful of soup and, running away with it, did not even wait until he reached the latrine but on the way there drank up the hot mess with feverish lips. If God exists, let him punish mercilessly those who break others with hunger.
¹¹

Yehoshua Gilboa, a Polish Zionist arrested in 1940, eloquently describes the deceptions which prisoners used to convince themselves that they were eating more than they were:

We attempted to deceive the stomach by crumbling the bread until it was almost like flour and mixing it with salt and large quantities of water. This delicacy was called “bread sauce.” The salty water took on something of the color and taste of bread. You drank it and the bread pap remained. You poured more water on it until the final drop of bread flavor was squeezed out of it. If you ate this bread sauce for dessert after you had filled up on bread water, as it were, it had no taste at all but you created an illusion for yourself by stretching several hundred grams.

Gilboa also writes that he soaked salt fish in water as well. The resulting liquid “could be used for making bread sauce and then you really had a delicacy fit for a king.”
¹²

Once a prisoner was spending all of his time hanging around the kitchen, picking up scraps, he was usually close to death, and could in fact die at any time: in bed at night, on the way to work, walking across the
zona
, eating his dinner. Janusz Bardach once saw a prisoner fall during roll call at the end of the day.

A group formed around him. “I get the hat,” one man said. Others grabbed the victim’s boots, foot rags, coat and pants. A fight broke out over his undergarments.

No sooner had the fallen prisoner been stripped naked than he moved his head, raised his hand, and stated weakly but clearly, “It’s so cold.” But his head flopped back into the snow and a glazed look came over his eyes. The ring of scavengers turned away with whatever scraps they had, unaffected. In those few minutes after being stripped, he probably died of exposure.
¹³

Starvation was not, however, the only way in which prisoners died. Many died at work, in the unsafe conditions of the mines and factories. Some, weakened by hunger, succumbed easily to other diseases and epidemics as well. I have mentioned the typhus epidemics already, but weak and hungry prisoners were susceptible to many other diseases. In Siblag, in the first quarter of 1941, for example, 8,029 people were hospitalized, 746 with tuberculosis, of which 109 died; 72 with pneumonia, of which 22 died; 36 with dysentery, of which 9 died; 177 with frostbite, of which 5 died; 302 with stomach ailments, of which 7 died; 210 who had accidents at work, of which 7 died; and 912 with circulation problems, of which 123 died.
¹⁴

Although it is a curiously taboo subject, prisoners did also commit suicide. How many took this route it is difficult to say. There are no official statistics. Nor, strangely, is there much consensus among survivors about how many suicides there were. Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet, wrote that people in the camps did not commit suicide, so hard were they struggling to live, and her belief has been echoed by others.
¹⁵
Evgeny Gnedin wrote that although he thought of killing himself in prison, and later in exile, during his eight years in camps, “the thought of suicide never came into my head. Every day was a fight for life: how, in such a battle, was it possible to think about leaving life? There was a goal—to get out of that suffering—and hope: to meet with the people one loved.”
¹⁶

The historian Catherine Merridale puts forward a different theory. During her research, she met two Moscow-based psychologists who had studied or worked in the Gulag system. Like Mandelstam and Gnedin, they insisted that suicide and mental illness were rare: “They were surprised— and modestly offended” when she cited evidence to the contrary. She attributes this curious insistence to the “myth of stoicism” in Russia, but it may have other sources as well.
¹⁷
The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov guesses that witnesses write of the strange absence of suicide because they want to emphasize the uniqueness of their experience. It was so awful no one even took the “normal” route of suicide: “the survivor aims above all to convey the otherness of the camps.”
¹⁸