Gulag Voices (11 page)

The house itself, seen from the road which led to the camp from the village, made a pleasant impression. It was built of rough pine beams, the gaps filled in with oakum; the roof was laid with good tiling; and fortunately the walls were not plastered. We all had occasion to curse the plaster with which the barrack walls in the camp were covered: water from melted snowdrifts, and urine made by prisoners against the barracks at night, disfigured the white walls with yellow-gray stains, which looked from a distance like the unhealthy pimples of acne on a pale, anemic face. During the summer thaw the thin plaster peeled off the walls, and then we walked through the zone without looking to right or left—the holes corroded in the brittle crust of whitewash by the climatic scurvy seemed to remind us that the same process was corrupting our bodies. If only because of the contrast, it was pleasant to rest our weary eyes by gazing at the house of meetings, and not without cause (though its appearance was not the only reason) was it known as “the health resort.” The door outside the zone, which could be used only by the free visitors, was reached by a few solid wooden steps; cotton curtains hung in the windows, and long windowboxes planted with flowers stood on the windowsills. Every room was furnished with two neatly made beds, a large table, two benches, a basin and a water jug, a clothes cupboard, and an iron stove; there was even a lampshade over the electric lightbulb. What more could a prisoner, who had lived for years on a common bunk in a dirty barrack, desire of this model petit bourgeois dwelling? Our dreams of life at liberty were based on that room.

Every prisoner was given a separate room, but the prison rules broke that intimacy brutally by making clear distinctions between the privileges of free men and the obligations of prisoners serving a sentence of forced labor. The visiting relative was at liberty to leave the house at any time of the day and night to go to the village, but always alone: the prisoner had to remain in the same room during the whole visit, or else, if he so wished, he could return to the zone for a few minutes after first being searched at the guardhouse. In exceptional cases the permission was burdened by an additional provision, which confined the visit to the daytime: the prisoner returned to his barrack in the evening and came back to the house of meetings at dawn (I could never think of a reason for this cruelty; some prisoners believed that it was a form of deliberate persecution, but this was not confirmed by general practice). In the mornings, when the brigades passed the house of meetings on their way to work, the curtains in its windows were usually drawn slightly aside, and we saw our fellow prisoners inside with strange, free faces. We usually slowed down and dragged our legs in a slightly exaggerated manner, as if to show the “people from over there” to what life behind barbed wire had brought us. We were allowed to give no other sign of recognition, just as we were forbidden to wave to passengers on passing trains as we passed by the railway tracks (the guards had strict orders to drive their brigades into the forest, away from the railway tracks, whenever they heard the sound of an approaching train). The prisoners in the windows of the house of meetings frequently smiled at us and sometimes greeted us by fondly embracing their visitor, as if in this simple and touching way they wanted to remind us that they were human, with well-dressed relatives, free to touch intimately those “from the other side.” But more often tears stood in their faded eyes, and painful spasms passed through the haggard faces; perhaps it was our own wretchedness which thus moved those more fortunate prisoners who saw us through the window of a warm, clean room, or perhaps it was only the thought that tomorrow or the day after they themselves would be back in the brigades, hungry and cold, marching off for another twelve hours in the forest.

The situation of those free women who, after surmounting countless obstacles, have at last succeeded in reaching the camp for a visit, is no more enviable. They feel the boundless suffering of the prisoner without fully understanding it or being in any way able to help; the long years of separation have killed much of their feeling for their husbands, and they come to the camp only to warm them, during three short days, with the embers of their love—the flame could not be rekindled from the spark hidden in the warm heart of ashes. The camp, distant and barred off from the visitor, yet casts its shadowy menace on them. They are not prisoners, but they are related to those enemies of the people. Perhaps they would more willingly agree to accept the prisoner’s burden of hatred and suffering than to suffer in silence the humiliating and equivocal situation of borderland inhabitants. The camp officials treat them politely and correctly, but at the same time with almost undisguised reserve and contempt. How can they show respect to the wife or the mother of a wretch who begs for a spoonful of soup, rummages in the rubbish heaps, and has long since lost any feeling of his own human dignity? In Yercevo village, where every new face left no doubt as to its owner’s purpose in the town, visitors to the camp were cautiously avoided. One prisoner told me that when his daughter visited him in the camp she met an old friend, now the wife of one of the camp officials, in the village. They greeted each other with pleasure, but after a while the official’s wife drew back anxiously. “What a coincidence, meeting you here! But what are you doing in Yercevo?” “Oh,” answered the girl, “I’ve come to visit my father. You can imagine how unhappy we are!” and added, “Of course, he isn’t at all guilty,” as if hoping that after breaking the ice she would succeed in obtaining some consideration for her father in the camp. But the other woman left her coldly, saying, “Good. You should write a complaint to Moscow, they will look into it there.”

Although, or perhaps because, these visits were so rare and so difficult to obtain, they played a large part in the life of the camp. I became convinced while I was still in prison that if a man has no clear end in life—and the ending of his sentence and his final release were too distant and uncertain to be seriously taken into account—he must at least have something to anticipate. Letters were so rare, and their language so commonplace and restricted, that they had no attraction as an object of expectation; only the visits were left to the prisoners. They waited for them with anxiety and joyful tension, and often reckoned the time of their sentences or their lives by those short moments of happiness, or even its very anticipation. Those who still had not been informed of a definite date for their visits lived on hope; they possessed something to occupy them, and perhaps even more, a quiet passion which saved them from utter despair, from the fatal consciousness of their aimless existence. They fed their hope artificially, wrote requests and applications to Moscow, bore the heaviest work manfully like pioneers building their own future; in the evenings they talked to their more fortunate comrades, repeatedly asking what ways there were of hastening that wonderful event; on rest days they stood outside the house of meetings, as if to make sure that their rooms were reserved and only awaiting the arrival of the guests, quarreled among themselves in advance over the choice of rooms, and endlessly cleaned and darned their best clothes. Lonely prisoners and foreigners were naturally in the worst position, but even they were able to draw some benefit from the visits, sharing as they did in the happiness and expectation of others, or recognizing them to be their only source of information about life outside, at liberty.

Men isolated forcibly, or even voluntarily, from the rest of the world, idealize everything that occurs beyond the frontiers of their solitude. It was touching to hear prisoners before the expected visit recalling the liberty whose mere taste they were about to enjoy. It seemed that never before in their lives had they experienced either important events or bitter disappointments. Freedom for them was the one blessed irreplaceable. At liberty one slept, ate, and worked differently; there the sun was brighter, the snow whiter, and the frost less painful. “Remember? Remember?”—excited voices whispered on the bunks. “I remember, at liberty, I was stupid and wouldn’t eat brown bread.” And another would take up: “I wasn’t satisfied with Kursk, I wanted Moscow. Just wait till my wife comes, I’ll tell her what I think of Kursk now, just wait till I tell her …” These conversations sometimes dragged on till late into the night, but they were never heard on bunks where a prisoner who had recently returned from a visit lay. The illusion had come face to face with the reality, and the illusion always suffered. Whatever the reasons for their disappointment—whether the freedom, realized for three days, had not lived up to its idealized expectation, whether it was too short, or whether, fading away like an interrupted dream, it had left only fresh emptiness in which they had nothing to wait for—the prisoners were invariably silent and irritable after visits, to say nothing of those whose visits had been transformed into a tragic formality of separation and divorce. Krestynski, a joiner from the 48th Brigade, twice attempted to hang himself after an interview with his wife, who had asked him for a divorce and for his agreement to place their children in a municipal nursery. I came to the conclusion that if hope can often be the only meaning left in life, then its realization may sometimes be an unbearable torment.

Younger prisoners suffered additional and, at least as far as their neighbors on the bunk were concerned, by no means intimate sexual anxieties before visits from their wives. Years of heavy labor and hunger had undermined their virility, and now, before an intimate meeting with an almost strange woman, they felt, besides nervous excitement, helpless anger and despair. Several times I did hear men boasting of their prowess after a visit, but usually these matters were a cause for shame, and respected in silence by all prisoners. Even the
urkas
4
murmured indignantly whenever a guard who during his night duty at the guardhouse had relieved his boredom by listening through the thin partition to the sounds of love from the other side, derisively shared his observations with other prisoners in the brigade. Unbridled sexual depravity was the rule in the zone, where women were treated like prostitutes and love like a visit to the latrine, and where pregnant girls from the maternity hut were greeted with coarse jokes. Yet the house of meetings, in this pool of filth, degradation, and cynicism, had become the only haven of whatever emotional life memory had brought into the camp from liberty. I remember our joy when one of the prisoners received a letter telling him of the birth of a child conceived during a visit from his wife. If that child could have been given to us, we would have looked upon it as our common child, we would have fed it, going hungry ourselves, and passed it from hand to hand, even though there were plenty of brats conceived on a barrack bunk. That, for us, was the most important difference: they had been conceived on a barrack bunk in the zone, not in the house of meetings with a free woman and on clean sheets … In that way only did life allow us, dead and forgotten men, to feel a slight bond with freedom despite our incarceration in that earthly tomb.

What else can I say about our house of meetings? Perhaps only that as a foreigner I never expected to see anyone there, and possibly that is why my observations about the behavior of my fellow prisoners, whose joys and disappointments I shared only involuntarily, are so objective and so indifferent even to pain.

1
. The Third Section was the internal camp police, responsible for vetting prison visits and the collection of information from secret informers.

2
. A reference to the system of giving more food to prisoners who did more work, so “at the highest level of food ration.”

3
.
I Chose Freedom,
a memoir by Victor Kravchenko (1905–66), had an enormous impact on the postwar European left, causing many to abandon communism.

4
. Camp slang for habitual criminals.

10.

LEV KOPELEV

B
orn in 1912, Lev Kopelev came of age as an idealistic Communist. As a working journalist, he witnessed the confiscation of grain from the Ukrainian peasants in 1931, the policy which led to the onset of a mass famine. Nevertheless, he retained his faith in the ultimate goodness of the system, even rising to become a major in the Red Army’s notorious Political Department, the institution that maintained ideological control over the soldiers. Only at the end of the war, horrified by the wanton rapes and murders he had witnessed during the Soviet invasion of East Prussia, did Kopelev begin to become disillusioned. He wrote a letter to his superiors condemning the Red Army’s behavior. For this he was arrested in 1945. Kopelev served a nine-year sentence, partly in Unzhlag, a camp in the Volga region, where he worked in a camp hospital, and partly in a Moscow
sharashka
(prison for scientists). Inmates in sharaskas were better housed and fed, and were allowed to conduct scientific experiments. Some of Russia’s most distinguished engineers spent time in them, as did Solzhenitsyn, who met Kopelev in a sharashka and later used him as the basis for a character in his novel
The First Circle.
Kopelev was rehabilitated in 1954 and returned to Moscow, where he became a literary critic and writer. In that capacity, he was able to help Solzhenitsyn publish his novel
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
the only true piece of Gulag literature to appear in the years before perestroika. But over time Kopelev’s disillusion grew, and he was drawn, like many former Gulag prisoners, to the human rights movement. He broke with the Party following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in 1980 the Soviet Union revoked his citizenship. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Germany.

Kopelev published many books, among them his memoir
To Be Preserved Forever,
whose title echoes the phrase stamped on prisoners’ files. Kopelev wrote the book in the early 1970s and had it smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published abroad in 1975. The selection reprinted here describes an episode that illustrates the deep ambiguities always present in camp life, as well as the camp system’s strange morality. The subject is informers—people who collaborated with camp authorities and secretly reported on their fellow prisoners—and the kinds of retaliation that other inmates frequently deployed against them. Informers were an intrinsic part of the Soviet system in many other spheres, of course, but in camps they were often spoken of, and dealt with, in a far more open way than they could be in the “free” Soviet Union. At the time of this incident Kopelev was studying to be a
feldsher,
a nurse, a job coveted by many of the educated prisoners.

Informers

In prison we used to be afraid of informers and talked about them in whispers. Here in the camp we spoke of them out loud. The lowest of all the minions of the mighty state, as helpless and humiliated as the rest of us, and often as falsely accused and as unfairly sentenced, they were nevertheless the indispensable cogs of the cruel punitive machine. They served for the sake of the little handouts the machine threw their way, and they served out of fear.

An informer talking: “I’ll tell you, as one frontliner to another, even in a camp a man can make out. A camp has its own laws. All you have to do is follow them.”

I listen. I like to find out what made them sink so low.

“They’ll tell you I’m a stool pigeon, and maybe you’ll think that I’m a rat, that there’s nothing I wouldn’t stoop to. Well, don’t you believe it.

“True, I have some business with the Oper”
1
—you know, the one they call the godfather. Of course I do—I’m a patriot, I used to belong to the Komsomol. And who is he? The representative of the Cheka, and this camp is full of enemies of the people. Of course, there’s also the other kind, like you and me. I can tell about people. I was educated. And life taught me plenty. I’ve been in the Crimea, in Rome, in Germany, and in France. As a prisoner of the Germans, of course.
Boche cochon, Russe très bien. Vive la France, vive la Russie!
2
You understand? Of course you do. You’re educated, too—I could tell about you at once. If the Oper asks me about you, I’ll say, ‘He’s one of us, law-abiding, a patriot.’ ”

Then, without stopping for breath, without a change of tone: “You have any buddies? Only one? Which one? Oh. What does he do? Was he in the Party? Was he taken prisoner? Oh. And you believe him? I’ll tell you, as one frontliner to another, don’t believe what you hear. One buddy—that’s all right. But if anyone else tries to get friendly, you come to me—I’ll tell you what he’s after. The cook, for instance. He’s a stoolie—hates everyone like you who’s here under Article 58. Be careful of him.

“Have some tobacco—first-class quality, this. You want to go to the bathhouse before you turn in—come to me. You want some underclothes, some soap—”

He goes on and on, endlessly. Why the confession? Some particularly subtle game? Or some human need to reveal himself or to play the big shot?

Another informer: “Ah, you’ve got some books. I can see you’re a cultured man. I also love books. Gorky, Kuprin, Ehrenburg … And do you get newspapers, too? What do you think of this Churchill? He was our ally, our buddy, and now, did you see what he said about us?”

On another day, mysteriously: “I want to talk to you privately. I know you’re a good guy, but … Just by chance I found out—somebody squealed—that you and this nurse are, as they say … Well, I want to tell you as a friend: tonight, be careful. There’s going to be an inspection. I found out by accident. I hope that as a cultured man, you won’t tell anyone I told you …”

Uncle Nechipor and young Iosip were Baptists. The older man had been nursed back to relative health, but they kept him on in our ward while putting him to work tending the heating system. Iosip, recovering from an operation for a chronic ear infection, was pale and thin and the youngest in our fourteen-man ward. When anyone spoke to him, he smiled sweetly. “As the Lord wills,” he would say, and “God bless you.”

Nechipor, polite and companionable, would tell us of miracles performed through faith—of the fatally ill cured by the power of prayer, of bums, thieves, and errant husbands reformed by Holy Scripture. But in the evenings he would often take Iosip out into the corridor so they would not hear our “worldly” conversations. Sometimes we would hear them singing softly in harmony.

The feast is spread, the guests rejoice,

And Jesus calls you to his side.

Why do you not hear his voice?

Why does your timid spirit hide?

My new buddy, Seriozha, was a raw kid sentenced to ten years for having contemplated deserting to the Germans when his frontline unit was surrounded in the summer of ’42—even though the plan, put to him by others, had never been carried out. He would receive parcels from his working-class family in Moscow; my parcels kept arriving every two weeks or so; and both of us would share our bounty with the others in the ward—most particularly with poor, sick, uncomplaining Iosip.

One day Nechipor received a parcel of cereal, cheese, pork fat, and homegrown tobacco (the last to be realized into cash, since, as a Baptist, he did not smoke). Nechipor cooked some gruel, thickened it with lard, and brought in four platefuls—for Seriozha, me, and two others in our ward.

As we ate, Iosip looked on sadly, meekly, unable to avert his eyes. We went into the kitchen and said, “Uncle Nechipor, thank you, but aren’t you forgetting Iosip? He is hungrier than we are.”

“You gave me to eat,” Nechipor replied in his cheerful, self-assured way, “and now I am giving you to eat. As the Bible says, ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you. Repay good with good.’ I love Brother Iosip with my soul, but I love all men and I do not have enough to give to all.”

“But Iosip needs it more than anyone. He’s so thin he’s practically transparent!”

“That is the cross he has been given to bear. Whom the Lord loves he burdens with tests. Brother Iosip bears his cross humbly and gains virtue in the sight of God.”

This was too much for Seriozha. “You—you kulak, you lousy bloodsucker!” He let loose a string of blasphemous oaths.

Nechipor turned away. After that he held himself at a distance and avoided looking at us. If we happened to meet in the morning, he would say hello with a soft, sad voice. He forgave his enemies.

The director of our hospital was a young woman who had graduated as surgeon before the war and had served at the front, with the rank of captain. She now wore the uniform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs,
3
but she retained some of the decisiveness and informality of frontline doctors and treated the two men under her as colleagues, though both were convicts, in the camp since 1938. One was Boris Liebenson (Uncle Boria), who was in charge of our section. The other was Nikolai Teliants, chief surgeon for the entire hospital.

Teliants was an Armenian, a son of the craggy Caucasus, who took great pride in the history of his ancient, brave, and wise people. He had been deputy people’s commissar for public health in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic and had been arrested and tried together with the entire Tajik government. He never talked about that but liked to discuss philosophy, literature, and history. He was demanding and hot-tempered—even the hospital director was a little afraid of his sharp tongue—and he made no secret of his hatred of informers.

As winter wore into spring and I began to study to become a male nurse while working in the boot shop, Teliants and the other doctors warned me that one of our orderlies, Stepan, was an informer. Stepan was another of those unfortunates who had been sentenced for falling prisoner to the Germans. Silent, slack-jawed, and melancholy, he always seemed to be present when any of us were talking about anything out of the ordinary.

We became conscious of it only when we found out that he was an informer. Pan Leon, a former fur dresser from Belorussia, whose case, like mine, was still before the courts, would challenge him loudly. “Why are you hanging around us, Stepan? Is there something you want? What is it? Tell us; don’t be shy.”

Stepan would grin uncomfortably. “I’m just … I’m only …” He would flush and perspire. “What’s the matter; can’t I stand where I want to? What are you afraid of—that I’ll wear a hole in the floor?”

Some of the others in our company made their feelings even plainer. One of them, a young village tough named Vasia, once “accidentally” dug his elbow into Stepan’s midriff so forcefully that Stepan gasped for breath. Another time, seeing Stepan standing in the doorway, he charged out to the toilet, knocking Stepan violently aside. “Out of the way, you lump of carrion—can’t you see I’m in a hurry?”

Vasia liked to tell stories in Stepan’s presence of how they had disposed of “Judas-informers” in his former prison barracks. “We took this stool pigeon by the arms and legs and swung him up—high, high. Then we brought him down on the floor, right on his ass. Again, and again, and again. You couldn’t see any marks on him. But the next day he was spitting blood. A week later he was dead. His kidneys were gone.”

Stepan listened with seeming unconcern, a drop collecting at the end of his nose.

Stepan’s assignment from the Oper was no sinecure. He had to haul sacks of bread, buckets of balanda,
4
and other supplies from the distributing center to our kitchen, where the food was warmed before serving; he had to serve the meals, keep the place clean, lead those who could walk to the bathhouse, help carry the bedridden on stretchers to the X-ray room, get the linen to the laundry and back, and do a variety of other odd jobs. Trying to ingratiate himself with us, he would get us additional food whenever he could. “Got this little extra for our gang,” he would confide in a stage whisper. “Pull is stronger than Council of People’s Commisars.”

He was at his most zealous when the blood was handed out. Sometimes, in addition to the usual gruel for dinner, we were given rations of coagulated blood, said to be very good for pellagra. Many of us refused to touch it, hungry as we were; it stank too much of carrion. So a lot of it was left over. Bringing in a trayful of dark-brown clots, Stepan would sing out: “If you’re delicate, light up; if you’re a blood drinker, set to! Lots for everyone!” He became lively and talkative, feeling more than ever the benefactor.

Pan Leon and Vasia were in awe of medicine; besides, Pan Leon never gave and never turned down anything and Vasia never got food parcels. So, unlike Seriozha and me, they gobbled up the dried blood and took a kindlier view of Stepan.

Aunt Dusia, our housekeeper, was a small, prematurely withered woman with big gray youngish eyes smiling out of a wrinkled face. Her voice was hurried, eager, with a musical lilt. Never did a bitter or unseemly word come from her mouth: a reproachful “Now, dearie,” or a resigned “
Ekh
, you cabbage head,” was the closest I heard her come to anger. She had spent more years in labor camps than anyone else I had met—since 1932. I liked to listen to her peasant speech.

…

Aunt Dusia’s room was next to the kitchen. It was in the kitchen, where I could read and smoke after lights out in the wards, and which also served as the duty room for the night nurse, that my liaison with the nurse Edith began. Edith, who was from one of the ethnic-German areas, was serving the last two years of a ten-year sentence.

In April of that year Aunt Dusia invited us to a secret observance of Easter. One of the inmates tending the stoves was a priest, two of the laundresses were nuns, one of the cooks was an expert in religious services, and the four of them, together with Aunt Dusia, had made one of the women’s barracks into an improvised chapel, greasing palms wherever necessary to keep it quiet.

Seriozha was invited as well.

“So what if you are unbelievers?” Aunt Dusia said. “You and Seriozha stand up for people, and whoever stands up for people stands up for God. Your Nechipor, the Baptist, is always talking about God, and I don’t believe him. But you and Seriozha, and your Edith, you are people with soul. I see right into you, and what I see is good, and I pray for you as for one of my own.”