Gulag Voices (12 page)

The service was held in the evening. The beds were placed alongside the walls. There was a fragrant smell of incense. A little table covered by a blanket was the altar. Several homemade candles cast their glow on an icon. The priest, wearing vestments made of sheets, held up an iron cross.

The candles flickered in the dark. We could hardly see the faces of the others in the room, but I felt sure that we were not the only unbelievers present. The priest chanted the service in an old man’s quaver. Several women in white kerchiefs joined in softly, their voices ardent and pure. A choir gave harmonious responses, softly, softly, in order not to be heard outside.

There, outside, ten steps from the barracks walls, was the barbed wire, with its watchtowers, its sentries in sheepskin coats; and, further on, the houses of the guards and the camp officials; and beyond them, all around us, the dense and ancient forest; and beyond the forest, the west, the Volga, and a string of villages, gray and hungry; and finally, hundreds of kilometers away, Moscow. The ruby stars in the Kremlin towers. An old, peeling house. A narrow room, where my daughters were asleep. And beyond Moscow, toward the west, a trail of ruins, ashes, and freshly dug graves …

The next day, Easter Sunday, some of us were invited to Aunt Dusia’s room. Each of us had tried to contribute something, and she had prepared a festive spread. There were hard-boiled eggs, painted according to Easter custom, and meat and baked potatoes; there were American canned beef and sausage, and biscuits and sweets—the yield of parcels from home. The doctors had contributed some alcohol, which Aunt Dusia had mixed with a bottle of liquid vitamins for color and taste. She had even managed to bake a kulich
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and to adorn it with colored paper flowers. We exchanged the traditional Easter toast—“Christ is risen!” “Truly risen!”—and Aunt Dusia took two plates of food and two glasses of the improvised vodka to Uncle Boria and Dr. Teliants, who lived in the doctors’ house.

Aunt Dusia also insisted that we invite the informer Stepan.

“Dearie,” she argued, “with his poor, lost, dark, sinful soul, where will he find a ray of light if we don’t show it to him? Let him see that even here, in prison, the light of Christ still shines and there is pity even for such as he. We didn’t tell him about the church service, because others would be held responsible if it became known. We invited only those we could be sure of. But here in my little room I am mistress. Around this little table we are all equal, believers and unbelievers, and for all of us this is a bright holiday, and there is only good here.

“And there is another reason. Oh, dearie, don’t think I haven’t learned. I’m a crafty one, I am. Just think—everybody who drops in for a bite and a drink—don’t you think Stepan will smell the alcohol on their breath? You’ll take a little food to your friends in your ward—don’t you think he’ll ask: from where? His eyes, his ears, his nose are always on the job, and so he’ll have to squeal on us. But if we invite him and treat him and exchange toasts with him, in Christ’s holy name—for Jesus taught us to love and pity our enemies—he will see things differently, and he will not be able to repay good with evil.”

Aunt Dusia did as she proposed. She called Stepan, and poured a drink for him, and exchanged the Easter toast with him. And Stepan drank and ate and beamed. “Thank you—thank you.” He even winked, as though to say that he understood and that there was no need to worry.

We were all in a tender mood and smiled and said kind things to each other. Someone made a speech about this being a holiday not only for Christians but for all men of goodwill. I argued compellingly that a good Christian and a good Communist not only shouldn’t, but couldn’t, be enemies.

Two days later, Aunt Dusia, her face stained with tears, told us that Stepan had squealed. She had her own intelligence network and usually knew what was going on. She had learned that Stepan had reported the reception to the Oper. The Oper wanted to conduct an investigation, but Uncle Boria and Dr. Teliants opposed the idea, and the hospital director sided with her convict-doctors. Instead, as a compromise measure, Aunt Dusia was to be transferred to a harder post in a sewing shop.

There were more tears, particularly among the younger nurses, the day she left. Stepan was replaced as orderly and transferred to an adjoining barracks. If we ran into him after that, we pretended not to see him; when he spoke, we pretended not to hear. For us, he ceased to exist. But Seriozha swore he’d kill him; it was only a question of finding a way.

I told the whole story to Dr. Teliants.

“Don’t do anything,” he said. “Tell your friend to lay off. Leave it to me.”

About a week later, I reminded him of his words.

“I haven’t forgotten.”

One evening in May, I was having dinner in the kitchen with Edith when an orderly came in. “The doctor wants you to play chess with him.”

I went to his room. Dr. Teliants sat before a chessboard.

“Some of our convalescents are well enough to go back to work. There’s a batch of them leaving for Post No. 18 tonight. I’ve added that snake of yours to the list. Have the telephone operator call Post No. 18 and give them his name. Just a hint will be enough.”

Dr. Teliants spoke absently, as though concentrating on the chess problem before him. Then he looked up. “Have a seat. We’ll play a game. You will also observe a little scene. Only no commentaries, if you please.”

Post No. 18 was located in the thick of a swampy forest and had one of the heaviest labor regimes in the whole camp. Where you were sent after you regained your health depended partly on luck, partly on the wishes of the hospital authorities, who could hold up your transfer until there was a transport for one of the softer work posts or who could wait until a transport for one of the hard-labor posts came by. Those authorized to decide were the hospital director, her deputy, and the chief surgeon, Dr. Teliants. On this particular day the director and her deputy were both away on a trip to Gorky, and Dr. Teliants was in charge.

We had hardly made the opening moves when there was a knock on the door. A woman secretary entered. “Doctor, here’s this list. Here’s a zek
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named—” Noticing me, she faltered. “Well, the Operational Representative says this zek shouldn’t be sent with the others.”

“Which zek?” Dr. Teliants looked at her list. “Ah, that one. He has recovered. Fully. I ordered him sent off. So there’s no reason for the citizen Operational Representative to be concerned. Understood?”

“Understood …”

The secretary lingered, disconcerted. She was a free citizen, attached to the camp administration; he was an inmate. But he was the “wild doctor,” a legend to the whole camp. He had operated on the camp commandant’s daughter and saved her life when she was dying of peritonitis. He even had NKVD officers for patients; they came all the way from Gorky to see him. He was afraid of no one.

“If you understand, what are you waiting for?”

The secretary left.

“So.” Dr. Teliants returned to the game. “I see you’re playing by the rules tonight—”

Soon there was another knock on the door. The secretary was back, in a state of frightened agitation, with the same list.

“Doctor, the Representative says that he forbids you to send this man, that you must cross out this name or else you must go to see him personally at once … That’s what he said.”

Dr. Teliants got up. His swarthy, sharply etched face with its thick black eyebrows under a shock of black hair wore a look of such fury that the woman fell back a step. He spoke to her softly, slowly, with exaggerated precision.

“Please tell the citizen Operational Representative that, as far as I am aware, I am still the chief surgeon of this hospital and hence am responsible for the hospital’s patients. I have issued my instructions, and I don’t propose to change them. I also don’t propose to go to see him. I have an operation scheduled for an hour from now, and I am resting before the operation by playing a game of chess. That is my way of preparing myself. And for that reason I request that I be spared further interruptions. Is that understood?

“And another thing. If the citizen Operational Representative cancels my instructions, it will mean that he has become the chief surgeon in my place. In that event I shall stop working immediately, and the citizen Operational Representative can perform the operation himself—a case of appendicitis. And then an operation for hernia. One of his colleagues, by the way—the Operational Representative in Post No. 9.”

He looked at his watch and continued. “In half an hour, I want to be informed if the transport has left. You don’t have to come back yourself—send one of the orderlies. But don’t forget to let me know. Otherwise the citizen Operational Representative will have a few operations on his hands. Is
that
understood? Now, good night.”

He sat down and studied the chessboard. “You’re not paying attention. You’ve lost your knight.”

The transport left on time. Later that night our telephone operator spoke with the operator at Post No. 18—both men were zeks—and expressed particular interest in the health of one of the men in the new batch, hinting at his role.

A month passed. By then I was working as a male nurse. One evening, when I was on duty, Edith came in.

“Do you remember Stepan—the one who got Aunt Dusia transferred? They just brought him in. Fractures of both legs and spinal column. A tree fell on him.”

Was it an accident or the outcome of the telephone call? I never knew.

1
. The Operational Representative of the secret police, who also organized the network of prisoner informers. All camps had at least one Oper. Prisoners referred to them by many slang names, including
koum,
“godfather.”

2
. “Kraut, pig, Russian very good. Long live France, long live Russia!”

3
. The ministry in charge of the Gulag.

4
. Camp slang for prison soup.

5
. Traditional Russian Easter bread.

6
. “Zek” is a slaug term for a prisoner, from
zakluchenny.

11.

LEV RAZGON

A
lthough of humble background—he was born in a small town in Belarus in 1908—Lev Razgon had the good fortune, or perhaps the misfortune, to have worked his way into the heart of the Soviet elite by the 1930s. A successful journalist, he married the daughter of Gleb Boky, one of the founders of the Cheka, the earliest incarnation of the Soviet secret police. As a result he was on intimate terms with many of the first generation of Bolshevik leaders. In 1937, when Stalin’s great purge began and the Revolution turned on its own creators, he watched these leaders disappear one by one: his father-in-law, his wife’s family members, his friends. He and his wife, Oksana, were arrested in 1938. She died in a transit prison before arriving at the camps. He went on to spend eighteen years in the Gulag. Released in 1956, Razgon rejoined the Party, as so many others did: it was a way to fit seamlessly back into Soviet society. But at the first opportunity, in 1988, he published several collections of memoirs—many written in secret years earlier—and renounced his Party membership. In his later years, Razgon became well known in Moscow as one of the founders of the historical and human rights society Memorial and a popular writer.

The excerpt that follows is from a chapter in his memoirs titled “Jailers.” By “jailers,” however, Razgon did not “just mean the individual who walks through the prison corridor with a bunch of keys” or the young armed guards who walked around the camp perimeter at night. What interested him was the psychology of the men and women who made decisions about prisoners’ lives, sometimes without much guidance from Moscow. Information from the archives has confirmed that prison guards and camp authorities were rarely told directly to be cruel to the inmates: on the contrary, their official instructions were to keep prisoners fed and healthy, the better to do the required work. But most of those in positions of authority had already been degraded by years of service in the secret police and were dissatisfied with their lot: jobs in the Gulag were considered the worst in the secret service, and many officers were sent there as a kind of punishment.

More to the point, most did not consider their prisoners human: they were “enemies” or “criminals,” units of labor to be deployed at the workplace, and therefore they did not require kindness or consideration at all. Nevertheless, the differences in their individual characters could have an enormous impact on the prisoners, as Razgon explains.

Jailers

Since jailers are at least originally human they each retain certain unique traits of character. The jailers whom I shall now describe were not all alike. They varied greatly in rank and ability. Among them were both the clever and the stupid, good and evil men, the bureaucrats and the fanatics. I and millions of others were at their mercy. I shall tell about my jailers. Let others tell about theirs. I think it is useful for all those who do not share our experience and knowledge to be told these things.

IVAN ZALIVA

Our transport walked for a whole week. Behind us lay the unmetaled dirt road to Knyazhpogost, the unfinished railway from Knyazhpogost to Vesliana, and the large wooden gates on the unballasted road over which there rose something like a triumphal arch bearing the handsome inscription, “Ustvymlag NKVD USSR.” Behind us lay the transit camp and Camp No. 11, the Zimka outpost, and the Machinery Depot. Now we were walking along a broad, sandy roadway, which climbed up one hill after another. A pine forest of exceptional beauty stood on either side. The smooth bronze trunks reached up to the sky and between them the ground was covered with an even, silvery-velvet carpet that I had never seen before. It was reindeer moss. We were tired after a week on our feet, and so were our escorting guards. They no longer gave us the usual ten minutes’ rest after two hours of marching, they cursed more often when prodding those who lagged behind, and they were in a hurry to hand us on to other masters.

Finally, after a sharp turn in the road, a river glistened ahead of us. It flowed rapidly over the shoals and calmly in the backwaters. Vesliana. A beautiful name, perhaps of early Slavonic origin. On the far side of the river stood an architectural structure to which our eyes were already quite accustomed: the tall logs, set upright in the ground, the posts of the compound fence; beyond them the low barracks; some way off, the unattractive houses of the camp administrators and free workers; the long stable building and the smoky chimney of the bakery … Our column crawled slowly across the pontoon bridge and approached the entrance to the camp. Various people stood outside the gates. Sharp young men in brand-new quilted work jackets held clean plywood slates and pencils in their hands: the work distributors. Other individuals in white coats who looked like prisoners—evidently doctors. The jailers and camp escort guard, who were not dressed up or there for show. And, in front of them all, a tall man in a well-made overcoat, with a blue NKVD cap and boots polished to an unbelievable shine. Wound about with the straps of his shoulder belt, his hand firmly placed on the wooden butt of his Mauser, he surveyed us with a condescending but severe gaze. This was our first camp boss, the head of Camp No. 1 in Ustvymlag, Senior Lieutenant Ivan Zaliva.

I am writing about him not only because he was my first jailer in the camps but because he was also a curious phenomenon. It was the first time I had come across someone of his kind, and for several years I was able to follow his career. The personality of Zaliva affected the many and, for us, very important changes then taking place in the camps. I do not know about Zaliva’s biography before he came to the Gulag—where he had studied or worked earlier, and how he had reached the by no means insignificant rank of senior lieutenant in State Security. He was a man of astounding ignorance and rare stupidity. In these respects he stood out among the camp bosses, and they were not a profession known for exceptional wit and education. He did not steal, like most of his colleagues. Neither was he a despot: on the contrary, he kept strictly to his instructions. Zaliva was no sadist and when, during -40 degrees of frost, bound and completely naked “refusers”
1
were taken on sledges to the punitive outpost, he would follow their departure with sad regret in his eyes. He even had a certain Ukrainian kindheartedness and cheerfulness about him, tempered by the strictness necessary for his post.

Zaliva always tried to do what his superiors demanded. When they required that he accept as many zeks as possible, he agreed to take one transport after another. Unlike some camp directors he did not try to refuse new prisoners on the grounds that there were insufficient barracks, tents, clothes, tools, or food. The interests of the state governed all his activities. He crossed rice, semolina, and sorghum off the list of cereals supplied by the food depot and replaced them with cheap barley chaff; salt beef and horsemeat were replaced with dried cod; he would check the prices of medicines and demand cheaper substitutes. Instead of new expensive coats and felt boots he eagerly accepted second- and even thirdhand clothing from the depot. He took great care, though, of the camp’s most valuable possession, its horses. Early each morning he himself would walk round the stable and make sure that they were being fed with the scarce oats. He checked how the feed was weighed out and given to the animals. While Zaliva continued to visit the stable the prisoners could not get their hands on this ration: the strict and incorruptible head of the camp would look on as the horses munched their oats. In the monthly reports from all the camps in Ustvymlag the lowest wastage levels for horses were consistently recorded at Camp No. 1. Zaliva was always praised for this.

To begin with, no one checked what he did with his “contingent” of zeks. During our first year in Camp No. 1, from 1938 to 1939, the transports arrived one after another, and Zaliva was held up as an exemplary boss who always found room for new “contingents.” The explanation was simple: in his camp, places were rapidly freed. There were 517 in our Moscow transport, which reached his camp in late August 1938. By spring the next year only 27 of those Muscovites remained. About 20–30 people were, probably, transferred to other camps in Ustvymlag where their professional skills were put to use. All the rest died that first winter. The same fate awaited those then transported from Smolensk, Stavropol, and Mogilev.

In November 1938, 270 Chinese were driven to our camp from the Far East. They were inhabitants of Manchuria, clad in enormous wolfskin fur hats, long fur coats, and peculiar quilted boots of their own design. Each summer they had been accustomed, for years uncounted, to cross the invisible border with Russia and work as market gardeners until the winter. In 1937 and 1938 they were all arrested, given eight years for “illegal crossing of the frontier,” and sent to the camps. Zaliva could not find sufficient words to express his delight. He set them hauling timber by hand. Usually horses pulled the felled trunks to the roadways, where they were carted away. There were few horses, however, and they were valuable; moreover, special paths had to be cleared for them at the work site. It was much easier to use manpower. Depending on the weight, a team of six, eight, or ten men lifted the trunk onto their shoulders and carried it. I have done the work and know what it’s like. Your eyes strain from their orbits, and as you walk, all thoughts except one fly from your head: how to drop this terrible, crushing, and murderous burden as quickly as possible. None of us could take more than a week of such work. The Chinese, steadily, quietly, and calmly, worked day after day. Each of them took a pole in his free hand, carefully using it to test out the path ahead. Ten men carried a log that weighed almost two tons, and carried it very well, with great care.

They were good-hearted, honest, and hardworking men, the Chinese. Even in the camp they managed to keep as clean as was possible. For a month or more Lizarevich
2
and I lived in the Chinese barrack, and it was a joy to be there: there was no robbing or stealing, and it was always swept clean. The Chinese came back from work when it was pitch dark, ate the thin soup, and then repaired their torn fur clothing. (Zaliva had economized here too, since they did not then require camp issue.) They would sit on their heels on the bed boards and, holding the lighted splinter (then the only source of illumination) in their mouths, deftly and quickly sew up their fur coats. By February 1939, 269 of these Chinese had died. Only one remained alive, working in the kitchen.

Every day Zaliva called in the work distributor and the planner and asked for a detailed and strict account of the morning roll call. How many Group A (workers), he asked, how many in Group B (services in the compound), and how many in Group C (excused on grounds of illness)? He would check carefully that all these figures fell within the limits laid down by the Ustvymlag authorities. Only after that did he inquire about the night’s “C figures.” This meant those who had died. Higher authority did not set any limits for this category and, therefore, did not expect reports on them. During our first winter the daily “C figures” amounted to about 25–30 people. There were no particular diseases involved. It was simply that Zaliva strictly enforced all the instructions. A transport arrived and for the first three days, until the new prisoners began working, they were given the standard food allowance. Then they were transferred to an output-related diet. Even experienced and trained lumbermen, with good tools, found it difficult to fulfil the norm. For those unused to hard physical labor, weakened by prison and transfers, and lacking the right clothes or footwear, they were quite unattainable. After the three days all those who had just arrived found themselves on the punitive ration—300 grams [10
1
⁄
2
ounces] of half-baked black bread, and two bowls of thin gruel a day. Nothing else. A week, ten days, or two weeks later, people began to swell up strangely, and then, over two to three days, an uncontrollable diarrhea would finish them off.

Before my eyes good-natured, bluff Zaliva killed off 1,500 people in the course of a single winter. Perhaps, even more. Yet, amazingly enough, the prisoners treated him with a kind of humorous disdain, and without hatred. To a great extent, we judged our jailers by how easily they could be hoodwinked. The stupidity, ignorance, and cowardice of Zaliva offered considerable opportunities. He prevented the prisoners from stealing the horses’ oats only for as long as he continued to visit the stable.

“I can’t help admiring your bravery, citizen director!” the vet said one day, with respect and a certain mournful pity in his voice.

“Indeed,” Zaliva agreed condescendingly. “But why did you say that?” he suddenly inquired, pale with fear.

“Well, just think what our horses are sick with! In-fec-tious anemia …”

“You damn Trotskyist!” howled Zaliva. “Why didn’t you tell me right away there was something contagious?!”

He never set foot in the stable again.

In accordance with an old instruction, never revoked, 58-ers
3
could not be permitted to work within the compound. Zaliva not only forbade us to be work distributors and managers but also quartermasters, ledger clerks in Supplies, bakers, and medical or barrack orderlies. All these posts were filled by the “socially acceptable,” as thieves, robbers, rapists, and other criminals were termed in that instruction. Naturally, in such circumstances, the workers did not even receive half of a ration that had already been cut in the interests of the state. The most unbridled thievery and lawlessness reigned among the prisoners.

Yet it was under Zaliva’s rule that the “politicals,” the 58-ers, began their irreversible takeover of the camps. Only during the first winter did Zaliva flourish. At that time no one demanded that he meet the plan for timber supplies. A year later, when the peak of excess zeks had passed, Moscow firmly told the camps that they must not only guard their zeks but also give “performance”: this was the term applied in official documents to the labors of millions of prisoners.