Gulag Voices (15 page)

Very few men are able to sustain a hunger strike for long and get their own way, although I have heard of cases where prisoners kept it up for two to three months. The main thing is, though, that it’s completely useless. In every instance the answer to the protest is exactly the same as to all other complaints, the only difference being that the governor himself comes to see the hunger striker, insofar as the enfeebled con is unable to walk:

“Your protest is unjustified, call off your hunger strike. Whatever you do, we won’t let you die. Death would save you from your punishment, and your term isn’t up yet. When you go free from here you are welcome to die. You have made a complaint, you are complaining about us to the higher authorities. Well, you can write away—it’s your right. But all the same it is we who will be examining your complaint …”

And this was the sanatorium I had been sent to on account of my illness. I served my seven days and came out, as they say, holding onto the walls—they had worn me to a shadow. Nevertheless, despite my weakness, I still had to go out to work the next day in order not to earn myself another spell in the cooler.

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. The writer and dissident Yuli Daniel (1925–88) was the object of a notorious case of political persecution and a show trial.

13.

K. PETRUS

K.
Petrus is a pseudonym for the author of a short but unusual Gulag memoir.
Prisoners of Communism
appeared in 1996 under the auspices of a publishing house linked to the Russian Orthodox Church. The memoir is valuable both because it is a relatively early account of the camps—Petrus was in Siblag, near Novosibirsk, in the mid-1930s—and also because it tells the story of a long imprisonment from the point of view of a deeply religious person. Petrus does not remember his years in the Gulag as a long torment but rather tells of conversions he effected, the people of faith he encountered, and his moments of revelation.

Nevertheless, the selection that follows was chosen not for its religious qualities but because it illuminates an aspect of camp life that has rarely been so well described: the strange ambiguity of “freedom.” After many years in camps, surviving prisoners would eventually be released—but to what? Many no longer had living family members; some did not have a profession or trade. The return home was complicated and difficult: from remote places like the Kolyma peninsula released prisoners might wait weeks or months for a ferry to Vladivostok. Many already knew that they would not be allowed to live in their previous homes in Moscow or Saint Petersburg: they had been given a “wolf’s ticket,” a release document that required them to live at least a hundred kilometers (sixty miles) away from major cities. Some were assigned to exile villages in Kazakhstan or Central Asia.

As a result, many decided not to leave at all and remained on the edges of camps, employed by the Gulag administration as “free workers.” Even after the Gulag itself ceased to exist—following Stalin’s death, most of the camps were slowly closed—some former prisoners remained. They and their descendants still form an important part of the population of Russia’s northern cities. Petrus decided to leave, but the journey was not easy. Nor were his first encounters with Soviet citizens who had not shared his experience. Late at night, he explains, walking to a train station, he met a woman who asked him where he was from: “I’m from a place you’ll probably never ever see.” He already had the feeling that his camp experience had taken place in a different world, an alternate universe. And that, too, was typical.

Liberation

When my prison term was coming down to the wire or, as they say in the camps, “down to the bell,” I had no illusions about what awaited me on the outside. The only thing that drew me there was my family, who were living in terrible privation. I was scared to death that a second sentence would be tacked onto the first, not because
I
would suffer but because my family would. For their sake, I had to get out and get back to them.

Usually, one month before a prisoner was freed, he was transferred to a central lagpunkt. Here he was processed for release. When I had only one month left to serve and still had not been transferred from N——k to K——sk
1
I began to get nervous. N——k housed only five hundred prisoners; many of them were also finishing out their sentences and were expecting to be transferred to K——sk. My ambiguous situation plunged my fellow prisoners into despair. If they can tack on a new sentence for one prisoner today, perhaps they will tack on one for everyone tomorrow?

So on my way to work in the kitchen or the baths I was constantly stopped and asked, “What’s up, why aren’t you getting moved to K——sk? You’ve got less than a month to go … Are they, what … adding on?”

Anyone who has done time knows how fast it flies there. It flew by particularly swiftly in Soviet camps. My last week, however, dragged on slowly and painfully. But I knew that not a hair of my head would fall were it not God’s will, and that faith sustained me. I knew that my freedom hinged on decisions made by Moscow and kept inventing various scenarios. I was supposed to be released on December 10, but as the date approached there were no signs, no signals. The camp administrators denied any knowledge; nothing but silence from Moscow.

But Providence was not so silent.

At ten o’clock one morning I was summoned to the main office and half an hour later was plunked onto a standard one guard–one horse sleigh and sent off to K——sk. We were expected to cover 120 kilometers [75 miles] in two days, and the driver—that is, me—pushed our lively little Siberian horse hard in order make the first shelter by nightfall. My guard, fearing a wolf attack, pushed me too: “Go. Go! Step it up!” Still, it was not until late in the evening that we reached our next stop. He hauled me to the local militia to transfer custody, but the chief countered that he had no special cells set aside for “transports” and he could not just lodge me in a cellar. He did not want to answer for “some frozen guy.” They took me back to the station, where my guard and I slept in real beds, side by side.

We spent the second night in a dirty kolkhoz dooryard, along with the kolkhoznik.

The next morning another kolkhoznik walked up to us and proffering his hand said, “I think you might have dropped this little pouch, some money maybe. I found it out here.” He looked at the guard, then at me. I fumbled in my pocket. It was empty. My last hundred rubles had disappeared. But this stranger had given them back.

I was so grateful! I gave him a firm handshake; he looked at us silently, his eyes moist. I saw and felt what he was going through, and felt glad both for myself and for him. It may be that he too was a believer, that he had guessed why I was standing there with an armed guard at my side. In those days a hundred rubles was not a lot of money, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that the man had given it, and that both of us felt the joy of his gift.

We made it to K——sk by dinnertime the next day. This was the last stage on my road to freedom. As the guard turned me over to the camp authorities, he said, “Look, if all prisoners were like you, things might be different.” But what this peasant boy from somewhere around Chernigov meant by
different
I never found out, because two warders immediately grabbed me and started patting me down.

On the thirteenth I was processed. On the fourteenth I was free.

As he was writing out my “passport to life”—the document that proved I had served out my sentence and that also determined my next place of residence—the official leafed through a very thick book, searching out an appropriate district for me.

I was later told that this fat book, which prisoners called the Talmud, was an index, a list of places where “counter-revolutionaries” who had served out their sentences were sent. The index was divided into chapters and subchapters based on Article 58. So I was banned from any capital, major city, industrial center, port, or border city, as well as from the district I had lived in before my arrest. All these bans and restrictions can be described by a single phrase: “forty below.”

I was out, but was I free? As a “counter-revolutionary” with a stain on his record, I was restricted to a particular district, the better to feel the full force of the despotic regime. So that at any time I could be swept back behind bars. So that it would always be watching not only over my behavior but also over my soul.

At the guard post they frisked me one last time, reread my documents, then swung open the gate and let me out. I walked past the grim and filthy barracks where the so-called free workers, former kulaks, were housed, and struggled to figure out my place in all this.

“So I’m free?” I whispered to myself, not quite believing that I was on my way to the local militia to get myself an internal passport. I saw a haggard woman’s face in one doorway in those barracks; she glanced at the dirty bundles heaved over both my shoulders and bobbed her head knowingly. I kept thinking that everyone was looking at me, that I would be stopped any minute now. But at the same time I felt that I could weather all these hardships, find my family and another life. I ducked around a corner, stopped to take a breath, looked up at the Siberian sky, and remembered the comfort of Psalm 27: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

Both in the Zapoliarie camp and in N——k, many of my fellow prisoners had asked me to visit their families or send messages once I got outside. I had memorized about ten addresses. On their release, prisoners were searched meticulously, and the only way to pass along illegal information was to memorize it. The last time I was about to be frisked at the guardhouse, the guard on duty was strict: “Any letters to the outside?”

“No,” I said calmly. I knew them all by heart.

“Addresses on the outside?”

“No.

“Well, what if we find some?”

“Go ahead and look.”

“Fine. Beat it!”

And so I carried with me all the messages sent to the orphaned families, the pleas and wishes of their fathers, husbands, sons. Addresses flickered in my head: Irkutsk, X Street, no. 123; Tashkent, X Street, no. ??? ; Cheliabinsk, X Street, no. 17; Kharkov, X Street, no. 36; Stalingrad, X Street, no. 45, Moscow, Mayakovsky Square, no. X, Leningrad, Vasilievsky, Ostrov … The former editor of a major newspaper had asked me to write to his sister.

Meanwhile, here I was, lying on an upper berth in a third-class railcar speeding along the Trans-Siberian to Europe. It took eight days to get to Moscow, and all I wanted to do was eat. Eat and eat.

The only food for sale at the train stations was rotting pickles, a ruble apiece. Bread, let alone any other food, was impossible to find, although the war hadn’t even started yet, if you didn’t count the war with Finland, which was being waged exclusively by the “Leningrad Military District.”

Somewhere along the way between Novosibirsk and the Urals, a
komandirsha
2
sold me loaf of bread, and that sustained me a bit. She spied a “rabbit”
3
under her seat, summoned the chief conductor, and the raggedy young man was dragged out of the car. It turned out that he had escaped from a camp and was trying to make his way out of Siberia.

“So, you don’t feel bad about turning him in?” I asked her as they led the escapee away.

“What’s to feel bad about?” she replied tranquilly. She seemed surprised that I asked.

“Well if this were your brother or your husband, would you have done the same thing?” I asked, peering into her face.

“If they’d done something wrong of course I would have turned them in,” she answered, unconcerned.

I said nothing, but thought, “Oh, this is Stalin’s brood. Betray your father, mother, husband, child, anyone.”

In Kazan I managed to buy another loaf of bread, which lasted until Moscow, where I was able to find more food.

That night I went looking for the engineer’s family. Several metro stations down, I found the right street and the right building, took the elevator to the seventh floor, and tentatively pushed the buzzer next to a dark door with the right apartment number. An old woman peeped out, called the engineer’s wife, and then the two of them examined me and my camp clothes.

“Are you the wife of N.?”

“Yes, I am, what do you want?”

“I have a request from your husband …”

It is hard to describe in words how surprised the women were. We went to the kitchen; a twelve-year-old boy wearing a red Pioneers
4
scarf ran in.

I briefly told her what my engineer friend N. had told me. The women were upset, crying. The Pioneer, his mouth agape, just stood there, fiddling with his scarf. In parting she offered me ten rubles for the road. I turned down the money, said my good-byes, took the elevator down, and found myself on the street again. I had to get to Kursk Station, and decided to go on foot.

I was striding along, and suddenly there in front of me a female figure loomed up. She was dragging an enormous suitcase. As I drew even with her, a velvety voice said, “Comrade, help me haul this case to the Kursk Station. I’ll pay you for your trouble.”

“Of course. I’m at your service.”

I took the suitcase as she walked next to me, complaining. “I’ve been dragging it, dragging it, thought my arms would fall off. You’d think someone would help. But now here you are! I’m so grateful for your courtesy.” She stopped talking, then started up again, “No doubt you just got here too?”

“Right.”

“From a long way away?”

“Yes.”

“Where from, exactly?” she persisted.

“My dear, I’m from a place you’ll probably never ever see,” I answered. “I’m from another world entirely, where there’s no good or evil, just pure pleasure.”

“What … what did you say?” she squeaked, barely keeping up with my long strides. “What do you mean another world? … I don’t understand.”

“Of course you can’t. If the NKVD couldn’t understand me, then how in the world could you?” Nonplussed, she said nothing. Then, seeing the lights of the station ahead, she squeaked again, “Well, this is the end of our road. Take it over there, toward the doors, under the canopy. Good, yes … thank you. How much do I owe you for your work, citizen?”

“You don’t owe me anything. You needed help. I helped you. It’s awkward translating that into money. Have a safe trip!”

I dipped her a bow in parting, but she threw up her hands and exclaimed, “I’ve never met anyone so strange. You come from another world—you turn down money when you surely need it. I would have liked to get better acquainted. Well anyway, good-bye. Safe travels. You said you were going to the Caucasus? All the best.”

And so we parted. It was eleven o’clock at night. Two hours later I was on the train to Sochi, heading south, where friends, family, and the blue air of the mountains awaited me.

I hardly dared dream of going home.